Christopher Booker
Anyone who in the past 30 years has found Laurens van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari one of the unforgettable books of our time should read the new edition (Chatto, £18.95), partly for its superb colour photographs, but above all for van der Post's deeply moving epilogue, in which he describes his return to the Kalahari last year — to find the world of the Bushmen which he recorded in the 1950s now all but gone forever. Jacques Rupnik's The Other Europe (Weidenfeld, £12,95), the book to accompany his re- markable recent Channel Four television series, is a highly intelligent and serious discussion of the horrendous experience of Eastern Europe under Communism since the war, and gives a graphic picture of how that system is now in lingering and irrev- ersible decay.
It was fascinating to see how the critics (with the honourable exception of Paul Johnson in these pages) fell with sheep-like hysterical rage on Picasso by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (Weidenfeld, £16). What they could not stand was the truth which emerges from her admirably researched biography of a man who throughout his life was possessed by a devil of heartless destructiveness, until he was a wizened little monster — acclaimed by the world for paintings which only mirrored the darkest side of our own strange, lost modern world.
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