Jasper Griffin
I have enjoyed Mediaeval Civilisation by Jacques Le Goff (Blackwell, £19.95), which combines illuminating generalisa- tions with appealing nuggets of fact: for instance, 'probably the only benefit brought back from the Crusades was the apricot'. One of the most attractive books of the year is The Faber Book of Letters, edited by Felix Pryor (Faber, £12.95). It is clearly meant to be gloated over rather than to provoke thought (the editor thinks it would be 'absurd' to include any letters in translation). But within these limits it triumphs, with Sydney Smith for charm, Keats for pathos, and Hamlet and Ophelia for sheer cheek. The blurring of fact and fiction is handled with extraordinary effect in Georges Perec's W, out this year in English (Collins/Harvill, £10.95). This might be called a book about running: memories of a refugee childhood keep pace with the story of the island W, entirely devoted to sport. The memories, built around photographs, tell half the story; the rest goes into the developing nightmare of W, the ultimate concentra- tion camp. And a new paperback: best reading of the year for any literate loo must be J. D. N. Kelly's The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford, £4.95).
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