Anthony Blond
I much enjoyed Susan Hillmore's novella The Greenhouse (Collins/Harvill, £9.95) for its well-bedded flowery prose but I liked an equally properly written first novel, (which I also published), Marks of Weakness by Geraldine Jones (Anthony Blond/Quartet, £11.95) which only got one (good) review, from Isobel Quigly, who didn't like our jacket. This relative neglect stems, I fear, from Geraldine's having lived for the last 18 years in Germany.
To some Americans and to some French, whose revolutions he inspired, the greatest ever Englishman was Thomas Paine. It is good to be reminded that England was once famous for liberty, at home to exiles like Karl Marx and export- ing revolutionaries like Tom Paine who was more or less ignored by historians, only rescued by Michael Foot and remem- bered by a glitzy statue in Thetford by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, until our most elegant and charming intellectual of the Left, A. J. Ayer, wrote this year his biography (Seek- er & Warburg, £12.95). It is more than that, for the former Wykeham Professor of Logic treats us with pained lucidity to exegeses of the essence of Hobbes and Locke and, best of all, to his own views on civil liberties today, eg 'I am equally chary of allowing them [the police] the right to search people's houses . . . and am un- moved by the rubbish that politicians talk about national security'.
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