Dot Wordsworth
For me Beyond the Prosaic, edited by Strat- ford Caldecott (T&T Clark, £21.95), was of practical importance this year. This is because its subject is the liturgy, and just at the moment the bishops are poised to bug- ger about (as my husband puts it) with the language of worship once again. This mat- ters deeply to churchgoers, and has a dev- astating effect on infrequent churchgoers, who at funerals and weddings are com- pletely lost, even in the Lord's Prayer. Beyond the Prozac, as I like to think of it, got a sniffy review in the Tablet (which is stuck in the Sixties), and this confirmed my opinion. Otherwise most of my fun has been with old books. David Knowles's The Evolution of Medieval Thought (I hadn't even known there was any) was a handy leg-up to understanding the Pope's most important encyclical (apart from his first), Fides et Ratio.
Nirad Chaudhuri once pointed out how negative Englishmen are, even about their countryside, lest they seem to be showing off or currying favour. So it is that our poor literary editor, Mark Amory, will probably get few plugs here for his biography of Lord Berners, The Last Eccentric (Chatto, £20). A model biography and a jolly good read.
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