D IGBY D URRANT How did Siegfried Sassoon at 42 in the
throes of a love affair with Stephen Tennant, the most flamboyant homosexual in the land, and moving in the same smart circle as the Sitwells and the Garsington set, shut himself off from their world and write Memoirs of a FoxHunting Man, that wonderfully innocent and moving account of his utopian Edwardian childhood? Later, in search of that lost innocence but tormented by sexual demons, he became a Catholic, setting up an oratory, sometimes praying while stripped naked and achieving a kind of peace. Max Egremont’s magnificent biography about this heroic man is my book of the year (Picador, £25).
The Assassin’s Cloak, edited by Alan Taylor and Irene Taylor (Canongate, £9.99), is an anthology of the world’s greatest diarists. There are 1,800 entries or so. Anyone who is anybody is here: Evelyn Waugh, Goebbels Virginia Woolf, Joyce Grenfell, Tolstoy, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Darwin and Siggy himself.
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