John Mortimer
The book I fell in love with was Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Cape, £11.95). Page follows page of hallucinating brilliance, and at the end you are left with an extraordinarily touching story of sex postponed until the partners are very old and can enjoy it. The best book Nabokov never wrote. The second best novel of the year was Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (Con- stable, £9.95), her writing back in irresisti- ble form. Miss Spark is generous enough to tell us how to write a novel: 'pretend you are writing a letter to a dear, close friend, and write so your true friend will want more enchanting letters from you.' Very few authors take this advice, but Miss Spark follows it to the letter.
'He would sit with his book in his left hand holding his wrist and . . . constantly moving it up and down — and at the same time sucking with his tongue . . . reading as if for life.' This quotation describing the boy Dickens comes from a superb new biography by Fred Kaplan (Hodder, £17.95) which may do for our greatest writer after Shakespeare what Ellmann did for Oscar Wilde.
In The Politics of Paradise (Collins, £17.50), Michael Foot has written a useful addition to Byron studies which sets out engagingly to prove that Lord B. was a scholarly, radical politician as charming as the former Opposition leader himself.
I have carefully avoided all over- estimated books but look forward to Nor- man Tebbit's autobiography (Weidenfeld, £14.95) without the naughty bits.
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