Nigel Spivey
The lists from Yale University Press are Consistently interesting. I do not know the chief commissioning editor at Yale, but he or she would be a soul mate if I did. Two Yale offerings have particularly impressed me over the past year: Linda Colley's Britons (£19.95), which truly fulfills its sub- title (Forging the Nation: 1707-1837); and Francis Haskell's History and Its Images (£29.95), a less coherent study, but packed with a type of humanistic learning that now has to be saluted as rare. Both books are beautifully produced. I was reluctant to believe that someone called Donna Tartt could write a novel which begs for the blurb 'haunting', but that is just how I eventually found The Secret History (Viking, £9.99). I think it may even become 'a modern classic'.
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