CHRISTMAS BOOKS I

Books of the Year

We asked our contributors to select the books they would recommend most highly from those they had read in 1981.

Harold Acton

The books that stand out in sharper relief than others I have read this year are: Taste and the Antique, by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, (Yale University Press) which clears the air of pseudo-aesthetic cant and revives a healthy interest in Greek and Roman sculpture: Loitering with Intent, by Muriel Spark, (The Bodley Head) a feast of subtle surprises in the author's happiest vein: and Victoria Glendinning's sensitive biography of Edith Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) which is suitably sub-titled, 'A Unicorn Among Lions'.

Mark Amory

Nothing bowled me over. Loyal sometimes to the point of idiocy, I read the new book by an established favourite whatever it is like. This policy netted a prime Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent, which for once I felt I had understood completely, and Other People (Cape) strikingly written by Martin Amis, which gave me no such feeling. Rewarding new territory was discovered with A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd (Hamish Hamilton) who gave the peculiar satisfaction of saying things that I felt I had probably thought myself but never quite got round to expressing. The hopeless Englishman abroad, in this case West Africa, blundering from disaster to humiliation with his work, his girls and his attempts at skulduggery, is not a new hero but he is a sympathetic one and the background, sharply and enjoyably observed, is kept in its place. He has already followed up with an excellent volume of short stories.

Christopher Booker

I'm afraid it has rather been 'Russian Year' for me — beginning with Evgenia Ginzberg's Within the Whirlwind (Collins/Harvill) which completed the spiritual odyssey through Stalin's labour camps begun in Into the Whirlwind. Susanne Massie' s The Land of the Firebird (Hamish Hamilton) was a splendid compilation on the creative exuberance of Russia in the centuries up to 1917 — from the ubiquitous folk song and peasant woodcarving to the glories of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. As a curiosity, I greatly enjoyed Villi the Clown (Faber), the memoirs of Bill Campbell, stepson of the Clydeside communist leader, who spent 40 years in the USSR as a comedian and a variety artiste. And, though anything but Russian, for anyone who read that extraordinary book The Captive Mind, by the 1980 Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, I cannot recommend too highly his autobiography Native Realm n (Sidgwick & Jackson), about what it was like to grow up as a Lithuanian Pole in the 30 years before the communists came.

James Cameron

I read hardly any novels; it is hard enough trying to keep up with the books on politics and travel that come free and at least purport not to be fiction, though doubtless many of them are. I find it hard to get involved in tales of something that avowedly never happened. This is almost certainly because I was never able to do it myself.

Three of the year's books come readily to mind, because they all define experiences I could share. To avoid relative valuejudgments they are in alphabetical order:Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English by Edward Behr (Hamish Hamilton). The one thing wrong with it is that its silly and vulgar title does no justice to one of the best journalistic books there has been as far as I can remember, and I can remember even further back than Ed Behr. We trod the same paths, though rarely at the same time, through Europe, India, Africa, and Asia. If you think of it, there wasn't much else to go to. If I give Edward Behr the okay then so must everyone.

Old Glory, by Jonathan Raban (Collins). A delightful, idiosyncratic tale of a solo trip down the enormous Mississippi River, as meandering as the river itself, done with elegant observation and a bitter wit: wholly subjective, malicious, touching and funny.

Slow Boats To China, by Gavin Young (Hutchinson). The plural is important; it took all manner of ships, dhows, and assorted sea-craft in erratic and random schedules to get Gavin Young across the world to Canton. It goes to prove that while it may be quicker by air it is a darned sight duller.

Eric Christiansen

Why read new books? It is like drinking gin in pubs: an expensive way of getting short measure. Old books are a safer bet, but when publishers reissue them they are apt to sell them infamously dear. The best this year was Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, better known as Vulgar Errors, but the pauper's curse will fall on the Clarendon Press for pricing it at £80. This is a treasure which lays bare the most important characteristic of the human mind: being wrong about almost everything. It should be distributed free, especially to scientists and dons.

Richard Cobb

Of books published this year that I have read, those that I most enjoyed as much for their literary merits as for their originality were three works of history. Richard Holt's Sport and Society in Modern France (Macmillan) is at times marvellously funny, and always imaginative and inquiring. Wilfred Halls's The Youth of Vichy France (Oxford) blends lightness of touch with compassion and proves that it is possible to write about education without being didactic. Kenneth Morgan's Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (Oxford) treads gingerly over a minefield — a model of fairness, restraint and understatement offering occasional discreet hints of malice.

As I like books about itineraries, I found delight in Dirk Bogarde's essay, `Windover Hill', in Places, edited by Ronald Blythe (Oxford, for Oxfam). This year I stumbled on two major classics, both compelling: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, and George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters. I like books about houses.

Isabel Co legate

Books I have enjoyed this year include James Lees-Milne's Harold Nicolson, the second volume of which I have just finished (Chatto & Windus). I recommend it even to those who think Harold Nicolson sounds rather a silly man, or who do not want to read any more about the famous marriage which was so maddeningly perfect in spite of both partners behaving in ways most of the rest of us could not hope to get away with. It places its subject in his period and social group with great subtlety and understanding, and it is also in parts extremely funny. I also enjoyed John Carey's John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (Faber) which, by emphasising Donne's abandonment of the Church of Rome and the rash marriage which set limits to his boundless ambition, throws new light on the complicated workings of his extraordinary imagination, and The Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour, edited by David McFarland (O.U.P.) which is comprehensible to the non-specialist and fascinating to those who cannot help being quite unscientifically anthropomorphic and/or the opposite (is there a word for seeing men as like animals which implies no particular discredit to either party?).

Patrick Devlin

Churchill and de Gaulle by Fransois Kersaudy (Collins). The attractions and repulsions of two mighty men moving within a circle of great events. Well written, well researched and constructed: a distillation of spirit from a mass of material. An immoral book, calculated to deprave and corrupt any politician into whose hands it may fall: for the hero has to be de Gaulle and the book shows how in politics perpetual unreasonableness and frequent bloodymindedness can achieve heroic results.

Diana Cooper by Philip Ziegler (Hamish Hamilton). Only a masterly biographer could write an interesting life of a society beauty. True, she is more than that, but the part that is more has already been revealed in her own delightful memoirs. For me the fresh interest is in the marriage: what makes some succeed and others fail? The question is not asked or answered, but the story is there.

The Lyttelton — Hart-Davis Letters, (John Murray) the latter being irrelevantly Lady Diana's nephew and relevantly the former publisher who must have distressed his authors by writing better than they. Two urbane minds on what they think as they think it, showing in this third instalment that the art of good letter-writing is not at an end.

Roy Fuller I must plug Volume 3 of The Lyttelton — Hart-Davis Letters: I want to help make sure this highly readable and rereadable series goes on. Julian Symons's Critical Observations (Faber) displays the bookish facet of a many-sided writer, but these pieces reprinted from various periodicals are no less gripping than his crime novels. Controversial commonsense, yet real in sight, too. A book of sharp, poignant, funny poems by a Yorkshire Professor of English Literature living in Lancashire, Every Common Sight by C. B. Cox (London Magazine Editions), I think has not had the praise it deserves: a cheap Christmas present for anyone with a rizzom of gumption.

Christopher Hibbert

Although evidently not quite such a marvellous and valuable find as some newspaper reports suggested, the contents of Scrope Berdmore Davies's recently discovered trunk have helped T. A.J J. Burnett provide an illuminating, absorbing and sharply detailed account of Byron's raffish circle in The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy (John Murray), a book full of interest, and containing many hitherto unknown letters, that provides excellent compensation for the memoirs that Davies never got round to writing. John Julius Norwich's Venice: The Greatness and the Fall (Allen & Unwin) completes a splendid history which must have been as difficult to write as it is a pleasure to read. And James Lees-Milne's Harold Nicolson is a delightful biography of a delightful man.

Brian Inglis

Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life, (Blond & Briggs) is essential reading for anybody interested in the power struggle which is going on in the sciences, par ticularly in biology and in physics, between the old guard — fighting for their dogmas in their last ditch — and the rebels, faced with the unenviable task of constructing a new model of the universe. In her The Invisible Picture (McFarland & Co.) Louisa Rhine, J.B. Rhine's widow, has continued her useful share, in this pilgrim's progress; a thoughtful survey of thousands of spontaneous ESP experiences, studied with a view to putting them into some kind of orderly perspective. And I cannot resist including Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons (Chatto & Windus). Although it deals with a subject which will repel many a reader — the experiences and the feelings of a surgeon — it gives the vivid impression of that craft that impelled me to say in his defence, when I read the American edition, that 'he overwrites like an angel' P.J. Kavanagh Two books of poetry, very different from each other. Poems of G.S. Fraser (ed. Ian Fletcher and John Lucas, Leicester University Press) turns out to be an account of what it is like to be a poet, and what poetry is. For G.S. Fraser was a poet in the 1940's and became a poet again in the 1970's before his death in 1980. In between came literary journalism and university teaching and you can chart the effect of these on his verse. The result is an instructive and entertaining account of an intelligent and humane mind re-discovering the poet in himself.

The Apple Broadcast and other new poems (Routledge and Kegan Paul) is Peter . Redgrove at his clearest, funniest and most magi-like. He makes everything from spiders to television sets tingle and sparkle as on the first day of Creation. To Redgrove, with his eye of a magical newborn babe there is no such thing as the commonplace and (if we let him) he has the power to show us he is right. Nothing is safe from his hymns of excitement, his transformations — dogs, shirts, chartered accountants, a Gents' lavatory. If G.S. Fraser struggled, and succeeded, to remain a poet, you feel Redgrove must struggle to be anything else. He is intoxicated with language, inspired by his vision of the physical world.

Francis King

The two books that have made the deepest impression on me are autobiographies: Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass (Cape) and John Osborne's A Better Class of Person (Faber). Both homosexual novelist of indisputable genius and heterosexual playwright of indisputable talent have been scrupulously accurate in transcribing their personal equations; but whereas White contemplates his with queasy humility, Osborne's induces in him a preening self-congratulation. A fascinating contrast.

Best novel was Brian Moore's The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (Cape). Mr Moore must always be a cause of envy and exasperation to his fellow novelists. Everything seems so easy, casual, even careless; but the final memory is one of complexity, originality and power.

J. G. Links Dominating my memory of the year's reading, and likely to do so for a long time, is Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons. These essays of a surgeon poet (although he writes in prose) provide an experience to be undergone rather than a book to be read. His style may be unendearing, but no other would do to tell what happens while his hands and knife are exploring the recesses of our bodies like a diver on the ocean's bed. We learn what is going on in his mind whilst ours is gratefully handed over to the blessed anaesthetist — as well as the fate of whatever is left of us if all his skills fail to make us whole again. But his ghastly trade does not deal only in wreckage: he has glimpses of the human spirit denied to most of us who live nearer the surface.

For pure pleasure there was the third, and to my mind the most enjoyable, volume of The Lytteltton — Hart-Davis Letters. For stimulation of the mind there was Kenneth Clark's Moments of Vision (John Murray); as relief from the 'applied aesthetics' with which most of the book is concerned there is a chapter on Bernard Berenson which alone is worth its price.

Christopher Logue

Although they will not be published until next February, do not miss the comic poems of Wendy Cope in Faber's Poetry Introduction 5. Clear-headed, neat-footed, and sharp-eyed, Cope has invented a lugubriously defiant sonneteer called Strugnell among whose triumphs is the certainty that modern literary critics will be unable to make copy out of his work: How like a sprinter you have turned and run From me, who'd loved you almost half a year.

The world's become a fridge, there is no sun, I hardly have the stomach for a beer. And yet I still have my guitar to strum And books to read and some fantastic grass That Tony got me. I sit here and hum The tunes we used to hear in Norwood Bars — We are All Slobs. The Muggers' greatest hit — Do you remember? Once you said to me 'This is their best since Education's Shit' Beryl Cook's One Man Show (John Murray/Gallery Five) reproduces 30 new paintings by England's most famous Modern Mistress. The philosophical waffle known as 'art history' calls the work of painters like Cook naif and/or Primitive, i.e. not heterodidactic: in her case tonic (as in Sanatogen) is the right word. My favourite is 'Ivor Dickie', in which a stripper reveals all he hasn't got to — as Cook says in her caption: 'An audience of handsome women dressed in their finery and out to enjoy themselves. He had a very fine figure and liked lots of clapping and loud cries of "get 'em off" .

About John Ford by Lindsay Anderson (Plexus). If Anderson was lucky to have been inspired by Ford, Ford is lucky to have one who writes as well as he directs to criticise his films. Knowing that to discuss an artist's work without discussing his life is a kind of lying, Anderson includes biographical facts and several revealing, funny anecdotes. But the importance of his book lies in the connection it reveals between Ford's morality and the lyrical spirit that fills his pictures. Ford made, and makes, his audiences feel, and feel deeply; he was unafraid of, and artistically strong enough to deal with, common sentiments; his fictions aim at truth. It is this kind of aesthetic power that inspires Anderson.

Philip Magnus

For interest and entertainment regardless of cost, my first choice is the new volume of the Dictionary of National Biography edited by E. T. Williams and C. S. Nicholls (Oxford University Press). 611 different authors have contributed accounts of 745 more or less eminent persons from Winston Churchill downwards, who died during the decade 1961-1970. Every reputable field of activity is well covered, and the 1178-page volume is a delight to browse in.

I was fascinated also by T. A. J. Burnett's The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy. This is an account of Scrope Davies, Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, and a notorious scamp, who fled abroad in 1820 to escape arrest for debt. His papers, retrieved by chance in 1975 from the vaults of a London bank, include a number of splendid and previously unknown letters from Byron, who was his intimate friend.

I recommend lastly Edward Crankshaw's study of Bismarck (Macmillan). The author appears to set out with high hopes of finding aspects of his hero to admire; but he is too honest to attempt to conceal his growing disillusionment. He presents Bismarck as a man of wonderful gifts corrupted, and suggests that he and the German people corrupted each other. An unhappy and strangely moving story, beautifully told.

Hugh Massingberd

T. A. J. Burnett's witty and delightful 'book of the trunk' on the life and times of Scrope Berdmore Davies, The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy, is the sort of scholarly study that restores one's faith in publishing. As well as illuminating this shadowy and sympathetic figure, Mr Burnett also provides fresh insights into the life of Byron (and who would have thought that possible?).

Of the new novels, I most enjoyed Molly Keane's Good Behaviour (Andre Deutsch), which apparently lost the Booker Prize because it was such a good read that it might have appealed too much to 'the public'. Thank heavens that novels about the upper classes, albeit Anglo-Irish period pieces, are permissible again.

When the original of G.E.C.'s great Complete Peerage costs thousands on the second-hand market, the new reprint in a reduced format (Alan Sutton/Pitman Periodicals, 6 vols, £.300) is very welcome — particularly to hacks such as myself who can thereby pass off secondary research as primary. The footnotes are surely the funniest ever published.

Caroline Moorehead

It is not easy to see how Saki could ever be explained: there is something inpenetrable in that mixture of detachment and finely tuned sense of the cruel. A. J. Langguth's Saki: A life of Hector Hugh Munro (Hamish Hamilton) gives what will probably be the closest picture we ever get of a figure whose wretched childhood at the hands of sadistic aunts turned out a man on the surface cool and elegant, and a writer of wit, curious flippancy and bizzarre imagination. It is a highly pleasurable biography.

For sheer compulsion, I enjoyed no book more this year than Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (Collins), a tense, funny, often touching thriller set in Moscow, a manhunt rich in setting and detail with a true hero, a loser, scruffy and sympathetic.

There will be a further selection of Books of the Year next week.