Alastair Forbes
No doubt a genuine Old Fogey should in this space be plugging the work of a younger specimen of that alleged genus, and it is true that, as a modest founding contributor to the fund that long ago established it, I was astounded that the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize should not this year have been awarded to the admir- able A. N. Wilson's admirable life of Hilaire Belloc, the bibulous semi-Frog, anti-semite author of the immortal Cautionary Tales.
Next year, that prize and doubtless many far richer rewards will justly go to Philip Ziegler's highly professional and readable biography, almost-all-warts and-almost- but-not-quite-all-else and chock-a-block with political and royal scoops of `Dickie' Mountbatten, from Collins, who have set a projected price of £15 on it. I preferred, however, the deeply moving and also extraordinarily stimulating post- humous Diary 1941-43 (Cape £8.50) of Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz. 'The outside world' she perceptively wrote 'probably thinks of us as a grey, uniform, suffering mass of Jews, and knows nothing of the gulfs and abysses and subtle differences that exist between us.
The poisonously protracted Consumer- mas season into which Advent, and Shortest-Days have now been blended would be for me unbearable without the sight and sound of children. For the latter I have bought in considerable numbers, in the hope that they will later read it aloud to their elders, a real pearl of a captioned picture book (Perfect Pigs: An introduction to Manners, Collins, £2.95). Inside I am including a little-noticed 1984 quote from President Reagan telling them that reading a book is better (surprise, surprise) than watching the telly.
In the Bad Books Class, I'm afraid I iconoclastically placed the octogenarian Graham Greene's egregiously silly if beautifully written Getting to Know the General. The old boy deservedly got a magisterial come-uppance for it from none other than Auberon Waugh who, in Books & Bookmen, blew away any piously lurk- ing cobwebs above his Combe Florey study. I see Greene has said he'd rather die in a Gulag than in California. It's a long walk to the permafrost, as many a better writer than he has discovered. Oughtn't he to get started, lest he miss roll-call?
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