Alan Judd

Jeremy Lewis, biographer, critic and former publisher, has perpetrated a third enjoyable volume of memoirs, Grub Street Irregular (HarperCollins, £20). He writes so well, with such clarity and seeming simplicity, such unexpected but apt comparisons, that he could make a software manual entertaining. In fact, he only pretends to be an autobiographer, using himself as the foil while he writes with kindly observant irony of others — which is why his memoirs are so entertaining and which tells us, also, something important about him.

Richard Holmes, pre-eminent biographer of the Romantics, tells in The Age of Wonder (HarperCollins, £25) how the Romantic generation discovered science. Contrary to popular assumption, they embraced it with wonder and enthusiasm. Holmes’s account is beautifully written, carrying you along like the great Pacific rollers that swept the young Joseph Banks to unknown Tahiti. But Holmes does more than tell good stories very well: he makes important points about scientific culture, about the necessity of ‘the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe’ — qualities as evident in his own writing as in what he writes about. This is an important book.

Jonathan Mirsky

My Father’s Roses by Nancy Kohner (Hodder, £18.99) recalls the bourgeois, non-observant Jewish world of central Europe from which Ms Kohner’s father, an émigré to England, was lucky to emerge alive. A dandy and an energetic gardener, he had to represent relatives who had perished in the gas chambers, one of whom, his sister, a quirky realist, knew she would never escape the Nazis.

Philip Pan is an American-Chinese with plenty of China left in him. In Out of Mao’s Shadow (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) he describes how, when he was the Washington Post’s man in Beijing, he tracked down Chinese who — heroically seems a paltry word — took on and troubled the system.

The Spectator’s reviewer disliked Philip Hoare’s Leviathan or the Whale (Fourth Estate, 18.99). I loved it. What family creatures whales are, whose songs communicate over hundreds of miles with fellow pod members. Moby-Dick, about which Hoare has plenty to say, has given whales a bad name. Most of all, I liked the novels I re-read. This year, the two best were Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and Death of the Heart.

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