Books Of The Year

Christopher Howse

Two biographies changed my view this year of people who already command a wide appeal. William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (Oxford, £25) gives a deeper understanding of its subject’s thought, and the background to it, than any book since Chesterton’s Autobiography in 1936, which emphasised the importance of his childhood and his later conquest of pessimism. Dr Oddie brings out Chesterton’s left-wing presuppositions and his astonishing gift for sharp insights, taking his story up to 1908 and the publication of Orthodoxy.

Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson (Weidenfeld, £25) collects a mass of significant detail into a thoroughly readable narrative that compels admiration for this lovable man’s generosity to underdogs and his determination in overcoming melancholy.

Those who did not know her are not perhaps accustomed to seeing approachable humanity in the work of G. E. M. Anscombe, the foremost analytical philosopher of the late 20th century. There is more of it than expected in a collection of her essays on religion and ethics, published under the title Faith in a Hard Ground by the University of St Andrews (Imprint Academic, £17.95). In addition to the usual hard-headed explosions of popular fallacies, she gives a moving account of what the presence of God can mean.

The books I threw away this year have left not a ripple on the surface.

Nicky Haslam

For Ferdinand Mount, in his masterly memoir Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, £20), memory’s madeleine is the cosmetic his titled mother advertised, with unorthodox audacity, in blotchy 1940s newsprint. I just remember the company’s sister product, which promised ‘Pond’s lipstick stays on . . . and on . . . and on.’ Mount’s calm, self-effacing and wistful envoi to a waning world, and his unexpected morph into Downing Street guru, stays on, indelible, in the reader’s mind.

Francis Wyndham’s dissecting ear for enigmatic tension — his grandmother was ‘the Sphinx’ to Oscar Wilde after all — is at it’s most acute in his short stories, recently gathered as a pungent bouquet in The Other Garden (Picador, £7.99) And, along with Wyndham’s chilling humour, you get an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst.

The Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, has produced, at £20, an indispensible catalogue, Lucian Freud: Early Works 1940-58 for their current exhibition (until 12 December). There is a preface by James Holland-Hibbert and an afterword by Catherine Lampert who, with David Dawson, helped curate the exhibition. The paintings are perfectly reproduced and relevant photographs of, and notes on, their subjects are socially, let alone intellectually, fascinating.

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