A poetry highlight of the year was a new Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, £30, edited by Peter McDonald). The previous Collected (1966), by E. R. Dodds, MacNeice’s classical mentor and friend, had difficulties with chronology and, good as it is, has an air of rush about it. Here all is satisfactorily tidied up, one imagines for good. A hugely enjoyable poet, MacNeice (1907–63) had a dull patch in his middle years but by the time of his early death had come brilliantly back into form.

Another Collected of a poet I enjoy was Anthony Thwaite’s (from Enitharmon) — he was, incidentally, a junior colleague of MacNeice’s at the BBC. What these two poets have in common is clarity of form, interest of content and skill. Their poems, unlike some, do not read as though translated from Arabic and probably better in the original. I still cannot understand why more people don’t read poetry: when it is good it is quicker.

Philip Ziegler

Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, £30) is an informed and scholarly study of a great architect, a wide-ranging conspectus of the social and aesthetic movements of the age, and a brilliantly perceptive account of an extravagant, passionate and too often tormented soul. It is difficult to believe that this extraordinarily accomplished work is a first biography.

Robert Peel was neither extravagant, passionate nor tormented but he was one of the giants of 19th-century politics. Norman Gash in his great life of Peel left little room for even the most zealous researcher to find new material of significance. What Douglas Hurd provides in this biography (Robert Peel, Weidenfeld, £25) is the sympathetic insight of one who has done many of the same things and understands the pressures under which Peel was working. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, beautifully written and admirably fair.

William Leith

Blackwell Bookshop

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