Anita Brookner
For devotees of the Diaries of James Lees-Milne, Michael Bloch’s biography (John Murray, £25) is essential. Absolute discretion combined with extensive knowledge make this a dignified achievement. I much enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie’s Love’s Civil War: Letters and Diaries 1941-1973, edited by Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). The contrast between Bowen’s uninhibited outpourings and Ritchie’s extremely circumspect comments is painfully instructive. Stefan Zweig’s Journey into the Past (Pushkin Press, £7.99) reminds one of a quality too often missing from contemporary writing: tenderness. My absolute favourite is a reprint: Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov. A Critical Journey (Granta, £8.99) which comes prefaced with a memorable Chekhovian observation: ‘What torture it is to cut the nails on your right hand!’
A good year for fiction. Wolf Hall is being reserved for Christmas.
Philip Ziegler
William Fiennes’s The Music Room (Picador, £14.99) is a magically well-described account of childhood in a moated castle with an elder brother whose epilepsy doomed him to ever more dangerous bouts of uncontrollable violence. The love and understanding with which the family coped with this disaster are awe-inspiring; the story is a sad one, yet radiant with hope and patient determination.
John Campbell’s Pistols at Dawn (Cape, £20) brilliantly recounts eight of the political feuds which have disturbed British politics: from Fox and Pitt, by way of Gladstone and Disraeli to Brown and Blair. Only Castlereagh and Canning actually had recourse to weapons, but if Heath had been able to call out Margaret Thatcher Campbell leaves little doubt that he would have done so.
Finally Selina Hastings, who specialises in difficult subjects, in The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, £25) provides an acute, penetrating, yet wonderfully sympathetic portrait of that hypersensitive and sometimes spiteful man. Literary biography could hardly be better done.
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