CHRISTMAS BOOKS 1

Clive James

Three books of non-fictional prose kept me awake like thrillers. Frederic Raphael’s The Benefits of Doubt (Carcanet, £14.95) is an exemplary book of humanist essays, although I would hate to have him doubting me, because he makes me laugh too hard when he doubts Heidegger. Published posthumously, D. J. Enright’s Injury Time (Pimlico, £12.50) is only part of his memorial: the full set of his volumes of casual reflections distills the civilised views of an era. Richard Eyre’s National Service (Bloomsbury, £18.99), subtitled ‘The Diary of a Decade’, inhabits two different political worlds. ‘Terrifying events in Yugo- slavia,’ he notes on 18 April 1993, ‘and we’re helpless. Why don’t we intervene as we did in Kuwait?’ But he scorned the intervention in Kuwait. On the other hand, he is knowledgeable about the liberation of Romania, and everything he has to say about his time at the National Theatre is as informative as you might expect, and as believably self-deprecating as you mightn’t. How Britain goes on producing national servants of his calibre is one of the great mysteries, and still one of the best reasons for being here.

Robert Macfarlane

Gil Courtemanche’s novel of Rwanda, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Canon- gate, £14.99), shocked and edified me. The finest biography of the year was Nicholas Rankin’s Telegram from Guernica (Faber, £14.99), a life of the war correspondent George Steer. Competition for most over-rated book of the year was stiff; the prize is shared by Peter Ackroyd’s pseudo-serious Disneyfication of mediaeval London, The Clerkenwell Tales (Chatto, £15.99), and Don DeLillo’s wafer of meta-waffle, Cosmopolis (Picador, £16.99).

M. R. D. Foot

Norman Davies’ Rising ’44 (Macmillan, £25) is a salutary reminder that all is not always for the best. Even in the war against Hitler, there were some on the winning side who were unhappy at the result.