David Crane
If nothing else, this has been a good time for catch-up. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (translated by Walter Wallich, Persephone Books, £13) was a treat. But the real discovery of the year was an author I had never heard of, Wallace Breem. He seems to have spent his life as a librarian in the Inner Temple but found time to write three historical novels, one of which, The Leopard and the Cliff (Faber Finds, £13), set during the Third Afghan War of 1919, is up there with the very best novels of military life: vivid, tense and deeply moving, with a central character who has a touch of Guy Crouchback about him.
For those of us who never got to the exhibition, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company edited by William Dalrymple (The Wallace Collection, £18.75) is a wonderful reminder of what we missed.
Graham Robb
The adventurous realism of Anna Keen’s Turneresque drawings of a dissolving monumental city in London: The Metamorphosis (Unicorn, £25), with an essay by Edward Lucie-Smith and the artist’s own contemplative commentary, reminded me of the multimedia paintings of Victor Hugo, another admirer of ‘the Black Babylon’.
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