Hugh Massingberd
Surrounded by spin, mealy-mouthed political correctness and Orwellian ‘newspeak’, I longed for the absolute frankness demanded by the Memoir Club of Old Bloomsubry — and found it in A. N. Wilson’s joyfully funny Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (Hutchinson, £18.99); the tenth volume of James Lees-Milne’s addictive diaries, Beneath a Waning Moon (John Murray, £22.50); Beaton in the Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries edited by Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld, £25); and James Delingpole’s Thinly Disguised Autobiogra- phy (Picador, £12.99), which contains the most truthful descriptions of sex from the male point of view that I have ever read. Full marks for candour also to Simon Jenkins’s guidebook to England’s Thou- sand Best Houses (Allen Lane, £30), with its strictures on ‘museumitis’ and celebration of the clutter of family homes.
Philip Hensher
Jonathan Bate’s life of John Clare (Picador, £25) was an exemplary writer’s life, passionate and self-effacing; Clare is a writer who has always been forced out of shape to serve other people’s ends, and here for once was the great poet seen on his own terms.
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