Spectator books of the year: Roger Lewis recommends his own unwritten books

I wish I could pull off the Anthony Burgess stunt and recommend books of my own — Erotic Vagrancy, about Burton and Taylor, and Growing Up With Comedians, about, well, comedians. Both are doing well on Amazon and have garnered wonderful reviews. They are clearly my most successful and esteemed achievements. Unfortunately, neither title actually exists as such and no words have been written. The publishers jumped the gun with their announcements — though in our ‘virtual’ world perhaps this no longer matters.

A book I do have physically in my hands, which I enjoyed immensely, is David Hare’s The Blue Touch Paper (Faber, £20), which is as phosphorescent as a Larkin poem. It is easy enough to see how the puritanical repressions and genteelisms of post-war Bexhill-on-Sea fomented Hare’s anger and gave him impetus as a playwright — but what about his mother? I have read no more powerful a scene than the one where Nancy Hare, after a lifetime of provincial middle-class ‘recessiveness and apprehension’, waits until her deathbed before she can finally snap: ‘Well then damn you.