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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 30, No. 1. 1967.

1966 Best Ten

1966 Best Ten

Last Year thousands of new books were written and published, and many thousands reprinted. Here we present the first five of 15 writers' and critics' opinions on what were their three best books of 1966.

A. J. P. Taylor

It has been a good year for biographies. Disraeli, by Robert Blake, had almost all the virtues; scholarly, instructive, well-balanced, highly readable though not exactly gay. A biography which came out early in the year is worth remembering: Rosa Luxembourg, by J. P. Nettl (Oxford. 2 vols.). A most remarkable account of a most remarkable woman. In straight history, the highest place was occupied by the third volume of From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, by A. J. Marder (Oxford). This gave a detailed account of Jutland and much more besides.

Marghanita Laski

The most remarkably haunting book I have come across in the last reading year I read only in December: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (Deutsch), the terribly imagined story of Mr. Rochester's wife. This never distorts Charlotte Bronte's story yet has an autonomously valid life.

There is a link, though I'd be hard put to define it. between this macabre imaginative flight and Norman Longmate's popular, well-documented history King Cholera (Hamish Hamilton), which provides indispensable background to knowledge to almost any reading of Victorian history or fiction.

In a year of exceptionally good thrillers, the most original and twice readable that came my way was Tree Frog, a first novel by Martin Woodhouse (Heinemann).

Arthur Koestler

I cannot think of any book I have read this year which I am likely to want to read again in the next 10 years. This also applies to A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway (Wei-denfield and Nicholson); yet I feel that it will be quoted and commented on for a much longer period. Not for its literary qualities, which are indifferent, but for its documentary value: conveying artlessly but with a shattering impact the tragedy of a genius who created a new era in the art of writing.

C. M. Bowra

I have learned most from Raymond Carr's Spain (Oxford University Press). Spanish history has hitherto been unintelligible to me. but Mr. Carr illuminates it at all points with a mass of significant learning presented with style and ease.

In poetry I have been delighted by John Betjeman's High and Low. Though it belongs to his very special world, it is all new and fresh and at times deeply disturbing.

I am no great reader of novels, but I found David Caute's The Decline of the West (Deutsch) curiously powerful, despite its appalling metaphors, its tedious pornography and its excess of tortures. He writes about a real subject, and though he is deeply committed, what he says rings true.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Unquestionably, the book which has most interested me this year is Kierkegaard's Journals. What incredible awareness of what was happening and to happen.

The book I enjoyed most was Gibbon's Autobiography, an old favourite in an elegant new edition. Of contemporary works. the most curious was Reith's Wearing Spurs (Hutchinson), the most readable Harold Nicholson's Diaries and Letters 1930-39, and the most useful—at least for those, like myself, obsessed with the notion of a double-agent—The Case of Richard Sorge, by F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry.