Culture

Rumpole is back with us. In Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (Viking, £16.99) Rumpole is writing his memoirs and looks back on his first murder case when, as a pupil in a lazy barristers’ chambers, he takes over the defence of a young man accused of murdering his father and his father’s closest wartime friend. The chambers are lead by C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), and the reader learns for the first time how Rumpole succumbs to her demands and marries her. Very funny it is too. Henning Mankell appears to be getting bored with his policeman hero, the middle-aged, pessimistic Kurt Wallander.

Long before she became a finger- lickin’ television star Nigella Lawson’s ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine’s first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its confidential tone of voice, her larky attitude to cooking and eating, as well as brilliant, original recipes that brought her legions of fans. To them she became what Elizabeth David had been to their grandmothers. Nigella’s latest book, Feast (Chatto, £25), which arrives without benefit of a television boost, is another big, comprehensive book, its subject nothing less than ‘food that celebrates life’.

A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line edition. You will miss the special pleasure of straying into the article next door. No, take out a second mortgage, call in the cabinet-maker and buy the volumes.

How a timid, subdued, frustrated man from Buenos Aires, with failing eyesight and blind for the last part of his creative years, turned out to be one of the major, if not the major writer of the 20th century, is the central mystery this book preserves, untouched, at its centre. Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges is what its title claims to be — ‘a life’. Whether it is the ‘definitive biography’ (as Mario Vargas Llosa in a publicity blurb claims it to be) is something only time, unearthed documents and loosened tongues may prove. But ‘a life’ is two things — Borges’ own and Williamson’s version of it.

What a welcome change from the energetic staccato style of many modern thrillers is this, Rennie Airth’s second book. No short thudding sentences for him, no relentless brutality and spattered swear-words, more a leisurely, gentlemanly unfurling of a story which yet is as bloody and grim as any. The rape and murder of a Surrey schoolgirl, her face hammered beyond recognition, tax the police from the local constabulary. Her body is found lying beside a stream in a wood frequented by tramps. Gradually a few other cases of young girls with smashed faces come to light in other counties and Scotland Yard is brought in. The investigation widens and enquiries are made as far afield as Germany.

The fashion for novelty is scarcely, well, novel. In the 18th century Dr Johnson warned that the frenzy for the new had reached such a pitch that men would even look to ‘be hanged in a new way’. New fashions, new fabrics, new furniture, new decorations and ornaments, all cascaded out of workshops and factories. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, his 1776 summation of the new theory of supply and demand, talked about the ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. And leading the way in supplying the voraciously consuming masses for the previous two decades was Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ as he proudly styled himself.