Culture

This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman's study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. 'This fellow says he wants to make the world a better place, but let us find out what he's really in it for' is the gist.

Whenever, searching through the television channels for something worth watching, I come across a Dad's Army repeat I invariably stay with it. The series has not dated, partly perhaps because it was dated when it started. Few of us who were young in the 1960s had clear memories of the Home Guard and many of the plots could have come straight from an old Will Hay film. Yet the interplay between the characters has remained unsurpassed. And the lynchpin is the great Arthur Lowe. Captain Mainwaring remains a superb comic creation. A pompous, narrow-minded petty tyrant, he is not an obviously attractive character.

If Harold Pinter's plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris's autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads of Bernard Weatherill, Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin, and no one has noticed it except for the eagle-eyed former parliamentary sketchwriter for the Times up in the press gallery. It's the perfect example of a Parris observation. Take something grand, respected, highfalutin, like parliament, and show quite how lowfalutin and dull it really is.

INSIDE SAHARAby Basil PaoWeidenfeld, £25, pp. 200, ISBN 0297843044 Michael Palin is a decent chap, I thought, after bumping into him for a nanosecond at the Hatchards Authors of the Year party a few months ago. It was just long enough for the briefest exchange of desert tales before he was mobbed by growing numbers of the Palin Fan Club, at which point he faded from view and I was left wishing I had cornered him for longer. That was back in May, and this being October, it is time for the latest Palin tome to land in bookstores the length and breadth of Britain, for what could be a nicer Christmas present than this sleek volume from the man who brought us Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle and Hemingway Adventure?

Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing peccadilloes. The novel opens like an arty French film, with some rhythmic coupling in a Paris flat. Eliza Lynch, an 18-year-old beauty with a chronic clothes habit and a pragmatically carnal relationship with her dressmaker, is intent on pleasuring Francisco Solano Lopez, a visiting South American with absurd manners and extravagant tastes. He is the heir-apparent to the dictatorship of Paraguay, she is a black-eyed hussy on the run from a prudent marriage.

Two running stories are brought to a close in Death's Jest-Book. The first was introduced in the novel in which we first met Ellie, Peter Pascoe's future wife. An Advancement of Learning, published in 1971, has that great team - politically correct Sergeant Peter Pascoe and fat, slobbish, thuggish Superintendent Andy Dalziel - investigating a series of murders in the academic institution where Ellie teaches. A pattern emerges when they come across the charismatic, psychopathic, clever young student, Franny Roote. It is not entirely clear at the end how guilty Roote is of murder. He does, however, go to a secure mental hospital before trans- ferring to prison. Those who go to prison usually come out, and Roote knows how to use the system.