This is the last Shelf Life. I’ll miss having a space in which to press books on to complete strangers – even odd little books about nuns – and it has been intensely gratifying to hear which of my recommendations you’ve enjoyed (when a publisher emailed me to tell me how much his teenage daughter had liked Katherine by Anya Seton, I stood up and clapped my hands). I’ve relished, too, the suggestions some sent my way (thank you to everyone who did). But all columns run their course, and I must do other things.
What to offer up by way of a valedictory read? Right now, I’m in the middle of a novel that won’t come out until the summer, so that won’t do. Casting my eyes towards my groaning bookshelves, I can only think of the books I’ve loved nearly all my life, and to which I return again and again: Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (when I’m dying, I’ll probably ask the poor sod sitting by my bed to read The Adventure of the Speckled Band out loud), the poems of Philip Larkin, and the novels of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, David Lodge and Nancy Mitford. But you probably already know all about them.
Something else, then. The most horribly enjoyable book I read during the period I’ve been writing this column was undoubtedly Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, which was recommended to me – I’ll allow myself a massive namedrop in this, my final column – by the wondrous biographer, Selina Hastings. Chips Channon, in case you don’t know, was an American-born anglophile and major league snob, who married a Guinness and became the Conservative MP for Southend in 1935. His diaries are superbly gossipy: he knew (and occasionally slept with) everyone from Terence Rattigan to the Duke of Windsor. But he was also, before the war, an appeaser, mostly because he hoped Hitler would restore the German monarchy.
In August 1936, he attended a fabulous party hosted by Göring in Berlin. His account of this queasy-making fiesta is luridly gripping, but it will also, should you seek it out, provide some food for thought as politicians everywhere set about kissing the backside of the egregious Donald Trump.
