Best books… Simon Callow
Actor and writer Simon Callow picks five favourite books. His one-man staging of A Christmas Carol is at the Arts Theatre, London WC2, until 7 January. One-man Band, the third volume of his biography of Orson Welles, is out now
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens, 1843 (Puffin £9.99). Though by no means his greatest novel, it remains an extraordinary distillation of Dickens’s big themes: the healing potential of social life, the vulnerability of children, life versus anti-life. The form of the piece is astonishing, cinematic, almost cartoonish: Dickens the writer as conjuror.
The Man Who Was Thursday
by G.K. Chesterton, 1908 (Penguin £5.99). Chesterton was – amongst other things in a huge output – a great Dickens expert, and author of a number of perceptive books about him. This novel is his finest achievement in fiction, a phantasmagorical story of
the anarchists of the end of the 19th century: horribly familiar previsions of our own world.
The Hollow Man
by John Dickson Carr, 1935 (Orion £8.99). One of a series of novels featuring amateur detective Dr Gideon Fell. The triumph of the novels is Fell himself: vastly corpulent, droll and quirky. He is clearly based on Chesterton, a romantic conservative whose comment on psychoanalysis remains definitive: “confession without absolution”. A splendidly ripe figure, Fell is said to bring the spirit of Father Christmas into any room he enters.
A Bullet in the Ballet
1937 (out of print). From the fattest detective who ever lived to the “Scotland Yard Adonis”. Inspector Quill is deputed to investigate a murder during a performance of Petrushka by the Ballet Stroganoff. This comedy thriller is one of the glories of backstage writing, fielding dozens of terpsichorean grotesques with sublime dialogue, mostly in broken English.
Bolshoi Confidential
by Simon Morrison, 2016 (4th Estate £20). The real story behind the greatest of all ballet companies, culminating in the notorious acid attack on its director. Sometimes funny, but always dramatic, it is a chilling, thrilling read.