Books for Xmas

Two recommendations:

1. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.   If you want to know why Britain secularised in a way that abandoned the Christian idiom (as opposed to the way America did, by secularising the Christian idiom), then you have to come to terms with the slaughter of the First World War and the perceived collusion of the church in it all. Paul Fussell, in his work on the Great War and modern memory, is very good on this point -- how the war transformed culture in a stark, permanent way. Read Owen's `Anthem for Doomed Youth' and see how Owen, a former curate, transforms religious language in the light of the violence of the trenches.  The last two lines are among the greatest ever written in English literature.

`Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.'

2. My Correct Views on Everything by Leszek Kolakowski.  Thought this might make a great gift for Del Boy.  Nuff said.