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Lead book review

Spectator writers pick their books of the year

Favourites old and new from Paul Johnson, Roger Lewis, Philip Ziegler, Ferdinand Mount, Michela Wrong, Bevis Hillier, A.N. Wilson, Piers Paul Read and more

16 November 2013

9:00 AM

16 November 2013

9:00 AM

Mark Mason

JFK’s Last Hundred Days by Thurston Clarke (Allen Lane, £20) brilliantly captures Kennedy’s entire life through the prism of his final months. Deliberately thrusting his crotch for an official portrait, musing about assassination (he even acts it out in a game of charades, covered in ketchup), folding his monogrammed handkerchiefs to hide the initials because he disliked ostenatious wealth, putting a black marine at the centre of a ceremonial line-up … the hero, like the devil, is in the detail.

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