From Brideshead to Bond: top 10 books on booze

Henry Jeffreys raises a glass to the best writing about alcohol, including the James Bond novel that inspired a cocktail and Roger Scruton’s guide to wine

This isn’t a collection of books about drunkenness or alcoholism, though both feature. Rather, it is a celebration of those who write well about alcoholic drinks. I write about alcohol for a living. My latest book, The Home Bar, is a guide to setting up your domestic refreshments but it is also about booze history and culture. With drink, and especially wine, it’s easy to write in a technical way and leave out what makes alcohol interesting for most people: its intoxicating properties. Most drink-soaked fiction – by Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and others – ignores the nerdy stuff. It is the intersection between connoisseurship and drunkenness that interests me.

I return to the following books again and again for inspiration and amusement. I am sure readers will vehemently disagree with some of my omissions.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BQOmAH

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