South and West (4th Estate), comprising two excerpts from notebooks written in the 1970s by Joan Didion, one of America’s greatest essayists, has just been published in Britain. When it appeared in the United States in March, Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it for The New York Times, said that it “shed light on the current political moment. At a remove of more than four decades, [Didion] maps the divisions splintering America today, and uncannily anticipates some of the dynamics that led to the election of Donald J Trump and caught so many political and media insiders unawares.”

Peter Conrad, reviewing the book yesterday in The Observer, was similarly struck by its “chilling power of prediction”, while noting that Didion showed “enough catty snobbery… to explain why Trumptards resent the coastal elites who belittle them”.  Duncan White, in The Daily Telegraph earlier this month, was less impressed: “The literary tourist [in Didion] is so busy lapping up the southern Gothic that the hard-nosed reporter in her misses the story. Everywhere she goes she notices black Americans, but not once does she speak to them about their experience living in a world that, despite being six years after the Civil Rights Act, is still ornamented by Confederate flags and KKK graffiti… South and West is ultimately a testament to failure; it shows us how a writer as formidable as Didion can get it wrong.”

Judge for yourself: the Review section of The Guardian at the weekend had an extract from the book, which is now online.