Sam Leith

Richard Price’s meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (Quercus, £16.99), is bliss, too, because it has Spenser, Hawk and the Gray Man in it. Short stories from Kurt Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect, Cape, £16.99), and Annie Proulx (Fine Just The Way It Is, 4th Estate, £14.99) were moving, funny and wise.

In politics, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic, £12.99) offered a lucid account of the world order; while Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’s The Three Trillion Dollar War (Allen Lane, £20) offered a similarly clear explanation of why the Iraq war, to paraphrase their argument, sucked cheese.
Lettres don’t get more belles than Robert Lowell’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s (Words in Air, Faber, £40). And J. G. Ballard’s Miracles of Life (4th Estate, £14.99) is testament to an extraordinary writer and a true mensch.

Lettres don’t get more belles than Robert Lowell’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s (Words in Air, Faber, £40). And J. G. Ballard’s Miracles of Life (4th Estate, £14.99) is testament to an extraordinary writer and a true mensch.

Philip Ziegler

With The Private Patient (Faber, £18.99) P. D. James has written a book which, for masterly evocation of place and understanding of human nature, is as good as anything she has ever done. It therefore ranks among the masterpieces of British crime writing and, but for the snobbishness of genre categorisation, would be an obvious candidate for a major literary prize. There are ominous hints that this might be Dalgleish’s last case. May it not be so.

Andrew Roberts’ Masters and Commanders (Allen Lane, £25) is an enthralling analysis of the relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall and Alanbrooke. Frequently at loggerheads, shifting in their alliances with each other, occasionally reduced to fury by the the others’ obstinacy or intransigence, these men knew that the future of the free world depended on their working together. Roberts tells the story of their doing so with consummate mastery of his sources and all the vigour and enthusiasm which makes his writing such a joy to read.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP