Rupert Christiansen

Mick Imlah’s exploration of the culture of Scottishness, The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99), is brilliantly witty and intellectually supple, a worthy winner of this year’s
Forward Prize for Poetry. Bloomsbury Ballerina (Weidenfeld, £25), Judith Mackrell’s life of Lydia Lopokova, is a hugely entertaining and informative study of the Ballets Russes star who had a remarkable second career as wife to Maynard Keynes. Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon’s Lutyens and the Great War (Frances Lincoln, £30) is a beautifully produced tribute to that great architect’s work on cemeteries and memorials.

Published in 2007 but new in paperback, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, £8.99) was sneeringly reviewed by a lot of dryasdust chauvinist pigs who seemed to miss the point. I loved it — a daringly original piece of scholarship and speculation which makes one rethink received suppositions and opens up fascinating new possibilities. My novel of the year is without doubt Aleksander Hemon’s hauntingly strange and weirdly comic The Lazarus Project (Picador, £14.99).

Anita Brookner

As I spent a large part of the year writing, my actual reading was rather restricted, and limited to fact rather than fiction. I very much enjoyed Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, £20) and the endlessly fascinating Diaries of James Lees-Milne (John Murray). I also liked The Other Garden and Collected Stories by Francis Wyndham (Picador, £7.99), tenderly and faithfully written. Everything else has been mildly disappointing. Now I am reduced to nostalgia reading: Simenon, Kundera, Alice Munro.

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