Books Of The Year

Sebastian Smee

I was excited to see the publication this year of Peter Schjeldahl’s Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, £18.95). Schjeldahl’s is not typical New Yorker prose: he has a distinctive, highly refined voice, at once condensed and probing. One doesn’t need to agree with him always (I don’t) to acknowledge that he is currently the best writer on art in the English language. A younger New Yorker writer, Alex Ross, deserves special praise for his history of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Fourth Estate, £20). The first chapter, which opens with a description of the 1906 production in Graz of Strauss’s Salome, with Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and possibly even Hitler in attendance, is a triumph. Finally, a book of perfume criticism called Perfumes: The Guide (Profile Books, £20), by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

Like Ross and Schjeldahl, these authors seduce you, with superb prose, into believing that fine discriminations matter, even in areas you may not previously have cared about.

Byron Rogers

The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, (University of Wales Press, £65) for its scholarship, also for its sense of proportion, as in comments such as this on Roy Jenkins, ‘[He was] a ferocious croquet player’, and on Queen Victoria who ‘spent only seven nights in Wales, compared with seven weeks in Ireland and seven years in Scotland’.Halfway to Venus (Umbrella, £12.99) by Sarah Anderson, with whom I was once in love but who hit me over the head with a kettle, as the result of which I did not know until now how well she could write.

George Osborne

In the fashionable rush to re-read Keynes, Galbraith and Friedman on the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, don’t neglect an emerging batch of modern writers on the current crisis. Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution (Princeton, $16.99) is the best short study I’ve read of what went wrong in the US and how we might fix it.  Niall Fergusson has just published a timely and brilliant new financial history of the world, The Ascent of Money (Allen Lane, £25). And if you want to escape all the doom and gloom this Christmas, you must turn of course to my wife’s gripping tale of the woman who scandalised Edwardian London and White Mischief Kenya (The Bolter, Virago, £18.99).

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