Raymond Carr

By far the best book I have read this year is Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (Bloomsbury, £20).   It is the humane, sincere and often very funny autobiography of a man who was, for a time, head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit. There are sympathetic and revealing portraits of Keith Joseph and Selwyn Lloyd. I particularly relished his portrait of Siegfried Sassoon, whose besetting trait was ‘to repent of any gesture almost as soon as he had made it’. His loving tribute to his father brought tears to my eyes — something I have not experienced for some several years.

William Leith

This year I enjoyed Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf (Icon Books, £8.99), a brilliant book about how human beings learned to read and write. There’s a superb explanation of the conditions that cause dyslexia — which, Wolf points out, wouldn’t have conferred an evolutionary disadvantage until very recently, and might even have been beneficial to some people.

I liked Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt (Allen Lane, £20), which explains, among lots of other things, why it’s counterproductive, beyond a certain point, to tell people what to do. People drive better when they have to think about what they’re doing, rather than living in a world of relentless instructions. And I take my hat off to Randall Stross, whose book Planet Google (Atlantic Books, £16.99) explains the genius of that company: how they found a way to make more data into better data, which is, perhaps, the modern-day equivalent of striking oil. Naturally I loved Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury, £14.99). And I was pleasantly drawn into Ethan Canin’s novel America, America (Bloomsbury, £17.99).

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