Their vast fortune came from coal — the richest seams in the country ran under their land. The most fascinating part of the story is the Fitzwilliams’ relationship with the thousands of miners they employed. In spite of their wretched housing and starvation wages, the miners preferred to work for Lord Fitzwilliam than for a faceless corporation. The park at Wentworth was traditionally their recreation ground and when in 1946 Manny Shinwell proposed to despoil it with opencast to within a few yards of the house no less a man than Joe Hall, Yorkshire NUM president, wrote a letter of protest.

Even more extraordinary is the photograph of Billy Fitzbilly, 7th Earl, teaching the pit-pony drivers to play polo during the 1926 General Strike. These two occurrences seem incredible to anyone like myself who experienced the bitter 1945 election in a mining constituency and knew the feelings of the miners towards the coal owners. This is a history lesson with the oddest twists.

These two books are quite enough for one year, but there is a brilliantly edited book of letters that I cannot mention because I would have to declare an interest. Bother.

Ferdinand Mount

This year I have been mostly reading novels about American estate agents. You might not think this would be a popular subject, but in the kingdom of the restless the realtor is royalty. Anyway novels about moving can be moving novels. And informative too. After finishing Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury, £7.99), I feel I could close a deal on a three-bed dutch-colonial condo without breaking sweat. This is the third of Ford’s rich, rambling novels about Frank Bascombe, the one-time sportswriter who now sells houses and sheds wives along the Jersey shore in a mordant, solitary, reflective sort of way. It’s getting late. Independence Day, the title of the previous volume, has given way to Thanksgiving — for what Frank stoically doesn’t quite ask.

In Jane Smiley’s Good Faith (Faber, £7.99), Joey Stratford sells houses in an inland rustbelt state. He’s pretty solitary too, though he gets more sex. Smiley is snappier and plottier than Ford. She goes a little easier on the desolation too and, as she always does, gives you a delicious sense of being in there. But my favourite, for its sly charity and flickery wit, is Anne Tyler’s Digging to America (Vintage, £7.99). If Jane Austen had ever written a novel about an Iranian-born estate agent in Baltimore who adopts a Korean orphan, this would be it. What is so remarkable about these three enchanting books is that in each of them the estate agent adores being an estate agent. Nothing like this has happened in world literature before.

Francis King

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