In his Skin Lane (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99) Neil Bartlett shows eerie skill in his evocation of a small, secret pocket of the City of London devoted to the skin trade way back in 1967. His account of the increasingly desperate obsession of an inarticulate senior employee in a furrier’s business with one of his male assistants is masterly in its sinister progression. Another novel that greatly impressed me was Robert Edric’s The Kingdom of Ashes (Doubleday, £16.99), set immediately after the war in a Germany of camps for displaced persons, a festering black market and clandestine fraternisation between victors and vanquished. With the mot juste always taking precedence over the métaphore outrée, Edric’s fastidious and austere style is a joy. The most overrated book to come my way was Ian McEwen’s On Chesil Beach (Cape £12.99): technically proficient, as always, but tinny and wan.

Rupert Christiansen

David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain: 1945–1951 (Bloomsbury, £25) is one of the most vividly imagined, brilliantly researched and hugely entertaining books of social history I have ever encountered, and I can’t wait for the next volume in the series. Julie Kavanagh’s Rudolf Nureyev (Fig Tree, £25) is a magnificent example of the old school of biography — a warts-and-all portrait of a flawed but intensely lovable human being who ranks as one of the great performing artists of the last century. I was dazzled by Andrew Hodges’ One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers (Short Books, £12.99), even though I could barely grasp the complexity of the concepts it discusses. Couched in prose of superlative elegance, V. S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People (Picador, £16.99) is full of a rare wisdom and moral honesty. The only new fiction I read was Lloyd Davies’ subtle and touching Mister Pip (John Murray, £12.99).

Jonathan Mirsky

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