Philip Hensher
The English novel I liked best this year was Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Cape, £18.99) — humane, rueful and wonderfully resourceful in its wit. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) was simply a marvel of technique, observation and sympathy. At the other end of the artistic spectrum, Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £20) were a must for anyone seriously interested in the means of fiction. All three were, among other things, masterpieces of comedy.
The memoir of suffering now has its own section in bookshops. Few of them deserve one’s attention, but Candia McWilliam’s magnificent What To Look For In Winter (Cape, £16.99) transcends its apparent category through the beauty and freshness of its language, and the stoic nobility of its spirit. That, and Edmund de Waal’s gripping The Hare With Amber Eyes (Chatto, £16.99) showed that what counts in a memoir is not experience alone, but intelligence and an ability to write.
The best biography of the year was Philip Ziegler’s rather straight-faced life of Edward Heath (Harper Press, £25). Simon Winder’s Germania (Picador, £18.99) was a wonderfully entertaining voyage into terra incognita — the German nation, its history and geography, hardly mentioning the Nazis. I love Germany, and Winder’s untidy, idiosyncratic but always interesting book both confirmed old interests and sparked off new ones. The German nation should award him the Verdienstkreuz without delay.
Jonathan Sumption
It has been a good year for historical writing about the ‘long’ 18th century. The appearance of Thierry Lentz’s book on Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Les Cent Jours: 1815 (Fayard), completes the author’s magnificent five-volume history of the public career of Napoleon, which now ranks as the best modern account. Unusually for a work on this subject in French, it is wholly objective and even shows some interest in the rest of Europe’s experience of the great despot.
Ian McBride’s Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Gill & Macmillan, £19.99) is one of the few histories of Ireland to treat it as part of Europe and not just as an appendage of England.
Finally, those who admired Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter will also enjoy her latest contribution to the social history of 18th-century England, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, £20), which is just as readable even if it is not quite as original as its famous predecessor.
Byron Rogers
The Romantics in Wales edited by Glyn Tegai Hughes (Gwasg Gregynog, £500). Cut off from Europe, and the Alps, by Napoleon, English Romantic poets sought their fixes of sublimity in the mountains of Wales where, unfortunately, they encountered the Welsh. One tried to shoot Shelley, according to Shelley (‘I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. Oh, send me £20 if you have it’). Another, a vicar, was so irritated by Wordsworth he took a knife to him. The result is that you will never see the Romantics in quite the same light again. Southey writes thoughtfully about the Welsh, ‘These creatures were somewhat between me and the animals, and were as useful to the landscape as masses of weeds and stranded boats.’
The Garden in the Clouds by Antony Woodward (Harper Press, £16.99). The author buys a six-acre smallholding 1,200 feet up a Welsh mountain. This is called Tair Ffynnon, which, he tells his readers, means Four Wells, and conscientiously he tries to locate all four, a job that will take him the rest of his life — for, sadly, Tair Ffynnon means Three Wells.
This is an enjoyable book as he tries to create a garden in the clouds and encounters Welsh sheep who eat everything (‘hay, straw, silage, horse and cattle feed, chicken feed, bird seed, cat food, grass cuttings’), and are incredibly none the worse for eating, also, ivy and yew. But he wins through in spite of the sheep and the Welsh language. This is a triumph of the human spirit.
Andrew Taylor
Here are three books that I wasn’t able to review this year, but any of them would grace a Christmas stocking. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (translated by Michael Hofmann; Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99) was originally published in 1947. Set in 1940, it’s the story of one man’s futile gesture of resistance against the Nazi state apparatus. This thriller is a German Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the chilling difference that the world it describes is not a fable. Beautifully written, timeless and as relevant now as 60 years ago. Belinda Bauer’s Blacklands (Corgi, £7.99) won this year’s Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association. A boy tries to trace his missing uncle by writing to the jailed serial killer who may have murdered him. The result is a tense, well-orchestrated crime novel with a refreshingly unusual premise. Another well-earned award — the Steel Dagger — went to Simon Conway’s A Loyal Spy (Hodder, £7.99). Thrillers that straddle the globe and have millions of lives at stake are standard issue in the genre. But this one does it differently. It’s sprawling, violent and contemporary, with whiffs of authenticity that lift it above the crowd.
David Sexton
Two volumes of Nigel Slater’s Tender are a masterpiece. Volume I, on vegetables, appeared last year, bound in green; Volume II (4th Estate, £30), on fruit, this autumn, bound in pink. They are continuously paginated, amounting to 1,226 pages in total, beautifully printed and illustrated. Both growing and cooking, Slater has made a whole world from his own back garden in North London. The recipes are wonderful but these books are endlessly re-readable too — they are in fact a kind of sensual autobiography, quite new. I wouldn’t be without them.
Justin Cartwright
I loved David Mitchell’s new book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre, £18.99). The boy is frighteningly talented. I also loved Nicholas Shakespeare’s Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (Cape, £25). It is a masterpiece of sympathetic and diligent editing, absolutely fascinating and larded with acerbic comments from Shakespeare’s joint editor, Elizabeth Chatwin. And I think that for those of us who worship Saul Bellow, the Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor (Penguin, £30), are a treat, demonstrating how closely his novels followed the twists and turns of his life.
Paul Johnson
The book I relished most from 2010 was John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1883–1899. This is volume 5 in the catalogue raisonné being lovingly compiled by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray and published by Yale at £50. It contains a detailed account of Sargent’s greatest painting, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, which took him two years, 1885–86, to complete and is now in the Tate.
Also enjoyable was the latest instalment of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle which covers the year October 1860–October 1861 and is volume 37 in this remarkable series — notable as always for the feisty letters of Jane (Duke University Press).
The year was marked by two striking biographies. As I am writing a life of Darwin, I found Emma Darwin by James D. Loy and Kent M. Loy (Florida), describing his patient, sensitive and supporting wife, invaluable and illuminating. And that enterprising spirit Dinesh D’Souza has produced an alarming portrait of the gruesome US President in The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Regnery, £16.99).
Francis King
On announcement of any Booker result, usually the same writers pop up yet again to dispute the choice of winner. But this year there was general agreement. Who, after all, could maintain that Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99), so witty on its surface and so melancholy in its depths, was not the perfect choice? Otherwise this was a bad year for the novel — J.M. Coetzee in effortfully listless form, Martin Amis once again garnering huge reviews for a novel even less satisfying than its skimmed-milk predecessor.
But it was a year of triumph for biography. The best to come my way was Adam Sisman’s cruelly perceptive and faultlessly written Hugh Trevor-Roper (Weidenfeld, £25). I sometimes used to meet Hugh in the company of his famous eye-surgeon brother, Pat, whose modesty, kindness and courage in battling for social reform provided such a piquant contrast to the snobbery, boasting and bullying that Sisman has so brilliantly portrayed in his book.
William Leith
Before I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (Fourth Estate, £20), I thought human beings were doomed. Since reading this brilliant book, I still think we might be doomed. But now I have my doubts. Ridley shows us that, when people exchange things, they specialise, and become more productive. As time goes on, the incidence of exchange increases — so life should get better. Even if you don’t agree with everything he says, the writing is superb.
I also loved Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg (Cape, £12.99), a memoir in which Clegg, a New York literary agent, describes his life as a crack addict. And I loved Greg Baxter’s A Preparation for Death (Penguin, £14.99), a memoir about a man who drinks too much, and keeps getting off with women, and writes about it with a rare charm.
Christopher Howse
Bleak, ghastly, dismal, prison-like, harsh, hideous, bare, gloomy, cold, and oppressive are among the adjectives that Augustus Hare attached to the Escorial when he visited it in 1873. This melancholy characterisation has stuck, but now Henry Kamen, renowned for his revisionist histories of the Inquisition and of Philip II, has in The Escorial (Yale, £25) presented the palace-monastery as it really is: a lovely Renaissance wonder in the humanistic tradition.
At home, Yale, which is also to be thanked for taking on the expansion of Pevsner’s series of The Buildings of England (with Cumbria and north Hampshire appearing this year), has added an 18th monograph volume to that glory of British serial publication, The Survey of London, which has produced 47 volumes on London parishes in the past 110 years. The Charterhouse (£80) details, in words, photographs and plans, the mixed fortunes of a remarkable survival from medieval London.
Sam Leith
The book that I’ve found myself telling other people about most has been Through The Language Glass (Heinemann, £18), Guy Deutscher’s gripping pop-science book about linguistics and neuropsychology, describing how language shapes our perception of reality.
I also hope people look at the handsomely produced A Hedonist’s Guide to Art (Hg2, £15). I must confess an interest: I’ve contributed a couple of essays and it’s edited by a friend, Laura K. Jones. But it’s highly original, and stuffed with fascinating gobbets from contributors as diverse as Brian Sewell, Will Self, Gilbert & George and Genesis P. Orridge.
Anne Chisholm
One of the best biographies I have read for a long time was Wendy Moffat’s study of E.M. Forster, A New Life (Bloomsbury, £25), in which she reconsiders the man and his writing in the light of newly available material about his sexuality. Neither reductionist nor prurient, her book is revelatory in the right way, illuminating both about his fiction and the two enduring British hang-ups, sex and class.
Michael Frayn’s memoir My Father’s Fortune (Faber, £16.99) celebrates his modest suburban background and his unbookish salesman father with loving precision.Sad, but not miserable despite his mother’s shockingly early death, his book is a model of restraint but full of feeling.
Andro Linklater
C’est encore moi qui vous écris by Marie Billetdoux (Stock). In 1971, the enchantingly named and gypsily beautiful Raphaele Billetdoux promised to become the new Françoise Sagan with the publication of Jeune Fille en Silence, and more personally stole my heart away. After three decades as a highly regarded novelist, she suffered the loss of her husband and, with his death, her belief in fiction. This, the second of two anguished compilations made since then under her new name consists of past writings by, to and about her. It is undoubtedly my book of the year, privately because it contains letters I once wrote of toe-scrunching embarrassment, but more generally for its stark portrayal of a writer seeking to find a lost meaning among words she no longer trusts.
I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy’s C (Cape, £16.99) also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize. Its failings — occasional, didactic, mind-numbing passages — are those of ambition, and its achievements — the hero Serge Carrefax’s aerial dogfights and decoding speculations — are those of imagination set free.
Alan Judd
Charlotte Moore’s Hancox (Viking £20) does more than catalogue the history of a Sussex house and the lively and distinguished family (her own) that has inhabited it for the past 120 or so years. She writes with insight and kindly wit, observing her forbears with an Austenian eye. You follow them as you would characters in a novel, which makes them more real than most historical figures. She should give us a fictitious sequel.
John Biggins is the author of a wry and fascinating tetralogy of novels beginning in the first world war Austrian navy’s submarine service (sic). The Surgeon’s Apprentice (ww.johnbigginsfiction.com) is another soundly researched tale of sea-faring and warfare, with the addition of 17th-century medicine, science and astrology. His hero has the misfortune to take part in the disastrous 1625 expedition to Cadiz, regarded ‘by connoisseurs of incompetence as the worst-conducted military operation in Britain’s entire history’. But it makes for a good yarn.
Another first world war tetralogy is Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, arguably the most sophisticated British fiction to come out of that war. Carcanet’s reissue of the first volume, Some Do Not (£18.95), is the first reliable text, reconstructing Ford’s dramatic original ending. Brilliantly edited by Max Saunders and now to be filmed (scripted by Tom Stoppard), it deserves to be — and will be — better known.
P.J. Kavanagh
The Great Books (Icon, £20) by the philosopher Anthony O’Hear was published in 2007 but I only read it this year because the title made it sound too like a crib, which it is, but much more as well. O’Hear points out for example that the Greek heroes in Homer (whom Simone Weil called ‘ killing-machines’) were attacking a culture that was domestic and civilised. Andromache was preparing a hot bath for her husband Hector, not knowing that he was being dragged, dead, behind the chariot of Achilles. Homer tells us this, but amid the blood and clamour we might overlook the contrast. In the Aeneid Vergil can be sensed flinching at the violence of the pax romana — even ‘pious Aeneas’ could be guilty. This ‘piety’ is O’Hear’s theme.
All the books he describes and examines, from Homer to Goethe’s Faust, exist in an order that contains some form of transcendence, above and outside man. This order, essential to understanding the books themselves, O’Hear contends that we now too often push aside, treating ‘the mythology and mysticism of Plato’s thought as if these things were too naive and embarrassing even to notice’. Against this impoverishment O’Hear, unfashionably, goes doughtily to war.
I also admired Ian Ker’s John Henry Newman (OUP, £30) because Ker had the courtesy and good sense to let Newman almost write it himself. The quotations, especially from the letters, are a revelation and delight. The fruit of years of travel and study.
Lewis Jones
Chasing the Sun (Simon & Schuster, £30) tells non-scientists all they might want to know about the sun, and scientists much that they probably did not know. Richard Cohen supplies plenty of dizzying figures — the sun is 32,000 light years from the centre of its galaxy of a hundred billion stars, and so on — but also considers our star from such perspectives as the mythological, literary and musical. There is an excellent chapter on sunbathing, an activity which was banned in Bournemouth until the early 1930s. Endlessly informative and diverting, Chasing the Sun is an encyclopaedic plum pudding of a compendium.
Keith Richards is not an obviously literary figure, but he turns out to be an avid reader and — with the help of James Fox — an entertaining writer. He and Mick have not composed a decent song together for several decades, and Life (Weidenfeld, £20) explains why: Mick has betrayed the blues (and the Stones) to go tarting after disco and reggae. But despite this and many other faults — snobbery, greed, inability to hold his drink — ‘Keef’ still loves him. He has vivid recall of the band’s great early years, of people met, ‘bitches’ bedded and drugs ingested. He is brilliant on the technical aspects of the music. And for all his piratical vice and criminality, he emerges as a basically decent bloke.
Ian Thomson
Even today, it’s extraordinary what people flush down their lavatories. Thames Water periodically hires ‘flushers’ to pan the sewers hopefully for jewellery and other items. The great Victorian chronicler of London’s underclass, Henry Mayhew, documented similar employees, known as ‘toshers’, who trawled sewerage outlets round Blackfriars and Surrey docks in search of copper nails and other windfalls.
I was impressed by the new edition of Mayhew’s towering work of social reportage, London Labour and the London Poor (OUP, £12.99) edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Mayhew was among the first to elevate London’s poor to the dignity of print; chronicled here are sewer-hunters, card-sharps and prostitutes who scraped a pittance to get by. Not even Dickens documented the teeming antheap of mid-Victorian London with such unsparing lucidity.
The Sicilian writer-prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa enjoyed a burlesque correspondence with his cousins during his travels abroad in the mid-1920s. His Letters from London and Europe (Alma Books, £14.99) reveal a charmingly perplexed fascination in English foodstuffs and clothes (with, incidentally, ribald talk of Sicilian noblemen’s ‘testicles, bollocks, cojones’ surprising in one who later wrote The Leopard).
Sean Willentz’s Bob Dylan in America (Bodley Head, £20) is heavygoing in parts, with pages of academic flim-flam. Yet it throws up a wealth of unexpected connections (Dylan and Aaron Copland, for example), and sent me back to the naff mid-period albums as well as the classics.
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