Books of the Year

Blair Worden

J.R. Maddicott’s The Origins of the English Parliament 924–1327 (OUP, £30) is not one for the bedside, but its wide and profound scholarship has much to teach us about the roots and functions of an institution now subjected to so much unhistorical criticism.

Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Allen Lane, £25) is an absorbing and elegant account of Smith’s mind and of the Scottish context, social and intellectual, that produced it. D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto, £25) gives a wonderful sense of Macmillan’s complexity and stature and of the place of personality in the fortunes of power and the making of policy.

Marcus Berkmann

Every compulsive reader is on a quest of some sort, and mine, I have realised, is in search of the perfect comic novel. God knows why: I have 80-odd P. G. Wodehouses on my shelves, and a good quarter of those must be as near perfection as makes no difference. But the search must go on, even though out-and-out comic novels tend to sell modestly, excite little more than critical indifference and never win awards, Howard Jacobson’s recent gong notwithstanding. Especially do they never win the Bollinger-Everyman-Wodehouse Prize for comic writing, which by hallowed tradition, only goes to something deeply unamusing.

But this year I found a beauty: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury, £7.99). Jensen is Danish, lives in London and writes in English, and every book of hers is different. This one, which came out in 2006, tells the story of a sparky young house-cleaner and part-time prostitute in late 19th-century Copenhagen who, for reasons too complicated and daft to go into here, ends up in 21st-century London, where she falls in love. Time travel is not a fashionable subject for serious fiction, but the book has a wild energy, a narrative voice unlike any other, a plot of Wodehousian elegance, and great warmth of spirit.