Deborah Devonshire
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (Profile Books, £9.99) is small, short, cheap and perfect. It is a gem among the dross, without a wasted word. It conjures a picture so skilfully that whenever I see the Derbyshire County Library van in the village I see Norman and his employer inside discussing their lists of books to borrow. Several bedside copies have already been taken away by my guests. I don’t blame them.
Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey (Penguin Viking, £20) proves truth to be stranger than fiction. It tells the history of the Fitzwilliam family, with its convoluted relationships, living in royal style at Wentworth House, the biggest-by-far private house in England.
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
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
Grand Canal, Great River: The Travel Diary of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Poet, translated with a commentary by Philip Watson (Frances Lincoln Ltd, £20). A beautifully written and produced account of the journey down two of China’s great waterways by one of its main poets. Lu You saw and appreciated every place and every body. Watson’s commentary and photographs are perfect.
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25). A gripping and convincing account of the web-toed monster from his earliest years. Lenin loved him because he was such a reliable and devoted killer.
Energy of Delusion: a Book on Plot by Viktor Shklovsky translated by Shushan Avagyan (Dalkey Archive Press, £9.99). One of Russia’s best writers and critics, Shklovsky (died 1984) was learned, relaxed, rambling and in love with Anna Karenina. He said this of critics: ‘Most mistakes in literary criticism, I think, occur when people approach so close to the poetic horse — Pegasus — and mount it so swiftly that they miss the saddle and end up on the other side of the horse. Then they get up, look around, the horse is still standing there, but the person is not in the saddle.’
The book I most enjoyed reading this year was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
Piers Paul Read
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £17.99), a risky but in my view wholly successful departure for this author of mellifluous, well-crafted novels — witty, intelligent, sinister, original, compelling.
The Last Mazurka: Passion, War and Loss in a Polish Family by Andrew Tarnowski (Aurum, £14.99), an intriguing account of the author’s aristocratic family who lived in mediaeval splendour on their vast estates in eastern Poland until they lost all in the second world war: a historical vignette but also an honest examination of the suffering caused over several generations by failures in love.
The Illumination of Merton Browne (Sceptre, £12.99), a vivid, sometimes shocking first novel by J. M. Shaw set on a sink estate which combines a fast-moving narrative with intelligent digressions on politics and history, and an incisive, satirical critique of ‘bog standard’ comprehensive education.
Allan Massie
I haven’t read a better new novel this year than Clara’s Tale by Pierre Péju (Harvill Secker, £12.99). Excellently transl ated by Euan Cameron, this is a meditation on the nihilism of the 20th century, but also a fine narrative, sometimes chilling, sometimes with marvellous moments of redemptive tenderness. It owes something to Camus, and discharges that debt admirably. Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib (Little, Brown, £20) is both a delightful evocation of late 19th-century India and an acute study of Kipling’s genius; utterly absorbing. Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, £20) is a very fine collection of essays, memoirs and reflections on literature, life and politics; it includes his delightful and inspiring Nobel lecture. I also greatly enjoyed The Renaissance Popes by Gerard Noel (Basic Books), full of agreeably scandalous stories, also offering a spirited defence of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. I rarely read overrated books these days, experience having taught me that novels praised by certain reviewers are far better avoided.
Anita Brookner
Death of the novel — again. This conclusion was reached after reading the ramshackle performances of J. M. Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year, Harvill Secker, £16.99), Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero, Bloomsbury, £17.99) and Philip Roth (Exit Ghost, Cape, £16.99). I make exception for Ian McEwen’s On Chesil Beach (Cape, £12.99), which should have won the Man Booker, and Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before it is Sung (Bloomsbury, £16.99), a subtle exploration of a troubling friendship. Everything else proved unmemorable.
Rereadings: the novels of Edith de Born, completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter, of Sybille Bedford. Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners. I recommend The House in Vienna and The Flat in Paris (both Chapman and Hall). These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived. Their saving grace is that, like her slightly younger contemporaries, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, this author writes like a lady.
P. J. Kavanagh
A poetry highlight of the year was a new Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, £30, edited by Peter McDonald). The previous Collected (1966), by E. R. Dodds, MacNeice’s classical mentor and friend, had difficulties with chronology and, good as it is, has an air of rush about it. Here all is satisfactorily tidied up, one imagines for good. A hugely enjoyable poet, MacNeice (1907–63) had a dull patch in his middle years but by the time of his early death had come brilliantly back into form.
Another Collected of a poet I enjoy was Anthony Thwaite’s (from Enitharmon) — he was, incidentally, a junior colleague of MacNeice’s at the BBC. What these two poets have in common is clarity of form, interest of content and skill. Their poems, unlike some, do not read as though translated from Arabic and probably better in the original. I still cannot understand why more people don’t read poetry: when it is good it is quicker.
Philip Ziegler
Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, £30) is an informed and scholarly study of a great architect, a wide-ranging conspectus of the social and aesthetic movements of the age, and a brilliantly perceptive account of an extravagant, passionate and too often tormented soul. It is difficult to believe that this extraordinarily accomplished work is a first biography.
Robert Peel was neither extravagant, passionate nor tormented but he was one of the giants of 19th-century politics. Norman Gash in his great life of Peel left little room for even the most zealous researcher to find new material of significance. What Douglas Hurd provides in this biography (Robert Peel, Weidenfeld, £25) is the sympathetic insight of one who has done many of the same things and understands the pressures under which Peel was working. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, beautifully written and admirably fair.
William Leith
This year, I felt galvanised and excited by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan (Allen Lane, £20). Taleb, whose background is in finance, believes that, in the modern world, weird things happen much more often than we expect them to. He calls these weird things Black Swans, and they’re events like economic crashes and terrorist attacks. They come out of the blue, he says, and afterwards, we nod wisely and pretend we understand what they were about. But we don’t. He has a lovely way of telling a story, like a good companion. I’d also recommend Terence Blacker’s book on Willie Donaldson, You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This (Ebury, £12.99). It’s a serious study of a self-destructive individual, a man who threw away his money and became a crack addict, although Blacker wonders if, in spite of everything, Donaldson’s life was not ‘a sort of perverse triumph’. I also liked Chuck Klosterman’s fourth book, Chuck Klosterman IV (Faber, £12.99), in which, among other things, the American journalist interviews Britney Spears and Val Kilmer, and writes a fictional story in which a woman falls out of the sky and lands on his car.
Sebastian Smee
I read, on a friend’s recommendation,
V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (Picador, £8.99) this year. Strange, thwarted, entrancing book. It calls itself a novel, but it reads as a very thinly disguised memoir about a writer’s secluded — but not yet completely secluded — time on an estate near Salisbury. Naipaul’s writing relies on fastidious observation and a kind of mental precision that conveys the ongoing movement of thought. There is a rhythm to it, an enormous, mounting sense of loss kept in check by a ferocious resistance to sentimentality. Despite its long and devoted descriptions of nature, it is not a sensual book. Crucial, then, that it be followed by a book like James Salter’s memoir Burning the Days (Picador, £7.99). ‘Nature is ravishing,’ writes Salter, ‘but the women are in the cities,’ before continuing: ‘There was one night in Rome, one morning really…’ And there you have Salter in a nutshell. Salter was a real discovery for me this year: an erotic, profound, intoxicating writer. Finally, Roger Ballen’s black-and-white photographs in Shadow Chamber (Phaidon, £19.47) show us things we are afraid of and things we cherish and adore, then sow confusion between the two. If it’s true, as Susan Sontag wrote, that great art makes you nervous, Ballen’s can be nothing else.
Sam Leith
Nicola Barker’s visionary epic, Darkmans (Fourth Estate, £14.99), is a really strange and lively and unsettling book that at first I hated, then loved, and now can’t get out of my head. For steely humour, bleak exactness of evocation and fastidious prose, it’s hard to match A. L. Kennedy’s Day (Cape, £16.99). I also loved Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Fourth Estate, £17.99), a divine gumshoe romp set in an imaginary Jewish homeland in Alaska.
My non-fiction book of the year is the Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber, £30). Brilliantly edited by Christopher Reid, these are gasp-makingly revelatory and electrically written. Hughes’s austerity, humour, generosity, love of nature and craziness animate every page — and they transformed my assumptions about what Hughes was like; he’s warmer and funnier than you’d think. They’re let down by a sketchy index, but the in-text apparatus is excellent. You emerge at the end like someone staggering out of a good production of King Lear.
Philip Hensher
The book I loved best all year was Daljit Nagra’s wonderfully inflected collection of poems, Look, We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, £6.99). When I had finished it, half the b ook turned out to have been half-committed to memory. David Kynaston’s improbably entertaining history, Austerity Britain: 1945–1951 (Bloomsbury, £25), made enterprising use of unusual sources and was an unexpected popular success. The novels I liked best were Charlotte Mendelson’s lovely family romance, When We Were Bad (Picador, £12.99), and Michael Chabon’s knockout alternate-world fantasy, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Fourth Estate, £17.99). I went back and read all of Chabon for the first time — he is the most wonderfully vaudeville performer. The two books with the real tang of greatness about them were Ted Hughes’s selected letters (Faber, £30) and Günter Grass’s sublime memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, £18.99). Their huge literary merit was somehow swallowed up in absurd speculation about guilt and truth; speculation which, of course, this painfully truthful and searching book contained within itself in immeasurably more honest forms.
Justin Cartwright
Graham Greene, A Life in Letters by Richard Greene (Little, Brown, £20). At a time when British fiction is stuttering, this is a very good moment to look back on the life and personality of Graham Greene, revealed in this exemplary collection of his letters.
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 by Christopher Clark, (Penguin, £12.99). It seems to me that we have mostly been guilty of a facile and convenient dismissal of Germany and its tragic history. This book, thorough, sensitive and well written, explains at least one part of the conundrum.
I have read a lot of novels this year, but the one that provided the most pain was Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (Cape, £16.99). It seems to record the end of an immense talent, while J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (Harvill Secker, £16.99) a complex but thoroughly satisfying work, declares that Coetzee has moved to unexplored fictional territory.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
This was a vintage year for history books, none better than David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain: 1945–1951 (Bloomsbury, £25), a cracking read with powerful resonances for those of us born under the Attlee Junta. My favourite line is from James Lees-Milne describing dinner with Harold Nicolson, who has decided that since ‘socialism is inevitable’ he must become a socialist, although ‘the sad thing is that no one dislikes the lower orders more than he does’. God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill (Allen Lane, £30) is admirable as biography, architectural history and psychoanalysis of a tormented soul. It didn’t make me like Pugin’s work much more, but that would be asking a good deal.
One tries to avoid mentioning books by friends, but not only have I actually read The Ghost by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, £18.99) when I haven’t read any of the books on the Booker short-list (well, who has?), but it’s a remarkable work, not just roman à clef but roman à thèse: a thriller which turns into a real political novel. It might even succeed in driving Tony Blair from office, unless there’s something I’ve missed.
David Gilmour
The most enjoyable book I have read this year is Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter (Atlantic Books, £35), a work which is as boisterous as its subject — sex and satire in 18th-century London. The author has a wonderful sense both of place and of atmosphere.
Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (Allen Lane, £30) is a hugely impressive narrative of the making and breaking of the Nazi economy. The drama and recklessness with which the Germans managed their economic policy are powerfully conveyed.
Italy was in need of a comprehensive modern history to rank with Denis Mack Smith’s masterpiece of 50 years ago. Christopher Duggan has now provided it with The Force of Destiny (Allen Lane, £30), a brilliant work dealing equally with the successes of the national movement in the building of Italy and the long series of political failures that followed.
Digby Durrant
Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (Headline, £8.99) about his extraordinary forebears starting with the Brute, his great-great-grandfather, who always carried a whip with an ivory handle with which he crushed a wasp on his wife’s cheek. His son Arthur was totally unlike his father, though siring a son, Evelyn, who was not entirely dissimilar, and whom he published, sometimes overruling his Board to do so. The author’s father, Auberon, described by Polly Toynbee as ‘effete, drunken, snobby, sneering, racist and sexist’, was to Alexander ‘a loyal, generous father …I am honoured to be his pale shadow’.
James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, (Picador, £7.99). A doomed love between a Yale dropout and a French waitress and the irresistible car, the Delage, to drive them to those haunting small French hotels for the once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that’s always too hot to cool down. Bliss!
Marcus Berkmann
The book I have bought most copies of this year is Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Free (Penguin paperback, £7.99). Hodgkinson is only in his late thirties, but already he is tired of all the things I’m tired of: shopping, debt, television, pensions, cars, puritanism, waste and advertising. There are countless books out there telling us that modern life is rubbish, but only Hodgkinson seems to have any idea what to do about it. His manifesto is wonderfully straightforward: divest yourself of as many trappings of 21st-century striving as you can. Get off the career treadmill, stop worrying about money, stop worrying full stop, purge yourself of guilt and fear and jealousy, concentrate instead on fun and good books, drink more wine, spend time with your children, play the ukulele. It’s the most cheering book I have read in ages. I have given it to several people for their birthdays and will be stocking up for Christmas shortly.
Oldish and newish novels I have particularly enjoyed this year include William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When? (1982), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (1995) and Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me (2006).
Martin Vander Weyer
Mavericks of the money world fascinate me, but the books I want to read by and about them are often left aside while I tackle duller tomes for duty. So here’s a couple of years’ worth: if some are not new, that won’t diminish their freshness to the first-time reader. Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing On The Edge by Tom Bower (HarperPress, 2006, £20) mercilessly uncovers our former proprietor, who’s up for sentencing this month. Michael O’Leary: A Life in Full Flight by Alan Ruddock (Penguin, 2007, £14.99) does likewise for the strange, hard-driving Irishman behind Ryanair. How To Get Rich by publishing tycoon Felix Dennis (Ebury Press, 2006, £16.99) is engaging and occasionally poetic. The Maverick by Luke Johnson (Harriman House, 2007, £14.99) is a must-read collection of the outspoken entrepreneur’s Sunday Telegraph columns. And I’ve only just caught up with Jabez by David McKie (Atlantic, 2005, £8.99), a life of Victorian MP and fraudster Jabez Spencer Balfour — the Maxwell of his day.
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