Books of the Year I

Jonathan Sumption

Barbara Emerson’s The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, £35) is an outstanding account of Britain’s relations with Russia at a time when ambassadors mattered and Britain was the only world power. No one has explained the Great Game in Central Asia or the intricacies of European dynastic politics so well.

Anne Somerset’s Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers (Collins, £30) overlaps with it, since one of the abiding themes of the queen’s relations with the eight men who occupied No. 10 in her long reign was her enthusiasm for going to war with Russia. Victoria was opinionated and outspoken, but easy to manipulate if you knew the codes. She took little trouble to conceal her likes (Melbourne, Disraeli) and dislikes (Palmerston, Gladstone), thus furnishing Somerset with some excellent copy.

Both of these books are based on serious documentary research (including, in Emerson’s case, in the Russian state archives during the brief period when they were readily accessible to western scholars). Both combine breaking new ground with scholarship, elegance and humour.

Hadley Freeman

Yes, he’s my friend, and, yes, we share an agent. But I have lots of friends, and share an agent with many people, and I have never claimed they wrote my favourite book of any year – as I’m sure at least some will point out to me when they see this. But David Baddiel’s My Family (Fourth Estate, £22) really is my book of the year. To say that it tells the story of Baddiel’s extraordinary mother and equally outsize father barely touches the sides of what it is; and I haven’t come across a book so jaw-droppingly outrageous and deeply compassionate since I don’t know when. Baddiel could have written it as a story of childhood trauma, but instead he has turned it into one of the funniest books imaginable.