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. I’ve now read it three times just because I love it so, and each time I weep with laughter. A heroic triumph.
Mark Mason
Geir Jordet’s Pressure (New River, £25) is an absorbing study of football’s penalty kick. The psychological effect of previous events is so great that watching a goalkeeper save a penalty leads players to estimate his height as around 6cms more than is really the case. Keepers themselves might want to avoid Jens Lehmann’s mistake with his list of opposition players and their preferences: he kept it down his sock, where sweat rendered the writing illegible.
Punning Title of the Year goes to Paul Sinha’s One Sinha Lifetime (Ebury Press, £22). The memoir skilfully explores the interface between self-aware nerdery and minor celebrity. At a wedding, Sinha is seated at a table with the only other gay man there. He breaks the ice by ‘praising him on conducting such a beautiful service’.
Christopher Howse
‘When did crowds stop waving their handkerchiefs?’ asks Craig Brown in his idiosyncratic biography A Voyage Around the Queen (Fourth Estate, £25). ‘It was a strange tradition, when you come to think of it – though altogether friendlier than our contemporary practice of shielding our faces with iPhones. “I miss seeing their eyes,” the Queen said.’
As with his biography of Princess Margaret and the poor old Beatles, Brown makes a mosaic from a big-data input of tesserae chipped from memoirs, diaries and a magazine called Logophile to produce a surprisingly violent chapter on corgis, one less violent on curtseying and an account of a street party in Rillington Place. It must have been hard work for him, but it’s easy for the reader. I wish it had been longer.
Antony Beevor
Two books this year really deserve attention. Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing (Faber, £30) is a fine rehabilitation of the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin and benefits from dramatic new material. Prideaux tackles the controversies of his life head on and most successfully. Mercifully for such lush and subtle images, the book is beautifully produced.
Rachel Cockerell’s astonishing debut Melting Point (Headline, £25) is a brave experiment which actually works. Her story is mainly about the early attempts to create a Jewish homeland, particularly the little known story of a group of Jews, mostly from the Russian empire, who were settled in the Texan port of Galveston. It is also a family story; but all is told through meticulously selected material, whether newspaper clippings or letters, without linking passages – a deliberate decision. Her introduction alone is enough to show how well she can write.
Julie Burchill
Writers are a notoriously envious lot, often grudging the successes of their compadres. ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ said Gore Vidal. But a few are so good that envy is beside the point, and they make you feel like giving them a ticker-tape parade. Gareth Roberts is one. Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia (Swift Press, £16.99) is a very funny book about a deeply serious subject: western civilisation’s apparent desire to destroy itself by any means, especially on the battleground of sex. Witty, wicked and wise, a sobering education and a supreme entertainment, written by a polemicist and show-pony at the height of his powers, this is the best book yet about the culture wars.
Clare Mulley
The Harrimans were an extraordinary family and two members of the clan feature in a couple of my books of the year. Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell (Virago, £25) is a rich, insightful biography of the brilliant and beautiful American diplomat Pamela Harriman, whose influence extended from Winston Churchill to Joe Biden. To what extent she was at the heart of history is reflected by the fact that her third husband Averell Harriman was one of the group whose wartime dealings form the focus of Giles Milton’s gripping and hugely enjoyable The Stalin Affair (John Murray, £25).
The foreshadowing of war also informs two fabulous novels. Jane Thynne’s Midnight in Vienna (Quercus, £20), a detective story set in 1938, has great fun weaving in everyone from Maxwell Knight to Dorothy L. Sayers; and Robert Harris is on top form with Precipice (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22), the exquisitely told story of the British prime minister H.H. Asquith’s affair with the clever young socialite Venetia Stanley in the summer of 1914.
Duncan Fallowell
Robert Hooke is one of the less accessible geniuses from the age of Isaac Newton (he invented miscroscopic science), so I pounced on Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy by Felicity Henderson (Reaktion, £17.95), the latest in the publisher’s refulgent ‘Renaissance Lives’ series (they also publish the equally admired ‘Critical Lives’ series).
I’ve been following with fascination Oliver Harris’s bloodhound commentaries on William Burroughs. Making Naked Lunch (Moloko Print, €20) arrived earlier this year and One Shot (a photo mystery) is due any day. They are published in Germany by a remarkable house whose books – whether in English, German or bilingual – far exceed in design anything issued by UK publishers.
I’ve always been on terms with the god Pan and am a devotee of his current ‘rewilding’ incarnation, whose high priestess is Isabella Tree. A children’s edition of her classic Wilding has lately been published (Macmillan, £20) with idyllic-but-accurate linocut illustrations by Angela Harding.
Philip Hensher
Anne Somerset’s Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers (Collins, £30) was fascinating: the relationship changed so much during the reign. David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu had a good subject in the history of copyright in Who Owns This Sentence (Mountain Leopard Press, £25), done with pugnacious vigour. Arunava Sinha’s exceptional Penguin Book of the Bengali Short Story (Penguin £35), opened up a new literary world to western readers. And of course I loved Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen (Fourth Estate, £25) – a triumph.
Most of my year was spent reading for the history of the British novel that I’m writing, but among the new novels I did like were Holly Pester’s immaculate The Lodgers (Granta, £14.99). Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet (riverrun, £18.99) deserved more attention than it got – it is exceedingly well written – and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) was simply adorable. It’s the book I have recommended to friends with the most success.
Cressida Connolly
The books I’ll be giving as Christmas presents are Craig Brown’s wonderful A Voyage Around the Queen (Fourth Estate, £25); Scapegoat (Fourth Estate, £30), Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s brilliant portrait of the life and times of the scandalous 17th-century Duke of Buckingham; and James Stourton’s excellent Rogues and Scholars (Bloomsbury, £30), about the rackety art world of the second half of the past century and the vast amount of money it attracted.
This year marked a tremendously sad loss for poetry – the death of John Burnside. His final collection, Ruin, Blossom (Cape, £13), is as mysterious, tender and sad as anything he wrote. I very much hope someone is at work on a biography of this beautiful writer both of verse and prose. There aren’t many truly great poets, but Burnside was one.
Artemis Cooper
Catland by Kathryn Hughes (Harper-Collins, £22) charts the rise of the cat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – how a half-feral hunter of small vermin was selectively bred to produce that voluptuous and pampered pet the British Shorthair. The cat artist Louis Wain illustrates the story, but its driving force is Frances Simpson. She made a fortune breeding cats and writing about them, and created an exciting new profession for single ladies that didn’t involve teaching or childcare.
In Raising Hare (Canongate, £18), Chloe Dalton, living in the country during lockdown, finds an orphaned leveret and rears it with the minimum interference. It grows to adulthood, un-named, unconstrained, regularly Instagrammed, seldom handled and never cut off from woods and fields. Dalton opens her house to hare, and hare opens Dalton’s eyes to the beauty of the wild.
Allan Mallinson
The Price of Victory (Pen & Sword, £25), General Stanislaw Maczek’s memoir, previously unpublished in English, is edited by Jennifer Grant, the historian grandchild of Poles whom Stalin first imprisoned and then, in 1942, released to fight alongside the western Allies. Maczek’s Polish armoured division closed the Falaise Gap in Normandy, sealing the fate of the withdrawing Germans. In 1944, the Poles had just one armoured division while we had six. Today they have four armoured/mechanised divisions while we have none.
The House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate by Simon Mayall (Osprey, £25) is enlightening, even if its subject seems intractable. ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth,/The labour and the wounds are vain,/The enemy faints not, nor faileth,/And as things have been they remain’? Full disclosure: the author is a regimental friend, but also a Balliol man with a lot of sand between his toes. Not unrelated is A Short History of the Roman Mass (Ignatius Press, £12) by Uwe Lang, a native of Nuremberg and priest of the Oratory of St Philip Neri in London: a study of change with continuity, and thereby of Rome’s authority and strength. Instructive and fortifying.
Anna Aslanyan
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann (Granta, £9.99), won this year’s International Booker Prize. I haven’t read a better novel in a long while. Love in a time of upheaval may be a much explored subject, but this take on it is special. The book transports you to East Germany on the eve of collapse – of a doomed romance, of the Berlin Wall, of an ideology that once appeared omnipotent – and leaves you there once it’s all over to find your way through the ruins.
Another discovery was The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse (NYRB Classics, £16.99). The late Italian writer, to quote Roberto Calasso, ‘left behind a handful of unforgivably perfect pages’. Reflecting on fairy tales, world literature, ancient landmarks and much besides, these beautiful essays are a product of Campo’s ‘passion for perfection’.
Mark Amory
Percival Everett is hardly a discovery. He has written more than 30 books, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 with The Trees and is a strong contender this year with James (Mantle, £20). His other novels, if perhaps less ambitious, are also original, funny, quirky and serious without being solemn. I can recommend I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Erasure, Assumption, Dr. No, Wounded and Telephone. I have just begun So Much Blue – daunting, but I have faith. My only failure so far is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell – but that may be my fault. The titles give away nothing, so you have no idea where you are going.
A.N. Wilson
Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets are beautifully produced. Charlotte Lee has written two distinguished books on Goethe and has edited the Everyman volume German Romantic Poets (£12). She has chosen some really good translators, including Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Vernon Watkins, Michael Hamburger and herself. If you know German it is still fun to read her selections alongside the translations. If you do not, her choices of hypnotic lyrics – from Goethe’s ‘Mignon’s Song’ and ‘The Elven King’ to Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’, Eichendorff’s ‘Night of Moon’ and Brentano’s ‘Lore Lay’ may inspire some to begin the adventure of learning German. Her elegant foreword is one of the best introductions to Romanticism I have ever read.
Lucasta Miller
I loved Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings (Picador, £22) – a tender, subtle evocation in perfectly calibrated prose of the way in which the individual life combines the ordinary with the extraordinary, and death always leaves questions unanswered. It was funny, too. The bit with the Tory MP and the helicopter had me hooting out loud. Richard Sennett’s The Performer: Art, Life, Politics (Allen Lane, £25) was a thought-provoking, essayistic and touchingly personal exploration of the ethics and aesthetics of performance from one of the leading intellectuals of our time.
Sam Leith
I was hugely moved and impressed by Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Chatto, £18.99), which uses an eccentric toolkit – part memoir, part history, part fictional imagining – to produce a book quite unlike anything else, and which gathers Anton Chekhov, Leo Szilard, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the bombing of Hiroshima and the Tasmanian genocide, as well as the author’s own family history and traumatic early experiences – not to mention an unexpected cameo from Boris Johnson – into its pages. It’s an anguished and extraordinary book – Flanagan’s masterpiece, I think. And, speaking of being moved, I defy anyone to read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart (Abacus, £22) without collapsing into a snivelling mess. It’s the tender and intimate account of a heart transplant – a little girl, in losing her life, saves that of a little boy – but it’s also richly informative about the history and mechanics of the operation; and uplifting, even as it breaks your heart.
Marcus Berkmann
Operation Reread continues as I attempt to relieve my groaning shelves and dump a few inadequate novels at the local Oxfam shop. The Anne Tylers have been wildly variable (although Saint Maybe was much better than I remembered) and the Ian McEwans were mostly dismal. The real hits of the year were Robertson Davies’s The Salterton Trilogy (published between 1951 and 1958). I once thought the books a bit thin, but they proved as entertaining as anything could be in a discursive Trollopian manner. Set in the Canadian cathedral city of Salterton, the first novel concerns an amateur production of The Tempest; novel two revolves around a local scandal, inadvertently magnified in the press; and novel three is about the consequences of a very strange will. Nicely plotted and characterised, they have all the virtues of old-fashioned novels, with Davies’s wonderfully fluent, witty, non-judgmental prose doing the hard work. Other more recently published books I enjoyed included Tim Pears’s Chemistry and Other Stories, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy and Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £22). Hollinghurst’s early work was elegantly written but unflinching in its portrayal of modern gay life, as if Henry James had suddenly stripped off his waistcoat and started sniffing amyl nitrate in a dark club room. Our Evenings is more restrained in terms of its sexual content but no less intense in its style – with the difference being that the author’s passion here is chiefly directed towards an assessment of contemporary Britain and how we have come to be living in such a sad, shrunken state. Narrated almost entirely by a mixed-race actor whose life unspools against the backdrop of seven decades of social change, it slowly builds to a climax that lingers in the mind long after the final page. It’s the best novel I’ve read all year and quite possibly the finest of Hollinghurst’s career to date.
Frances Wilson
Ali Smith’s Gliff (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) is a witty, sad dystopian puzzle built on ‘unbelievable believable hope’. Seen through the eyes of Briar and Rose, two missing children, words and names are mined for the last drop of meaning, and to cap it all there is the most charismatic horse since Black Beauty: ‘It smells great, being up on a horse… It smells like something should smell.’ Smith’s worlds are always perfect-pitch, but the genius of Gliff left me blasted.
The non-fiction event of the year must be Peter Parker’s two-volume anthology, Some Men in London (Penguin, £30 each). Compiled from newspaper reports, medical journals, diaries, letters, extracts from novels and government archives, the work captures the experience of gay men before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. The editing is masterful and mordant, with Parker’s observations peppered throughout: ‘Sending homosexual offenders to prison provided them with opportunities to continue the very pursuits that had landed them in court in the first place.’
More books of the year next week.
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