Clive James
Three books of non-fictional prose kept me awake like thrillers. Frederic Raphael’s The Benefits of Doubt (Carcanet, £14.95) is an exemplary book of humanist essays, although I would hate to have him doubting me, because he makes me laugh too hard when he doubts Heidegger. Published posthumously, D. J. Enright’s Injury Time (Pimlico, £12.50) is only part of his memorial: the full set of his volumes of casual reflections distills the civilised views of an era. Richard Eyre’s National Service (Bloomsbury, £18.99), subtitled ‘The Diary of a Decade’, inhabits two different political worlds. ‘Terrifying events in Yugo- slavia,’ he notes on 18 April 1993, ‘and we’re helpless. Why don’t we intervene as we did in Kuwait?’ But he scorned the intervention in Kuwait. On the other hand, he is knowledgeable about the liberation of Romania, and everything he has to say about his time at the National Theatre is as informative as you might expect, and as believably self-deprecating as you mightn’t. How Britain goes on producing national servants of his calibre is one of the great mysteries, and still one of the best reasons for being here.
Robert Macfarlane
Gil Courtemanche’s novel of Rwanda, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Canon- gate, £14.99), shocked and edified me. The finest biography of the year was Nicholas Rankin’s Telegram from Guernica (Faber, £14.99), a life of the war correspondent George Steer. Competition for most over-rated book of the year was stiff; the prize is shared by Peter Ackroyd’s pseudo-serious Disneyfication of mediaeval London, The Clerkenwell Tales (Chatto, £15.99), and Don DeLillo’s wafer of meta-waffle, Cosmopolis (Picador, £16.99).
M. R. D. Foot
Norman Davies’ Rising ’44 (Macmillan, £25) is a salutary reminder that all is not always for the best. Even in the war against Hitler, there were some on the winning side who were unhappy at the result. Davies presents one ghastly corner of the war from the Polish angle of sight, and shows that no amount of heroism could make up for the fact that Nazi tyranny was turned out to make room for communist tyranny, which was little better. This is an outstanding piece of historical writing.
Christopher Howse
Jonathan Bate’s John Clare (Picador, £25) makes you like the man and want to read his poetry. Mr Bate refuses to reduce his subject to a mere victim of doctors or publishers or to a mouthpiece for environmentalism or radicalism. Like Clare he is strong on significant detail.
Of the many books called After something-or-other, Fergus Kerr’s After Aquinas (Blackwell, £15.99, paperback) looks the most valuable. Aquinas is a boom subject and Fr Kerr uses decades of study to put him in perspective; but he has not lost the refreshing enthusiasm that he felt in his youth for the ontology of the brilliant old thinker.
A. C. Grayling misleadingly called his latest volume What is Good? (Weidenfeld, £18.99). Not this book, anyway. And though some seem to have enjoyed Karl Miller’s biography of James Hogg, Electric Shepherd (Faber, £25), the annoying title is a reliable indication of Professor Miller’s continuing potency as the Typhoid Mary of verbal infelicity.
Bevis Hillier
The giant paperback of Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, was published in Britain this year (Picador, £18). For once the words ‘masterpiece’ and ‘classic’ can be used without hyperbole. Caro’s Johnson is as great as Boswell’s Johnson. I also relished Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (Faber, £16.99), his ingenious reworking of the ‘Ern Malley’ literary hoax of 1940s Australia.
Otherwise this has been the year of the turkeys — and not the kind one wants for Christmas. In any other year, Adam Thirlwell might have won the Least Wanted Book of the Year Award for his Rachel Papers pastiche in Politics (Cape, £12.99), the work of an exceptionally learned man apparently desperate to prove that he is like any other man. Or it might have gone to Martin Amis himself (at his best a writer of genius) for his pastiche of himself in Yellow Dog (Cape, £16.99). But this year the award has to go with brass knobs on to A. N. Wilson for his Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (Hutchinson, £18.99).
David Hughes
Not often does a biography make you against the odds fall headlong for its heroine, especially if she is as stroppy as this number, but Caroline Moorehead’s exemplary and exciting account of the Hemingway wife who reported war like it was, Martha Gellhorn: A Life (Chatto, £20), sweeps you incisively into a broad-based history of the last century through the eyes of two women, author and subject, each as brilliant as the other but sharply differing in temperament. I savoured too Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes (Allen Lane, £12.99), which in language of utmost clarity takes you to the heart of the other language of music, not only pulling you to the keyboard, but impelling you to reflect on forms of communication subtler than words. The pleasures of bone-dry wit have a rare heyday this year in Stanley Price’s priceless memoir of his origins, Lithuanian, Jewish, Irish, in Somewhere to Hang My Hat (New Island, £12.99), which makes one long for his early novels to be revived. As for Martin Amis, whose Yellow Dog (Cape, £16.99) was so poorly received, my strong desire is that he use this near fatal gangplank as a springboard to propel him into the big splash of a novel that lies within his oceanic powers, provided he avoids metaphors like preceding.
Anita Brookner
My favourite novels of the year were both American: Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (Sceptre, £14.99) and John Updike’s Seek My Face (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). Both were intensely serious and brought a dimension of dignity and feeling back into a genre which seems to have lost sight of both. I also liked Dr Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg (Harvill, £9.99), also serious, also dignified. For non-fiction Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov (Granta Books, £13.99) is a beautiful, sober account of what it means to read and travel in Chekhov’s shadow. I know that Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories (New York Review Books, £9.99) will impress me all over again. She publishes all too rarely, but never fails to strike home.
Jonathan Sumption
Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, £25), is a marvel of objective iconoclasm, much better than the associated TV series, which presents one of the world’s great liberal empires without the usual overtones of Pecksniffian disapproval. Fran
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