Ferdinand Mount’s and Philip Hensher’s books of the year

Ferdinand Mount: Mark Girouard’s Elizabethan Architecture is a prodigy book devoted to the Prodigy Houses, those fantastical mega-palaces which reared up out of the placid landscape in the brief, dazzling period of Elizabeth’s ending and James’s beginning: Longleat, Hardwick, Burghley, Castle Ashby, Wollaton and Montacute. The English built nothing so breathtaking before or after. The illustrations are lovely, and so is the text: crisp, authoritative, with a touch of mischief. This is a ripe example of the Girouardesque, a glorious slab of a book. Si monumentum requiris, perlege.

Going to very cold places is the idealist’s last resort. David Vann’s losers escape into the snow and solitude without, of course, escaping themselves. In Legend of a Suicide, he strings together half-a-dozen stories of self-destruction (springing, partly at least, from the suicide of his own father).