Matthew Parris on Owen Jones, Alan Johnson on hawks, David Crane on Noah’s Flood: Spectator books of the year

Jane Ridley

2014 has been the year of 1914. In the same way that Christmas puddings appear in supermarkets in October, many of the contestants in the publishing race for 2014 defied starter’s orders and came out pre-maturely in 2013. What has been striking about the bumper crop of first world war books is the terrifically high standard.

One of last year’s books which I’ve only just got round to reading in paperback is David Reynolds’s Long Shadow (Simon & Schuster, £9.99). Because the Great War seemed so meaningless, killing so many British soldiers for reasons which remain remote and obscure even today, it has always been especially difficult for the British to make sense of it. Yet of all the European countries Britain dealt with its consequences — mass democracy and the rise of Labour — remarkably well. What the hell was it all about? asks Reynolds, and the answers he delivers are always interesting and sometimes brilliant.

Margot Asquith’s long-awaited Great War Diary 1914–16 edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock (OUP, £30) takes the lid off No. 10 during Asquith’s difficult wartime premiership, and gives a compelling picture of Liberal England and the belle époque in meltdown under the nightmare stresses of a war that no one could have predicted or planned for.

James McConnachie

If asked in January 2014 whether I was interested in Aristotle, reptiles and severed heads, I’d have shrugged and pouted doubtfully in a sceptical, French sort of way. At best. Three wonderful books on those subjects gave my lazy thinking a rough drubbing.

The scintillatingly argued The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi (Bloomsbury, £25), transformed a man I thought of as a tedious pedant with a leaden turn of phrase into a pioneering proto-biologist, whose work is steeped in the flora and fauna of the ancient Mediterranean.