Paul Johnson on Henry Kissinger, Susan Hill on David Walliams, Julie Burchill on Julie Burchill: Spectator books of the year

Mark Amory

Being a slow reader, I first try the shortest, or anyway shorter, works of famous novelists unknown to me. This year, with many misgivings, I read The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Penguin, £8.99) and was shocked and impressed by the intensity of the sex and violence he describes at a military boarding school in Austria. But do I really want to continue to the great works? Nagasaki, by the prize-winning French journalist Eric Faye (Gallic Books, £7.99), describes in 112 pages a middle-aged Japanese man who suspects that someone is secretly living in his house. It is as gripping as a thriller, but sad and serious. I shall try another short one.

More confidently, I took Nora Webster (Viking, £18.99) on holiday and marvelled that Colm Tóibín could make the ordinary life of a middle-aged Irish widow so utterly compelling. So now I am reading his earlier, almost related, Brooklyn and cannot wait to find out if the nice young Italian whom Eilis met at the Irish dance in New York is to be trusted. I do hope so.

A.N. Wilson

Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire (Allen Lane, £25) is a stylish history of the British empire, told through its cities in sunny, civilised prose. He begins with the bungling of the American colonies and ends with Britain’s bewilderment as its own cities in turn become ‘colonised’.

Constantine Phipps’s What You Want (Quercus, £20) is a verse novel in heroic couplets. It is bright verse, not light verse; a gripping, upsetting story of adultery, which turns into a sort of Dantean journey (while he drifts off in an unwise mixture of whisky and pills) with Freud as Virgil. Unlike many modern novels, this is actually about something. It is moving, scary, funny, endlessly interesting and much the best book I have read this year.