Rod Liddle
The angels in Jim Crace’s Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can’t fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart’s The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, which has the temerity to suggest that divorce rates and broken families might just have something to do with our epidemic of mental illness. How dare he?
Lionel Shriver
I’d recommend the novel Havoc by Christopher Bollen, set in an Egyptian hotel to which westerners have fled to avoid the tyrannies of Covid regulations. I loved the concept of a character who’s a compulsive meddler, priding herself on fixing people and their faulty relationships – only for the older woman to meet her match in an eight-year-old boy. It’s refreshing to read prose that is so well crafted. Bollen has style, and he’s a natural storyteller.
Matthew Parris
‘Sometimes, as the car passed a scarlet thicket of cactus and geraniums, a nightingale scattered a few daylight notes through the window.’ A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis is John Hatt’s anthology of this superb travel writer’s best articles. What observation! What majesty of style! What laconic humour! For me, Lewis has been the discovery of the year.
Melissa Kite
I only just discovered H.E. Bates and read The Darling Buds of May, which, it turns out, really is perfick. I laughed until the tears ran down my face as Ma Larkin piled impossible amounts of food on the table and Pop Larkin persuaded Miss Pilchester to get on a stampeding donkey. All the eccentric earthy charm of long lost England and the ideal antidote to woke if you’re feeling jaded. Generous, life-affirming and joyous.
Rory Sutherland
The comedian Max Miller was in the habit of attending football matches and shouting at the players: ‘Use your own judgment!’ He was right in a way. It is situational awareness, not intelligence, which makes for good decision-making. Unfortunately we now live in a world so codified and controlled by weird unaccountable entities such as HR or compliance that we are often powerless to act independently, even in the face of utter stupidity. If you want to understand a large part of what has gone wrong with modern life, I can recommend no better book in 2024 than Dan Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost its Mind. Complexity theory, cybernetics and squirrels all in one book. Who could ask for more?
Kate Andrews
There were lots of caveats that came with this year’s release of Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘lost’ book Until August. It was imperfect, unfinished and ultimately a work that the author – who wrote it while struggling with dementia – decided he did not want released. However, a decade on from García Márquez’s death, his children decided it should be rescued from the archives. Unsurprisingly, it’s fantastic: short, raw and heartbreaking. It’s a study for all readers on the tensions between independence and betrayal – and for García Márquez’s fans it is such a treat to return to his work and experience it new.
I also can’t resist nominating a book that was not published this year, or in this decade. Yet somehow, I found myself reading Nora Ephron’s Heartburn for the first time this spring. Now I will be forever smiling, forever crying, and forever laughing to myself as I remember passages from this perfect autobiographical novel. I could not recommend a book more highly.
Martin Vander Weyer
Heavyweight biographies (and worse, autobiographies) of over-achievers in the business world come at me like juggernauts in motorway fog. So it was a joy to discover a literary celebration of under-achievers: Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz, subtitled ‘A history of loafers, loungers, slackers and bums in America’, is a thoroughly researched (no slacking here) chronicle of several generations of laid-back leisure-seekers in fiction and fact, from the cast of The Great Gatsby to the young George W. Bush. In a highly entertaining way it illuminates the cultural heritage of today’s workshy Generation X – but they’re almost certainly too idle to read it.
Toby Young
My book of the year is Mania by Lionel Shriver. The Great Awokening is an excellent subject for a dystopian satire and there have been a few attempts, but Lionel absolutely nails it. The conceit of the book is that it suddenly becomes unacceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of intelligence and, of course, the world immediately goes to pot – nothing works, planes start falling out of the sky and if you go to see a doctor, you’re taking your life in your hands. All frighteningly plausible, until the ending, in which common sense and sanity return. That will never happen.
Peter Jones
Easily the most interesting book about the ancient world which I read this year was E.E. Cohen’s Roman Inequality: Affluent Slaves, Businesswomen, Legal Fictions. It explains how the evidence from legal fictions described by Roman legal advisers (‘jurists’) demonstrates that slaves could make big money out of business transactions on behalf of their wealthy masters, who were not allowed to engage in trade, and that women too could set up their own businesses, running banks, offering loans, owning and renting out property and so on. It would take 1,000 years before women in Europe had such power again.
Realising that the sea monster of the brain had, many aeons ago, purged any memory of Jane Austen, I also picked up Persuasion. I was transfixed: it was as thrilling a literary experience as any I have ever had.
Mary Killen
The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century tells the story of the identical Paget twins, Celia and Mamaine, who were born in 1916, orphaned at 12 and taken in by a stuffy uncle who tried to turn them into debs. But they escaped society for bohemia where their soulmates lived. The beautiful brainboxes were fit to win the hearts of leading 20th-century thinkers – among them George Orwell, Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler. Pivotally, the twins wrote letters and kept diaries. When editor/narrator Ariane Bankes finally brought herself to look at these after her mother Celia’s death, she learned that the twins had had ringside seats for the 20th century’s intellectual developments – and what love was like in the days of proper romance and when driving passions consumed each waking hour.
Christopher Howse
In 1939, residents of Pinner, Middlesex, petitioned for their new Metropolitan line station to be built in ‘medieval’ style. The champion architect of ‘new old’ timbered houses was Blunden Shadbolt, who laid roof tiles on wobbly chicken wire for an effect of weathered age. Such popular byways of British architecture of the time, alongside unpopular abstractions like Berthold Lubetkin’s (London Zoo penguin pool and Highpoint flats, Highgate) are explored in the eye-opening Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 by the incomparable Gavin Stamp, who died in 2017 leaving a manuscript now edited by his widow Rosemary Hill.
Jonathan Ray
The martini is the most elegant and stylish of drinks and Alice Lascelles the most elegant and stylish of writers. I read The Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon at a sitting and have been dipping in and out ever since. I learn something new every time – a witty quotation, a new twist, a surprising fact, the ideal accompaniment – and Laura Edwards’s gorgeous photos always have me drooling with desire. Barman, a Gibson on the rocks please!
Olivia Potts
Always with my finger on the pulse, I finally discovered Muriel Spark this year. I’d read her before – once, I think – but over the summer I almost accidentally began reading The Girls of Slender Means – which is so short that if you do accidentally start reading it, you may also end up accidentally finishing it. It’s brimming with what makes Spark so timeless – perfect prose, biting social observations – and is very, very funny. In slightly more recent publications, I ate up Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a brilliantly crafted tragicomedy family saga that was published last year, and I will be thinking about Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, a forensic and compelling reporting of a murder in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, for years to come.
Roger Alton
Some terrific sports books this year, notably Sir Chris Hoy’s heartbreaking but uplifting memoir (have some tissues with you) and fast-bowling legend Jimmy Anderson settling some scores off his long run. But it is always good to turn to top-class fiction. And you won’t find much better than Henry Porter’s latest superlative thriller, The Enigma Girl. His new heroine, Alice ‘Slim’ Parsons, is a tough, resourceful undercover MI5 spook and as ballsy, hard-nosed and, er, sexy as you could wish for. Much of the highly twisty plot evolves around events near the wartime code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, hence the title. Thrilling and gripping, it’s a big book too. Not to be missed.
Bruce Anderson
Rory Stewart is a master of prose. It may not be a recent release, but The Places in Between is one of the best books published in English so far this century. Mr Stewart also has a fascinating political intellect. Last year’s Politics on the Edge is full of controversy but will not be the last word on any of the subjects. On David Cameron, our author is unfair to the point of silliness. But Stewart opera omnia always guarantees a good read.
Robert and Isabelle Tombs’s That Sweet Enemy, an account of Anglo-French relations, and the two nations’ history, is not a good book. It is a great book. There is stimulus and delight on every page. Everyone interested in politics should devour this seminal work. It is scandalous that I had taken so long to get round to doing so.
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