Rupert Christiansen
Mick Imlah’s exploration of the culture of Scottishness, The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99), is brilliantly witty and intellectually supple, a worthy winner of this year’s Forward Prize for Poetry. Bloomsbury Ballerina (Weidenfeld, £25), Judith Mackrell’s life of Lydia Lopokova, is a hugely entertaining and informative study of the Ballets Russes star who had a remarkable second career as wife to Maynard Keynes. Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon’s Lutyens and the Great War (Frances Lincoln, £30) is a beautifully produced tribute to that great architect’s work on cemeteries and memorials.
Published in 2007 but new in paperback, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, £8.99) was sneeringly reviewed by a lot of dryasdust chauvinist pigs who seemed to miss the point. I loved it — a daringly original piece of scholarship and speculation which makes one rethink received suppositions and opens up fascinating new possibilities. My novel of the year is without doubt Aleksander Hemon’s hauntingly strange and weirdly comic The Lazarus Project (Picador, £14.99).
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