A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors

Jonathan Sumption Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, £25) is a marvel of objective iconoclasm, much better than the associated TV series, which presents one of the world’s great liberal empires without the usual overtones of Pecksniffian disapproval. François Guizot: Lettres à sa fille 1836-1874 (Perrin, 38 euros) is a revelation of a different kind: a moving and humane correspondence, comprising nearly 1,000 letters exchanged between the French statesman and man of letters and his eldest daughter over four decades. The best work of serious history which I have read this year is Toby Barnard’s A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 (Yale, £25), a superb social history of the dominant Anglo-Protestant minority in Ireland in the century before the Catholic revival overwhelmed it.

Francis King Alan Bennett’s Untold Tales (Faber, £20) was my most entertaining book of the year. His dramatist’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of everyday speech and his novelist’s insight into the vagaries of human behaviour delighted me. I was also impressed by the adroitness with which this highly sophisticated and subtle man once again projected a wholly convincing North Country persona of gaucheness and guilelessness. Not for the first time the Russian novelist Andrei Makine, now resident in France and writing in French, provided the year’s finest novel, The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme (Faber, £16.99). His trilogy of Russian 20th-century life, of which this is the concluding volume, is a truly remarkable achievement. Makine will surely one day win the Nobel Prize.

Overrated books: John Banville was right to be dissatisfied with Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Cape, £17.99). But then immediately afterwards his own The Sea (Picador, £16.99) proved to be even more disappointing.

Philip Ziegler Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon (Picador, £25) is a model literary biography: lucid, elegant and meshing together writer and works with apparently effortless skill. In The Lighthouse (Faber, £17.99) P.D. James is on the top of her form, which means that she transcends the barriers of genre fiction and has written a novel which, in any well-ordered literary society, would certainly have been on the shortlist for the Booker and would probably have won it. Set in a remote island off the Cornish coast, it shows that astonishing feeling for place and atmosphere which marks all her work, while at the same time providing a thoroughly engrossing story. Finally Peter Pouncey’s Rules for Old Men Waiting (Chatto, £12) is an always moving, sometimes harrowing, never sentimental novel about old age which is essential if uncomfortable reading for anyone over 70.

Anita Brookner This year’s novels were good up to a point: that is to say they were proficient, conscientious and interesting. I refer in particular to Saturday by Ian McEwan (Cape, £17.99), Arthur and George by Julian Barnes (Cape, £17.99), Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £16.99), The Sea by John Banville (Picador, £16.99), and Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee (Secker, £16.99). However all lacked some human quality, or perhaps it was intimacy. The ideal novel should be like the ideal doctor, a combination of Viennese subtlety, French logic and American good humour. I liked The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster (Faber, £16.99), a family mystery with a wry ending. Better perhaps than any of these was A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel (Canongate, £12.99), a delightfully companionable example of unpretentious erudition and an encouragement to its readers to keep a diary of this sort. I bought the same author’s Reading Pictures (Bloomsbury, £30), which I shall read slowly and almost certainly with the same pleasure. I re-read, with great profit, two earlier novels, currently reprinted: The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Virago, £7.99) and Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant (Bloomsbury Classics, £9.95). Both demonstrate that excellence is the best defence against the passage of time. Christopher Howse After 150 years, the Crimean war remains a scarcely credible combination of events and circumstances. The most engrossing way into the subject is through The Thin Red Line: An Eyewitness Account of the Crimean War by Julian Spilsbury (Weidenfeld, £20). The battle of the Alma kept me up into the small hours.

There has been a huge growth in studies of Thomas Aquinas over the past decade, and the best of the crop available this year in Britain has been Trinity in Aquinas by the Swiss Dominican theologian Gilles Emery (St Austin Press, £25 through Amazon). It includes a chapter on the Trinitarian God and creation that could change your whole world view.

Of the books cashing in on the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Alan Jacobs’s The Narnian (SPCK, £12.99) is all right, but the authors of some others deserve a custodial sentence, both as a punishment and a deterrent.

Andrew Taylor Reginald Hill’s The Stranger House (HarperCollins, £12.99) is a magnificent stand-alone thriller involving an Australian mathematician and a Spanish historian on the trail of corpses past and present in darkest Cumbria. Witty and compelling a rare combination.

Phil Rickman’s The Smile of a Ghost (Macmillan, £17.99) is the latest in his Merrily Watkins series featuring an Anglican priest who doubles as diocesan exorcist. Compassionate, original and sharply contemporary, Rickman’s crime series is one of the best around.

Staying with the clerical theme is Kate Charles’s hugely entertaining Evil Intent (Allison & Busby, £18.99). A woman curate fears she’s become the catalyst for murder. Kate Charles is brilliant at evoking the nuances of contemporary politics in the bleeding but still beating heart of the Church of England.

P. J. Kavanagh A modernised version of the 14th-century Middle English poem Pearl — the ‘modernisation’ mostly consists of helpful glosses in the margin — in a beautiful edition (Enitharmon, £15) has, although concerned with a bereavement, a delightful, spring-like freshness. A hundred and one 15-line stanzas, connected like a string of pearls, alliterate and rhyme. It is both charmingly simple and technically dazzling. A father who has lost his two-yearold daughter, his ‘pearl’, falls asleep near her grave, beside a river. In his dream he meets her, now grown, ‘a Queen of Heaven’. They talk, she explains, even shows him the Holy City, but when he tries to reach her, and reach it, he awakes, still saddened, but reassured.

Rather more up-to-date — it couldn’t be more so — the handsome, literate Ashes Victory (Orion £17.99) arrives steaming hot, only a month after the end of that 25day fluctuating thriller. Session by session it is described, mostly in the words of the England team, still, of course, uncertain of the outcome. Those of us who watched more of it than we should have, unable to tear ourselves away, can take comfort from John Arlott, who described the enjoyment of cricket as ‘nearly guiltless’.

Deborah Devonshire Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall (Galore Park Publishing Ltd, £20), first published 100 years ago, has reappeared at last. Thank goodness. It gallops from the Romans to the Boer war, bringing each epoch to life in simple English. Henry V’s enemy, the King of France, is described as ‘mad’ — very refreshing, you’ll agree. It reads like the thriller it is, and the illustrations are glorious. Just look at Sir Walter Raleigh throwing his new cloak over the puddle for Queen Elizabeth to tread on.

Nancy Lancaster: English Country House Style by Martin Wood (Frances Lincoln, £35) knocks the hundreds of books on interiors and gardens for six. Her vivid personality — charming, stylish, wilful, rich and funny — comes through the pages via her achievements in decoration and gardening. She influenced fashion like no other.

In Men of Honour (HarperCollins, £16.99), Adam Nicolson has the brilliant idea of telling what happened on the day of the battle of Trafalgar, from the beginning until the agonies and ecstasies were over. Read it and be humbled.

Anthony Daniels Eastern Customs by Derek Mackay, (Radcliffe Press, £27.50) is a fascinating memoir by a customs officer in British Malaya, much of whose work involved the regulation of the opium trade. Although it describes what is well within living memory, the memoir evokes a world that seems centuries away and is already all but forgotten. Far from living the end of history, we live at a time when it is accelerating.

The Rape of the Masters by Roger Kimball (Encounter Books, £22.50) is a hilarious and chastening exposé of the fatuities of what passes for art history in many American (and no doubt British) universities. Art history may not be a very important subject, and the targets may be easy from the purely intellectual standpoint, but if the brutalising nonsense that Kimball has uncovered is not challenged, civilisation is harmed.

Alan Judd Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women by Joseph Wiesenfarth (University of Wisconsin Press, $34.95) is a perceptive, erudite and engaging account of four of the principal women in Ford’s life. Ford was not — quite — a philanderer, but he had an enduring emotional need to which women variously responded. All four Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and Janice Biala — were artists or authors in their own right and their relationships with Ford were reflected in their works, sensitively delineated here by Professor Wiesenfarth. You don’t have to be a committed Fordian to be fascinated.

Of a piece with this is the resurrection by Persephone Books of Norah Hoult’s 1944 gem of a novel, There Were No Windows (£12). Based on Violet Hunt whom Hoult knew during her senility in wartime London, it’s an intelligent, unsparing, generous, ironic and funny depiction of the descent into Alzheimer’s, or something as near as makes no difference. Written with nice social observation, it deals with sadness but it’s not depressing.

David Crane ‘Oh for an hour of Herod,’ Anthony Hope famously murmured after the first performance of Peter Pan, and he cannot have been the last person to have felt like that. It seems unlikely that Barrie will ever recover the popularity he once enjoyed, but Lisa Chaney’s Hide and Seek with the Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (Hutchinson, £20), a sympathetic portrait of the man and a highly intelligent exploration of his work, goes a long way towards making the Edwardians’ obsession with Barrie intelligible.

The Gunpowder Plot, Trafalgar, the Ashes — the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima already seems a lifetime ago, but Diana Preston’s Before the Fall-Out: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Doubleday, £20) should not be missed. Her narrative has all the pace of a thriller, and can give even the scientific illiterate the warming, if momentary, illusion that it might be possible to understand the science involved in the creation of the bomb. Robert Stewart James Gaines takes the meeting of Frederick the Great and J. S. Bach in 1747 as the hook on which to hang an account of the place of music in the transition from the Baroque to the Enlightenment. His Evening in the Palace of Reason (Fourth Estate, £17.99) has diverse charms, but its shining quality is the lightly worn erudition which he brings to a loving elucidation of the transcendent, unmatched genius of Bach. For the beauty of chaste, simple prose there is no need to look further than Simon Barnes’s A Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion (Short Books, £9.99). Droll, whimsical, throughout informative, it deserves to make bird-enjoyers (not birdspotters) of us all. The great flop of the year was Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Cape, £17.99): proudly paraded research, clichéd social reportage and half-baked philosophising. No hero as self-absorbed as Henry can be interesting to anyone but himself. But then Herzog left me cold, too.

Ferdinand Mount A brief excursion up the M1. Like other Nottinghamshire squires, Myles Hildyard joined the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry before the war broke out. He started on horseback in Palestine (the horses kept on stampeding), transferred to tanks, before being swept up in the battle of Crete and left behind when Layforce ‘cut in’ (behaving every bit as badly as alleged in Sword of Honour). He escaped across the White Mountains, starving, ill-shod and Stukaed for weeks, then in small boats across the Aegean to fight again in the desert, briefly in Sicily and through Normandy all the way to the surrender of Hamburg. It Is Bliss Here, his letters home and diaries (Bloomsbury, £17.99), is marvellously laconic and gay, in the Homeric sense as well as ours. Some of the setpieces — ‘Flash’ Kellett’s sermon to his troops in the Libyan desert, George Formby strumming in the ruins of Leptis Magna — deserve to become immortal.

Then two masterpieces from the West Riding. Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (Faber, £7.99) is a story of illicit passion and revenge killing in a Pakistani enclave unhappily settled in a fantastical Northern town which now and then overlaps with Aslam’s native Huddersfield as dark and unforgiving as it is lyrical and endearing. Alan Bennett’s Leeds needs no introduction. The recounting of his parents’ marriage in Untold Stories (Faber/ Profile, £20) is the best thing he has done.

Jane Rye Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (Fourth Estate, £12.99): both a clinically detached observation of her own bereavement and a beautifully constructed and controlled incantation of grief, by a superlative journalist who has the facts and figures of grief at her fingertips, and avoids self-pity and sentimentality with almost painful meticulousness. Marina Lewycka’s touch is so light, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Viking, £12.99) so funny that it comes as a surprise to find that one has read a much more serious and moving story than at first appears. Having missed out on Gorky Park when it first appeared, it was a pleasure to discover Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko in Wolves Eat Dogs (Macmillan, £17.99) — a good new battered detective is always a find, and the setting for this gripping story, a Chernobyl that has reverted to a new Dark Ages, deeply sinister and quite brilliant.

Piers Paul Read Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (Public Affairs, £18.99) is an audacious, compelling literary/historical investigation that challenges our assumptions about the plays, the playwright and English history itself. I am no expert on Shakespeare, but found her account of how the perilous day-to-day politics of Elizabethan England affected Shakespeare’s dramas wholly convincing.

I have only just read Justin Cartwright’s novel, The Promise of Happiness (Bloomsbury, £7.99), and am still wondering quite what makes it so good. The story of a retired accountant and his family is perceptive, entertaining, moving, funny: but its particular distinction is perhaps the skill with which this South African author so successfully conveys the complex moral condition of Britain today.

Finally, a book that has shaken my Auberon Waughish misgivings about contemporary poetry, The Gift Returned by Hamish Robinson (The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, LA 22 9SH, £5): witty, sparse poems with a sardonic take on everyday life.

Olivia Glazebrook The best book I read this year was A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry (Faber, £12.99), the story of a young Irishman who enlists to fight for the British in the first world war. It is a startling, tragic history told with immense compassion. Barry’s lyrical prose makes the context truly vivid, and his meticulous research never stifles the narrative.

My next favourite was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). Although there were bits I couldn’t get on with at all, I found the central narrative a ten-year-old boy’s struggle to accept the loss of his father — intensely affecting. I have been haunted by his voice since I read the book in May.

And finally Hollywood Animal (Arrow, £8.99). I was glued to this book on holiday — pity my poor companion. A wicked, indulgent, surprising and hilarious memoir by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Susan Hill This year has been dominated by reading for an MA in Theology. Paul: His Story by Jerome Murphy O’Connor (OUP, £16.99) combines depth of learning with wonderful evocations of past times and places, and brings Paul in all his contradictions and complexities convincingly alive.

It is scandalous when children ask for bread and are given a stone in the form of bad poetry, pandering to the lowest common denominator of silliness and weak puns. Give them Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems for Children (Faber, £16.99), wonderfully illustrated by Raymond Briggs. Hughes wrote some of his finest verse for the young, never patronised or wrote down but assumed they would rise to his level of perception and understanding. Which of course they do.

Two very well-written and original new novels this year. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (Viking, £12.99), which fully deserved the attention it got, and The People’s Act of Love by James Meek (Canongate, £12.99), a superb novel which received nowhere near enough.

M. R. D. Foot Sarah Helm’s A Life in Secrets (Little, Brown, £20) laid bare a great deal hitherto quite unknown about one of the more powerful personalitites even in SOE, that assemblage of them: Vera Atkins, born in Romania of Ukrainian Jewish parentage, valuable prewar agent of MI6, sustainer of French underground resistance and persecutor of some of the worst Nazi war criminals, who died past 90 disguised as an entirely English lady. The Guy Liddell Diaries, edited by Nigel West (Routledge, two volumes, £50), are of enormous interest for their context — Liddell was MI5’s wartime head of counterespionage — even if their indexer thought Neville Chamberlain was still alive in July 1941.

David Gilmour Few books can have said more about wildlife and human nature — and the relationship between the two — than Ruth Padel’s wonderful Tigers in Red Weather (Little, Brown, £17.99). The author is a poet who writes exquisite prose, and her book, which is both highly personal and generously objective, combines a vivid if almost elegiac passion for tigers, a strong sympathy for the people who live near them and a lucid abhorrence for the greed and stupidity that are taking the animals to extinction.

Michael Fry is a Scottish historian unafraid to challenge long-prevailing myths of his country’s history. His excellent Wild Scots: Four Hundred Years of Highland History (John Murray, £25) is at the same time scholarly and well-written, provocative and yet full of common sense. People who still believe that the ‘Clearances’ were a form of genocide, comparable to the Holocaust or the Irish Famine, will hate it.