Books of the Year

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

Robert Salisbury It is difficult to look beyond three biographies this year: Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao (Cape, £25), William Hague’s Pitt the Younger (HarperCollins, £8.99) and Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon (Picador, £25).

Mao is a standing indictment not only of Mao himself but also of the self-hating Left of the Sixties and Seventies who bought his Little Red Book and worshipped at his feet. William Hague on Pitt is elegant, readable and, with admirable clarity and concision, brings a politician’s understanding of the world of Whitehall and Westminster to the service of his scholarship. His return to the Conservative front bench is long overdue. It is risky to puff the work of one’s close relations. However, Max Egremont, ever the stylist, is discerning and elegant about Sassoon. His reviews are richly deserved.

The most overrated book is difficult to pick from a crowded field, but 1776: America and Britain at War by David McCullough (Allen Lane, £25) stands at least a good chance of finishing among the first three.

Lee Langley Margaret Yourcenar’s 1951 novel Memoirs of Hadrian, reprinted by Penguin Classics, £8.99. An astonishing feat of imagination that takes us into the world and the mind of the Roman emperor. An enthralling meditation on power, politics, love and death.

Pinkerton’s Sister by Peter Rushforth (Scribner Paperbacks, £8.99). A wonderfully weird and enjoyable novel of 752 pages; take your time and be rewarded. In turn-of-the-century New York a clever young woman escapes from grim reality into books, identifying herself with the mad woman in the attic of literature. Funny and original, disturbing beneath its witty surface.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco (Secker, £17.99). A man loses his personal memory but can recall every book he’s read. Cue extravagant literary razzle-dazzle. Retracing his life through his books, Eco’s protagonist stumbles into a dangerous landscape of emotion and feeling. By the end the book is unexpectedly moving. Gorgeous illustrations too.

Nicholas Haslam I believe that Sybille Bedford is, quite simply, the greatest writer of our time. I first encountered her honed, crystalline prose and breadth of knowledge in her 1953 Mexican masterpiece, A Visit to Don Otavio, during an anxious night in a prison cell in Puebla, and I’ve since reread it about every six months. This year, Mrs Bedford’s 95th, saw the publication of Quicksands (Hamish Hamilton, £20), as near to autobiography as this fabulously learned and most subtle writer has come, fleshing out, and often filling in, the hints and clues about her pre-both-wars continental life that have permeated her work since the first novels, to Jigsaw, her vie à clef of a decade ago.

Anthology of Apparitions, published by that most elegant of private imprints, Pushkin Press (£10.99), is a first novel by Simon Liberati about drugging, shagging, money, clothes, celebs, and fashionable, places-obsessed French jeunesse. Don’t let that put you off. Pulsating with surreal yet controlled imagery, each page, each paragraph, each sentence leaves one astonished at Liberati’s audacious urban eloquence.

Among my parents’ greatest friends was Moura Budberg, a glamorous Russian. I remember her huge frame shaking with conspiratorial laughter, or surreptitiously on the telephone to her bookie, or maybe her controller, as she was rumoured to be a spy. She famously had affairs with Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells and Robert Bruce Lockhart, among others. Her story, Moura: The Dangerous Life of Baroness Budberg, by her contemporary, and some say rival in those affairs, Nina Berbova, has at last been translated and published (New York Review Books, £17.95). The first few pages are wonderfully catty about Moura, and the index, which contains almost every politician, artist, actor, dancer, singer and writer between the wars, promises pleasure during winter evenings.

Page notes are always irritating, but the most banal pop up, or rather down, in James Lees-Milne’s The Milk of Paradise (John Murray, £25) such as, page 161: ‘the Cocteau chapel... influenced by Picasso*’. *Note. ‘Pablo Picasso (18811973) Spanish artist. Founder of cubism.’ We know, Misha, we know.

D. J. Taylor Among new works of non-fiction, I was transfixed by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey’s Birds Britannica (Chatto, £35), a superlative doorstop-sized framing of natural history within its wider cultural context. As an annual passage migrant to Southwold in Suffolk, I also greatly enjoyed Ian Collins’s Making Waves: Artists in Southwold (Black Dog Books, £30). Pierre Coustillas’s George Gissing: The Definitive Bibliography (Rivendale Press, £50) made me yearn once again for Professor Coustillas’s biography of Gissing, advance notice of which I first saw in a publisher’s catalogue over 20 years ago. Two novels that could have appeared to advantage on an immensely low-risk Booker shortlist were Hilary Mantel’s paranormal tour of Home Counties England, Beyond Black (Fourth Estate, £16.99) and William Palmer’s devious Eden-era tragicomedy, The India House (Cape, £16.99). Good to see George MacDonald Fraser back on the trail, too, with Flashman on the March (HarperCollins, £17.99).

Bevis Hillier A lot of people like cats, but ‘feline’ is a pejorative word when applied to humans. I hesitate to use it of James Lees-Milne, for, with all the blemishes classically sent up in a Craig Brown spoof, he was kind, generous and ethical. But listen to him on Anthony Powell — one diarist assessing another — in the final volume of his diaries, The Milk of Paradise (John Murray, £25). He starts with praise, then glissades into attack, like an executioner escorting somebody to the block with reassuring words.

It says much for Britain today that Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories (Faber/Profile, £20) rose to the top of the non-fiction bestseller charts, as he is sophisticated and honest. As he states, I was his history pupil at Oxford. It was just before he burst on to the London stage in Beyond the Fringe. Having no idea of the fame to which he was to climb in the coming year, my friends and I laughed about him a bit and did imitations of him saying, ‘Brazil was the ogly dockling of Portuguese diplormacy’ (in Leeds they say ‘ogly’, not ‘oogly’) or ‘I’m sorry about all this ’orse-’air all orver the floor — I’ve been onstoffing my sorfa.’ We liked him; he looked much the same as his image on the jacket of this book, but smilier.

Piers Morgan’s The Insider (Ebury, £7.99) was a surprise. As he is plaintively puzzled to acknowledge, he was not a hit on Have I Got News for You and really got across Ian Hislop, who regularly does him over in Private Eye as ‘Piers Moron’. But, in common with Woodrow Wyatt, he is ruthlessly honest about himself, and it’s mostly very engaging. We exult with him when Murdoch makes him editor of the News of the World at 28. We cringe with him when he commits some appalling blunder, like the one that got him sacked from the Mirror.

Morgan is a little too keen to show Diana, Princess of Wales and Tony Blair addressing him as ‘Piers’ in every other sentence, but his book is a hoot from beginning to end.

Sebastian Smee Saul Bellow died early this year, prompting me to pick up The Adventures of Augie March for the first time (Penguin, £8.99). I think it is the best book I have ever read better, anyway, than Bellow’s more mature masterpieces, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift. Full of tumbling, amorous feelings, antic energy and headlong charm, it had me almost appalled with admiration every time I sat down to read it.

If one has a pre-existing love for a subject, picking up a biography can be a dan gerous thing to do. But the second volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Henri Matisse (Hamish Hamilton, £25), like the first, was a wonderful read. It corrected clichés, complicated received wisdom and, in the end, redoubled my love for Matisse.

Finally, Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, first published in 1940 and recently re-released by the New York Review of Books (£7.99), is a brilliantly concise, urgent novel about the appetites of artists, hawks and men.

Jane Ridley Kathryn Hughes’s The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (Fourth Estate, £20) turns all our preconceptions about Mrs Beeton and her cookery book upside down. Isabella Beeton wasn’t interested in cooking at all, nor was she a middleaged matron. She was a 21-year-old journalist, who filched her recipes from the great cooks of the day, and in the process succeeded in compiling a manual which exactly fitted the needs of the Victorian middle-class housewife, elevating domesticity into a profession. Poor Isabella died tragically young at 28, and Hughes expertly sleuths her journalistic career and marriage ruined by syphilis. A marvellous and original book.

A. N. Wilson’s After the Victorians (Hutchinson, £25) is a brilliant examination of the first half of the last century. Written with verve and wit, this book is utterly compelling — erudite, intelligent and wise. Essential reading.

I am hugely enjoying Xandra Bingley’s Bertie, May and Mrs Fish (HarperCollins, £14.99), my bedtime treat. It’s a beautifully written memoir of a Cotswolds wartime childhood which captures exactly the inflections of Xandra Bingley’s parents’ generation. Her amazing Irish mother May, who ran the farm, could cope with anything, from fingers chopped off by a chainsaw to puncturing the bellies of cows imploding with grass sickness, but her father Bertie was a charming wastrel, and there is no happy ending.

Algernon Percy’s A Bearskin’s Crimea (Leo Cooper, £19.99) is the story of Colonel Henry Percy, one of the first to win the Victoria Cross. Percy’s papers have never been used before, and Algernon Percy has written a wonderfully vivid account of the Crimea through the eyes of a great Victorian soldier.

Jane Gardam My two best books this year have been the reprint of the ageless Al Alvarez’s biographical essays, Where Did It All Go Right?, and his new essays on the imagination, The Writer’s Voice (Bloomsbury, £9.99 and £12.99). The most welcome and delightful biography was Richard Ingrams’ The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (HarperCollins, £20). The most delicious book for wandering through was The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London by C. Paul Christianson (Yale, £25). And though there have been more startling novels this year, the one I most enjoyed was Penelope Lively’s Making It Up (Penguin/Viking, £16.99) because of its enviable biographical notion, suppose it had all gone wrong? An extraordinarily moving and very able first novel is The Fattest Man in America by Christopher Nicholson (Constable & Robinson, £6.99). I’m just beginning to understand it — but then it’s by my son-in-law.

Philip Hensher Book of the year has to be Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao (Cape, £25), a book of quite extraordinary importance, as well as excellence. Some people found it relentless in its arraignment; in my view, they were following a moral imperative of the highest order. Kathryn Hughes wrote a brilliant and long overdue life of Mrs Beeton (Fourth Estate, £20). Hilary Spurling completed her life of Matisse (Hamish Hamilton, £25); that certainly won’t need to be done again for very many years. I’ve always wanted someone to write a history of that madhouse in Brooklyn where Auden, Britten, the Bowleses and Gypsy Rose Lee lived together, and Sherill Tippins’s The February House (Scribner, £14.99) was just as amusing as one had hoped. (My favourite moment: Salvador Dali politely asking Auden over the dinner table whether he spoke English.) Richard Taruskin performed an absolutely incredible feat by writing all 4,000-plus pages of the Oxford History of Western Music (OUP, £450), the sort of book which is really only ever written by committees — and it was quite astonishingly good.

Personally, I didn’t think the year produced as many brilliant novels as some people claimed, but Ali Smith’s The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) was dazzling. I have a violent prejudice against novels in the present tense generally, but for Miss Smith I make an exception. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) was rich with observed humanity. Otherwise, there were too many total stinkers by novelists not just established but, to a painful degree, of the Establishment.

Terribly sad to read the last volume ever of James Lees-Milne’s diaries (The Milk of Paradise, John Murray, £25), one of those shameful pleasures. I bet quite a lot of people are relieved that there won’t be some awful paragraph lying in wait for them now that they’re done. I hope Michael Bloch’s forthcoming biography has all the same enjoyable ghastliness of its subject’s writings.

Now, comic verses by dons, especially Oxford dons, are absolutely not my thing, but the publication of Maurice Bowra’s New Bats in Old Belfries (R. Dugdale, £17.50) had me retching with laughter. I particularly recommend the one about Betjeman’s crush on Princess Margaret — ‘Green with lust and sick with shyness,/Let me lick your lacquered toes./Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness,/Push your fingers up my nose...’ There’s a lovely introduction by Julian Mitchell, too.

Alexander Masters The book I want to shout about — though it’s too early yet to tell if it’s been underappreciated — is Graham Rawle’s A Woman’s World (Atlantic, £15.99). A thrilling novel made up entirely of words cut out of women’s magazines issued between 1958 and 1962 — extraordinary, yet not at all gimmicky.

Why doesn’t everyone know about Ronald Blythe? Borderland (Black Dog, £16.95), the last of the Wormingford trilogy, is a gathering of Blythe’s reflections about the countryside on the Suffolk-Essex border. A more gentle account of rural life than his classic Akenfield, filled with shrewdness and wry humour.

Sidney Day’s London Born (Fourth Estate, £9.99) is a glorious, hilarious, poignant memoir, from the first to the second war, of a vagabond East End life. Recorded by his grand-daughter and edited with enormous skill, this is a book of startling immediacy, spoken by a man who couldn’t read or write.

Sam Leith The publication of Robert Lowell’s Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton (Faber, £30), at long last, was a gift for fans of this great poet, and a truly extraordinary, moving, angering look at the raw stuff of his personality. Likewise, at long last, the first half of John Haffenden’s biography of William Empson, Among the Mandarins (OUP, £30): measured and affectionate in tone, exhaustive in detail, lucid in the exposition of his difficult verse and often anguished life. I was hugely impressed, too, by Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s two-volume history of the Sixties era (Little, Brown, £20). Sandbrook writes a treat: light of touch, and capable of ranging between social, political and cultural history as if equally at home in them all. Also, I read some comics. Daniel Clowes’s bleakly funny small-town fantasy Ice Haven (Cape, £10) was the best of them: a tiny masterpiece, and one that stays with you.

Byron Rogers Pronto, Tishomingo Blues and Mr Paradise by Elmore Leonard. At some point in the last 20 years a writer of Western pulp fiction invented garrulous gangsters and became the master of the English novel. First the adverbs went, then the adjectives. If you want to see what can be done with dialogue alone, read him. It will be a joy.