Book Review

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Our critics tell us what they have enjoyed reading most this year

P.J. Kavanagh
Richard Bradford’s life of Philip Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear (Peter Owen, £19.95) is a work of detection, relating Larkin’s poems to his life. Larkin’s romantic attachments remind his biographer of an Ealing comedy. One was to a devout Catholic, which fascinated Larkin. He took to propping an annotated Bible by his shaving mirror. (“To think that anyone ever believed any of that.”) Mary Kenny I most admired Rose Tremain’s The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (Chatto & Windus, £14.99). It is a fascinating mixture of imagination and biography by a most accomplished writer. Most useful was S.U.M.O (Shut up, move on) by Paul McGee, a self-help manual to stop you brooding and get on with life.

Melanie McDonagh
Susanna Clarke’s captivating novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury, £7.99) is now out in paperback. Take the first few lines: “Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers on the history of English magic.” Is it possible not to read on? Not for me it wasn’t. Wonderful.

In Shadowplay (Public Affairs, £18.99), Clare Asquith builds up a detailed argument for William Shakespeare having expressed his Catholic beliefs through a series of coded images. As the historian A.W. Kinglake wanted inscribed on churches: “Important if true. Intriguing in any case.”

John Cottingham
Freud by Jonathan Lear (Routledge, £12.99). A profoundly original thinker, Sigmund Freud has been ignored by most anglophone philosophers. Lear’s absorbing book brings out Freud’s genius while exposing the flaws (for example, in his critique of religion).

David McLaurin
One book that lingers in the memory is Eventide by Kent Haruf (Picador, £15.99). Set in the town of Holt, Colorado, it combines the simple style of Steinbeck with the profundity of Shakespeare. It’s brilliant, moving and beautiful.

David Goodall
Two very different books have given me particular pleasure this year: The Vanished Landscape (Phoenix, £7.99), Paul Johnson’s affectionate recollection of a secure, provincial Catholic childhood; and Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb (Granta, £6.99), painfully evoking the disorientation and despair which attended the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Anthony Lejeune
The Collected Jorkens: vol III by Lord Dunsany (Cold Tonnage Books, £19; tel. 01276 475388) – these extravagant, whimsical stories are a delight; they recall an author who deserves to be read; and they are a reminder that there are more good books to be rediscovered than the newcomers of any year can rival.

Kate Kavanagh
Two kinds of accessible history. A.N. Wilson’s lively, varied After the Victorians (Hutchinson, £25) presents the twentieth century (first half) through spotlit personalities that stay in the mind. In A Dorset Utopia: The Little Commonwealth and Homer Lane by Judith Stinton (Black Dog Books, £11.95), an optimistic experiment in a small corner of that century prompts thoughts on human nature and possibilities of social change.

Jeremy Lewis
In Sorrows of the Moon: a journey through London by Iqbal Ahmed (Coldstream, £9.95), a Kashmiri now living in London, evokes his adopted city through the sad and lonely lives of its recent arrivals, including a Brazilian cab-driver, a Nigerian doorman with a pair of crocodile-skin shoes and a tyrannical Gujarati postmistress. Ahmed is a cool yet compassionate chronicler of London’s new underclass, and his book makes compelling reading.

David Willey
My best read this year has been A.N. Wilson’s After The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25). It filled in so many annoying gaps in my knowledge of the world I was brought up in and also that of my parents’ generation.

John Jolliffe
Roger Scruton’s Gentle Regrets (Continuum, £16.99) has wonderfully lucid reflections on today’s world. Professor Scruton’s integrity, clarity and unselfish courage in the face of mean-minded opponents are remarkable. A brilliant book, both erudite and refreshingly readable.

Ian Bradley
Peter Barberis’ Liberal Lion (I.B. Tauris, £19.50) provides a much-needed biography of my hero Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party from 1956 to 1970. It rightly calls him an “ideas man” and puts him in the tradition of the great British idealist.

Isabel Quigly
The Sleeping Voice by Dulce Chacón (Harvill, £11.99, trans. Nick Caistor) is a novel based on the testimony of sufferers under Franco after the Civil War. Passionate, credible, a terrifying eye-opener to outsiders.

Noonie Minogue
Sheena Joughin’s marvellous second novel, Swimming Underwater (Doubleday, £16.99), had me spellbound for three days this summer – she writes like no one else.

Crispin Jackson
Nicholas Clapton’s Moreschi , which is about the last castrato (Haus, £9.99), ties with Lewis A. Erenberg’s The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs Schmeling (OUP, £16.99). Both chronicle titanic struggles: traditionalists against musical reformers in the Sistine Chapel, fascism vs. democracy in the boxing ring.

Mary Blanche Gibbs
Knife-sharp, fast-moving, written with vivid, airy grace, Eva Tucker’s exquisite novel Berlin Mosaic (Starhaven, £10) about a twentieth-century Jewish family rings with such truth that it serves also as a shocking parable for our own times.

Victoria Clark
Zadie Smith’s portrait of a fat black woman railing at her white husband’s affair with a skinny white woman in On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) sticks in the mind and the heart.

Jeremy Hooker
My book of the year has to be one of the great illustrated books of the last century, the new, affordable edition of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner with David Jones’ copper engravings and introductory essay (Enitharmon Press, £15).

Brendan Walsh
The war correspondent Patrick Cockburn’s enthralling, hilarious and dry-eyed memoir The Broken Boy (Cape, £15.99) weaves in unsentimental accounts of his mother’s half-cracked Anglo-Irish descendants, of his journalist father phoning in mischievous copy from the bars of the Irish seaside town of Youghal, and tells the almost forgotten story of the polio epidemic in 1956 that left many children in Cork, including himself, crippled. Timothy Brittain Catlin Sheila Kirk’s Philip Webb: pioneer of Arts and Crafts architecture (Wiley, £29.99) is an outstanding, beautifully produced account of this pivotal figure of nineteenth-century design.

Michael Burleigh
Most of the books I have read are about totalitarians and terrorists, so Anthony Howard’s wise and gentle biography of Basil Hume (Headline, £20) afforded welcome relief. Roger Scruton’s memoir Gentle Regrets (Continuum, £16.99) is a marvellous, often funny, account of a modern life of the mind.

Robert Nye
Two good lives of two good poets came my way this year. The first was Anna of All the Russias: a life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20); and the other was A Mannered Grace: the life of Laura (Riding) Jackson by Elizabeth Friedmann (Persea, £21.50). A fascinating collection of new verse is Sebastian Barker’s The Erotics of God (Smokestack, £5.99). It takes its burden from Origen and The Song of Songs, but is best when most personal.

Rosalie Osmond
The most evocative book I read this year is Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North (Reaktion, £16.95). Though by no means perfect, the book does stretch the reader’s imagination to the abstract ideas and formative influences behind climate and landscape. It is haunting book; I rather wish I had written it myself.

Mary Emma Baxter
I only discovered Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw (Eland Books, £9.99) when it was reissued this year to coincide with a further volume of her memoirs and I fell in love with it at once. By far the best and most moving account of a childhood I have read.

Julian Gibbs
In The Stories of English (Penguin, £8.99) David Crystal describes, densely but grippingly, the evolution of our language. Fascinating facts abound – Alfred the Great, for example, urged all freemen to study, so becoming the first advocate of (a kind of) universal education.

Kathy Watson
Clever, imaginative and well-researched, Kathryn Hughes’ The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (Fourth Estate, £20) is a real treat. It’s a sympathetic and intriguing portrait of the woman who became the first domestic goddess and a deft deconstruction of the Mrs Beeton brand.

Alain Woodrow
Earthly Powers by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, £25). This analysis of the politics of religion and the religion of politics in Europe is breathtaking in its scope and depth. Never before has the influence of religion on the secular state been described so compellingly and readably.

Ian Thomson
Catherine Merridale is our finest historian of Soviet Russia. Her latest book, Ivan’s War (Faber, £20), recreates the life of the ordinary Red Army soldier. Merridale discovered not the stalwart of Stalinist myth, but a human creature prone to drinking, depression and desertion. The book is a model of imaginative empathy and sheer good writing.

Simon Scott Plummer
Mao: the unknown story by Jung Chang and Jon (Jonathan Cape, £25): the author of Wild Swans and her historian husband on a despot who, they claim, caused over 70 million deaths in peacetime. Their damning account lacks, however, sufficient explanation of Mao’s personal magnetism.

Selina O’Grady
In Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Virago, £14.99). A 76-year-old dying pastor in Iowa writes a love letter to his young son. Rarely has a good man been drawn so movingly or Christianity been treated with such sympathy.

Francis Beckett
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian , by Marina Lewycka (Viking, £12.99). An old man falls for a young, scheming woman, and his two daughters try to rescue him – but the story really begins years before, in the Ukraine that Hitler and Stalin fought over. A remarkable first novel that shows you don’t have to be sententious to be multi-layered.

Austen Ivereigh
Andrea Riccardi, La Pace Preventiva: Speranza e Ragioni in un Mondo di Conflitt i (Edizioni San Paulo). Riccardi’s Rome-based lay community, Sant’ Egidio, has for 20 years been building the Christian counter-dynamic to the clash of civilisations. The fruits are captured in these pages. Publishers: please translate.

Andy Bull
After 43 years of leaving his songs to speak for him, Bob Dylan has written about Dylan in Chronicles Volume I (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). With honesty, humility, perception and humour, he conveys how puzzling and remarkable it is to be him. The only book you’ll need about Bob – until he writes Volume II.

Raymond Edwards
Among the books from fluent pens mulling over the papal election, a welcome reissue: Aidan Nichols’ magisterial work, The Thought of Benedict XVI (Continuum, £14.99); its theological incision, polyglot learning and clarity are typical of both author and subject.

Betka Zamoyska
Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England by Alison Weir (Jonathan Cape, £20). In this biographical tale of sex and violence, Isabella, queen to the notorious, gay Edward II, emerges triumphant against daunting odds. Weir combines gripping drama with meticulous detail.

Philip Womack
In The People’s Act of Love by James Meek (Canongate, £12.99) the revolutionary Sama- rin escapes from prison, bringing confusion to a Siberian town. Passion, deception and the frozen wastelands are the background to this tight and absorbing book where love reigns supreme and no one is what they seem.

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