Andrew Lycett

Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination.

Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about her mixed reactions to her beloved dad’s dive into a religious cult and subsequent alcoholism, is notable for its emotional truthfulness, sure sense of time and place and appealing tone of delivery.

The novel which gave me most pleasure was Winchelsea by Alex Preston (Canongate, £14.99), a rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century. The energy, word play and attention to contemporary detail could not be bettered.

Mark Mason

If you want a laugh, it’s Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat: ’Til the Cows Come Home (Michael Joseph, £20). The book will keep us going until the next TV series appears. It includes Clarkson’s battles with Whitehall: ‘If the government sends round an execution squad, I shall simply tell them that while my cattle look like cows they actually identify as alpacas.’ For a more comprehensive critique of big government there’s Konstantin Kasin’s brilliant An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (Constable, £18.99). The stand-up comedian demolishes socialism, whose ‘answer to poverty is the equivalent of helping wheelchair users by cutting everyone else’s legs off’. He quotes The Spectator’s heroic Lionel Shriver on cancel culture: ‘These people think they’re motivated by virtue, but the thrill isn’t doing good, it’s authoritarian – pushing people around.’

Peter Frankopan

This was a bumper year for books, perhaps because so many people got scribbling during lockdown. I greatly enjoyed The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag-Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £35) and The World the Plague Made by James Belich (Princeton, £35), both sweeping, ambitious histories. Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World (Profile, £20) was well-timed and a revelation, showing how deeply exposed our financial systems have become. I am a great fan of Frank Dikötter, and his wonderful China after Mao (Bloomsbury, £25) did not dis-appoint in its forensic coverage of the past five decades. Carrie Vout’s sparkling Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (Profile, £25) was transformative reading, while I learned much too from Jeremy Bowen’s The Making of the Modern Middle East (Pan Macmillan, £20) which was filled with nuggets. Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come (Apollo, £27.99) was typically fiery and brilliant, while I also greatly admired Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels (John Murray, £25), about the intellectual powerhouse of Jena that exploded like a firework in the late 1790s. History writing at its best.

Rod Liddle

I started reading quite a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction this year, but all of it was woke, stupid, shrill and badly written so I stopped. Dystopia ain’t what it used to be. I was glad for Lionel Shriver to come to the rescue. Nobody creates fictional monsters quite like her, and I can’t work out if I find her personal trainer ‘Bambi’, from the hilarious The Motion of a Body Through Space (2020) more or less wondrously appalling than the care home functionaries in last year’s Should We Stay or Should We Go. This isn’t log rolling. I’ve met Shriver only twice – the first time when she addressed the SDP annual conference and compared us to the People’s Front of Judaea.

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (Bloomsbury, £20) provided a staggering insight into the misery occasioned by our addiction to the idiocies of the web. If you have kids please read it. Kevin Hickson’s fine biography Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot (Biteback, £25) reminded me what a kind, prescient and clever man he was.

Duncan Fallowell

I’m going through a Bacon revival, so not only devoured the paperback of Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Harper Collins, £20 – and much better laid out than last year’s hardback) but also James Birch’s delightful Bacon in Moscow (Profile Books, £17.99), a reminder that there have occasionally been slivers of light in that very dark city. Michel Houellebecq’s collection of essays and interviews, Interventions (Polity Press, £20, sustains his gift for wrongfooting the reader, climaxing in the shock of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Speak, Silence (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Carole Angier’s quest for W.G. Sebald, is a mesmeric rite of necromancy bordering on necrophilia. I’ve yet to read the year’s most promising title, The Mad Emperor: Helio-gabalus and the Decadence of Rome by Harry Sidebottom (Oneworld, £20), but I’ve asked my brother to give it to me for Christmas.

Lucasta Miller

Two exemplary literary biographies offered significant insights into modernism. Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (HarperCollins, £25) dispelled the myth that this virtuoso female novelist was just a naive chronicler of her own experiences. Conversely, Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (Little, Brown, £25) revealed that the great man’s poetry was a lot less impersonal than he led us to believe. And anyone who’s ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith’s delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers (Penguin, £20).

Marcus Berkmann

As always, I tend to read non-fiction for work and fiction for fun. But rereading my way through my groaning shelves, I realised how much I detest the novels (and indeed short stories) of Ian McEwan. There’s only one rule in McEwan: the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen – and then something worse will. On Chesil Beach is a loathsome novel, utterly bleak and as far from anything I recognise as real life. It might have been written by an android. The Cement Garden is also ghastly. Obviously it is supposed to be, but that’s no excuse. What a pleasure it’s been to remove them all from the shelf and take them to Oxfam.

Instead, this year has been a celebration of Elizabeth Strout. I have read three: Olive, Again (magisterial), Oh William! (relatively slight) and The Burgess Boys (genuinely involving). She has that witchy quality you associate with Hilary Mantel, of making her writing feel completely real, as though she’s describing something that is happening instead of something she has just made up. She is everything McEwan is not: humane, generous, emotionally mature and – possibly above all – female.

Frances Wilson

Matthew Yorke’s Fish Tale (Cogito Publishing, £8.99), the most beguiling novel I’ve read since M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (which is also, curiously, about fish), nearly slipped through the net. Brought to us by an independent publisher and delivered without the fanfare of a vast publicity machine, it rests on the toss of a coin, the theft of a picture, an accidental-on-purpose death during the salmon season and a king venturing forth among his subjects. This seemingly soft-footed fable anticipates the surreal realities of this year, where the reign of our own king began with a government gamble.

In Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (New York University Press, £18.99), the poet Vona Groarke traces, through a blend of poetry and prose, the life of her grand-mother, who emigrated from Sligo to New York in 1882 to work as a servant. Groake’s lyrical act of historical investigation will surely become a classic of Irish literature.

Peter Parker

Although he is fantastically vain and snobbish, holds some reprehensible opinions and is far too fond of clapped-out royal families, Chips Channon is irresistibly entertaining company – at any rate in print. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1943-57, edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35), is the final volume of a work running to well over 3,000 pages. There are inevitably some longueurs, but it’s hard to imagine any of our current crop of parliamentarians writing anything so lively and irresponsible. Combining the wealth of Croesus with the recklessness of Oscar Wilde, the long-serving MP for Southend bestows diamond cufflinks and gold cigarette cases on any young man who takes his fancy, while swearing devotion to his hapless partner Peter Coats. The highlight of the volume is his ludicrously hot-and-cold romance with Terence Rattigan, whose beauty he finds overpowering but whose character he frequently deplores. All in all, a pretty disgraceful life that is a guilty pleasure to read about.

Francis Wheen

A sad tale’s best for winter, and tales don’t come more wintry than Kate Barker-Mawjee’s debut novel The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99), set in a remote Siberian town whose only claim to fame is its record-breaking sub-zero temperatures. These are regularly reported to Moscow from its weather station by Irina, the manager of the local motel, who is trapped in a marriage as frozen and failing as the town itself. This may sound forbiddingly bleak, but Irina’s fears and dreams are so vividly evoked that I found the book unputdownable and unforgettable.

Mark Cocker

Regenesis by George Monbiot (Allen Lane, £20). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is often cited as the book which launched all modern environmentalism, but here is its equal in terms of the Orwellian strength and clarity of its prose, the depth of its author’s research and the moral weight of his arguments. The surprise is that Monbiot manages to be undogmatic and even entertaining and funny, while also presenting a devastating critique of our agricultural abuse of the biosphere.

Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness by Charles Foster (Profile, £10.99). If Monbiot explains what we are doing to the Earth, Foster examines why we are so destructive. He offers nothing less than a history of the human mind and our relations to the rest of life during the past 40,000 years. His book is as important for the range of its intellectual inquiry as for its virtual reinvention of the ‘nature writing’ model. It’s one of the stand out environmental works not just of the year but of the century so far.

William Dalrymple

Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury, £25) is a brilliantly concentrated meditation on the power of myth and history, and the ability of both to form and deform and guide and misguide the present. Thoughtful, nuanced and above all persuasive, it shows how we are all trapped in the loops and coils of myth, memory and forgetting, and demonstrates the urgent need for historians to remember, and insist on. the truth.

I also hugely enjoyed Anthony Sattin’s Nomads (John Murray, £25) a thoughtful, lyrical yet ambitiously panoramic study of what the author calls ‘our wandering other half’. As fleet and light-footed as its subject, it takes us along a dizzying path over many of the highest ridges of human history, looking down from the time when we were all nomads, and the world was without walls or borders, to our divided, fractured and hobbled present. It is an important, generous and beautifully written book, perhaps Sattin’s best.

Murray Pittock’s Scotland: The Global History (Yale, £25) is a much needed overview of a fascinating and underwritten subject. Spectacularly panoramic and sweeping while always remaining rigorously scholarly, it ranges effortlessly and with confident authority over 400 years of history, from Quebec to Calcutta, from Ossian to Train-spotting. Pittock is as admirably frank about Scotland’s participation in the slave and opium trade and the looting of half the globe as he is about its contribution to the finance, technology and innovation that drove the steam age. He has made a major contribution to the field.

David Crane

Old hat to a lot of readers maybe, but I had never read Pierre Lemaitre’s The Great Swindle before (MacLehose Press, £8.99). Anyone who has tried his thrillers will know you need a strong stomach to tackle Lemaitre, and The Great Swindle, translated from the French (and it could only be a French novel) by Frank Wynne, is no exception. It’s as brilliant, original and blackly comic a book about the first world war and its aftermath as one could find. 

Richard Ingrams

Cherchez la femme has always been a useful guideline for historians and journalists, but in today’s unhealthy atmosphere, if followed too diligently it can lead to accusations of misogyny, a grave offence if not quite yet a criminal one. Such has been the experience of Michael Ashcroft, whose book First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson (Biteback, £20) was widely dismissed by critics as a work of hateful misogyny, with even Private Eye damning it. Misogyny apart, there is a general and regrettable reluctance on the part of today’s media to pry into the private lives of politicians. Yet anyone seeking to explain the downfall of Johnson, which has landed us in the mess we are now in, should consult this gripping account of the shambles that resulted from his divorce from the sensible, level-headed Marina and his liaison with a highly ambitious woman half his age, convinced of her political abilities while lacking the necessary experience or diplomatic skills. There followed a string of scandals which lost Johnson what had once seemed like an impregnable position. A new edition, bringing the sad story to its inevitable end, would now be most welcome. It should be retitled The Spad Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carrie (Geddit?)

Hilary Spurling

Ronald Blythe is 100 this month and his new book shows him to be not only one of our best writers but still on top form. Next to Nature (John Murray, £25) is a hoard of observation, gossip and stories designed to take you through the year, with something rich and strange on every page. He peoples his Suffolk landscape with artists: John Constable revolutionised painting in these fields, the landlord of the local pub was Thomas Gainsborough’s uncle and Blythe’s bedroom used to be John Nash’s studio. He has a knack of telescoping time so that the past belongs to the present as he ranges from Stone Age, Roman and medieval farms to our own ‘curious country days, when the land is tidy to a T without a worker in sight’.  Nature, in Blythe’s reassuring perspective, will soon put paid to our industrial tidiness.

Jane Ridley

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1943-57, edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35). The third instalment of the diaries takes the story up to 1957, shortly before Chips’s death. Each of these three fat volumes consists of more than 1,000 pages, but don’t be put off by the word count. Reading Chips is a mesmerising experience. The diaries give a riveting account of politics and society in Britain from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Snobbish and judgmental, Channon is not a likeable character, but the waspishness is what makes him a great diarist. Heffer is an exemplary editor, giving the information you need to make sense of the text and never overloading it.

Andrew Roberts

A.N. Wilson’s memoir Confessions (Bloomsbury Continuum, £20) is subtitled ‘A Life of Failed Promises’, presumably a reference to the oath of fidelity to his first wife that was forced out of him at an absurdly young age while he was still an Oxford undergraduate, and various promises made to the Anglican and Catholic Churches as he veered between them. In these moving, uproariously funny at times, and searingly – almost masochistically – honest pages, it is clear that one promise he has been unswervingly faithful to is his promise as a writer.

Flora Fraser’s Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald (Bloomsbury, £25) is so well researched, pacily written and sympathetic to the Auld Cause that it almost makes one a Jacobite. Fraser’s own paternal heritage in the Highlands has clearly helped her to understand her subject, but, as she makes very clear, MacDonald’s story did not end with her saving Bonnie Prince Charlie. How she wound up on the Hanoverian side in the American War of Independence is worthy of a novel or movie.

Anna Aslanyan

Oliver Bullough has done it again. He has followed his 2018 bestseller Moneyland with another fine piece of reportage, Butler to the World (Profile, £20), which investigates financial skulduggery in Britain, ‘a place defined by irony, tradition and substantial breakfasts’. Meticulously researched and well written, the book has in its sights both money launderers and their smooth-talking, sleek looking accomplices, the titular butlers willing to accommodate the crooks. Unsurprisingly, there is Russian material here, which makes this exposé – published shortly after the war in Ukraine began and Britain finally started sanctioning the individuals it had long been supporting in their shady dealings – timelier than ever. Bullough brings these crimes to light and urges us to think of their ‘real-life victims, whose loss is far greater than Britain’s gain’.

Honor Clerk

Those of us living in the lumpier parts of Britain may be familiar with Hallewell’s Pocket Walks, a series of extraordinarily successful small walking guidebooks, mostly written by Richard Hallewell and illustrated by Rebecca Coope. From the same pen – and brush – comes Ka, the Ring and the Raven (Hallewell Publications, £10), a beautifully written and charmingly observed children’s story that will appeal to all ages. The perfect stocking filler.

Daniel Hahn

Motherlands by Amaryllis Gacioppo(Bloomsbury, £20) is an appropriately hard-to-pin-down sort of book from a writer gifted with multiple heritages surveying the landscapes of her own and her family’s pasts. Note: pasts necessarily in the plural, like those titular motherlands. My favourite books of this type find the big questions (belonging, memory etc) in small, concrete things: an old photo, an old building, a map. It’s not a new approach, but few do it this well.

Kübra Gümüşay’s Speaking and Being, translated by Gesche Ipsen (Profile Books, £14.99), asks how language shapes and constrains our thought and politics, revealing a lot – and not all of it good – about those things. It’s intellectually rich and rigorous but never dry and rarely just abstract. Gümüşay is an activist, so approaches her subject with a generous combination of passion and practicality that is not easily resisted. A rare book that might actually change our minds.

Cressida Connolly

I’ve only just discovered The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury (first published in 1994), and it would be downright cruel not to tell others how fantastic it is. This must be among the greatest American novels of the past half century. It’s like a cross between Kent Haruf and Anne Tyler but with better jokes; almost every page has something that makes you snort with laughter. It’s also very sad. Everyone talks at cross purposes to everyone else, nothing is fair, and goodness is seldom rewarded. In other words, it’s a perfect depiction of life itself. It shines.

Nicola Shulman

James Buchan’s A Street Shaken by Light (Welbeck, £16.99) is one of the most strikingly original books I’ve read in ages. It’s the story of Will Neilson, a Scottish orphan who goes to France in 1720 to work as a clerk for the French Royal Bank and the East India Company in the time of the great economist John Law, and is overtaken by circumstances.

In a way, it’s a classic adventure tale: here are shipwrecks, slavery, hopeless love, bills of credit and the biggest uncut diamond in the world. Where Buchan overreaches his influences is in his ability to inhabit the 18th-century cast of mind, in language, manners, morals and the scale of imperatives wholly alien to us now, but invoked here in their entirety, without apology or explanation. To read it is a form of time travel.

I loved Nell Hudson’s Just for Today (Headline, £18.99), a novel written by a young person about young people getting into the sort of muddles with love and friendship that tend to beset you in your twenties. I opened it with trepidation, thinking it would make me feel old to be thrust into this world, but on the contrary, it made me feel young.

Naomi Alderman

Are you looking for some hope in a dark season? The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen Lane, £30) is a line of light at the edge of the world – an exploration of the radically different ways societies have been organised throughout time. Like the Kwakwaka’wakw people whose law enforcement was in the form of ‘clown police’. Like societies where ‘owning’ something meant having only the special responsibility for looking after it – rather than the ability to destroy it. Like indigenous cultures which didn’t have one leader but many, depending on the season or the reason – the best elk hunter taking charge during the elk hunt, the best dancer during the dancing festival, for example. After a difficult year for the UK, the idea that we might be more stable if we didn’t rely on one central prime minister feels rather exciting, fresh and, yes, hopeful.

Roger Lewis

I’m not saying you have to go back to 1979 and Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs for a guarantee of excellence (‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun’ – which they did), but literature appears to have come to an end. Nothing that’s reached me in recent times do I wish to keep on the shelf and reread; nothing of the calibre of Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark exists. I’m sorry she died and everything, but I did think Hilary Mantel frightfully overpraised. Her novels will be placed by history next to Mrs Humphry Ward’s – stock impossible to shift in antiquarian bookshops.

The post Books of the year II – chosen by our regular reviewers appeared first on The Spectator.

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