Andrew Motion

Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends the already considerable range of her first book, Three Poems. She’s the cleverest poet of her generation and also one of the most deep-feeling.

Clare Mulley

Vulnerability, strength and defiance this year, starting with Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £25), which caught me up in its humanity as it testified to the importance of bearing witness to extremism. Frank McDonough provides an authoritative and immensely readable guide to the fractured Weimar Republic, along with a lesson on the vulnerability of democracies, in The Weimar Years (Apollo, £35), the prequel to his two-volume The Hitler Years. In Forgotten Warriors (John Murray, £25), Sarah Percy explores the history of women in combat and tackles their exclusion from the historical record. Honourable mentions also to Thomas Harding’s The Maverick (Orion, £25), Roger Moorhouse’s The Forgers (Vintage, £25) and –a rare novel for me – Elizabeth Fremantle’s Disobedient (Michael Joseph, £18.99), which brilliantly reimagines Artemisia Gentileschi.

Philip Hensher

The book I most enjoyed this year is a Bengali classic, now translated by Rebecca Whittington. The glorious poet Jibanananda Das also wrote novels, and Malloban (Penguin India, £12) is an exquisite, small-scale account of the adventures of a bickering married couple in 1920s Calcutta.

Other novels I liked were Mick Herron’s splendid The Secret Hours (Baskerville, £22) and Eleanor Catton’s garrulous, precise, boisterous satire Birnam Wood (Granta, £20). Martin McInnes, a superb, adventurous writer, does something altogether new in In Ascension (Atlantic, £16.99). The Granta Best of Young British list introduced me to Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99), a book so vividly evocative in its writing, Angela Carter would have appreciated it.

It was a thin year for biographies, but two I did enjoy were Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming (Harvill Secker, £30) and Oliver Soden’s Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30). They are subjects much done already, but both books are justified because of the volume ofnew evidence. A third was Karen Arrandale’s Edward J. Dent (Boydell Press, £60), a very thorough life of the musicologist. It won’t interest everyone, but the friend of Busoni, an elegant writer and a dashing presence in pre-war gay Cambridge, Dent deserves attention.

Jenny Colgan

I loved Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Penguin, £19.99), which immersed me as thoroughly as a good Victorian novel should. I’m delighted that Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (Penguin, £18.99)has made the Booker shortlist. It’s funny and sad and human and joyous. Peter Bradshaw described Emma Cline’s The Guest (Vintage, £12.99) as ‘addictive as crack, and about as good for you as crack’, which I cannot better.

Non-fiction wise, I enjoyed Ben McKenzie’s Easy Money (Abrams, £15.99), about crypto. He’s an actor, and his outraged incredulity comes over particularly well on audiobook. I am a huge fan of Laura Cumming, and Thunderclap (Penguin, £19.99), on the golden age of Dutch art, is possibly her finest book yet. If you’re a child of 20th-century pop, Michael Cragg’s oral history Reach for the Stars (Nine Eight Books, £19.99) is irresistible.

Jonathan Sumption

Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring (Allen Lane, £35) is an account of the revolutions that broke out in 1848 throughout Europe, and nearly in England, one of the seminal events of the modern world. It is the only comprehensive account of these linked uprisings in any language, a remarkable feat of scholarship and elegant writing.

Nicholas Orme’s Tudor Children (Yale, £20) is the latest work by one of the most original and perceptive historians of English life writing today. His earlier books on childhood and education broke new ground and this one continues the tradition. Finally, those who hope that the liberal tradition may survive just a bit longer should turn for solace in the dark night to Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents (Profile Books, £9.99) – a thought-provoking threnody for a lost world of rational, humane and reflective thinking.

Mark Mason

Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher (Mudlark, £25) reads like a Frederick Forsyth novel. The background to, planning of and investigation into the 1984 Brighton bomb are described with wonderful attention to detail. Thatcher’s suite at the Grand Hotel was the same as the one in which Abba celebrated their 1974 Eurovision Song Contest victory. As Norman Tebbit was taken to hospital, a paramedic preparing painkillers asked if he was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Bombs.’

In Everything to Play For (Faber, £14.99), James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski apply their QI chops to the subject of sport. It had never occurred to me that TV coverage often needs to add its own sound effects. In the University Boat Race, for instance, the sound of the helicopter and following flotilla drown out the noise of the oars hitting the water, so recordings made specially for the purpose are played in at the right moments.

Mark Cocker

The loss of wildlife in Britain, judged the world’s 12th most denatured country, is gaining recognition. Less appreciated is how peer-reviewed surveys, organised partly by Miles Richardson, show that the British also have less relationship with other parts of life than the people of 18 developed nations. In Reconnection (Pelagic, £20), Richardson makes his meticulously researched case in prose that a teenager would understand. He offers redress for the causes of our double ecological crisis rather than just describing the symptoms. My stand-out environmental book of the year.

If you want to explore what deep nature connectedness looks like, read Kapka Kassabova’s Elixir (Jonathan Cape, £20), a joyous celebration of the Pomak community in southern Bulgaria. Their attachment to growing and harvesting plants of all kinds supplies the ingredients for the title. The elixir named is a profound love for our living world.

Frances Wilson

Wendy Mitchell, now aged 67, was diagnosed at 58 with early onset vascular dementia. While her two previous publications described living with the illness, One Last Thing (Bloomsbury, £16.99) – the best and most useful book I have read this year – is about how to die with dementia, a subject doctors tend not to address. She does not want to ‘slip over the edge’, she explains, and spend her last years inside a black hole. The point at which her life will lose its joy and therefore purpose is when she can no longer go for walks, type or recognise her two daughters. One Last Thing is an argument for assisted dying and also, invaluably, a guide to the paperwork and acronyms involved, including ACP, ReSPECT, LPA and DNACPR forms. It is curious, Mitchell notes, how little value we place on a good death when the death rate among us is 100 per cent.

Allan Mallinson

Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars (Hutchinson Heinemann, £35), the fourth and final volume of Simon Heffer’s polychromatic history of Britain from the accession of Queen Victoria to the coming of war with Hitler, connects just about everything with everything else. Heffer reappraises the too-often lazy narrative of the ‘low, dishonest decade’ and ‘the guilty men’ with hitherto neglected or underweighted evidence, informed in no small part by his editorship of Chips Channon’s diaries.

Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World (Head of Zeus, £30) is a study of the Catholic Church since 1700 by Ambrogio Caiani, a history don at the University of Kent. Mary McAleese says it’s ‘utterly absorbing from start to finish’ – and so it is.

Away from the male-dominated world – well not that far really, since the heroine is a former army officer – I much enjoyed my friend Louise Doughty’s new thriller, A Bird in Winter (Faber, £16.99). It reminded me of John Buchan’s line: ‘The North was where a man can make his soul or where the man who knows too many secrets can make his escape.’ Edgy, elegant and impeccably researched.

Anna Aslanyan

Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) is a historical novel with enough surrealist spin to keep us wondering how much of it is grounded in fact – and how much veracity is needed in fiction. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, this complex, clever book deserves to win.

On the shelf opposite there is Ronald Allen’s The Notebook (Profile, £25), an engaging popular history that considers the notebook in its various forms – wax tablet, ledger, spreadsheet – over the centuries. Why, despite the digitisation of everything, do many of us still write and draw on paper? Reflecting on this question, Allen touches on art, accounting, science and politics the better to trace through the years the relationship between power and information technology.

A.N. Wilson

Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s books are hard to classify. They seem modest, minor, but they are in fact great. She told the story of boarding schools for girls, then how the British spent their summer time. She has now written the best of the trilogy, and that is saying something: Jobs for the Girls (Abacus Books, £22), whose title is self-explanatory. She is an extremely punctilious observer, and has interviewed an enormous range of women, asking them about a now vanished world in which it was simply taken for granted that women would not be properly educated. If they did have ‘jobs’ – a word put in inverted commas by one headmistress in this wonderful gallery – no one would think these were comparable with serious work, which was done by men. Maxtone Graham has actually invented a new genre, which is partly journalism, partly an almost fictive take on the world. When she seems to be most nostalgic for a dear British past, she shocks the reader by the devastating but always humorous accuracy with which she describes the sheer horror of it. She is a sort of George Orwell, who has taken journalism to a soaring literary height – only she is even better than Orwell. I actually do not know of any writer alive in the English language, in verse or prose, who is cleverer, more observant or who has told us more about ourselves.

Daniel Swift

The poet Saskia Hamilton died this summer after finishing, but before the publication of, her new collection All Souls (Corsair, £10.99). These are poems written by one ‘caught in the far gone far alone glance/ of mortality’, as she writes, and there is much of death: expected, terrifying, solitary. But also so much of life. For her, history is made of tiny, intimate moments, and the poems remember the pleasures of museum visits, summer afternoons, conversations with friends and reading. A boy – presumably her son – ‘touches your arm in his sleep/ for ballast’. I loved this precise, brave book, and wanted it to keep going.

Christopher Howse

The Isle of Man is like a counterfactual novel in which someone else won the war or William the Conqueror lost at Hastings. Everything’s the same but different. I’d never have gone there if Yale had not published Isle of Man (£45) in its Pevsner series of architectural guides. Since the island is not even in the UK, it had not commanded a volume before, but Jonathan Kewley, the son of a Manxman, slots its strange buildings beguilingly into its weird history. And now Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South-East by Simon Bradley (£45) triumphantly tops out the revision of the whole glorious series (except for Staffordshire, coming next year). In Oxford, Nikolaus Pevsner found ‘a density of monuments of architecture which has not the like in Europe’. As I longed to during the pandemic, I shall catch the Oxford train again – armed with my fatter, broader Pevsner.

Marcus Berkmann

Operation Reread continues, as it seems to for many people of my age (63) with groaning bookshelves. Ann Patchett (59) recently said she had been rereading John Updike from the beginning: the books had started out brilliant and gradually got worse and worse. P.D. James is very up and down: Unnatural Causes (1967) is feeble, but The Black Tower (1975) is positively perky, and even The Lighthouse (2005) isn’t bad, and she was 83 when she wrote that.

Anne Tyler is similar: A Slipping-Down Life (1970) and The Clock Winder (1972) are wonderful, while Celestial Navigation (1974) doesn’t amount to much and The Accidental Tourist (1985) goes on and on and on and limps dismally to a close, as though Tyler couldn’t quite decide how to end it. Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020) is the skimpiest of hers I have read, which is saying something. But I suppose if you do write 24 novels in a 60-year career, some are going to be duds. Even P.G. Wodehouse published a few poor books, which obviously we fans never acknowledge publicly – just to each other after a few sharpeners.

Sara Wheeler

We lost Jonathan Raban this year. At his best, he was (almost) the best. In memoriam, my choice is his Father and Son (Picador, £22), which came out posthumously. It is a lyrical memoir of his father’s war – mainly in Italy – culled from letters home, and of the author’s own experiences in a private war against illness. Raban writes that his lodestar in the years following his 2011 stroke was Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. He admired the clarity of the prose and the brilliance of the author’s insights even as Judt’s own health failed. As a result, I read it this summer (Vintage, £14.99). It is a book for all time. As a boomer, I felt the soil from which I grew. Two outstanding writers yoked forever in my mind. Requiescant in pace.

Peter Frankopan

I greatly enjoyed Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink (Abacus, £25) – hugely impressive in its research and balance and fully deserving of its many plaudits. Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall (Allen Lane, £25) offered a set of fresh and often brave perspectives on East Germany during the Cold War and after. I am new, and late, to Mick Herron, but I devoured The Secret Hours (Baskerville, £22) in one sitting. And, oh yes, also any book about air fryers. I’ll be getting a few in my Christmas stocking, I fear.

Lucasta Miller

The distinguished nonagenarian Lady Antonia Fraser was on sparkling form in Lady Caroline Lamb (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), while Francesca Peacock, who’s in her early twenties, made an impressive debut with Pure Wit (Apollo, £27.99), about the 17th-century eccentric Margaret Cavendish. Both books deal with women considered ‘difficult’ in their own times, yet make them alluringly easy to read about. I still can’t get my head around the near 70-year age gap between the two authors. Historical biography must have the longest trajectory of any career path.

Duncan Fallowell

The latest episode in Roger Lewis’s love-hate relationship with show business is Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Riverrun, £30) – a dionysiac humdinger. Thanks to it, 11 hours in A&E went by in a trice, with enough book left to sustain the murderous wait for my scan results. Having recently been the victim of two SLAPP letters from a notorious firm of solicitors, I hugely welcomed David Hooper’s Buying Silence: How Oligarchs, Corporations and Plutocrats Use the Law to Gag their Critics (Biteback, £25). We who made vital friendships in the open Russia of the 1990s are left beleaguered by the deranged horrors of Putinism. Elena Kostyuchenko, now in exile (of course), gives her version in I Love Russia (Bodley Head, £22). And I loved rereading Alethea Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Faber Finds, £20).

Andrea Wulf

As a judge of this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize, I read a huge number of fabulous non-fiction books. Whittling them down was a painful choice, which is why I’m going to pick two that didn’t make the shortlist. I was deeply impressed by Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried (Profile, £25), a story of slavery and loss but also of love and resilience. It is a brilliant example of how we can tell the stories of those who have been forgotten or written out of history. Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story (Allen Lane, £25) is a harrowing eye-opener, and given what is happening in Israel and Palestine, it has become even more poignant.

In between all the non-fiction books, I read a few novels and loved Lauren Groff’s Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20) which tells the story of an unnamed girl escaping from an early 17th-century colonial settlement in northern America. Groff’s prose is haunting, poetic and simply delicious.

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