Stephen Amidon
Richard Yates's Collected Stories (Methuen) is an unforgettable and long-overdue compilation of work by one of the great, neglected American writers of the postwar era. The Constant Gardener (Coronet) proves that John le Carre has retained his authority far beyond the end of the cold war. Here, he takes on the corruption of big pharmaceutical companies. Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso) is a compelling polemic that convincingly makes the case against America's most famous diplomat.
J G Ballard
As religious terrorists fall from the sky, it may well be the time to look at another era of suicidal madness. The Third Reich by Michael Burleigh (Macmillan) is a justly praised account of the rise and destruction of this insane creed and its roots in the deep pathology of German history. Burleigh sees Hitler as a pseudo-religious leader, and the German people as his congregation. Interrogations: the Nazi elite in allied hands, 1945 by Richard Overy (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) provides a chilling glimpse into the minds of Hitler's chief lieutenants. Almost without exception, they come across as devoid of pity, numbed by violence and convinced of their innocence. Profoundly unsettling.
Joan Bakewell
Carol Shields's Jane Austen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Shields knows at first hand what matters to a growing writer. She shows tender sympathy for the young Jane and some fine insights into the adult Miss Austen. Doubts and Loves by Richard Holloway (Canongate), in which the former Bishop of Edinburgh offers up more good sense and criticism of the religion he loves. He has always been a radical living in the real world, ready to come to terms with its hectic demands and constraints. This book offers the churches hope but, more importantly, has something to say to each of us. The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller (Jonathan Cape). The Bronte story has everything: early loss of the mother, supposedly tyrannical father, young genius, frustrated passion, drink, drugs, early death and posthumous fame. No wonder the family has become the subject of half-informed hero-worship and inappropriate criticism. Miller takes a shrewd look at it all and makes you reassess your own perspective.
Lynn Barber
Kenneth Tynan's Diaries (Bloomsbury) didn't really work as diaries, but is a wonderful ragbag of ideas, anecdotes, aphorisms and, well, spanking, if that's your thing. I much enjoyed Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Little, Brown), as well as Jonathan Self's Self Abuse (John Murray), which could well have had the same title if Young hadn't bagged it first. Young and Self are the sort of emotional klutzes usually branded "insensitive" by women, so it is quite valuable to learn how their minds work - I felt like an anthropologist reading an account of a hitherto undescribed tribe. Another book I enjoyed for its sheer quirkiness and bravura writing was Charles Hawtrey 1914-1988: the man who was Private Widdle by Roger Lewis (Faber).
Hugo Barnacle
Douglas Coupland's All Families Are Psychotic (Flamingo). Farcical ructions among an astronaut's family as they gather in Florida for a shuttle launch. Despite the title and the outrageous plotting, it's actually a hymn to motherhood. You don't come across many of those. Hill 112: battles of the Odon, 1944 by Tim Saunders (Pen and Sword). A remarkable reconstruction of an event that filled the headlines in 1944 and is now wholly forgotten - the struggle between a single British infantry division (the 43rd Wessex) and no fewer than four elite SS Panzer divisions for control of a small hilltop orchard near Caen. It got quite heated, as you'd imagine.
Martyn Bedford
Ian McEwan's Atonement (Jonathan Cape) was his best novel for years; Rachel Seiffert's triptych of novellas, The Dark Room (William Heinemann), was a hugely assured debut; and David Mitchell's number9dream (Sceptre) was a breath of fresh air in a literary scene supposedly bereft of new talent. But my pick of the fictional bunch was Hotel World by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton): moving and original, and proof that formal inventiveness and page-turning readability are not necessarily incompatible. If she looked like that other Smith - Zadie - perhaps she would get the attention she deserves, because she is by far the better writer.
Nicholas Blincoe
P-P Hartnett's Sixteen (Sceptre). I should first admit that I was the editor of Hartnett's book, but the truth is that editors are not responsible for a writer's achievements. Sixteen is a brave, chillingly erotic look at the way young teenagers have become objects of desire and have learnt to exploit their sexuality. This is a book about a boy band, but it could easily be about a girl group, a model or an actor in one of the many teen ensemble films or soaps.
A S Byatt
Two non-fiction books have really changed my mental landscape this year. The first is J W Burrow's The Crisis of Reason: European thought, 1848-1914 (Yale University Press), which explained many things I had half understood and many more I hadn't thought about. The second was Jean-Pierre Dupuy's The Mechanisation of the Mind (Princeton University Press), a lucid account of the creation of cybernetics (which is not what we thought it was). Two works of fiction. One Chinese-French, one Belgian, both creating unique worlds and blackly comic stories - Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Chatto & Windus) and Erwin Mortier's Marcel (Harvill), both translated by Ina Rilke. Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea (Granta), like his earlier Fishing for Amber, is a patchwork of art, connecting disparate things, brilliantly written.
Amanda Craig
This year has been too grim to recommend anything that hasn't made me laugh aloud. If you're unaffected by bombs, I suggest Ian McEwan's Atonement, the novel for which I've waited 20 years, and a masterpiece. Otherwise, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club (Viking), charting the adventures of four wicked Birmingham schoolboys, is outstanding - romantic, experimental, touching and so engaging it almost made me nostalgic for the 1970s. Christina Koning's Fabulous Time (Viking), set in the 1960s, contains the best portrait of a gay couple in modern fiction, and is a delicious satire on a house party from hell. Francine Prose's Blue Angel (Allison & Busby) is a mordantly witty campus novel, concerning a hapless teacher of creative writing who believes he's discovered a brilliant new writer. She proves to be a manipulative minx who pursues him, then sues him for sexual harassment. Lastly, Kathy Lette's Nip'n'Tuck (Picador) is a tonic for any woman facing 40. Polemical and stuffed with great jokes about plastic surgery, it is the perfect present for anyone frozen by Botox injections.
Patricia Duncker
Stephen Knight's magnificent Mr Schnitzel (Viking), his fictional memoirs of his family and hilarious horror trips to his mother's native Austria, made me roar and weep in equal measure. Michele Roberts's sexy tales of food, desire and revenge, Playing Sardines (Virago), continue to delight, as do two absorbing historical novels: Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones (Faber) and Jane Stevenson's Astraea (Jonathan Cape).
Julian Evans
Give everybody Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing (Granta). Its maze-like exploration of history, as well as bombing, expresses what I have suspected: that war is our once and future fantasy. It was Lindqvist's countryman Alfred Nobel, reclusive dynamiter, who set up his prizes after the French press mistook his dead brother for him and obituarised him as a merchant of death. V S Naipaul, Nobel laureate, provided in Half a Life (Picador) another quietly glittering sketch of the ever-incomplete conversation between India and Britain. Dai Sijie supplied the complete argument for the power of great novels to work anywhere in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Michael Bracewell's perfectly tuned Perfect Tense (Jonathan Cape) brooded with rueful, then tragicomic, results on that other epic subject matter of western civilisation - office life. A blessing: we would all be bombing each other more often if it didn't exist.
Richard Gott
Top of my list, and very topical, is A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, an original and cleverly composed account of imperial bombing campaigns, which describes how aerial warfare came to be prefigured in fiction. Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) is a wistful evocation of post-imperial Africa culled from the notebooks and imagination of a wonderful writer. An under-noticed first novel that I enjoyed more than most was In the Blue House by Meaghan Delahunt (Bloomsbury), a well-researched but fictional account of the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Trotsky, with accurate side-swipes at historical figures in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.
John Gray
J G Ballard's Complete Short Stories (Flamingo) is a feast, and not only for those who think - as I do - that Ballard has long been Britain's most original and inventive writer. For anyone bored with the stale conventions of mainstream fiction, his 90-odd stories of stilled time, desolate beauty and personal fulfilment in extreme situations will be sheer delight.
Eric Hobsbawm
Erna Paris's Long Shadows: truth, lies and history (Bloomsbury) is an indispensable book. Many lie about history, to themselves more even than to others; few seek the truth, and these are discouraged by postmodern ideologists who don't believe in it. A Canadian writer talks to both about the Second World War, the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid, the Balkan wars and international tribunals. The Author of Himself by Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). The author, a literary pundit in Germany, does not invite sympathy, and the latter part of the book is mostly German literary gossip. But he tells the story of how a Jew survived the war and the Warsaw Ghetto, calmly and perhaps even honestly, and it freezes the blood. Voyage dans le demi-siecle: entretiens croises avec Andre Versaille by Gerard Chaliand and Jean Lacouture (Editions Complexe, Bruxelles) is a fascinating half-century of spoken memoirs by two eminent French reporters of, and activists in, world affairs from Vietnam 1965 to the "war against terrorism" after 11 September. Particularly illuminating on the bond between counter-terrorism and torture. Having now seen many such conflicts, my answer is that there is no such thing as counter-terrorism without torture.
Anthony Howard
Roy Jenkins's Churchill (Macmillan) stands unchallenged as the political biography of the year. Nicely proportioned, elegantly written and full of lollipops for the general reader, it fills the one-volume gap left on both sides of the Atlantic even after around 600 books on the same subject. James Naughtie's The Rivals (Fourth Estate) had the misfortune to come out in the same week as the attacks on the twin towers in New York. A perceptive look at the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it nevertheless remains an essential vade mecum for all students of new Labour. Nicholas Henderson's The Private Office Revisited (Profile Books) is a reissue, with a fresh prologue and epilogue, of a book first published in 1984. The author served as a private secretary to five foreign secretaries and he has a refreshingly unusual insider's view on offer. A minor classic.
Mick Hume
In the year when adultescents everywhere have been unashamedly reading Harry Potter and those putrid child abuse memoirs, I read one good book about behaving like grown-ups: Frank Furedi's Paranoid Parenting (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press). And two crackers from the "everything you know is false" school are Daniel Ben-Ami's Cowardly Capitalism (John Wiley) and Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press). The latter has 2,930 footnotes - just the thing for Boxing Day.
Kathryn Hughes
James A Secord's Victorian Sensation (University of Chicago Press) is one of those books that transform the way we think about what it would have been like to be alive in the 19th century. Secord traces the genesis, production, distribution and reception of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, an anonymous and popular precursor to Charles Darwin that had everyone from Cambridge dons to laundresses pouring over its scandalous 400 pages. Secord does much more than write the history of one particular (and now forgotten) book. Rather, he charts the passions, terrors and rages of a society tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss.
Roger Lewis
Perhaps because I've spent too long down the salt mines with Anthony Burgess (my biography of him will be out from Faber next year), I've quite gone off words. I'm happiest when looking at the pictures in cookery books. There's much to choose from - and to avoid. Nigella Bites (Chatto & Windus) is full of Cruella De Vil's manicured claws in lurid close-up, poking and prodding at bits of pastry. Or then there's Jamie Oliver's Happy Days with the Naked Chef (Michael Joseph) - essential reading for chicken-hawks, I'd have thought, as Oliver preens and pouts, slurps and flirts, and the main meat and two veg on display is his own. If only Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey were alive, I'd slip them one for their Christmas stockings. Oo-er missus! But best of all is the cuisine of New York - peasant richness encounters Manhattan chic - as exhibited in Da Silvano Cookbook by Silvano Marchetto (Bloomsbury). Enjoy!
Mark Mazower
Edward Trelawny's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (Woodstock Books), recently reprinted, is a sparkling gem of a hatchet job on Byron and a flamboyant reminder of how an earlier generation of idealists encountered the Levant and made it their own. Today's Middle East came alive for me in Edward Said's bitter-sweet memoir, Out of Place (Granta). Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (Penguin) is a lucid, deeply depressing analysis of the roots of the self-defeating direction of Israeli foreign policy. Amir Cheshin, Bill Hutman and Avi Melamed, former insiders in the office of the mayor of Jerusalem, have written, in Separate and Unequal (Harvard University Press), a compelling indictment of the municipal occupation politics since 1967, drawing on both their personal experience and the archives to show how fundamentally Israeli politicians failed the Arab inhabitants of the occupied territories.
Frank McLynn
The best book in the year's Churchill revival was Geoffrey Best's Churchill (Hambledon & London). Another growth area was polar exploration, where Cherry: a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Sara Wheeler (Jonathan Cape) took the palm. Cherry would have been better off serving with Ernest Shackleton than with the doomed Captain Scott. Among the heavyweight tomes on the Second World War, War Diaries 1939-1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), stood out. Full of fascinating glimpses of Montgomery, Stalin and so on, the book exposes the "muddling through" process by which the Axis powers were defeated.
Karl Miller
Two books: V S Naipaul's Half a Life, about which James Wood seemed to me to write very well in this paper, is a really funny book, light and simple, and yet far from light and simple. And the edition that appeared this year, from Edinburgh University Press, of an old book of great quality: James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Pankaj Mishra
Stanley Stewart's account of his travels through the margins of the old Soviet empire, In the Empire of Genghis Khan (HarperCollins), pointed to possibilities that are still alive in the much-ravaged genre of travel writing, if not in the much-ravaged countries of the Caucasus and central Asia. There is an ever-widening gap between the sophistication of much of the academic writing about Asian politics and the ill-informed but aggressively glib analysis found in newspaper journalism and, more alarmingly, among think-tanks and foundations. Aijaz Ahmad is one of the rare academics who manage to synthesise new intellectual discoveries with an already formidable understanding of historical processes. His collection of essays, Lineages of the Present (Verso), confirms his credentials as one of the finest writers on south Asian politics. Isaac Babel could be said to belong to the extraordinarily gifted group of Russian artists who found their lives and work broken by the turmoil of the Russian revolution. But the new complete translations of his work (W W Norton) places him in his own unique realm, as both participant in and witness to a strange, obscure episode of the revolution. I also enjoyed the wonderfully accomplished fictions of Malcolm Knox, in Summerland (Picador), and Sylvia Brownrigg, in Pages For You (Picador).
Jan Morris
One book I particularly enjoyed in 2001 (and I enjoyed heaps of them) was Dannie Abse's autobiographical memoir, Goodbye, Twentieth Century (Pimlico). Abse is not only a Welshman, a Jew, a splendid poet and a physician, but to add to these grand advantages he is also a most moving memoirist and a terrifically entertaining teller of tales. Another work that engrossed me was Secret Knowledge (Thames & Hudson), a sumptuous book about the possible uses that Old Masters made of ocular aids, which I would have sneered at as baloney if it had been written by one of your tomfool art historians, but it is actually by David Hockney, who knows what he is talking about.
Adam Newey
Not, perhaps, the greatest year for new poetry, but three books stand out. Gilgamesh (Chatto & Windus) is Derrek Hines's version of the Gilgamesh Epic - not so much a translation as a vibrant and vigorous reimagining of the world's first book, which should take its place alongside Heaney's Beowulf and Hughes's Ovid on the shelf of revivified classics. James Lasdun's Landscape with Chainsaw (Jonathan Cape) is, among other things, a sharp and sensitive evocation of the wilderness of upstate New York. And Greta Stoddart's At Home in the Dark (Anvil Press) is a fine debut collection from a poet of huge promise.
Ben Pimlott
Can politics be governed by reason? In recent months, the idea that it can has rather gone out of the window. Those who want to recall a more optimistic era will be uplifted by Robert Skidelsky's John Maynard Keynes Volume 3: fighting for Britain 1937-1946 (Macmillan), the magnificent last volume of his definitive biography. The author paints the great economist as an artist and hedonist who cheerfully believed that the way to maximise his own and everybody else's pleasure was by applying a kind of aesthetic logic to the world's problems. Two authors who also grapple with problems of rationality are Tim Clayton and Phil Craig, whose intelligent and well-researched Diana: story of a princess (Hodder & Stoughton) provides the best account so far of the unlucky lady and her mystifying cult.
Stephen Pollard
For sheer class, nothing has come close to Roy Jenkins's magnificent Churchill - every one of its 912 pages a joy, and a masterclass in the art of biography. Michael Barone's The New Americans: how the melting pot can work again (Regnery Publishing) would stand out at any time. After 11 September, and the potentially catastrophic impact on race relations, it should be on the reading list of anyone who claims to believe in liberal democracy. Haikus for Jews by David M Bader (Random House) is a work of surreal genius:
Jewish triathlon -
gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.
Anthony Sampson
Three very different books have given me special pleasure. W H Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare (Faber), delivered in New York 50 years ago, but only recently transcribed from notes, is full of brilliant and contrary insights by one great poet about another. The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is sad and self-involved, but a moving reminder of how seriously the theatre critic took both writing and acting. Another Bad Day at the Office? by Jeremy Bullmore (Penguin) provides pithy and witty advice, in a very short book, on how to hire, fire and handle tricky colleagues at work, and is also full of insight into human behaviour.
Roger Scruton
I have been captivated by Ian McEwan's Atonement, in which a crime caused by imagination is atoned for in the imagination. And the question arises: is that merely an imaginary atonement? McEwan's answer is strangely consoling. More deeply immersed in the horrible facts of the 20th century, and somehow making wonderfully light of them, is Antoni Libera's Madame (Canongate), beautifully translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kolakowska. Every detail in this brilliantly constructed novel rings true, and anybody who wants to know what the Soviet empire was really like should read it. And maybe all those who want to know what hunting is really like, and why it is so important to those who do it, should read Rupert Isaacson's beautifully illustrated invocation of the hunter-gatherer in all of us, The Wild Host (Cassell).
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
As to biography, Churchill by Roy Jenkins: partly because Jenkins is the last man who will ever be able to write such a book drawing on intimate experience of the kind of political and especially parliamentary life that Churchill knew, but which no longer exists; and partly because it's a masterpiece of orotund prose and polysyllabic humour. Also, Anthony Blunt: his lives by Miranda Carter (Macmillan), which couldn't be bettered; and A Double Thread by John Gross (Chatto & Windus), a beautiful memoir of a Jewish upbringing in London. As to fiction, the honest answer is A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and The Enigma of Arrival (all Penguin), reread while writing about our new Nobel laureate, V S Naipaul, along with his latest, Half a Life; and How to be Good by Nick Hornby (Viking), which is unfortunately too enjoyable and popular to win any prizes.
Zoe Williams
Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth Mon Amour (Bloomsbury). The bare bones of Pryce's achievement - conjuring a stylish noir atmosphere out of Aberystwyth, applying some real comic genius to the murder of children - make him sound like a smarty-pants. In reality, this is a very poignant book, besides all the razor-edged aplomb. The Dirt: confessions of the world's most notorious rock band by Tommy Lee et al (HarperCollins). This was put together from taped interviews with the Motley Crue, which explains the suspect anomaly of anyone in the band being able to write anything down, after a lifetime of swapping their brain cells for really rough drugs. Relentless sex, relentless drugs, inferior rock'n'roll, a paragraph of jokes, and once again from the top - truly, these are giants among men. 100 Days: an anthology, edited by Andrea Brady (Barque Press). A collection of poems, essays and graphic art to mark the first 100 days of the Bush government, this is a brilliant window on to evolved, leftist creative thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. I have to be honest, I lent towards the essays; a lot of the poems were too hard. The anthology ends with a time chart of Bush's legislation, which was bloody chilling even by April.
Ann Widdecombe
I am for the King myself, but Blair Worden's Roundhead Reputations (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) is an imaginative and scholarly work that is nevertheless a fairly easy read for both those with and those without knowledge of the English civil war. It is a serious attempt to trace the legacy of that war through the philosophy and causes of future generations, and to show how the spirit of the Roundheads was invoked by later, apparently unrelated, political bodies. None of it made me any more sympathetic to that band of regicides and killjoys, but I recommend it as a present for that festival which Oliver Cromwell would have abolished.
Robert Winder
In Jan Morris's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Faber), the distinguished author manages to locate, in one of her favourite cities, signs of the preoccupations that have flitted like ghosts between the pages of all her books. It's a brief, funny, sad and poetic elegy, both for herself and for an idea of Europe that now seems all but gone. Richard Ford shows once again, in A Multitude of Sins (Harvill), fine antennae for false domestic notes and romantic reversals. A new puppy or a duck shoot: events such as these are enough to trigger revelations that leave entire lives trembling and wounded. Finally, the paperback of A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist will, with luck, appear with an extra chapter to embrace recent events. But this might be a book that requires constant updating. Lindqvist narrates, with great coolness under fire, humankind's tragic enthusiasm for aerial blitzkrieg. And he writes more in sorrow than in anger: the urge to sow mayhem from the sky, he feels, is a primal human reflex. The sad news is, he seems to be right.
Peregrine Worsthorne
Maurice Cowling's Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England: Volume 3 (Cambridge University Press). This is the last of Cowling's three-volume study chronicling, with wit and irony, England's search for some alternative "public doctrine" to fill the frightening gap left by the decline in faith in Christianity. Because this task involves the author giving us incisive and sometimes acid accounts of the writings and characters of pretty well every 19th- and 20th-century historian, theologian, novelist and even journalist of stature, the resulting magnum opus constitutes possibly the most comprehensive and stimulating account of modern intellectual life ever written, and ever likely to be written. No, this work, quite apart from the price, is not for the general reader. But for New Statesman readers, interested in politics and religion, the reading of it could prove horribly invigorating, not unlike, from what I hear, the effects of a self-inflicted trepanning. By contrast, I would recommend Hugh Massingberd's delightful memoir, Daydream Believer: confessions of a hero-worshipper (Macmillan), which shows that the author, who used to edit the Daily Telegraph obits page, is no more just a young fogey than Max Beerbohm was just a dandy.
