Books
Our critics choose their Books of the Year
Published 28 November 2005
NS Christmas Books
Decca Aitkenhead
My favourite book of 2005 was Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs (Simon & Schuster) - the first analysis of post-feminism's unhappy legacy to nail the tragic absurdity of young women going about trying to emulate Loaded. Edmund White's My Lives (Bloomsbury) and Alan Bennett's Untold Stories (Faber & Faber) were both, unsurprisingly, masterpieces.
Stephen Amidon
As the Bush administration drags America deeper into the moral fog, Noam Chomsky remains an indispensable source of clarifying light. In Imperial Ambitions: conversations on the post-9/11 world (Hamish Hamilton) he deconstructs the central tenets of the specious "war on terror", showing them to be nothing more than smokescreens for the imperialist intentions of America and its "British attack dog".
Julian Baggini
I've enjoyed three books this year that are fundamentally serious, yet tremendously entertaining, partly because their authors don't take themselves too seriously and partly because they are so well written. John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? (Faber & Faber) lays bare the snobbery that often passes for good taste. Steve Fuller's The Intellectual: the positive power of negative thinking (Icon) treats its subject with all the irreverence it deserves. And Roger-Pol Droit's How Are Things? (Faber & Faber) is worth reading simply for how it makes you remember what it is to look on the world as a child, when even mundane things have the power to fascinate and astonish.
Joan Bakewell
Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness (Chatto & Windus) is two stories in one: first, the saga of a talented and often tragic Jewish family, and the emergence of the son who will become Israel's leading novelist; second, the story of the emerging state of Israel, observed at first hand. From this cornucopia of material, Oz weaves a dense and complex account in which the scale moves from the intimate, with its sadnesses and humour, to the grander issues of history and politics. A huge tapestry of a book, both personal and public. John Carey likes to tweak the noses of the self-appointed gurus among us, and in What Good Are the Arts? he blows the gaff on a lot of the received wisdom behind our culture. I disagree with him a great deal, but that's part of the fun. He's never dull, and when his polemic against the performing arts gives way to his lyrical defence of literature I am with him all the way. Here he reveals what books really mean to him, and probably to lots of us.
J G Ballard
Tony Judt's Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 (William Heinemann) is a masterly survey of how today's Europe rose from the ashes and exhaustion of 1945. One of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept is the anonymous A Woman in Berlin (Virago): a young German woman's account of exactly what happened when the Russian armies seized Berlin in 1945. Unsparing in its frankness.
Hugo Barnacle
Modesty Blaise: the hell-makers by Peter O'Donnell, Jim Holdaway and Enric Badia Romero (Titan Books) is the sixth in a handsome series of albums reproducing the comic-strip adventures of the barefoot war orphan-turned-glamour gal whose ferocious vendetta against the merchants of drugs and vice enlivened the London Evening Standard for nigh on 40 years. This very collectable volume will be the last to feature the wonderful artwork of Jim Holdaway, who died suddenly in 1970. The series will continue, as the strips did till 2001, and O'Donnell's stories were always good value - but for us aficionados, this is the end. Starr Smith's Jimmy Stewart: bomber pilot (Zenith Press) does not, as most of the actor's biographers do, skate over what for Stewart was the biggest thing in his life apart from his family - the year he spent in England flying B-24s against the Third Reich. Smith served with him at the time. The book is a little scrappy and sentimental, but valuable. Stewart was a lifelong Republican, but his tact and decency, which come across strongly here, are an awful rebuke to Bush's America. Harry Thompson's This Thing of Darkness (Review) is a chunky, thoughtful, well-chamfered novel about the strange voyage of HMS Beagle, with the fundamentalist but humane Captain Fitzroy, not the enlightened but cynical Darwin, as the hero. Makes you think.
Nicholas Blincoe
Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment (Little, Brown), is a national treasure. He can turn any flaw into a virtue: in his work, randomness, cleverness, pedantry, indolence and selfishness all become rather admirable qualities. Elmore Leonard's best book in ten years, The Hot Kid (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is more than a return to form. He has cracked new themes in a new way, in a western with bank robberies that's set during the Depression era. And I can't help it, I really enjoyed Isabel Allende's Zorro (Fourth Estate).
Christopher Bray
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press) told in just the right languorously psychotic tones of how the progenitors of a fantasy Albion came to be its own destroyers. Alan Bennett's Untold Stories looked on their works with all the ripe disgust we have come to adore him for. The Meaning of Recognition (Picador) showed that Clive James, the most glorious prose stylist of his generation, refuses to stop learning ever more about the world. The best film book was David Thomson's The Whole Equation (Little, Brown), a history of the American subconscious, with a picture of Rita Hayworth on the dust jacket. Yowser. And End In Tears proved once again that no British novelist knows the heart's hungers like Ruth Rendell.
A S Byatt
David Constantine's Under the Dam (Comma) is an extraordinary book of short stories. I began reading them casually and could not stop, gripped by the precision and beauty of the writing itself. A woman dead before the Second World War is found frozen and rips apart her old lover's pensioned life. A businessman loses his soul in a plate-glass hotel. Constantine offers us a singular vision of things. So does Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black (Fourth Estate/ Harper Perennial), a tale of a woman haunted by mean and nasty familiar spirits, ministering as a medium to depressed clients in a depressing modern world on the perimeters of the M25. Constantine is cool and Mantel is hot, furious and fleshy, but both tell uncompromising and frightening tales about good and evil.
Nicholas Clee
Literary awards pointed me towards my two favourite novels of 2005. (One cannot say that every year.) Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin (Serpent's Tail), winner of the Orange Prize, is a wordy but compelling account of parental feelings in extremis. John Banville's Booker-winning story of loss, The Sea (Picador), is moving and witty - the first a new quality in his work; the second, one that has always been there, but underrated.
Rachel Cooke
The best book I read was a biography of a psychotic, alcoholic, homeless man told in reverse. Stuart: a life backwards by Alexander Masters (Harper Perennial) is funny, sad, clever, pertinent and, most of all, humane. It is wonderful.
Jason Cowley
No book has enthralled and fascinated me more this year than Michael Finkel's True Story: murder, memoir, mea culpa (Chatto & Windus). It is a book about many things. It is about the impossibility of ever fully telling the truth, to ourselves or each other. It is about the relationship between fact and fiction in journalism, and how we journalists too often distort and embellish as we seek to smooth the world into instant understanding. And it is about how one man, in small-town America, murdered his entire family because so addicted was he to telling lies that he no longer believed in the independent reality of his own wife and children. They were mere phantoms to him, figures lost in the blurred landscape of his imagination.
Amanda Craig
The really outstanding work of fiction I've read this year, predictably neglected by the Booker judges, is Jane Gardam's Old Filth (Chatto & Windus). A Rembrandt portrait of a lawyer from birth to death, it shuttles between east and west, love and heartbreak, murder and pity, repaying patience with luminous wisdom. The best detective novel I read was C J Sansom's Dissolution (Penguin), a highly intelligent, well-plotted and sensitive thriller set in the time of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and recounted by a particularly appealing narrator. Kathryn Hughes's biography The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (Fourth Estate) is a mouth-watering piece of scholarship on both the Victorian era and the woman whose lively recipes concealed a life of pain.
For children of ten-plus, Kenneth Oppel's Skybreaker (Hodder Children's) is an irresistibly ebullient blend of adventure, mystery and romance set on an airship concealing a fortune in gold. It dragged my son back to enjoying reading.
Edwina CurrieThe best novel has to be Julian Barnes's Arthur and George (Jonathan Cape), a true story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a real-life miscarriage of justice: so beautifully written you can't tell what's reportage and what fiction. It's a compelling read. I also loved Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, an entirely credible tale of mediums and murky magic, perfect for dark winter evenings. And if you love literary memoirs with an eye for the preposterous, try February House (Scribner) by Sherill Tippins; on the eve of the Second World War, an old New York brownstone is filled with a disparate and dotty collection of young geniuses, and the masterpieces flow. Wonderful.
William Dalrymple
This was the best year for travel books in a long time. Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay lost and found (Review) is without doubt the best book of non-fiction yet written by an Indian of my generation, and a fabulous achievement. Humane and moving, sympathetic but outspoken, it is a shocking journey into the heart of Bombay's nightmare, and literally teems with extraordinary stories. John Berendt's City of Falling Angels (Sceptre) was an atmospheric Venetian follow-up to his classic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, while my Christmas reading is going to be The Chains of Heaven: an Ethiopian romance (HarperCollins) by the wonderful Philip Marsden - probably Britain's most underrated travel writer and one of our very finest prose stylists. I also loved David Gilmour's elegant and laconic Ruling Caste: imperial lives in the Victorian Raj (John Murray) and Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press), a collection of essays which enjoyably mixes moments of real profundity with flashes of mischievous provocation. It is the best answer yet written to V S Naipaul's Islamophobic take on Indian civilisation, celebrating the sheer diversity of views and faiths and competing ideas that have always coexisted in India, and seeing in this diversity the source of India's cultural strength. "In India", writes Sen, heterodoxy "has always been the natural state of affairs". My best distraction of the year: The Rough Guide Book of Playlists: 500 irresistible playlist ideas for your iPod or MP3 player, which led to me wasting hundreds of hours of writing time downloading many forgotten favourites as well as some new treats, such as Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell".
Margaret Drabble
Marina Lewycka's highly praised Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Viking) is an entertaining novel, as eccentric as its title, and full of unlikely but convincing characters. The fusion of Ukrainian incomers with conventional English Midland life is sharply comic, and the prose is lyrical. Clancy Sigal's Zone of the Interior (Pomona), first published in the US in 1976, has waited a long time for publication in the UK for reasons clearly not unconnected to its subject matter - it's a lively, not-wholly-fictional evocation of the crazy days of R D Laing and Kingsley Hall. Written in the days when Sigal was a New Statesman regular, its questions about the treatment of mental health problems are as topical as ever.
Terry Eagleton
Some years ago, the playwright Trevor Griffiths wrote a screenplay for a film on the great English radical Tom Paine, which Richard Attenborough was supposed to make but didn't. This superbly inventive narrative is now available as These Are the Times (Spokesman Books). The book is probably the finest artistic tribute ever to a revolutionary whose work quite literally transformed the course of modern history. Another great English pioneer was the literary critic William Empson, the subject of a magnificent biography this year by John Haffenden (William Empson: among the mandarins, Oxford University Press). This grippingly readable volume charts Empson's rake's progress from Yorkshire squirearchy to bohemian Fitzrovia to dedicated teacher in China and Japan.
John Gray
J A Baker's The Peregrine is a book that I have read and reread for many years. It was first published in 1967 and has been out of print since then, but, to my delight, New York Review Books republished it this year. A solitary masterpiece of British shamanism, it is an account of the author's quest for a pair of peregrine falcons across coastal East Anglia. As Robert Macfarlane writes: "This is not a book about watching a bird, it is a book about becoming a bird." John Banville's The Sea gave me much delight - partly for the clairvoyant glimpses it offers of the mists and wraiths that make up the inner life of human beings, and partly for the spectacle it affords of an incomparable magician at play with language.
John Harris
Zadie Smith's On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton) had me addicted by its 40th page. It elegantly crystallises all kinds of modern currents, while burrowing into the intimacies of very believable lives (and goodness, she can write). As far as non-fiction goes, events in New Orleans sent me back to the story of the Mississippi flood of 1927, and one of the most epic books I've ever read: John M Barry's Rising Tide (Simon & Schuster), an elemental tale of race, class and the failures of politics. Talking of which, I really enjoyed, chiefly on account of its Pooterish hilarity, Lance Price's The Spin-Doctor's Diary (Hodder & Stoughton), a strange account of that period of political innocence that was brought to a close in September 2001. My book of the year, by some distance, was Richard Ingrams's Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (HarperCollins), a brilliant account of the kind of free-spirited, principled, wonderfully spiky ideas that Price's old bosses have endlessly conspired to snuff out.
Roy Hattersley
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: the unknown story (Jonathan Cape) is hideously written, but so packed with facts about the 20th century's greatest monster that it is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the world. W F Deedes's Dear Bill: a memoir (Macmillan) is the near-perfect reminiscence: hugely informative about the age and invariably benign. Admittedly Anthony Howard is a friend of mine, but that should not preclude a recommendation for Basil Hume: the monk cardinal (Headline), which explores the life of a singular man with great elegance.
Michael Holroyd
Joanna Kavenna's The Ice Museum: in search of the lost land of Thule (Viking) is a most original book, both scholarly and adventurous. She blends fantasy with fact and shows how the culture of all countries arises from make-believe and wish-fulfilment. But what drives her to seek out such uninviting destinations? My own theory is that she lives in Ladbroke Grove. In Sir Henry Irving: a Victorian actor and his world (Hambledon & London) Jeffrey Richards uses Irving's spectacular career at the Lyceum to examine the social history of late 19th-century Britain, its religion, its press, its imperialism and the beginnings of our own celebrity culture. A richly detailed and informative study.
John Humphrys
It's always good to find an author you've never read before who can write as beautifully as Christopher Wilson. The hero of The Ballad of Lee Cotton (Little, Brown) is a black man born with a white skin in the racist south of America and savagely beaten by white thugs. What happens to him will be too fantastical for some - but it's great fun and often very funny. The eponymous hero of Jane Gardam's Old Filth is a barrister and a "Raj orphan". His story is told with compassion and great style. Gardam seems to get better as she gets older. Ali Smith's The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton) is an extraordinary book. One of the best of the new crop. If you think of Iain Pears as just a writer of detective novels, read The Portrait (HarperCollins) and think again. It's absorbing - and it's short. Why do so many writers want to pulp so many trees when they've said all they have to say after a few pages?
Simon Jenkins
The Victorians are fast overtaking the Tudors in the popular history stakes. There is no better backgrounder to the BBC's admirable Bleak House than Liza Picard's Victorian London (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), drenched in vapours, diseases, giants, pygmies, mud and glory, a familiar romp wonderfully
told. Where Picard ends, Stephen Inwood picks up in City of Cities (Macmillan). Victorian "improvement" blossoms into Edwardian comfort, until the incompetence of the Great War spoils everything. The Victorians would have appreciated Charles Jencks's The Iconic Building (Frances Lincoln), a dazzling display of in-your-face idealism and the arrogance when architects are allowed to play with stupefying amounts of money. It opens with the Gherkin as moon rocket. A more sober appreciation is allowed by Jeremy Musson's How to Read a Country House (Ebury), full of sub-headings such as "comfort zones" and "plastering to a purpose". Dublin, Christine Casey's new guide in the Pevsner Buildings of Ireland series (Yale University Press), is quite the best thing on that city since Ulysses. She is not afraid to give opinions and Joycean references. And please everyone read John Carey's iconoclastic What Good Are the Arts? - pricking the most pompous of balloons, its one own-goal being a quote from Julie Burchill on the front.
Prue Leith
What's the matter with the Booker judges? Julian Barnes's Arthur and George was easily the best of the shortlist, and easily Barnes's best book - fascinating, tense, gripping, touching. Definitely the best novel this year. I confess that Sam Leith is my nephew, but his Dead Pets (Canongate) is still the best loo book or stocking-filler I've seen. It's macabre and touching, funny and serious, full of arcane things you are glad to know and other things you wish you hadn't been told. Soup Kitchen (Collins) is a charity cookbook with great pics and lovely recipes by posh chefs (Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson) in aid of the homeless; it was put together by Annabel Buckingham and Thomasina Miers.
Kathy Lette
John Mortimer's Quite Honestly (Viking) is a witty and wry satire on the judicial system. The creme de la crim of comic fiction. The only way to find out what's going on inside an Englishman is with open-heart surgery, but in his memoir Untold Stories Alan Bennett peels off to his emotional underwear - and it's a psychological striptease that reveals all. An intensely private man, he was prompted to put pun to paper by prostate
cancer - the ultimate deadline.
Hilary Mantel
The Tyrannicide Brief: the story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold (Chatto & Windus) is Geoffrey Robertson's passionately fluent and witty vindication of the radical lawyer John Cooke, who prosecuted Charles I and was himself brutally executed after a farcical show trial at the Restoration. Robertson thinks the story has been as badly mangled by historians as Cooke was by the executioner. So this is a necessary retelling, as, says Robertson wryly, "a royal pardon somehow seems inappropriate". John McGahern's Memoir (Faber & Faber) of his boyhood in Ireland is a glowing masterpiece, shedding a clear light on the fiction of this masterly writer and on the society that bred him. Two ambitious and interesting novels didn't quite get their due in this crowded year: Neil Belton's A Game With Sharpened Knives (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), about Erwin Schrodinger's wartime sojourn in Dublin, and Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year (Bloomsbury), about the breakdown of law and conscience in an unnamed English town in the 1630s.
Andrew Martin
Even though it was the most hyped literary paperback of 2005, I enjoyed Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury), the only novel about magic that I have ever liked or even got to the end of. (And it's 800 pages long, so this is no small recommendation.) Leo McKinstry's Rosebery: statesman in turmoil (John Murray) is another real treat: a hypnotic biography of a fascinatingly neurotic and rarefied figure whose chief problem in life was that people kept pleading with him to become prime minister. With the greatest reluctance, he eventually, and fairly disastrously, complied.
Rosie Millard
James Shapiro's 1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare (Faber & Faber) triumphantly puts Shakespeare in the middle of Elizabethan London. Almost the only book with a convincingly "period" voice I have ever read is Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year: gripping and very moving. Jane Gardam's Old Filth is a remarkably subtle portrait of growing old at the Bar. And one old favourite is Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (Penguin), which I read to my daughter; it remains an utterly brilliant narrative.
Pankaj Mishra
I profited a great deal from Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad (C Hurst & Co), which is one of the most intelligent analyses of the world-view of the militant Islamist. Nasrin Alavi's We Are Iran (Portobello) is a fascinating portrait of a young generation trying to reconcile its demand for individual rights with the official ideology of political Islam. Books on China's imminent rise - and fall - by American and British writers are commonplace these days, and it is a relief to hear Chinese intellectuals speak of their country with intimacy and insight in One China, Many Paths (Verso). I also enjoyed rereading the classics of literary reportage - Joan Didion's Miami, Mark Danner's The Massacre at El Mozote and James Fenton's All the Wrong Places - handsomely reprinted by Granta.
Julie Myerson
I've been judging prizes, and read a clutch of wonderful books I might never have picked up. Richard Benson's The Farm (Hamish Hamilton) - an exploration of the author's growing up and away from the family pig farm - is moving, funny and solidly engaging from beginning to end. I especially loved the moment when a "white silky newborn piglet" tumbles out of the Aga and sits blinking on the carpet. Alexander Masters's Stuart: a life backwards is one of the most original books I've read in a long time. It walks a kind of tonal tightrope and manages, I don't quite know how, not to lose its footing once. Nick Warren's Thirty Years in a Turtleneck Sweater (Ebury) is a childhood memoir that gripped me - humbling and touching. And if you want something huge and enthralling, read Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, a 500-page ramble around Mumbai and its people. I admit I struggled with its depth and complexity, but I'm glad I did. It took me somewhere I'd never been before.
Andrew Roberts
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: the unknown story shows how disgusting Chinese communism was right from the start, and also why so many on the left in the west connived at hiding the truth about how it murdered 70 million people. Afterwards, to escape all that evil, read Helena Frith Powell's Two Lipsticks and a Lover: a year in suspenders (Gibson Square Books), which elegantly explains why Frenchwomen just get more attractive as they grow older and can wear lingerie, take lovers and flirt, whereas British women can, too, but generally don't. Finally, Robert Goddard has surpassed even himself in his latest mystery thriller, Sight Unseen (Bantam), with his unique blend of history, murder and Hamlet-like heroes brought to a perfect pitch.
Ziauddin Sardar
Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses (Bloomsbury), a poetic synthesis of politics, culture and family frustrations, is a highly accomplished novel. A daughter searches for her politically active mother, who disappeared 14 years ago, in a multi-layered but shrewdly simple tale. Shamsie is a major Pakistani-British novelist in the making.
In Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (University of North Carolina Press) Ebrahim Moosa demonstrates the contemporary relevance of one of the greatest thinkers of Islam: the 11th-century Muslim theologian and polymath Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali's ideas, Moosa argues powerfully, are essential for a critical synthesis of traditional Islamic thought, modernity and postmodernism. Amitava Kumar mixes autobiography, interviews, history and politics to illuminate love and hate in Husband of a Fanatic (New Press). Kumar, an urban Hindu who marries a Muslim, offers a passionate essay on the notion of "the enemy". Spellbinding reading.
Roger Scruton
Richard Taruskin's six-volume History of Western Music (Oxford University Press) is a path-breaking work of cultural criticism, and an unrivalled vindication of western civilisation. By way of contrast, Islamic civilisation is displayed at its worst in the collection of classical and modern texts edited by Andrew G Bostom - The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic holy war and the fate of non-Muslims (Prometheus Books), not a great book by any means, but a salutary one. To dispel the gloom I turned to Tom Phillips's new version of his ever-refreshing "treated" Victorian novel, A Humument (Thames & Hudson), already printed privately, and now publicly available. No loo should be without a copy of this delightful and deeply crazy work.
Colm Toibin
There are two Spanish-language novelists who deserve to be better known in English. One is Roberto Bolano, the Chilean novelist who died two years ago at the age of 50. His novels Distant Star and By Night in Chile (both published by Harvill) have an extraordinary narrative energy and zaniness. He is generally recognised as the most exciting novelist of his generation in the Spanish language and it is important that the rest of his work be translated. Juan Goytisolo's Blind Rider (Serpent's Tail) has just been published. He says it will be his last novel. This combines the brittle tone of the best of his fiction with the deeply confessional, brutally honest tone of his memoir Forbidden Territory, which is one of the best books I have ever read. This new book deals with the loss of his partner Monique Lange and the death of his mother in an air raid in Barcelona in 1937. He is one of the best writers alive in the world.
Andrew Wilson
My fiction choice is not a novel, but a volume of short stories, Nothing That Meets the Eye (Bloomsbury) by Patricia Highsmith. Ten years after Highsmith's death, her literary estate unearthed 28 short stories, most of them previously unpublished. With her transparent, monotone style, Highsmith cleverly seduces the reader into identifying with her warped characters, and in the process normalises abnormality.
Her dark humour oozes through this new collection like a particularly delicious poison. My non-fiction book of the year has to be Edmund White's memoir My Lives. Brutally, eye-poppingly honest, it details White's odd family background, his mammoth psychotherapy sessions, his impressive and imaginative sex life, and the real-life inspirations for his fiction. Although White writes about gay love, this book should be read by anyone interested in what it means to desire another.
Bee Wilson
Patience Gray, who died this year, was the author of Honey From a Weed, one of the best food books ever written. For us fans, there is some consolation in the posthumous publication of a fascinating little volume called The Centaur's Kitchen (Prospect), a book of Mediterranean recipes (red mullet baked in white wine; Mantuan pine-nut cake) originally designed for ships' cooks. Gerard Woodward's I'll Go To Bed At Noon was my favourite novel last year; this year, I've been enjoying his new collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians (Chatto & Windus), which is full of quiet wit and grimy truth. Finally, this has been a bumper year for fans of the children's author Lauren Child, whose books combine stunning collage with sly characterisation. There are two new Charlie and Lola books - We Honestly Can Look After Your Dog and But Excuse Me That Is My Book (both Puffin) - small exuberant masterpieces which make perfect presents. Even after you get bored of reading them out loud for the hundredth time, you can still enjoy the brilliant design (Child used to paint dots for Damien Hirst). I wish I had the wallpaper in Charlie and Lola's house.
Robert Winder
Simon Schama's Rough Crossings (BBC Books) was, to no one's surprise, a ripe and detailed narration of a neglected historical episode - the cruelly botched attempt, after the American war of independence, to transplant freed slaves to an uninhabitable safe haven in Sierra Leone. Caroline Moorehead's Human Cargo (Chatto & Windus) hears echoes of these ancient horrors in the lives of today's displaced people. Both remind us that the modern world is built on the sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant ebb and flow of people across and around the world. Best literary news: Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize.
Peregrine Worsthorne
David Reynolds's In Command of History (Penguin) is a riveting account of how Churchill's multi-volume history of the Second World War, in which the author was also the central character, came to be written: how Churchill smoothed the feathers of the other political and military leaders, many of whom took strong exception to his animadversions on their conduct; how he cajoled the mandarins into letting him quote from previously unpublished state papers; how he wrung immense advances from various international publishing houses and newspapers; how he recruited, inspired and bullied his immensely talented team of "ghosts"; and how he found time to undertake this huge literary operation while acting as leader of the opposition and, far more importantly in his eyes, performing as a major actor on the world stage.
Very much the least promising, at first glance, of John Bayley's Power of Delight: a lifetime in literature - essays 1962-2002 (Duckworth) is about a Polish playwright/novelist, living in Argentina, previously unknown to me, called Witold Gombrowicz. But so intriguing was Bayley's encomium that I took Gombrowicz's three volumes of diaries out of the London Library and spent the next six months or so reading the insights and observations therein with mounting admiration and delight. Incidentally, he is the only Polish writer known to history who was not a nationalist. Very belatedly the books have just been returned. I miss their company.
The House of Tekelden (Bloomsbury) tells the story of a noble family of dachshunds, as recorded by the great portrait artists through the ages, starting with the Sack of Rome in 463 by Rattila the Hund, on to Katherine Paw by way of Holbein, and ending with portraits by Picasso and Augustus John. The witty drawings and text are by the late Denys Dawnay, a largely unknown artist who died in 1983.
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