Books of the Year

A selection of the best and worst books of the yeat; chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption

There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line edition, You will miss the special pleasure of straying into the article next door. No, take out a second mortgage, call in the cabinet-maker and buy the volumes. Another book well worth going to moneylenders for is Margaret Smith's superb edition of The Letters of Charlotte Bronte (OUP, now complete at £265 for the three volumes), By comparison, a quite modest outlay will buy you Roger Hutchins and Richard Sheppard's The Undone Years (Magdalen College, Oxford, f55), a remarkable and moving account of the lives of 119 Englishmen and one German killed in the second world war, most of them at the threshold of their lives, all linked by common membership of the same great college at Oxford.

Anita Brookner

Three good novels appeared this year: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £16.99), The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, £16.99), and Author. Author by David Lodge (Seeker, £16.99). I also liked Oracle Night by Paul Auster (Faber, £15.99), one of this intriguing author's feel-bad novels which succeeds in making the reader uneasily aware of coincidence and fatality. But more memorable than any fiction was Chekhov's Last Moments by Leo Rabeneck, published in the TES for 2 July 2004. Rabeneck was present at this most iconic of deaths, and his account of how it took place — after that glass of champagne — is more than consoling: uplifting.

Rupert Christiansen

Two biographies stand out: Meredith Daneman's revelatory account of Margot Fontcyn (Viking, £20), written with lyrical urgency and sensitivity, and Stephen Greenblatt's highly speculative but wonderfully suggestive recreation of the life of Shakespeare, Will in the World (Cape, 120). Ivan Hewett's Music: Healing the Rift (Continuum, £14.99) must be one of the best essays on the trends and crises of modern music since Constant Lambert's Music Hot Other highlights have included Michael Arditti's collection of short stories, Good Clean Fun (Maia Press, £8.99), and Lucy Hughes-Hallett's magisterial accounts of Alcibiades, Wallenstein and Garibaldi in her epic Heroes (Fourth Estate, £25). No more novels about Henry James, please: I'm quite happy reading about him in his own words.

Francis King

My two best novels are based on the lives, one tumultuously brief and one serenely long, of writers of fiction. The first of these, C. K. Stead's Mansfield (Harvill, £14.99), is an uninterrupted narrative of Katherine Mansfield's existence from 1915-17, with an epilogue set in 1918, when a severe haemorrhage prefigures her death. The second, Colm Toibin's The Master (Picador, £16.99), selects isolated events in Henry James's life, all vital to the development of his character and art. Stead, a remarkable writer, has never quite received his due. Toibin is for me the finest novelist of his generation. In a year of outstanding literary biographies the best was Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant (Picador, £20), a life of B. S. Johnson, a novelist of vast girth, talent and ego, who in mid-life killed himself. For the record, none of the above is personally known to me or has ever reviewed me.

Jan Morris

Falling for Icarus by Rory Maclean (Viking, £15.99) was a lovely meditative account of the one-man building of an aeroplane in Crete. Salonika by Mark Mazower (HarperCollins, £25) brilliantly evoked one of Europe's most intriguing but least-known cities. In Welsh, On Diwmod YI2 Yr Eisteddfod by Robin

Llywelyn, enabled us to spend a full-blooded day at the Welsh National Eisteddfod talking and thinking about every Welsh preoccupation under the sun.

My most overrated novel of the year was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but perhaps that's a bit unfair because I never got through the thing, leaving it for the next people in my Spanish hotel room, God help them.

Christopher Howse

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols, £7,500) is what the Millennium Dome failed to be: monumental and fun, Sell your daughter's pony and buy the new DNB. Westminster Abbey by Richard Jenkyns (Profile Books, £15.99) gives an ideal introduction to a building often taken for granted. The style is agreeable, the judgments intelligent and the perspective humane. Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Language Myths by Michael Ouinion (Allen Lane, £12.99) obliterates those annoying people who tell you that the word golf derives from 'Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden'. It's even better than Dot Wordsworth.

There have been no end of overrated books this year, but one out-of-print book that is much better than it sounds and should be republished is Fashions in Church Furnishing by Peter Anson (1960), which concentrates on the chancel and the altar, from Pugin to 1940, the battleground for Gothic historicists and neo-Classicists.

P. J. Kavanagh

About halfway through David Lodge's novel about Henry James, Author, Author (Seeker, £16.99), I began to wonder if Lodge was gently mocking his subject; but no, he wasn't. The humiliation of the failure of James's play, then his deathbed, are nobly staged. We are even given James's surprisingly unmaterialist speculations about what awaits 'the mind' after death: `...who shall say over what fields of experience ... it shall not spread its wings'? No, no, no — I reach beyond the laboratory brain.' Lodge has (as it were) 'resurrected' this from a James essay in Harpers magazine. He gives chapter and verse for all his facts, and confesses his inventions, which sound justified. Great skill is shown, and affection.

Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliviera: Cricket and Conspiracy, The Untold Story., (Little Brown, £16.99) digs deep into a murky episode: the exclusion of D'Oliviera from the England Test team on grounds of race, because of pressure from the South African government. Then, thanks to public outcry, his inclusion, and the beginning of the sporting boycott of South Africa. A historically important story, well told.

The Catholic Revival in English Literature by Ian Ker (Gracewing, 114.99) strips away some post-Reformation spin. Good essays on Newman (as novelist), G. M. Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene and Waugh explain how Catholics actually think (and feel); not a subject often usefully and fairly examined.

William Trevor

Norman Sherry has completed his monumental biography of Graham Greene, Volume III, 1955-1991, (Cape, 125). Alexander Waugh has written what he calls the autobiography of a family, Fathers and Sons (Headline, £20). In both books a multitude of people have their say, and few of them are had value. In both, a lot happens — domestically for the most part among the Waughs, all over the place with Greene, who even as he passed into old age continued to winkle out the trouble spots of the world.

Five generations illuminate the repeated relationship of Fathers and Sons: the Victorian Alexander's, his son Arthur's, Evelyn's, Auberon's, and the author's. Their continuing story is told with humour and panache, with considerable inside knowledge and a perception that make this remarkable chronicle a delight to read. Sherry, meanwhile, continues to pursue his quarry to rewarding effect, ending with a flourish what must surely be one of literature's finest biographies.

Deborah Devonshire

There is a very good book about pigs; The Whole Hog by Lyall Watson (Profile Books, £16.99) is scholarly, sad and funny. The reviews of other books this year are enough to put you off reading any. I would give them a wide berth. The loved subjects of peculiar sex, suicide, violence, illness, torturing children, depression and man's escalating inhumanity to man are a bit much, So be cheered instead by Christopher Simon Sykes's The Big House (Harper Collins, £20) with entertaining portraits of Sykes and other Yorkshire oddities of yesteryear. I must declare an interest in Andrew Devonshire's Accidents of Fortune (Michael Russell, £13.95), but I do so with enthusiasm. It is nice and thin compared to the other autobiographical doorstops stuffing up the shops. And it's him speaking.

Eric Christiansen

Best history books, even within the fraction of the avalanche of new ones a single reader can get through, get lost in the crowd. Christopher Tyerman's Fighting for Christendom (OUP, £12.99) ought to be somewhere near the top because it is relatively short (230 pages), clearly written, scholarly, original and a potential giantkiller of fatuous ideas about the crusades. The collection of Isaiah Berlin's letters edited by Henry Hardy as Flourishing (Chatto, £30) is an eye-opener; a painful experience to discover how deeply he was involved in the seamy side of academic life (jobbery, gang-warfare, college politics) when young and how committed to Zionism, progressivism and the public school ethos. Both as a social document and for intellectual insights this is worth the money, although some may regret that Isaiah was such a very good son and wrote reassuring letters home so often.

Alberto Manguel

Three choices among my year's favourites: first, Amos Oz's extraordinary memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Chatto, £17.99). Less an autobiography than a chronicle of the birth of a writer and his country, Israel, Oz's book has astonishing depth and scope, vivid characters and a moving, elegiac tone. Second, a necessary book at a time when humanitarian values seem to be among the first victims of Bush's crusade in America: Resistance by Barry Lopez (Knopf, $18). Not yet published in the UK, it is the account, perhaps fictional, of a number of Americans 'resisting' their country's descent into dogmatism. With Resistance, Lopez, whose Arctic Dreams will remain a classic of nature writing, has given us a companion piece to Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. Third, a tiny marvel under the guise of a psychological thriller: Alessandro Baricco's Without Blood (Canongate, £8.99), beautifully translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

Hugh Massingberd

'What?'. exclaims one of the fruity characters celebrated in Christopher Simon Sykes's The Big House (HarperCollins, £20). 'Only one baronet and one viscount? What a mangy weekend.' Written with sympathy and insight, this is an irresistible portrait of the Sykeses of Sledmere. The lamented James Lees-Milne is still being treated as a mere country-house snob, but as the penultimate volume of his wonderful diaries, Ceaseless Turmoil (John Murray, 1.25), demonstrates to anyone with eyes to see, he was actually a superb chronicler of the human condition, Far and away the best novel of the year was A. N. Wilson's angry, passionate and spiritual onslaught on modern Mammon and the media, My Name is Legion (Hutchinson, £16.99), which should have won the Man Booker prize, but typically was not even short-listed.

Robert Salisbury

My most absorbing read has been Martin Woodrow's The Last Valley (Weidenfeld, £25). Woodrow, in a masterly fashion, sets the Shakespearian tragedy of Dien Bien Phu in the context of the wider politics of SouthEast Asia. He is good, too, on France post1975 and the courage, the stupidity and the undaunted intelligence of the beau sabreurs of the French army. For amateurs of 20thcentury French history, at last this is something to rival Alastair Home's A Savage War of Peace. For the rest, one can only salute Dean Godson's industry and relentless fact-checking. His biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone (HarperCollins. £35), weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages and his subject is not only still less than 60 years old, but still leader of his party. There may yet be a volume II. However, to begin to understand the last 40 years in Northern Ireland, Godson is a must. Imperial Hubris: Why, the West is Losing the War on Terror by `Anonymous' (Brassey's. £18.50) is stylistically not very elegant and carpers could quibble about some of its details. However, let us hope Bush. Blair and their advisers read it. It is, sadly, beyond the understanding of our friends in the EU.

D. J. Taylor

In a hot year for literkuy biography I was especially keen on Jonathan roe's Like a Fiery Elephant: The Stoty of B. S. Johnson (Picador, £20), which illuminated not only

the career of its irascible hero see the furious letters to disobliging Americans who had turned down his books but the art of fiction-writing itself. The runner-up was Jeremy Treglown's excellent V. S. Pritchett (Chatto, £25), which drew me straight back to the stout volume containing Pritchett's selected essays. Two of the novels I enjoyed most were the Flambard Press reissues of Sid Chaplin's The Day of the Sardine and The Watchers and the Watched (18.99 each), first published in, respectively, 1961 and 1962. The three words attached to Chaplin's name in the Oxford Companion to English Literature ('see Regional Novel') look startlingly inappropriate for a writer whose work has survived quite as well as, say, the early novels of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey. The most interesting book of poems I read this year was Matthew Hollis's Ground Water (Bloodaxe, £7.95), a debut collection full of quietly evocative meditations on landscape and loss.

Lloyd Evans

The funniest book I've come across is a travel spoof, Molvania by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Stitch (Atlantic Books, £8.99). The joke is that the country is full of prostitutes, thieves and child-abusers, yet the traveller is under an obligation to embrace their quaint customs in a spirit of warm approval. If, like me, you're a fan of chicklit and can't wait for Jilly Cooper's next book you may find Marian Keyes a good substitute. The Other Side of the Story (Michael Joseph, £12.99) is a romance about a literary agent and her boss. More than just a love story, it offers a fascinating insight into the publishing industry. The overrated publishing effort of the year is McSweeney's Quarterly Concern edited by David Eggers. Reviewers have been far too kind about this insufferably boring enterprise. The packaging is pretty though and The Best of McSweeney's (Hamish Hamilton, £17.99) will make a good Christmas present for someone you don't like. Keep asking them about it.

M. R. D. Foot

Richard J, Aldrich's Witness to War (Doubleday, £18.99) stands head and shoulders above all the other books that are flooding out to meet the 60th anniversary of the end of the last world war. Aldrich compiles his main text out of the diaries of men and women who were there at the time, and therefore write as direct witnesses; he precedes each month's entries with a judicious summing-up of the war's course during that month. He comes to the war's history from many years' work in intelligence archives; he therefore takes care not to leave out the vital intelligence dimension, usually neglected by military and by diplomatic historians who are still obsessed with the cult of secrecy. He takes care to spread his selection from the highest quarters — on both sides — to the most humdrum, and gives an excellent picture of a world in agony.

More books of the year next week