Culture

Oliver Sacks’s autobiography On the Move (Picador, £20) is full of surprising details —for example, the eminent neurologist was a weightlifting champion in his youth who hung out with Hells Angels. Sacks — who died in August — was an inspiring person with an extraordinary breadth of interests and enthusiasms. I also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s family portrait A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99). People have criticised Tyler for being too gentle, but actually she has the rapier wit of a true satirist. You know exactly how awful one character is because she has soft shoes and insists on calling her mother-in-law Mother Whitshank. Monsters by Emerald Fennell (Hot Key Books, £7.99) is absolutely great.

Richard Bourke’s Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, £30.95) is a monument of exact scholarship and careful reflection, by a long way the best book that we have on this profound and much misunderstood politician and philosopher. For those who want more thunder than even Burke can offer, Rory Muir’s Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814–1852 (Yale, £30) completes the author’s outstanding two-volume biography. Finally, Penguin Classics confirms its reputation for range and eclecticism with Magna Carta, with a superb commentary by David Carpenter (£10.

This has been a good year for biographies, especially of all-rounders. Hugh Purcell did a lot of digging to uncover the nine lives of that secretive man John Freeman. A Very Private Celebrity (Robson Press Biteback, £25) lists them as follows: pre-war advertising executive, wartime officer (Monty called him ‘the best brigade major in the Eighth Army’), postwar MP, Labour minister, Bevanite rebel, TV interviewer, top-line diplomat and ambassador in Washington, DC, media mogul and star academic at a US university — all first-class of their kind — and fascinating to read about. Richard Davenport-Hines is equally vivid in Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (Collins, £18.99).

Royalty Inc. by Stephen Bates (Aurum Press, £20) is a superb account of how ‘the Firm’ (Windsors rather than Krays) became ‘Britain’s best-known brand’. Bates is a veteran royal journalist, though much of his career was on the Guardian, which wouldn’t let him use that title. He reveals that the palace’s own term for their gameplan is the ‘Marmite jar strategy’: pretend you’re a timeless and static part of the national furniture, while subtly and constantly changing to remain relevant. Simon Hughes’s Who Wants to be a Batsman? (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) brilliantly analyses this fragile creature.

Dominic Sandbrook’s The Great British Dream Factory (Allen Lane, £25) is very long, but I read it in less than two days, my attention never flagging. Sandbrook’s main contention is that as Britain declined as an imperial power, it reinvented itself as a purveyor of popular culture to the world. Embracing everything from Black Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, losing his fingers in a sheet metal press to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, it’s dramatic, perceptive and often extremely funny. Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (William Collins, £30) is very long too — and somehow manages to be both prim and prurient. But there’s also plenty of fascinating stuff here.

No book this year has provided me with such interest and visual delight as Gavin Stamp’s superb Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott (Aurum Press, £30). The Midland Hotel St Pancras, the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford, the Albert Memorial in Kensington, the Hereford Choir Screen, Holy Trinity Rugby, where I often worshipped (eheu, now demolished), St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh — one of the finest cathedrals in the world. Stamp is the finest architectural historian of the Victorian era and his evocation of Scott — architect and human being — is a masterpiece, accompanied by superb illustrations. It is an intensely sad book, for so many of the towns which Scott beautified have been wrecked.

No question about the book of the year: it’s Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Heinemann, £18.99) in Lorin Stein’s fluent translation. It’s France, 2022, when a moderate Muslim Brotherhood government takes charge. While the narrator submits to the new low-key Islamic regime, the liberal left collapses for want of coherence before an ideology intent on winning the battle of ideas through demography. ‘To them it’s simple — whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate and does the best job of transmitting its values, wins.’ Following its publication, the Guardian asked brightly: ‘Does Houellebecq really hate women and Muslims, or is he just a twisted provocateur?

The highlight for me this year was the South African writer Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (Cape, £18.99), hugely topical at a time when Europe is contemplating what it means to be a refugee. I’ve repeatedly found myself recommending it to friends. Steinberg is a novelist camouflaging himself as a non-fiction writer, and his story of Somali tradesman Asad’s meandering journey across Africa — from the clan violence of Mogadishu via the slums of Nairobi and Addis Ababa to the townships of Cape Town and their vindictive, xenophobic attacks — is extraordinarily poignant. A real-life picaresque tale, it doesn’t contain a single dull sentence. Shame (Weidenfeld, £14.

My favourite book of the year was The Hotel Years, a collection of wanderings by the incomparable Joseph Roth (Granta, £16.99). I was oddly touched by Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting, the swan-song of Michael Jacobs concerning the Velazquez masterpiece ‘Las Meninas’. And the grand and peculiar Landmarks seemed to me a welcome change of direction by the uniquely gifted Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £20).

Timing is everything, and few cookbooks come at an apter moment than Mamushka (Mitchell Beazley, £25) by the excellently named Ukrainian-born Olia Hercules. It is too easy to pun on her strengths, but in these flamboyant recipes and stories, Hercules lifts up not just the cooking of her country but that of others in the former Eastern Bloc out of grey culinary oblivion. ‘Mamushka’ is an invented word, used by Hercules to describe the strong women in her life; her mother, aunts and cousins, not all Ukrainian but with roots in Bessarabia, Siberia, Armenia and Uzbekistan. All were great cooks, and Hercules says she includes very few of her own recipes. This food is as special as Hercules promises — and she writes beautifully about it, too.