Culture

Snowdrops, A. D. Miller’s literary thriller, has to qualify as the book I was ‘most unable to put down’ this year. It’s set in a contemporary Moscow which I instantly recognised — glamorous, vicious, amoral and terrifying all at once. Miller puts his finger right on what makes modern Russia so compelling to outsiders. When his main character, a bland Englishman, allows himself to be enticed into a scam involving beautiful girls, phony building permits, and enormous amounts of money we intuitively understand why. For those who prefer their scams closer to home, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash is a brilliant read, and highly educational.

It was an exceptional year for the novel, with impressive books from Adam Mars-Jones, Ali Smith, Edward Docx, Edward St Aubyn, A.S.Byatt, Cressida Connolly, Ross Raisin, Amitav Ghosh, Tim Binding and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to mention a few. Many congratulations to the enterprising Hesperus for bringing a small but enchanting German classic, Hans Keilson’s Komodie in Moll, to English readers for the first time. The three new novels I’d particularly commend are, first, Robert Harris’s superb The Fear Index guaranteed to appeal to anyone who shudders when their laptop unaccountably fails to switch off. Secondly, my friend Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent The Stranger’s Child, universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year.

What strange persons get themselves chosen to govern us. I have spent quite a bit of the past year reading some brilliant lives of our prime ministers, each of them heavy enough to sprain a wrist but light enough to tickle the imagination: in historical order, David Brown’s Palmerston, D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, and Philip Ziegler’s Edward Heath. Pam, Supermac and Ted managed to put across very different images of themselves, but all three were essentially solitary and implacable personalities who kept their enmities in better repair than their friendships, all unpopular in youth and chilly in old age.

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’. Graham Swift does just that. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung is a novel that everybody interested in contemporary China should read.

To mark the death of Christopher Hitchens, here is a piece he wrote in June 1986 to commemorate the life of Jorge Luis Borges. Jorge Luis Borges, Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator, 21 June 1986 Christopher Hitchens recalls a meeting with the Argentine poet, who died last Saturday ‘This is my country and it might be yet, But something came between us and the sun.’ As the old man threw off these lines, he turned his blind, smiling face to me and asked, 'Do they still read much Edmund Blunden in England?' I was unsure of what might give pleasure, but pretty certain in saying that Blunden was undergoing one of his eclipses. ‘What a shame,' said Jorge Luis Borges, 'but then you still have Chesterton. I used to live in Kensington, you know.

It’s no state secret that Britain was outmanoeuvred by France at last week’s European Summit. The Old Foe triumphed and their political establishment has been, in the words of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, farting in our general direction ever since. President Sarkozy has described David Cameron as an indignant child and the Parisian equivalent of Mervyn King has insisted that Britain’s credit rating be downgraded. We British are renowned for our stoicism, but there are limits. The Foreign Office has rebuffed the garlic-infused petulance wafting across La Manche: literary Tory minister Keith Simpson has produced his customary holiday reading list and it contains a few putdowns for our Gallic cousins.