Culture

Can nation building defeat terrorism? Jack Fairweather asks this question at the outset of The Edge of Eden, a history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admittedly, the question is rhetorical – having been answered by all too evident failures and the high cost in blood – but that doesn’t lessen Fairweather’s impact.   Fairweather was the Telegraph’s Baghdad correspondent and the Washington Post’s man in Afghanistan; this books commits a decade of strategic and political errors made to posterity's record. The account is high-political: an antidote to the foot soldiers’ memoirs that have emerged in recent years.

The history of British exploration is dominated by heroic failure. Robert Falcon Scott: defeated and died. George Mallory: probably defeated and died. Those two are the greatest, or at least the most famous of our imperial adventurers; the Victorian hero Captain Sir John Franklin is more obscure, though no less heroic. Prior to the construction of the Suez Canal, British seaborne commerce searched for a fast route to the East, preferably through the Arctic Circle. The hunt for the elusive Northwest Passage became a national obsession; the subject, even, of Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  Expeditions became more frequent after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1845, the 59-year-old Franklin led a Royal Navy frigate in the most audicious attempt.

Ferdinand Mount: Mark Girouard’s Elizabethan Architecture is a prodigy book devoted to the Prodigy Houses, those fantastical mega-palaces which reared up out of the placid landscape in the brief, dazzling period of Elizabeth’s ending and James’s beginning: Longleat, Hardwick, Burghley, Castle Ashby, Wollaton and Montacute. The English built nothing so breathtaking before or after. The illustrations are lovely, and so is the text: crisp, authoritative, with a touch of mischief. This is a ripe example of the Girouardesque, a glorious slab of a book. Si monumentum requiris, perlege. Going to very cold places is the idealist’s last resort. David Vann’s losers escape into the snow and solitude without, of course, escaping themselves.

Sam Leith: The book that I’ve found myself telling other people about most has been Through The Language Glass, Guy Deutscher’s gripping pop-science book about linguistics and neuropsychology, describing how language shapes our perception of reality. I also hope people look at the handsomely produced A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. I must confess an interest: I’ve contributed a couple of essays and it’s edited by a friend, Laura K. Jones. But it’s highly original, and stuffed with fascinating gobbets from contributors as diverse as Brian Sewell, Will Self, Gilbert & George and Genesis P. Orridge.

Cressida Connolly: Polly Samson’s new collection of short stories, Perfect Lives is terrific. Funny, beautifully observed and often poignant, they’re the best thing Samson has produced yet. Whether she’s recording the minutiae of modern marriage or the flora and fauna of a riverbank, this is a writer who misses nothing. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was a revelation. The stories sound ghastly: some of them are less than a page long, few characters are given names and Davis approaches her subjects sideways and in sudden scuttles, crablike. But the effect is quite brilliant — wry, original and wholly unsettling. I can’t think of a book it would be more of a pleasure to be given.

Elizabeth Baines is a novelist, playwright and blogger. Her work can be found at www.elizabethbaines.com, and she blogs at http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com and at the cutting http://fictionbitch.blogspot.com. Her first novel The Birth Machine has been reissued as it was originally intended; here she relates why. Christmas, a time for dreaming, and here, sure enough, are the Christmas books offering the dream that whatever your beginnings – East End boy selling TV aerials out of a van or anthropomorphized desert meerkat – with talent and determination you’ll succeed.

Julian Barnes is fast challenging William Trevor as the modern master of the short story. Barnes’ second collection of short stories, The Lemon, delved into life’s complexities and he dives deeper with this latest collection, Pulse. Each character is attuned to a ‘pulse’ – an amalgamation of a life-force and an Aristotelian flaw. They struggle against or thrive upon the submerged currents of life – touched by ambition, sex, love, health, work and death.        Barnes’ range of time and place is impressive, veering from the domestic to the exotic, from the contemporary to the historical – unsurprising given his success with fictionalising history in Arthur and George.

A.N. Wilson: Stuart Kelly’s Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation is a very engaging, highly intelligent conversation with its readers about what we owe to Walter Scott. His heritage is found not only in literature, but also in tourism, in the banking crisis (Kelly has some good things to say about The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther and their relevance to the crisis of 2008) and much more. The author is interested in everything, from Balmoral to the Wild West, from films to Hiawatha. I loved this book and heartily recommend it. To coincide with the anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Rosamund Bartlett has written Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator:   P. J. O’Rourke is what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men. Instead of sour-faced curmudgeons bleating that ‘politics is just a load of crap’, you get a succession of amusing and incisive observations about why politics is a load of crap. And his solution is that we should stop looking for solutions — from politics, that is. For the real solution, we need to look in the mirror. In his latest book, Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards, O’Rourke’s humour is used to advance arguments (‘the government is taking a third of your pay ... is the government doing a third of your dishes?

Our colleagues at the magazine have kindly allowed us to republish the books of the year columns. Here's the first installment. Anita Brooker Society is composed of two classes: the patrons and the patronised, and a change of status, the migration of the one to the other, is a subject well worth studying. Michel Houellebecq, misanthropist, Islamophobe, and rank outsider, performed this feat by winning the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. Houellebecq is famous for his preoccupations, which are largely rancorous, yet his novel La carte et le territoire is mild, strangely addictive, but not without its subversive elements: Houellebecq himself features in it, ultimately as a headless corpse. Much of this is beyond parody.

Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world's literary pages: Whilst the chattering classes are reverberating to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Jon Michaud of the New Yorker isn’t: ‘I breathed a sigh of relief and held up my hands like a distance runner breaking the tape. Though “Freedom” is sizable enough at 562 pages, it read to me like a much longer book. As I made my way through the final chapters, I began to feel like Walter Berglund, trapped in an unending marriage to this moody, depressive, Patty-like novel, while alluring, Lalitha-like books—“Unbroken,” “Room,” “Tinkers,” etc.—pressed themselves on me.

Christmas is coming, and the bookshelf is getting thin - so, any suggestions for Christmas reading? We are putting our Christmas Special to bed today, so your baristas at Coffee House would be grateful for any tips. I don't need to say that we're not after politics books. Coffee House is not simply a home for political wonks, and the brilliant suggestions last time I asked pointed me to all manner of treasures, old and new. So all suggestions welcome.

References to rap, hip-hop, bling and life in 'da hood' are a rare sight on literary pages. But, in his donnish but beery style, Will Self piloted through his love-hate affair with the genre in the Times recently. Decoded, a new book by one of the proponents of rap-as-literature, Jay Z, comes in for some head-patting, while the Guardian critically dissects the book. (You can read excerpts from Decoded here). The debate about lyrics as literature is timeless. Bob Dylan's verbal outpourings are usually cited as proof, none more so than by his most unlikely champion, Sir Christopher Ricks. Whether the men of letters are genuine or just wanting to get all down and happening with the yoof remains to be seen.