David Blackburn

Sir Roy Strong is irrepressible. His latest venture is to ask: ‘What is Englishness?’ England is a nation in search of an identity. For centuries, Strong contends, Englishness was synonymous with what it meant to be British. He cites monarchy, democracy, imperialism, propriety and industry as defining totems of the national psyche. Those parochial facets of British history are moribund and their legacy largely irrelevant. What remains is English culture in the sense of its artistic heritage. England’s rural and artistic traditions, with their aestheticism, simplicity and healthy distrust of authoritarian structures and creeds, have been resurrected out of the listlessness of post-imperial decline and economic uncertainty.

Jeffrey Sachs wants a revolution. The renowned economist has developed a Malthusian touch in The Value of Everything. He is adamant that resource scarcity is upon us and here to stay unless the globe transforms its consumption and production, radically. Beyond the doomsaying, Sachs’ book is a robust critique of the study of economics and the preoccupations of government. Mainstream economics and policy have obsessed about monetarism and fiscal policy since the early 80s, if not back to Keynes himself.

You can see it best through the window of a train, as you shuttle at that suburban-safe pace through the outskirts of major cities. A brown-field hinterland that is neither town nor country, occupied nor deserted, arid nor fertile. These are the Edgelands, the subject of Michael Symmonds Roberts and Paul Farley’s critique of what we term ‘wild’. With romantic attention to place and solitude, Edgelands describes the surreal beauty of disused industrial plants, exhausted mineral pits and landfill sites. First to industrialise and first to fade, Britain possesses the world’s most extensive post-industrial landscape, one which nature is struggling to reclaim. It is an eerie, dilapidated monument to consumption and decline.

Beware prophets and charismatics, warned Machiavelli. And he would know, having watched Savonarola’s brand of ascetic lunacy impede his political career, not to mention Florence’s prosperity and security. In his latest book, Paul Strathern revisits the city’s most effervescent period at the close of the fifteenth century, as princes, prelates and proles vied for its ‘soul’ at one of the ‘most important moments in Western history’. Whether Florence merits such prominence is open to debate, when Spain was acquiring the New World, anti-clericalism and new learning were stirring Reformation and the Ottoman Empire came close to crushing Christian civilisation east of Vienna.

Bethlehem was an odd venue for the birth of Christ; but not as odd as choosing Bedford for the New Jerusalem. Yet, in 1919, a widow named Mabel Baltrop, was declared to be the daughter of God by a group of women styling themselves the Panacea Society. They called her Octavia and she appointed 12 apostles who spread the word from Bedford to the globe’s four corners, founding a utopian communion followed by 130,000 people. The movement was observantly documented by devotees. This is the latest chapter in the history of the neo-spiritual boom that succeeded the slaughter in Flanders.

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.

Charlotte Moore: I revelled in David Kynaston’s Family Britain and am longing for the next instalment of this densely packed, non-judgmental social history of mid-20th-century Britain. Michael Frayn’s memoir My Father’s Fortune is exemplary; touching, funny, cleverly constructed and kind. I returned to Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour after 20 years and found it still perfect. Clara Claiborne Park, who died in July, was an American academic. The Siege, her book about life with her autistic daughter, diagnosed at a time when psychiatrists blamed autism on ‘refrigerator mothers’, was one of the earliest parental accounts, and remains one of the best.

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.

Sebastian Faulks examines the history of the English novel through its most enduring, though not endearing characters. Faulks on Fiction returns to BBC Two with a Peter Greenaway-inspired title The Hero, The Lover, The Snob and The Villain. Mr Darcy, Robinson Crusoe, Chanu and John Self are all subjected to a session of Faulks’ post-modern psychoanalysis; an exercise designed to clarify the opaque English character.