David Blackburn

It is more than 30 years since Mark Amory declared biography dead, when he published his edition of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. Despite the best efforts of Victoria Glendinning (notably on Trollope) and Claire Tomalin (on Pepys and many others) there has been no grand critical resurrection since, until this year and the announcement of the shortlist for the Costa Awards. Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne has received the recognition of which Spectator reviewers Philip Hensher and David Sexton believed it worthy.

The Paris Review has surpassed itself yet again, with a brief memoir by photographer Paul McDonough. His photos and writing depict metropolitan life as it is predominantly lived: in a constant motion of coming and going. For McDonough, there is no such thing as still life. The actors in a city’s exterior space may or may not be aware that they are the centre of attention; but they are never sedentary. This realisation affected his art: "What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare.

‘Oh my human brothers let me tell you how it happened,’ begs SS officer Max Aue, the narrator at the beginning of Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust novel The Kindly Ones. It is a book about the nature of evil. Simply memorialising the Holocaust, Littell says, always through the mouth of Aue, has relegated the killers to sub-human status. Littell challenges the reader to empathise with the Nazis, because Europe’s most grotesque trauma was perpetrated by the most civilised of men. Aue is strikingly human. If nothing else he is a study in pretentiousness, with an adolescent impulse to impress.

So, you thought you knew Dubya? His memoir has leapt to the top of the sellers' charts (£) in the States and The Spectator is publishing a comprehensive review by Sir Christopher Meyer next week. But, judging by extracts in the Times’ serialisation, Bush's ghostwriter Christopher Michel (the former President’s premier speech writer) has done a spectacular job: turns out we didn’t know George Bush at all. Certainly, the embodiment of manifest destiny emerges from the text, as we expected it to – resolute in action, defiant in moral certitude and confidant that history will remember him at least. ‘Did you use water boarding?’ ‘Damn right we did’.

I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for lack of opportunity rather than lack of will. However, the loud critical response has not escaped me. How could it? The Corrections and Freedom have both been crowned with the thorns of being a ‘Great American Novel’; and he is the celebrated author of the moment, gracing the cover of Time Magazine and making regular though unseen appearances in the latest series of Gossip Girl no less. Critics are unanimous: Freedom is ‘very good in parts’ – a green-eyed euphemism for 'bloody brilliant'. But when it comes to Franzen himself, the man divides the sexes in America, vehemently so.

Ageing roué Michel Houellebecq, the Serge Gainsbourg of the literary world, has won France’s most prestigious literary prize for his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory). Not before time, his supporters will say. But, then again, Houellebecq has long polarised opinion, and Les Cartes et le Territoire - featuring a foul-smelling, alcoholic, atrociously dressed writer called Michel Houellebecq, who is murdered in brutal fashion - promises to entrench that reputation. He was interviewed by the Paris Review last month.