Nik Darlington

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost.  It is not immediately clear which of these camps is most reprehensible. But the most culpable were those who knew that a Brown premiership would be a disaster and still allowed it to happen, including Tony Blair, who, as Alistair Darling reveals in this brilliant autobiography, said at the beginning of his premiership that working with Gordon Brown was “like facing the dentist’s drill without an anaesthetic”.

Close the nominations. Unless someone publishes proof of Shergar pulling a plough in the Yemen, it must be a good bet for William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011. Twirlymen is the absorbing maiden work by Amol Rajan, a journalist at the Independent.  His aim is to celebrate spin bowling’s impressive survival in the face of change and the often unjust machinations of cricketing authorities; to remind us of spin bowling’s past dominance; to explode myths; to raise off-spin, ‘an ugly ducking in cricket’, to its rightful plinth; to extol the mastery of the basics over the capriciousness of mystery; and to celebrate the great Twirlymen.

The hardback edition of D.R. Thorpe's Supermac is 626 pages in length (not including endnotes and index), 24cm x 16cm x 6cm in girth, and weighs in at more than one kilogram – on first appearances, not a book for a beach holiday. Or so I thought, because despite the corporeal hardships of reading this on a sunbed in mercury-popping heat, I was transfixed. And now I have the forearms to prove it. Thorpe gravitates between dextrous prose and a judicial exposition of evidence, such as when taking the reader through the controversial Cossacks repatriation episode, or the quandary of royal prerogative during the handover to Lord Home.

Turning it over with my bare toes, it had the look and feel of finely ground coffee, typical of the island’s volcanic black beaches. I could not help but smile to myself: even the white coral sand was a myth. As a youngster, I fell in love with a 1930s book series called The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.  They introduced me to the greatest true story ever told.  The narrative is swift and vibrant, the characterisation sublime.  The book inspired the 1935 Oscar-winning film starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and the 1962 remake, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. But Nordhoff & Hall, by their own admission, were not bound by historical truth. Like countless plays and books before them, they made most of it up.

It is an old cliché that films of books must be inferior to the books themselves. It is not always true. For instance, read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and see whether you disagree (the writing is pedestrian and the plotting is incoherent, which is why the movie has a different storyline). Then of course there is David Nicholls’ first novel, Starter For Ten, which was fun but nothing like as good as the film adaptation (in no small part thanks to James McAvoy). The adaptation of David Nicholls' One Day, a coming-of-age novel about love and fulfilment, hits our cinema screens this autumn. But clichés are not clichés for nothing. Unlike Starter For Ten, which began life as a screenplay, One Day does not feel as cinematic.