Eyejaybee is willing to give it a go in 2017

I am looking forward to taking the challenge for 2017. Last year I was quite fortunate in that my commuting arrangements gave me for time for reading than I had previously been accustomed to, so I was able to read more than 100 books. I am not sure whether I will be quite so lucky again for 2016.

Here are my counters for progress during the year:

1) Books read




2) Pages read

Before getting properly to grips with the new year, I thought this might be a good point at which to look back over my reading in 2016.

My highs and lows for 2016 (in order of reading rather than preference) were as follows:

a) Favourite ‘new to me’ fiction books of 2016
1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
2. Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
3. The Allegations by Mark Lawson
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5. Different Class by Joanne Harris
6. Oryx and Crace by Margaret Atwood
7. Nutshell by Ian McEwan
8. Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
9. Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin
10. Conclave by Robert Harris

b) Favourite non-fiction books of 2016
1. Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories by Thomas Grant
2. A Buzz in The Meadow by Dave Goulsen
3. A Very English Scandal by John Preston
4. The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn
5. 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth
6. 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage
7. The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre
8. Van Gogh’s Ear by Bernadette Murphy
9. The Railways: Trains, Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

c) Favourite re-reads of 2016
1. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
2. Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome
3. Jeeves in the Offing by P. G. Wodehouse
4. Dispatches by Michael Herr
5. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris

d) Books I enjoyed least during 2016
1. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
2. The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson
3. Never Mind by Patrick St Aubyn
4. Tiny Stations by Dixe Wills
5. Thirst by Benjamin Warner

14. Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer.

I am glad to have got off the mark for 2017, though I have to confess that I did start this last year.

Just over thirty years ago (though sometimes now it feels more like one hundred) I began my career in the UK Civil Service and found myself working in Bloomsbury Tax Office. Despite the name, it was neither situated in Bloomsbury nor included that area in its ‘parish’ It did, instead, cover London’s Inns of Court, and the greater part of the self-employed taxpayers who fell within my domain were either barristers (no baristas back then) or partners in long-established solicitors’ firms working out of chambers that seemed to have changed little since Dickens described them in Great Expectations. Among my allocation of taxpayers was a certain John Mortimer QC, who retained a place in chambers though by then he had more or less completely given up his practice at the bar having established himself as one of the most successful writers of his generation, seeming capable of switching between novels, short stories, plays and television or film scripts more or less at will. It was back then that I first started reading the Rumpole stories that have proved a source of huge entertainment ever since.

This was the original collection of six short stories that introduced the querulous, self-opinionated yet also strangely endearing Rumpole to the world. Of course, it is difficult now to imagine Rumpole without seeing and hearing Leo McKern, who immortalised him in the long-running television series.

Mortimer was clearly a very accomplished barrister, having (unlike Rumpole) taken silk as a Queen’s Counsel, and also sitting occasionally as a Recorder (one of the various grades of judge within the English legal framework). Rumpole never prosecutes, always choosing to work for the defence. He also eschews legal jargon, and even the technicalities of the law itself, preferring to pepper his summation with quotations from Wordsworth, and relying on a pleasing blend of theatricality and pragmatism to win his cases.

The stories are certainly a joy to read, beautifully written and mixing carefully crafted humour and satire against the pomposity of the legal system (though Rumpole himself is, in his way, possibly the most pompous of them all. The cast of supporting characters is also finely drawn, ranging from Rumpole’s frosty, long-suffering wife, Hilda (generally referred to by him as ‘She Who Must be Obeyed’), the feeble commercial lawyer Claude Erskine-Browne and smug head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone QC MP. They all complement each other admirably, allowing Mortimer to poke fun at all aspects of the legal profession.

In this first volume the stories are a lot longer than most of their successors, perhaps reflecting the fact that Mortimer had not yet identified Rumpole’s potential for portrayal on television. They are, however, a glorious mix of humour and social comment, minutely observed and joyously recounted.

Happy 2017 Eyejaybee, nice start !

Welcome back!

Happy to see your reads again! Interesting first review. I watch a lot of British TV, so I know the title but had never looked into it further.

2. The Long and Winding Road by Alan Johnson*.

I met Alan Johnson a couple of times during his spell as Secretary of State for Education and Skills, one of the many incarnations of the department that I work in. Well, perhaps to say I met him is to stretch the facts slightly. I once sat in on one of his ministerial meetings with some external stakeholders while on another occasion I held one of the lift doors open for him in Sanctuary Buildings, the sumptuous departmental headquarters. Needless to say, he doesn’t mention either incident in this latest volume of his memoirs.

Despite those oversights, the book is intriguing, recounting Johnson’s rise to General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, which represented most of the postal workers employed by the Royal Mail, and then his election to Parliament and rapid rise to feature in Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s Cabinets. For someone who has achieved such notable success he writes with great modesty and clarity.

I found this volume interesting principally for Johnson’s commentary on the deteriorating relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and also for his insights about the role of his special advisers during his spell in the Cabinet. As an official, I find the special advisers seem a class apart, bound by different rules and often more of a hindrance than a help to the delivery of departmental policy. This third instalment did, however, lack some of the immediacy of the previous two volumes, though the opening chapter, which detailed Johnson’s first encounter for several years with the father who abandoned him and his sister, and treated his mother so shabbily, provides a gripping opening.

Johnson has a reputation as one of the nicer men in British politics, and, having read this book, it is easy to understand why

I really enjoyed Station Eleven in 2015, James, and I still intend to get to that Margaret Atwood trilogy.

3. The Trouble With Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon.

Joanna Cannon’s debut novel is very accomplished, and utterly engaging. Set during the blisteringly hot summer of 1976 on a quiet avenue in a genteel suburb of an unnamed provincial town. All is not as it seems, however, and as the novel opens one of the residents of the street, Mrs Creasy, has gone missing. After church one Sunday, two young girls, Gracie and Tilly, decide to try to find out why and where Mrs Creasy might have gone. Being resourceful girls, they decide to combine this with a search for God.

As Gracie and Tilly start to look for evidence, we are given glimpses into the lives being led in the various houses all around the avenue. It soon becomes apparent that there have been some strange goings on throughout the years. Cannon handle’s this masterfully, with each new conversation seemingly opening up a new twist on what might happened. The use of the two girls as the principal investigators is inspired as it allows Cannon to scatter comedic misunderstandings as the truth gradually emerges.

I am not sure how to categorise the book. It displays elements of a whodunit, merged with some extremely funny episodes underpinned with some dark psychological themes, all wrapped up in an entertaining social commentary on the tastes and customs of provincial life in the England of the 1970s. I remember it all too well, and found myself alternately laughing and then shuddering with painful memories. Very entertaining.

4. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias.

I always wonder when reading books written in a foreign language how much of the overall impact is down to the original writer, and how much to the translator. A case in point would be Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume which I remember for the extraordinary flamboyance of its descriptive passages. Having only read it in English, I have no idea whether that was a straight representation of the original German, or a marvellous tour de force from the translator. Javier Marias’s novel is a simple story, beautifully told, and I find myself similarly unsure who to thank most: writer or translator. Of course, you are probably all shouting, ‘Does it really matter?’, and I suppose you are right.

The premise for the story is relatively straightforward. A man has dinner with a married woman while her husband is away on a business trip to London. This is their first night together, and romance is delayed until she has managed to put her young son to bed. During the night, she is taken ill and dies, leaving the man with a difficult decision: does he stay to inform the authorities and ensure that the boy is looked after, or does he just leave as quietly as possible, having removed any evidence that he had ever been there. He chooses the latter option, and the book recounts the various consequences that ensue.

Marias captures the man’s panic, and the wrenching of his conscience, masterfully. The book seethes with emotion, though never succumbs to tawdry cliché. Every character is entirely believable, and the story builds with great power.

Adding to the wishlist... great review!

5. The Twentieth Day of January by Ted Allbeury.

This novel has provoked considerable media interest recently, arising from its central premise of an American Presidential candidate who, between securing the election victory and being inaugurated, is investigated following suggestions that he might be subject to undue influence from the Russian government. Far-fetched or what! More intriguingly, the book was published as long ago as the early 1980s, when author Ted Allbeury was enjoying considerable success as a writer of spy thrillers.

In this instance, President-Elect Powell has been steered to election victory through the agency of his politically adroit right-hand man, Andrew Dempsey. Dempsey, however, has a past, and had been arrested during a violent anti-American demonstration in Paris during ‘les evenements’ in 1968., aliong with his beautiful Russian girlfriend. While most of those demonstrators who had been arrested were released within a couple of days, Dempsey and the girl were detained for two months, and only released following the intervention of a questionable American diamond dealer with shady connections to Soviet Eastern Europe. Now, twelve years later, Dempsey has re-emerged, steering the complicit but rather two dimensional Powell to election victory.

Less plausibly, no one in the American intelligence services seems aware of Dempsey’s past. It is left to James Mackay from MI5 to alert them unofficially, having recognised Dempsey from his own recollections of the riot as he had, himself, been a student in Paris in 1968. He flies over to America and works along with the CIA to investigate Powell and Dempsey urgently before the inauguration.

I think it is fair to say that the espionage novel has moved a long way since the early 1980s, and, fortuitous future topicality apart, it is not difficult to understand why Allbeury’s books have been out of print for so long. He writes clearly enough, but his characters are conspicuous for their emotional and psychological flimsiness, and plausibility is rare indeed. Still enjoyable, but perhaps principally as a curiosity.

6. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

This was my third attempt to read The Bone Clocks, and I desperately wanted to like it (or at least to finish it this time). I am still trying to decide what I think of it. Much of it - indeed, most of it - was marvellously entertaining, written with Mitchell's customary verve. I did, however, struggle to enjoy the rest of it, and as that might be said to be the crucial part, I suppose that now I just have to write it off as something that didn’t work for me.

Like his earlier novel, the marvellous Cloud Atlas, this book features several narratives delivered in the first person by a selection of different characters. The first is recounted by Holly Sykes, who leaves her home in Gravesend in 1984, aged 15, following a cataclysmic argument with her mother. The succeeding chapters are related by different characters who encounter Holly over the course of the next fifty or so years.

Some of those succeeding chapters are excellent. My favourite section of Cloud Atlas, which featured an almost concentric chapter structure, was 'The Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish' which recounted the travails visited upon an opportunist but seldom successful publisher. I found that 'Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet' formed a close counterpart to this in the new novel, and I especially enjoyed the literary poisoned darts that Hershey/Mitchell threw out at some readily identifiable literary sacred cows of the present day.

There was, however, a more troubling side to the book. Throughout the novel there are references to a struggle between The Horology and The Anchorites, two warring bands of people with their own respective brands of superpowers. The members of the Horology move from one carrier body to another, repeatedly inhabiting new forms and extending their lives over centuries or even, in the case of Esther Little, over millennia. The Anchorites also have paranormal abilities but their particular twist is to aspire towards eternal youth. These two groups are in perpetual enmity, and episodes of their combat intrude into the otherwise 'normal' activities captured in the novel.

As always with Mitchell, the book is beautifully written. The separate narratives each demonstrate their own style, quite plausibly suggesting completely different authors, and he effortlessly conveys their respective social and emotional hinterlands. Throughout the greater part of the book, everyone behaves entirely credibly, and the book builds to an enchanting climax. Sadly, the final section of the book simply defeated me.

I am willing to accept the charge of being a hidebound traditionalist, perhaps simply too middle aged and middle class, but I found this exceptionally annoying, and it detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the book. If I had wanted to read a science fiction story of that type I would have bought an Iain M Banks book and struggled to suspend my disbelief sufficiently. I would, however, at least have had some idea of what I was letting myself in for. I expected rather better of David Mitchell. To be fair, the good bits were exceptionally good, but the overall work just could have been much better.

7. It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

What an extraordinary act of prescience from Sinclair Lewis. The blurb on the back of the recently re-issued Penguin edition offers this brief synopsis: ‘A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant demagogue runs for President of the United States … and wins.’ Devastating topicality, all the more astounding when one realises that the book was published in 1935.

I had read a couple of Sinclair Lewis’s other novels (Babbitt and Main Street) but had never even heard of this one until I chanced upon a display of it in my local Waterstone’s and succumbed to an impulse buy. Like his other books, it has a dated feel (well, it is eighty years old) and I found the tone of the opening few pages rather off-putting. Once I got beyond them, though, I was hooked. The great charm of Babbitt was its celebration of the humdrum and ordinary, and that permeates this book as well, though here it is counterbalanced by the pellucid insight into the appetite and quest for power. The reader is guided through the startling events leading up to and then proceeding from the election of Buzz Windrip to the Presidency by Doremus Jessop, editor and columnist of the local newspaper in Fort Beulah, Vermont. Jessop is far from perfect, and has in his time subscribed to number of political inclinations, ending up in middle age as a wise, benign and liberal man, concerned at the threat to prevailing social mores while also hoping for a more equitable world.

Buzz Windrip is appalling, but all too plausible, and emerges fully formed into the political scene as America struggles to set the Depression behind her while striving to avoid further entanglement in the political and military crises looming in Europe as fascist dictators spring up seemingly everywhere. Throughout the Presidential campaign numerous commentators compare Windrip with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, to be met wth the constant refrain of, ‘It can’t happen here’, until, of course, it does.

Lewis writes in a simple, clear style, and excels in his portraits of middle class life in rural America. He captures the divisions that gradually affect the community of Fort Beulah as the campaign nears its conclusion perfectly. Even eighty years on, I felt I knew these people and could see how and why they formulated their opinions. It almost felt like talking to my colleagues now.

8 The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell.

This is the eighth instalment in the "Dance to the Music of Time" sequence, and the second set during the Second World War. As is the case with all of the novels in the sequence, Powell keeps the reader fully engaged even though very little actually happens.

Nick Jenkins's war is not one of direct and exciting engagement with the enemy. For most of this book he remains based in Northern Ireland while the Division to which he is attached prepares for deployment overseas. Jenkins finds himself working as general dogsbody for the Deputy Assistant Advocate General (the DAAG), in the person of the odious and overwhelmingly ambitious Kenneth Widmerpool, now gazetted in the rank of major but desperate to go much higher. Hitherto Widmerpool has been an occasional character - 'a transient and embarrassed spectre' as Widmerpool's and Jenkins's former school master le Bas might have said - but in this volume he is a constant presence, and we can almost feel the torpor with which Jenkins's spirit is ground down as, between them, they plough through the volumes of mindless paperwork.

Much of Jenkins's time is spent observing the ceaseless machinations within the internal politics of the Division as Widmerpool strives for personal advancement and to outflank the almost equally odious Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, a veteran officer who had seen service in the First World War and is never less than scathing of recently-drafted and generally ill-qualified junior officers. Hogbourne-Johnson earns Widmerpool's undying emnity following a splenetic outburst, provoked by an unavoidable traffic snarl-up during a regimental exercise. From that moment on, Widmerpool expend almost as much energy in trying to do Hogbourne-Johnson down as he does in pursuing his own advancement.

This novel also sees the re-appearance of Charles Stringham, who had been absent from the last two or three volumes. Here he appears as a Mess waiter serving Jenkins and his fellow officers at dinner. Now seemingly sober, he is even more deeply riven by melancholy than previously, though he accepts his lowly military status with considerable equanimity. We also catch up with Bithel, the irredeemably shabby but immensely likeable Welsh Officer who had so narrowly avoided court martial in the previous volume.

Powell retains his light and sardonic touch throughout, though the background melancholia from the preceding volumes is never wholly absent.

Part of me wants to pick up It Can't Happen Here right away, but part of me feels like it would be bad for my mental health. Definitely going on my list anyway, great review.

>16 mabith: I know what you mean! I felt that same dilemma when I came across it in the bookshop.

9. Slow Horses by Mick Herron.

I heard a radio programme over the weekend in which an established journalist offered some advice to aspiring cub reporters. One of his key tips was never to ‘bury the lead’, as many readers have a relatively short attention span. One should, instead, pitch your key message as near the start of the piece as possible. As someone who spends his days drafting replies to correspondence received by government ministers, I often find myself counting upon that waning attention span. Still, let’s try it the other way. Here goes …

This is one of the best spy novels I have ever read, and I have read a lot of spy novels. What made it even better was that I came across it entirely fortuitously in my local bookshop, so I had an enjoyable feeling of serendipity, too.

Jackson Lamb heads up a branch of MI5 based in Slough House in East London. His officers are not, however, engaged on active operations, and instead spend their time on repetitive strands of background research. The truth is that they have all messed up previously in their careers, and have been consigned to Slough House as a form of internal exile, and have come to be known as the ‘slow horses’. They are a disparate bunch, too, each of them seeming to have their own dysfunctional aspects. These are difficult times, however, and the slow horses gradually become immersed in the sidelines of a major developing crisis as a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, with his captors threatening to behead him in forty-eight hours.

Jackson Lamb is a marvellous character: perpetually angry and crushingly impatient, he shows a relentless disdain for the officers under his charge. He does, however, have operational pedigree. He needs it: internal intrigue is about to rip the service apart, and Lamb will have to dig deep into his long experience to try to hold things together.

The plot is elaborate, but always plausible, and holds together despite the many twists and turns. Herron writes with great immediacy – the reader is gripped from the start, and is immediately completely engaged.

I have It Can't Happen Here on my TBR list for this year, too, for obvious reasons. Great review.

10. Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig.

One of my favourite novels John Buchan’s John Macnab, a nostalgic evocation of a Corinthian idealism perhaps largely of Buchan’s own imagining, though no less magnificent for all that. I was, therefore, initially nervous about embarking on Andrew Greig’s homage to that book, The Return of John Macnab which featured a recreation of Buchan’s poaching adventures staged during the 1990s. My fears were allayed, and that book is also now one of my favourites.

Romanno Bridge features the same central characters from The Return of John Macnab though it is not exactly a sequel. Kirsty has moved south, ending up working on the local newspaper in Dumfries. Most of the time she ends up writing bland stories about simple local events. On one such story she attends a gathering at a private nursing home and starts talking to Billy, one of the residents. Finding him interesting, she visits him again a few times, and he gradually tells her about his part as a very young man in the events following the daring theft on Christmas Eve 1950 of the Stone of Destiny (also known as ‘The Stone of Scone’ or ‘The Crowning Stone’) from Westminster Abbey. It seems that the Stone became damaged during its brief return to Scotland, and Billy, an apprentice stonemason, had been co-opted to work on repairing it, and also creating two exact replicas. Billy also hints, however, that even the Stone that had been stolen (liberated?) from Westminster Abbey was itself a replica, and that the original Stone had been hidden for several centuries, with Edward I having been fobbed off with a forgery. Billy dies shortly afterwards, in possibly suspicious circumstances, and odd things befall Kirsty, who finds herself caught up in a conspiracy thriller reminiscent of he Da Vinci Code.

Greig is a great writer, though I feel that the thriller is not his natural milieu. I enjoyed this book though it lacked the flow of The Return of John Macnab. I felt throughout that Greig was stretching for something, yet never quite succeeding in grasping it. There are some humorous passages, and some marvellous descriptions of the Scottish countryside, but the action was never quite convincing. Greig established his literary reputation initially as a poet, and I wonder if that is perhaps his better medium. John Buchan’s trademark was his pellucid prose, as beautiful and engaging as the landscapes he described, and at times in his previous novel Greig came close to emulating it. In Romanno Bridge, however, he sometimes stumbled into a leaden prose that lacked emotional cadence.

I did enjoy it, but feel that it might have been better if he had known when and where to stop.

11. Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron.

This is one of Mick Herron’s earlier novels and introduces the character of Zoe Boehm, who would subsequently feature in three further novels. She is actually a fairly peripheral character throughout most of this book, though she does tend to make fairly striking entrances. The central character is Sarah Trafford, a woman in her thirties who seems to have missed out on a meaningful career of her own and has ended up keeping house for her ambitious banker husband, Mark. As the novel opens Sarah and Mark are hosting the dinner party from hell for Gerard Inchon, one of Mark’s prospective clients who has brought along his vapid trophy his wife, and Sarah’s closest friend (Wigwam) and her rather ineffectual husband Rufus.

As the ordeal of dinner finally draws to a close there is a loud explosion further down the street. Rushing out they find that a nearby house has been completely destroyed, and subsequently learn that two adults were killed in the blast though a four-year-old girl has, miraculously, survived. Touched by her proximity to such a catastrophe, Sarah becomes obsessed about the young girl, and undertakes to investigate what happened to her, and what might have caused the explosion. She is then catapulted into a living nightmare peopled by private detectives, murderous secret service operatives and the relentless machinations of a faceless government department.

Herron is adept at building the suspense. The narrative moves to follow different characters throughout the story, each with their own clear perspective and style. The characters are a disparate but gloriously drawn selection. Sarah has been passively bullied by her self-centred husband for too long, and comes into her own as the story develops, despite the relentless adversity she encounters. Herron is also a master of misdirection, constantly selling the reader the dummy, to devastating effect.

Very accomplished, and hopefully setting up an enjoyable sequence to come.

>14 Eyejaybee: It Can't Happen Here now on my Kindle, ready to read. I hadn't heard of it, despite reading Babbit and Main Street years ago. Thanks for your review.

>22 pamelad:. I hope you enjoy it.

I went past the massive flagship branch of Waterstone's in Piccadilly on Saturday and saw that the whole of one their shopwindow displays was given ove to It Can't Happen Here. A rare instance of a book coming into its own eighty years after publication.

12. The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva.

Gabriel Allon has established a reputation as one of the world’s leading restorers of Renaissance artworks, and is working on a marvellous altar piece by Francesco Vecellio for a London gallery. This is, however, his second profession. He was previously an accomplished assassin working for the Israeli secret services, participating in operations to track down and kill targets identified as terrorists working against Israel. During that phase of his life, his particular bête noir had been a Palestinian known as ‘Tariq’, believed to be the mastermind behind a series of attacks against Israeli targets all around the globe, culminating in a revenge attack on Allon’s own family. This had driven Allon away from that world, moving to his art restoration instead.

As the book opens, Israel and Palestine are cautiously moving towards a peace settlement, which has upset extremists on both side who suspect their political leaders of craven compromise. This is manifested by an audacious attack on the Israeli ambassador to France, which has Tariq’s trademarks all over it. Fearing that this might derail the peace process, the powers behind the scenes in Israel decide that Tariq must be killed before he can wreak further havoc and mayhem. Allon is persuaded to set aside his new life and return to the fold, with a specific mission to track down and kill Tariq.

Silva writes without frills, and this seemed to work for the first three quarters. As with so many promising thrillers, however, I felt he author erred on the side of over complication. He is also clearly better at describing action than constructing characters. The plot was sound enough but his principal characters too frequently teetered on the verge of two dimensionality, and the book might have been commensurately stronger if it had been one hundred pages shorter.

The Gabriel Allon series is one of my guilty pleasures - I agree that he's better with action than characters (particularly female characters!), and if you read more you'll find that they are really formulaic. However, I just eat them up.

My local bookshop also has a stack of It Can't Happen Here, I think I may have to grab a copy next time I'm in. I was tempted last time, but resisted.

Some fab books here - I've got Bone Clocks on loan from the library (because I read and enjoyed Slade House earlier this year, without realising there was a link between & order to these two books). I'll still give it a go, although I'm feeling some slight trepidation now...

>25 jfetting: I certainly thought he handled the action well, so I shall certainly try more of his books.

>26 wookiebender: Nearly everyone else I know that has read The Bone Clocks thought it was great, and I am sure that if you enjoyed Slade House you will like it.

#27#26 I agree !

13. Sirens by Joseph Knox.

Somehow I couldn’t make myself like this novel, though I tried as hard as I could.

Knox’s prose is sound enough, but I just couldn’t engage with either the plotline or the principal characters. It revolves around Aidan Waits, a detective constable in deep cover investigating the club scene in Manchester. Having been summoned back to base he is commissioned to search for the missing daughter of a leading local politician. The girl had last been seen on the fringes of the club/drug scene, and in particular in the hinterland of local super dealer Zain Carver. Waits goes even deeper under cover, and manages to infiltrate Carver’s inner circle, and even to locate the missing girl, but that proves only to be the start of the trouble.

Even allowing for my total lack of familiarity with the setting, I found that the story simply taxed my credibility too far and too often. The plot just didn’t seem to hold water, and I found that some of the characters struggled even to be two dimensional.

14. Dead Lions by Mick Herron.

Jackson Lamb is back, just as grotesque, crass and generally objectionable as he was in Slow Horses, the first volume in this hugely enjoyable series. He is still presiding over Slough House, the bin end of internal exile to which compromised or incompetent MI5 agents, disdainfully referred to as the ‘slow horses’, are consigned.

On a wet night in Oxford, during an episode of total chaos on the national rail network, a former dogsbody of the Service from Cold War days, of even lower status than the slow horses under Lamb’s tutelage, is found dead on a replacement bus service. Though never previously noted for his interest in, or even acknowledgement of, junior colleagues, Lamb is intrigued by this death, convinced that there is more to it than meets the eye. He evens deigns to send some of the slow horses to look into the death further. Meanwhile, one of the young hopefuls back at Regent Park, operational head office of the Service, is engaged in buttering up the latest Russian oligarch, helping him to host a business summit in a towering building clearly meant to be The Shard.

Herron is adroit at entwining several different stories, weaving them into a compelling and engrossing novel. His characterisation is also impeccable, rendering a host of entirely plausible and largely empathetic characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies. He is also adept at misdirection, constantly selling the reader the dummy and leading him up any number of blind alleys. His plots are as sturdy and watertight as John le Carre’s, though they are sprinkled with a grim gallows humour. Jackson Lamb is as dishevelled as George Smiley yet also as coarse as Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Dalziel – a heady mix indeed.

>30 Eyejaybee: I just took a book bullet there. :)

>31 wookiebender: Sorry ;)

"Sorry, not sorry" I think you meant. :)

FYI, I just started (finally) Capital which I believe you first brought to my attention (through this forum) several years ago. Apparently I bought it back in 2014 (!!!).

>33 wookiebender: well, maybe something like that.

I hope you enjoy Capital.

15. Downriver by Iain Sinclair.

I am not sure what I feel about this book. It was certainly beautifully written. Sinclair has a mastery with words that I have seldom encountered before, and the book is peppered with astonishing metaphors. He also has an extraordinary eye for landscape. Early in the book one of the characters wanders through the wasteland around Tilbury Fort, which I had visited not long before. Sinclair’s description of it is startling in its vividness. I can’t remember ever reading an account of a location that so accurately captured both the physical features and the sheer squalor and despair that they provoked.

I did, however, find reading the book quite a struggle. The narrative moves haltingly, changing focus and narrator with each new section. There are, in fact, several different stories interwoven with each other, each unfolding at a different pace. Desperately clever, no doubt, yet also desperately irritating. On balance, I felt that the glory of Sinclair’s prose just outweighed the difficulties imposed by choice of format. Perhaps I am simply too middle aged, middle class and middle brow properly to appreciate it, but I think my final judgement is that it was a shame that such beautiful prose was not better served by the story it told.

16. Jumpers by Tom Stoppard.

Tom Stoppard might well have a claim to be one of our finest living playwrights. He has certainly had a lengthy career. Jumpers was first published in 1972, and he was already an established and successful figure by then. It is fair to say that Jumpers now feels a bit dated, but Stoppard’s dazzling wordplay, and explorations of various philosophical dilemmas retain their vitality.

The basic plot is hard to summarise as it frequently ventures into the absurd, pulling off the tricky gambit of blending moments of pure farce with highbrow digressions into philosophy. Stoppard clearly had a very precise image of how the action should come across – the stage directions are exceptionally detailed, covering all sorts of minutiae. I enjoyed reading the play, and the fond memories it provoked of having read it thirty-five years ago at school, when it was still a fairly new play, but I imagine that it really needs to be seen to be experienced to its fullest.

17. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell.

Another dose of magic from The Master! This is the ninth volume of Anthony Powell's glorious largely autobiographical novel sequence 'A Dance to the Music of Time' and opens in 1942 with laid back narrator Nicholas Jenkins working as a captain in the army, now based in Whitehall on liaison duty with the Free Poles. All of the surviving principal characters from the sequence are here on display, not least the monstrous Kenneth Widmerpool whose relentless machinations and tireless ambitions have carried him to a significant niche in the convoluted hierarchies of Cabinet Office. Jenkins has, however, secured his escape from Widmerpool's immediate circle, and now operates among the immensely more civilised and sympathetic company of the intellectual David Pennistone, who manages to manoeuvre consideration of the history of philosophy into even the most straightforward of official transactions.

Although Jenkins does not participate in any direct action in the traditional sense of the word, his military career is far from incident free, and he has to trace a carefully-plotted path to avoid inflaming the delicate sensitivities of the various Allied and Neutral Powers with whose representatives he has to deal. Powell also offers us fascinating cameo appearances from Field Marshalls Montgomery and Allanbrokke, together with finely-drawn depictions of the tedium of red-tape laden administration. The final section of the novel includes a beautiful narration of the service at St Paul's Cathedral to commemorate the victory.

This was the first volume in the series in which the humour seems to outweigh the melancholia, which might explain why it is, I think, my favourite instalment in the whole sequence. There can be little dispute that the three war novels (The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art and this one) form the strongest group within the twelve. They also represent the finest war novels that I have read, for all their lack of direct military engagement.

18. Real Tigers by Mick Herron.

Mick Herron’s series featuring the inimitable Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’ goes from strength to strength. Lamb himself is an extraordinary creation, reminiscent of Reginald Hill’s burly and crass Superintendent Andy Dalziel, only far more dishevelled and boorish. His ‘slow horses’ are cast-offs from the elite world of MI5, each having been consigned to the equivalent of intelligence Siberia following a spectacular failure. They are a mixed bunch: Catherine Standish, middle aged and alcoholic, battling to make it through each day without slipping off the wagon; River Cartwright, whose survival in the Service might owe much to his grandfather who was one of its legendary figures; Louisa Guy, still grieving the loss of her partner who died during a misconceived operation the previous year; and Roderick Ho, the team’s computer nerd who takes dysfunctional behaviour to a new level.

This time around, the team finds itself under renewed pressure. Senior officials at the Service’s headquarters have lost patience with the slow horses, as has a politically ambitious Home Secretary. There are, however, greater dangers facing the slow horses, and these become evident when one of them is kidnapped and held hostage.

Herron is adept at developing watertight plots which he then peoples with colourful characters. His dialogue is masterful, too, peppered with hilarious exchanges though never to the extent that they compromise the serious narrative thread. The overall effect is intensely entertaining.

19. The House at Bishopsgate by Katie Hickman.

I really wanted to like this book, having been given it by a close friend, but it defeated me. Katie Hickman strove to generate a sultry atmosphere but I just found myself unable to buy into it, and the book simply became a chore. Perhaps it epitomises the idea that one should not judge a book by its cover – it is beautifully presented, with a lovely dust jacket and endpaper illustrations, but the style didn’t extend to the content, which I found unutterably tedious.

20. Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash.

This is an extraordinary novel, and defies cogent definition. At times it edges towards poetry, yet at other points it plums the depths of small town corruption and the squalor encountered in society’s hidden hinterlands.

As the book opens, Les, the sheriff of the unnamed Appalachian town, is due to take his early retirement in the next three weeks, and spends much of his time thinking about his new life to come. Meanwhile Becky, his close friend, is a forest ranger, dedicated to protecting the wild from human encroachment. Both of them have shadows across their past. Becky is also a poet, composing elegiac verse about the wonders of nature that she encounters every day. Les is waging war against the local crystal meth dealers, and each new raid is a further foray into the fringes of hell.

Against all this, Gerald Blackwelder, an aging local farmer, finds himself in an increasingly bitter feud with a local resort. Gerald, like Becky, loves all aspects of nature, and is particularly enthralled by the beauty of the trout to be found above a waterfall on the resort’s estate. The resort’s owner is concerned that Gerald’s grizzled countenance has alarmed some of his more urbane guests. Gerald has his own emotional and psychological baggage.

Rash’s language is amazing, allowing him to render poetic even the most mundane of actions. His characters are beautifully drawn, and all have their respective failings. Yet Rash does not allow the beauty of his prose to prevent the action fairly fizzing along. This was one of those novels that I was enchanted by, and while I was eager to discover how the plotlines would be resolved, I regretted having finished it as reading it had been simply so enjoyable. Scarcely a paragraph goes by without a beautiful image.

21. The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest.

I initially had such high hopes for this novel, only to see them dashed to matchwood as I persevered through it. The first hundred or so pages were enchanting, written in an engaging prose that sucked me into the story.

Something happened, however, about a third of the way through, with the immediacy of someone flicking a switch, and my interest in the characters and their parts in the convoluted relationships disappeared with the same instanteousness as Robert Burns's snowflake Landon on a river: 'a movement white, then melts forever'. Thereafter I felt mired in turgidity and relief came only when I felt the catharsis of deliberately leaving it on an empty seat on the Heathrow Express.

22. Last Night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel.

I first read this book a couple of years ago having been astounded by Emily St John Mandel's 'Station Eleven'. I had expected that ‘Station Eleven’ would romp home for the title of finest book that I would read during 2015. Marvellous though it was, however (and I recently re-read it, too, and found it even more enjoyable third time around), I think that 'Last Night in Montreal' eclipses it.

Right from the first page, when Lilia leaves the Brooklyn apartment that she shares with mature PhD student Eli, I was captivated by this hypnotic story. Lilia is beautiful, speaks four languages and can't stop travelling. She also has a complicated past.

As the novel opens she is in her early twenties and has been travelling through America, moving from city to city and never staying for long in any one place. We soon learn that this has been the story of her life, as far as she can remember. She was born in Montreal, though her parents separated shortly afterwards. Denied access for years, her father abducted her one evening and, having hastily driven south across the border into America, they just kept on moving.

Mandel drip feeds us little gobbets of information about the principal characters, moving around in time and place. Her father had taken on various careers after leaving Lilia's mother, from one of which he derived a sizeable fortune which would subsequently fund their chaotic odyssey throughout mainland America.

Eli has been studying dying languages, and enchants Lilia with some of his descriptions of metaphors and similes in remote dialects that completely defy translation. Bizarrely, however, he does not speak any ‘living’ languages apart from English.

Christopher is a private investigator hired to try to find and retrieve the abducted Lilia, though he gradually succumbs to a protective obsession with his quarry, to the extent that he neglects Michaela, his own young daughter back in Montreal. Michaela just wants to run away with the circus.

From these seemingly inchoate characters Mandel weaves a beautiful tapestry that manages to combine a road story with a lucid dissection of love, longing, loss, obsession and hope, with a gentle sprinkling of philology thrown in. What is more, she encompasses all this in just 250 pages that, once begun, are difficult to put down. The story is beautifully written, and the final chapter contains some of the most beguiling pages I have ever read.

Really interesting review for Above the Waterfall. It's not a book I'd pick up on my own, probably, but your review is making it really tempting.

>43 mabith:. I was very lucky to come across it. One of the staff in my local bookshop mentioned it during a conversation, and as I had just been paid I decided to take a punt on it. I am very glad I did

Great review for Last Night in Montreal Eyejaybee, but I am not meant to add any more books to my TBR pile...!?

23 Spook Street by Mick Herron.

Mick Herron’s series of espionage novels featuring Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’ goes from strength to glorious strength. The ‘slow horses’ are intelligence officers who have been cast into ignominious exile in Slough House, the repository for the Security Service’s has-beens and failures. Jackson Lamb is himself a marvellous creation, resounding with an almost Dickensian monstrosity, eating, drinking, farting and swearing his way through the day, and never happier than when crushing one of his staff with unremitting and deliberately wounding rudeness. Jackson Lamb reminds me of Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Andy Dalziel, just without the Beau Brummell charm.

Herron does not, however, rely solely upon the grotesqueness of Lamb’s character. His plots are well constructed, watertight and all too plausible. Spook Street opens with what appears to be a flash mob prank at a large shopping mall in West London which rapidly becomes a gruesome act of terrorism, with dozens of victims. In the wake of this outrage the Security Service, now under new management following the events of the previous novel, is stretched to the limit as is struggles to find any leads. Meanwhile David Cartwright, grandfather of River, one of Lamb’s ‘slow horses’, and formerly an eminence grise within MI5, is growing increasingly worried. Sometimes he is convinced that he is being watched, while at other moments he begins to doubt his own sanity. It is, therefore, perhaps unfortunate that he still has his old Service revolver close to hand.

Each of the ‘slow horses’ has their own individual frailties and failings, often gleefully mocked by Lamb with the utmost disregard for their feelings. They do, however, complement each other, and over the last three novels have gelled together into a capable, if unorthodox, team. Meanwhile, their counterparts within the Service’s mainstream, housed at Regent Park, have more than enough of their own problems, particularly as they face additional scrutiny following the revelations in ‘Real Tigers’.

Herron has the happy knack of combining gripping spy stories with colourful characters, strewn with moments of high comedy. All utterly entertaining.

24. Codeword Cromwell by Ted Allbeury.

I seem to have a very slow learning curve, which is not a comfortable admission for someone who works for the Department for Education. Uncomfortable, but unavoidable as, yet again, I found myself in the predicament of having finished my previous book without having made adequate literary provision for the commute back home. I didn’t even have my Kindle with me, and, being out of signal range, I was reduced to seeing what books were already loaded on my iPhone.

I think I downloaded this in a fervour of misplaced enthusiasm, after hearing about another of Allbeury’s novels, ‘The Twentieth Day of January’ which had some pertinence in the run up to President Trump’s inauguration. I chose poorly with that book, and I repeated the error here.

Perhaps my response to this book was exacerbated by the fact that I had just finished an excellent spy thriller, Mick Herron’s ‘Spook Street’ which was one of the finest in that genre that I have read. Allbeury’s book was of an entirely different character. Emotionally stilted and labouring under the weight of a plot whose implausibility matched the woodenness of its characters.

I was left wondering why Allbeury bothered. More to the point, why did I?

25. The Disappearance of Emile Zola by Michael Rosen.*

Emile Zola’s connection with the Dreyfus Affair is well known. His open letter, titled ‘J’Accuse’ and published in L’Aurore (edited by Georges Clemencau, who subsequently became French Prime Minister), brought international attention to the scandal and was a major contribution to the campaign that would, eventually (and woefully belatedly) see Captain Dreyfus pardoned for his wrongful conviction of treason.

Less, though, is known about Zola’s disappearance in July 1898. Zola had suffered for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, and in addition to heated public invective he was prosecuted for libel arising from his claims that the court martial proceedings against Dreyfus had been fixed from the onset. On 18 July, in advance of the declaration of the verdict in that libel case, Zola left Paris, eventually turning up in London. The verdict found Zola guilty, and he was fined 3,000 francs and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. The libel case has already proved a cause célèbre, with extensive press coverage and a crowd had gathered to bay for Zola’s head as he left the court on the previous day. His disappearance became, therefore, a major media event, prompting press exuberance across Europe.

Michael Rosen has explored how Zola spent his time in England following his escape from France, and has woven an enlightening account of the novelist’s life and works during that period. Zola’s personal life was involved, to say the least. He had been married for many years to the long-suffering Alexandrine but had also maintained a lengthy liaison with his mistress, Jeanne, (whom he addressed in his many letters as ‘Chère femme’), with whom he had two children. Nothing too surprising there, perhaps when one applies British stereotypes of French writers. What was less predictable, however, was that Zola’s wife would not only countenance Jeanne travelling with the children to be with Zola in England while she remained in Paris, but would actually make all the necessary arrangements herself.

Rosen offers a clear and engaging portrayal of Zola’s life in England, where he struggled to adapt to the life of an exile in what he clearly considered to be a most uncivilised country. Although he developed a liking for local Sunday roast lunches, for the most part he was appalled by the culinary fare on offer, finding even such staples as bread to be barely palatable. His sociological observations were far from sympathetic, too, coming to view the English as a nation of relentless litter louts. This did not prevent him from putting his time in England to good use, and he completed his novel Fécondité and planned its companion volumes.

Rosen is himself well known for his espousal of liberalism and has campaigned vociferously for the spread of literacy, and particularly for prisoners’ wider access to books, so it is clear that he and Zola are kindred spirits. His book is a sound tribute: informative, enlightening and engaging.

26. The Weather Experiment by Peter Moore.*

Peter Moore’s on the history of weather forecasting book is one of those hidden gems that seem to sneak under the critics’ radar and avoid any public attention. I only encountered it by chance – one of those serendipitous discoveries that bring such delight to the fortunate reader who happens upon them.

In describing it above as a history of weather forecasting I realise that I am doing the book a great disservice. While that is indeed the central theme, Moore offers us so much more than that, detailing the major advances from the Age of Enlightenment right up to the modern day. En route we are taken through a brief history of the Ordnance Survey, the development of the methodology for classifying clouds, analysis and measurement of the winds and an history of Samuel Morse’s development of the telegraph. What emerges most clearly is how, right from the start, efforts to predict the weather were adopted by the military establishment. Indeed, the Met Office was founded by Admiral Robert Fitzroy.

Moore has that happy knack of being able to convey often technical information with a clarity and accessibility that enables the simplest of lay readers (i.e. me) to absorb and understand it. He also imparts a great enthusiasm to a subject that may, on the face of it, seem unpromising as the material for a popular science book.

27. Black Water Lilies by Michel Bussi.

Michel Bussi’s novel is a mixture of modern murder mystery and potted biography of Claude Monet along with an appreciation of his art (and in particular the series of painting of water lilies for which he is most famous). Set in Monet’s home village of Giverny, the novel opens with the discovery of a corpse that has been stabbed, then battered with a heavy rack and then plunged into the river as if to make absolutely sure.

The story alternatives between a first-person narrative from an old woman who is free to observe the comings and goings of the villagers while remaining largely unnoticed, and an omniscient author’s description of the police investigation into the murder, which is led by Inspector Laurenç Sérénac, a newcomer to the area who had previously lived in the deep south of France. A further narrative focuses on Fanette, a young girl who attends the local school in Giverny, and who is very gifted.

The murder victim had a reputation as a ladies’ man and the police identify this as the most probably cause of the murder. Shortly afterwards Sérénac receives a package, from an unknown sender, which contains photographs of the victim with several different women. Sérénac identifies one of these women as the local school teacher, and goers to interview her. She is beguilingly beautiful, and Sérénac falls utterly under her spell.

Meanwhile the investigation continues, described against a backdrop of Monet’s paintings. Bussi takes the opportunity to educate the reader about Monet’s life and art, though this is never obtrusive. It does, however, add to the hypnotic atmosphere.

I bought in to this novel completely, all the way until the last twenty or thirty pages. I was, though, unconvinced by the ending which I found too contrived. Judging by the critics’ comments quoted on the cover, I seem to have been in a minority of one in that regard.

28. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell.*

This was a simply marvellous book, with that added savour that comes from a serendipitous acquisition. I happened to be on a bit of a spree in Waterstone’s and came across this entirely by chance. Recognising that I knew virtually nothing about existentialism I hurled caution to the wind and added it to my pile. For once, I chose wisely.

Sarah Bakewell writes with a charming lightness of touch, and has the happy knack of conveying interesting though occasionally complex ideas with a charming simplicity and clarity. Her book is, essentially, a potted history of existentialist thought with some illuminating biographies of many of the leading proponents. Her principal focus is on Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though it extends to some of their contacts and counterparts, with interesting sections about fellow philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Bakewell recounts how Sartre and de Beauvoir were drinking in the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in early 1933 with Raymond Aron, a school friend of de Beauvoir. He had recently returned from Berlin where he had been studying phenomenology, a new branch of philosophy of which the leading proponent was Husserl. Sartre and de Beauvoir were so impressed by what Aron told them that they immediately decided that they had to go to Berlin and discover more for themselves. This was, of course, an unpropitious time to be going to Berlin, with Hitler’s National Socialist party have just been ‘jobbed into power’. This was to prove more than a little significant in the life of Martin Heidegger, who would become one of the leading existentialists of his time.

Bakewell’s depiction of Sartre and de Beauvoir is intriguing. Though in their own long term relationship, they both took other lovers with a remarkable frequency, but always swore to keep the other informed of their various sexual exchanges. They were both prolific writers, seemingly capable of producing books, journal articles and semi-political tracts almost at will. The world of philosophy, or at least the community of philosophers, through which they moved was not always a sociable environment, and disputes about specifics could lead to deep, irreparable rifts. Bakewell captures this marvellously, though she never lets the detail of the various fallings out obscure her narrative flow.

Informative and entertaining, without ever succumbing to the risk of dumbing down, this is a simply dazzling book.

Major book bullet with At the Existentialist Cafe. Though I had to give up reading Sartre stories in high school as they were making me so depressed.

>52 mabith: having just enjoyed At the Existentialist Cafe so much I am looking forward to reading some Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though I did sense a predisposition towards the depressing end of the spectrum from Sarah Bakewell's descriptions of them.

I read Les Mains Sales for French A level, but have never quite got round to trying any other Sartre in the 32 years since then.

29. The List by Mick Herron.

Mick Herron has tapped a rich mine with his stories about the ‘slow horses’, the aspiring officers of the intelligence service exiled for their respective faux pas to Slough House where they fall under the chaotic, and often vitriolic, management of Jackson Lamb. Lamb himself has little more than a walk-on role in this novella, but he doesn’t need to be there for long to make his presence felt. He is characteristically brutal when he encounters JK Coe, newly appointed to the service, who has been coerced by John Bachelor, an old hand (though not of Lamb’s prehistoric vintage) to investigate a series of names uncovered in the home of a recently deceased East German double-agent.

Herron’s touch is marvellous. He blends elements of great comedy with carefully crafted plotlines, but never allows one aspect to compromise the other. His books stand up on their own as high quality spy fiction, while their humour puts them in a cast of their own.

30. The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness.

I was introduced to the work of Nobel Laureate Halldor Laxness by Rory McTurk, my tutor at Leeds University what now seems about a hundred years ago. Although he initially just taught me Old English, Dr (indeed later Professor) McTurk was one of Britain’s leading authorities on Old Norse literature, but was almost as enthusiastic about contemporary Icelandic fiction too.

I fear that Rory’s enthusiasm was not infectious, and although I dabbled in some of Laxness’s works back in the early 1980s, I found I just couldn’t properly get to grips with them. I did, however, feel a flush of fond memories of sipping beer (or even mead) with Rory and his colleague Tom Shippey when I saw a special display of this Laxness book in my local bookstore, and succumbed to a purchase on a wave of nostalgia. I think, on refelction, that that was a mistake. I would have better served my mentor’s memory by returning to the sagas or a quick romp through The Battle of Maldon.

The basic premise of this novel is sound, which was why I fell for the blurb on the cover. Published in the close aftermath of the Second World War, the book revolves around the true story of plans for the United States of America to buy significant plots of land in Iceland on which to establish a major airbase (that would eventually become Keflavik). This provoked major protests across Iceland, which are recounted by a simple country girl who has come to Reykjavik from her home in the north of the island to work as a maid for the family of a member of the Thing, the Icelandic parliament.

This allows Laxness great scope to comment on the bourgeois lifestyle in Reykjavik compared with the maid’s harsh prior existence in the untamed hinterlands. Of course, there is a sort of parallax effect reading this now in Paris in 2015, a perspective from which the Reykjavik of 1948 seems irredeemably lacking in any hint of bourgeois comfort or complacency. The maid’s sense of wonder as she moves through her new environment is certainly endearing.

Unfortunately, the novel has not aged well. The political tension fuelling the historic context should have cut through the gap in time, but the characters now seem hopelessly flat and stilted. Laxness also seemed to try too hard to cast some air of charm or oddness about the family that employs the maid. Perhaps something was lost in translation, but I just found this to be an exercise in misplaced quirkiness that lacked the comic deftness to bring it off.

Sorry, Rory!

31. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman.

As a young boy I revelled in Roger Lancelyn Green’s reworking of old legends, and remember reading and rereading his collection, Tales of the Norsemen, which introduced me to Odin, Thor, Loki and the rest of the Norse gods. So, it seems, did Neil Gaiman, and he pays tribute to Green’s books, and also to Kevin Crosseley-Holland’s more modern recounting of the stories in the foreword to his own retelling. He brings the stories to life, rendering the stories accessible without compromising the nature of the originals.

I imagine that the Norse myths must provide a wealth of study material for the anthropologist. There is a lack of cohesion in the form behind the stories. There are many times when the Norse gods seem almost human. Early on, Odin is so desperate to drink from Mimr’s well, recognised as a source of wisdom and foresight, that he is prepared to sacrifice one of his eyes. Zeus or Apollo could have generated a hundred new eyes at the drop of a hat if they had so wished, but Odin was condemned to remaining one-eyed from then onwards. At other times, however, the gods seem capable of changing form and size.

Loki, steeped in mischief and mindless evil, has to borrow the goddess Freya’s falcon suit in order to fly, but in the same incident can suddenly turn another character into a hazelnut. Tyr, god of war, loses his sword hand while trying to subdue Fenris, the monstrous wolf, and is left to fight left-handed thereafter.

Gaiman writes these compelling stories in a simple, straightforward manner, bringing out their charm and an essential humour – there is, after all, a boyish camaraderie between Thor and Loki … at least, when Thor isn’t threatening to kill Loki. Gaiman also reflects, however, the grim side to the myths which resonate with the underlying tragedy of existence. Everything the gods do is set against their awareness of the approach of Ragnarok, the final battle between the gods and the giants, which would mark the end of the world. The gods knew that, like mortal men, they too might be doomed, and passed their time in Asgard knowing that their time was gradually, relentlessly, ticking away.

This is an excellent introduction for anyone yet to discover the Norse myths, and an enjoyable reworking for any old hands such as myself.

>31 wookiebender: Good to know! I bought this on a whim the other day; I'm glad I won't need much prior knowledge of the Norse myths (mine consists entirely of the Avengers movie).

32. The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes.

I found reading (well, actually, re-reading) this beautiful novel reminiscent of the first time I met my wife. On that occasion I remember listening utterly spellbound, hanging on every word (indeed, every syllable) of that mellifluous Scottish accent as she spoke so earnestly and enthusiastically about The Dream of the Rood and The Battle of Maldon. Simultaneously, however, in another part of my brain, all I was aware of were the fireworks going off in my head and the glorious fanfare that was playing (and I do believe there might even have been a choir of angels), utterly amazed that this extraordinary woman was not only talking to me but even seemed interested in what I might have to say, or at least pretended to be.

This book brought a similar sense of dichotomous dislocation. Even reading it for a second time, I wanted so anxiously to complete it, to know how it would be resolved. Meanwhile, I also wanted to read it as slowly as I feasibly could, to savour the experience and wring every last modicum of pleasure from it.

This short but beautifully crafted novel, so worthy of the Man Booker Prize that it won in 2011, is narrated by Tony Webster who starts by recollecting the latter years of his schooldays in the 1960s at a prestigious London independent school (presumably modelled closely on City of London School which Barnes attended). Tony had two close friends with whom he had formed a gauche clique, affecting an intellectual detachment rather beyond their mental capacity. However, a new boy, Adrian, joins the school during their time in the sixth form and is soon adopted as guru by the other boys. They all complete their school careers fairly successfully, with Adrian winning a scholarship to Cambridge with Tony secures a place at Bristol where he reads history.

During his time at Bristol Tony meets and falls for Veronica, a girl from a socially more elevated family from Surrey. Their relationship develops slowly, and is never wholly comfortable. Indeed, it gradually peters out. Shortly afterwards Tony receives a letter from Adrian bearing the news that he and Veronica are now a couple. We are told that, deeply angry and hurt, Tony wrote a letter back, expressing his views of how Adrian and Veronica have behaved. We learn that he went on to meet, and subsequently marry Margaret with whom he has a daughter, Susie. Tony and Margaret are now divorced but still on relatively amicable terms.

At this point the first chapter or section of the novel closes. As the second section opens, back in the current day, Tony himself receives a letter, this one from a solicitor, which sets him thinking once again about those long lost days.

It is difficult to classify this novel - there is no fast action but it does have elements of a thriller in the way that Barnes controls how much we learn about Veronica and Adrian, and even Tony. Tautly, but elegantly written, it holds its readers attention through to the very last word.

33. Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.

I think that this novel is only really challenged by The Code of the Woosters for the honour of being the finest story about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

There are a lot of things one can say about P G Wodehouse's books - immature, very childish, total unworldly, lacking in any political or ecological conscience … It is difficult to challenge any of those judgements (and I should know because most of them have been applied, regularly to me, too). However, I prefer to think of them as exquisite, beautifully written, faultlessly constructed, charming and ceaselessly entertaining. Sadly all too few of those epithets have ever been applied to me!

Right Ho, Jeeves is, to my mind, the apotheosis of Wodehouse's world. His plots are always full of Byzantine twists, his characters are usually hilarious, but in this novel he excelled his own extremely high standards and brought off a comedy classic.

There are two set pieces in particular (Gussie Fink-Nottle's address when presenting the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School's Speech Day, and the stream of outrage from Anatole, the sublimely talented yet extremely temperamental French chef, when Gussie appears to be pulling faces at him through the skylight of his bedroom) which must rank among the finest examples of humorous writing. If one is prepared briefly to suspend disbelief and enter Wodehouse's world the rewards are enormous. This particular book was first published in 1934, but is already looking back to an unspecified Corinthian past, largely of Wodehouse's own imagining.

In this world, gentlemen always wear suits, and occasionally spats though never (in England, anyway) white mess jackets, or not, at least, if Jeeves has his way. They also never bandy a lady's name or break an engagement, no matter how disastrously they might view the prospect of nuptials. Bertie Wooster, though not the brightest chap ever to have ventured into metropolitan life, is a stickler for such correct behaviour, and frequently finds himself beset as a consequence.

Wodehouse's writing is a joy - always grammatically perfect, yet he is able to capture the different voices with clinical precision. Bertie rambles in a manner now reminiscent of Boris Johnson (though without the egregious narcissism) though, of course, in reality it is the other way round with Johnson trying to be like Wooster, but lacking the charm to pull it off while Jeeves favours a cultured orotundity of speech, peppered with a mixture of highly scholarly references to poetry and philosophy bathetically contrasted with allusions to his rather bizarre-sounding family. The plots are immensely intricate, to the extent that they make Agatha Christie's novel seem entirely transparent, but Wodehouse always ties up every loose end, no matter how impossible that might seem even just one or two chapters from the end of the book.

I have read this novel several times before, and am confident that I will read it several times again, as it never fails to cheer me up.

34. The Unexpected Professor by John Carey.*

I was looking forward to this book for quite some time. John Carey is one of the most revered academics of his time, having risen to Merton Professor of English Literature and established himself as one of the leading anti-elitist literary critics. In this latter capacity, he twice chaired the Man Booker Prize Committee. Taking all of this into account, I was anticipating an enjoyable saunter through his literary memoirs. Sadly, that hope never materialised. Despite what I imagine to be a wealth of opportunities for amusing literary anecdotes, this book never quite got into its stride.

Despite his reputation for concise reviews, his own book seemed curiously long-winded. The passages about his childhood at grammar school and then as an undergraduate in Oxford seemed curiously sterile. I was, admittedly, disappointed to find him so dismissive of Old English (though he did concede the wonders to be encountered in the works of Chaucer), but I would have felt that mattered less if he had spent longer discussing the works that he did enjoy.

35. Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift.

In the 1920s, Mothering Sunday had not degenerated into the commercialised ‘Mother’s Day’ of today. It was, instead, a special occasion, particularly for the maids and other domestic servants around the country who would normally be excused work and allowed to return home for the day.

In Graham Swift’s beautiful novel, most of the action occurs on that one day, 30 March 1924. Having no mother, Jane Fairchild, maidservant to the Niven household, is looking forward to spending the day away from home. The Nivens are kind employers, and Jane has already been granted certain concessions during her time working for them. She does, however, have particular plans for that free day.

Swift always writes beautifully, and here he captures Jane’s feelings as her day proceeds. There is a momentary fear early on that she might be asked to complete some unexpected task, or that the Niven family’s own plans might change, leaving her own schemes unresolved. Her hopes, fears and resentments are made tangible.

While most of the action is centred on that one day, we do learn something of Jane’s future. In his masterful early novel, ‘Waterland’, Swift explored the possibilities of narratives set in different times, offering dexterously managed flashbacks within flashbacks, and an almost architectural structure of memories within memories. Here he turns that mechanism on its head, with enticing flashes forward, and we have hints of Jane being interviewed in her nineties, having become a successful novelist, drawing much of her inspiration from the events of that day.

This is a short novel (I read it within an afternoon), but beautifully formed, and one that will stay with the reader for a long time.

Thanks for introducing Mick Herron. Slow Horses was a really good read, and I've just started Dead Lions.

>63 pamelad: I am glad you enjoyed it :)

I've been hit with a big book bullet for Mothering Sunday.

>65 mabith: Sorry :)

36. Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale.*

I remember learning about the Russian Revolution, or rather, Revolutions, of 1917 as part of my History O Level course, nearly forty years ago now. My teacher, Mr Nigel Johnson, stressed, repeatedly, that one of the key reasons behind the failure of the first phase of the insurrection to capitalise upon the enforced abdication of the Tsar to introduce a new, enduring socialist regime, was the absence of experienced, seasoned revolutionaries. At the time of the initial rising, Lenin, for example, was in exile in Switzerland, working doggedly each day in his local library, desperately struggling to keep abreast of emerging political ideas and news from his homeland.

When he heard of the success of that first rising, Lenin and his cronies, all exiled throughout western Europe in a form of communist Diaspora, were desperate to return, to help the cause, and also to stake their own respective claims in the emerging power vacuum. This was more easily said than done. The First World War was nearing the end of its third year, and in addition to the military forces campaigning across the continent, the various nations all had extensive networks of intelligence agents at work virtually everywhere.

For Lenin, the greatest imperative was to return to Russia to enable the revolution to push through to secure Russia’s withdrawal from the war. This was of obvious advantageous to Germany, who was engaged on two fronts, but would prove disastrous to France and Britain. Germany was, therefore, eager to help Lenin, but the issue was not quite as simple as that. If he were to return to Russia too obviously through the beneficence of Germany, his motives, and his loyalty to Mother Russia, would be questioned. The solution hit upon was to transport Lenin across Germany from the Swiss border through to Sweden in a sealed train. From there Lenin and his retinue would travel further north, before crossing into Finland and then back down into Russia.

Catherine Merridale’s marvellous book details the various stages of this grim journey, conducted in cramped conditions with inadequate food and drink, limited access to any facilities and scant assurance of success. Interspersed with this account she outlines the progress of the revolution, and the struggles of the Provisional Government and the Soviet Executive Committee to administer a country that was imploding without adequate food or munitions supplies. The trains did, however, run more or less to time – one of my friends remarked that if the network had been run by Southern Rail, we would still have a Tsar today.

There have been plenty of histories of the Revolution, and we can expect a flurry of new ones in this centenary year. Few, however, can match the accessibility, fluency and downright engagement of Catherine Merridale’s book. She has that happy knack of explaining complex issues with a clarity that gains and securely retains the reader’s attention. This is history writing at its best – accurate, brief and clear, drawn from extensive, well-marshalled research.

Beastly unfair to strike me down with two book bullets in a row. I'm trying to really get a grip on 20th century Russian history in the next few years and Lenin on the Train sounds perfect.

>68 mabith:. Sorry, Meredith. I just thoroughly enjoyed it.

37. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing.*

I found reading this book a difficult but immensely rewarding experience. Olivia Laing writes beautifully, with a style that captures and retains the reader’s attention right from the opening paragraph. At the most simple level this is a book that explores the nature and impact of loneliness, though it offers so much more than that.

Olivia Laing moved to New York to be with a man with whom she had fallen in love, though shortly after her arrival there the relationship foundered. Her plans left utterly awry she had to find accommodation for herself (which she achieved through a series of sublets from friends of friends of friends, and then try to carve out a new life for herself in a city in which she was a complete outsider. She achieved that, but succumbed at times to a crushing, almost immobilising, loneliness, which led her to research what was merely suspected, and what was actually understood, about that sensation.

Her exegesis of the nature of loneliness is fascinating, and she renders the psychological analyses in a completely accessible manner. It is, however, also heartrendingly sad in places, and there were times when I simply had to stop reading for a while. Such was the power of her writing, however, that after a brief hiatus, I returned agog for more.

Along the way, she also explores the effect of loneliness on the work of several prominent artists, including Edward Hopper, David Wojnarowicz and Andy Warhol, all of whom suffered from crushing loneliness throughout their careers. Laing recapitulates their respective careers with a brisk but engaging analysis, and demonstrates how their early experiences of isolation, disenfranchisement and loneliness contributed to their eventual success. Laing also delivers a brief history of the emergence and eventual diagnosis of AIDS, and the marginalisation that it wrought upon the gay community in the early years after its identification.

A courageous and moving book.

38. Night Trains by Andrew Martin.*

I met Andrew Martin by chance a few years ago when I happened to be drinking in one of the very welcoming pubs in Highgate, North London, and was introduced by a mutual acquaintance. I was rather the worse for wear and my contribution to the conversation was simply to tell him, probably more than once, that I had enjoyed his novel ‘Bilton’ and was disappointed that it hadn’t achieved greater commercial success. He was suitably gratified by this genuine assertion, though he politely but firmly indicated that he would prefer to return to reading the book he had brought in with him.

‘Bilton’ is indeed a great novel, and it has had far too little recognition. Martin is, therefore, perhaps best known for his series of crime novels, set on the Victorian railway network and featuring Jim Stringer. Comprehensively researched, they clearly show that he is a man who knows his railways, and that interest comes into its own for this book, a history of the heyday and subsequent decline of Europe’s sleeper trains.

The sleeper first established itself as a viable concept during the late nineteenth century, and most countries in Europe had flourishing networks to support them. During that period, the most prevalent travellers by sleeper trains were affluent Britons or Americans, and that was to continue throughout most of the twentieth century. Sleeper trains have always evoked a certain frisson, not least because of their portrayal in fiction and in films. Agatha Christie set two novels (‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’) and a short story on continental sleepers, and Graham Greene’s commercial breakthrough came with his thriller, ‘Stamboul Train’. These were, however, merely the slightest tip of the iceberg.

Martin’s book looks at the popularity of these fictional versions of the sleeper journey, and compares them to the modern reality. Sadly, the sleeper is an endangered species, with most of the recent services being under imminent threat of termination. To understand why this might be, and how dreadful a loss their cancellation might be, Martin travelled along the routes of the most famous services.

He also touched on Lenin's journey in the 'sealed train' that conveyed him back to Russia following the first wave of the Russian Revolution in 1917. As I had so recently read Catherine Merridale's highly entertaining account of that journey 'Lenin on the Train', i found his summary of it unnecessarily trivial. He might have been wiser to avoid any reference to it at all.

I found this slightly disappointing. While he showed a tendency to slump into Paul Theroux’s relentless moaning and resentment, he lacked Theroux’s capacity for glorious observation. Even at his most deprecating (and he can be exceedingly deprecating when moved) Theroux can always captivate his reader with a pellucid description of his locale. Martin does not have, or at least does not deploy, that facility. As a consequence, while I found the subject matter interesting, and did enjoy the book overall, it was not the unalloyed joy that I had expected.

39 The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron.

This is the second of Mick Herron’s novels to feature Oxford-based private detective, Zoe Boehm. I only discovered Mick Herron this year, and have devoured his espionage novels featuring the grotesque Jackson Lamb. Driven on by me enjoyment of them I have been working through his previous novels, written a decade ago.

This was a well-constructed novel. Zoe Boehm is an engaging and plausible character, and Herron has a gift for writing watertight plots. Somehow, though, this novel never quite fired my enthusiasm. I was sufficiently intrigued to keep reading through to the end, but never found the same zeal that his Jackson Lamb novels have provoked. It is certainly a bit too long. The closing scenes were drawn out quite unnecessarily.

The denouement is clever, however, and the linking of the various subplots, which had seemed so disparate, is clever. I wonder whether I had simply made the mistake of reading a few too many of his books within too short a space of time. I am always prepared to accept that some of the fault can lie with me as a reader.

40. Shadows on the Grass by Simon Raven.*

Simon Raven is probably best known as the author of the ‘Alms for Oblivion’ series of ten novels. Like Anthony Powell’s marvellous ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ sequence, those novels are largely autobiographical, with Raven being represented by the character of Fielding Gray (with a few embellishments). There the similarity ends. Powell’s chronicle is gently paced, with an almost hypnotic impact as the characters gather substance. Raven’s roman fleuve is more direct, with every character flawed and self-serving, often with hilarious impact, though tragedy is never far away either.

Raven described this volume as a "cricketing memoir" but it is essentially a collection of extremely funny, utterly scurrilous anecdotes from his time at Charterhouse (from which he was expelled for “the usual thing”), Cambridge and then the army, covering the period from about 1944 to 1960.

None of his friends escape entirely unscathed from these recollections, though most of those who emerge with the greatest slurs on their reputations were already dead by time the book was published. It is, however, usually Raven himself who is portrayed as having behaved in the vilest manner (and contrition is largely absent).

Anyone familiar with the "Alms for Oblivion" novel sequence will readily recognise the source for many of the narrative episodes, and it is extremely amusing to try to identify the paradigms for the likes of Somerset Lloyd-James and Peter Morrison.

However, I am confident that even a new reader who has neither encountered any of Raven's fiction, nor ever shown any previous interest in cricket, will still find this book entertaining.

41. East West Street by Philippe Sands.*

Philippe Sands has produced a gem of a book, in which he combines an account of the development of the international law addressing crimes against humanity and genocide, with a history of the city known at different times by the names of Lvov, Lemberg and Lviv (among others) and a heart-rending account of the fate of several members of his family in the Holocaust.

The city now known as Lviv is currently in Ukraine, though at different times in the past it was in Poland and the Soviet Union, and had fallen under the control of several different forces and regimes. It was also the birthplace in 1897 of Hersch Lauterpacht, a leading academic lawyer of the early twentieth century who would be one of the principal architects of the internationally recognised law covering crimes against humanity. Later it would be the home of Rafael Lemkin, another academic lawyer, who would champion the importance of prosecuting genocide.

Nowadays, with the tragic proliferation of atrocities coming under the purview of the International Court, the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ have come to be viewed in the public consciousness as similar, almost to the point of being synonymous. They are, however, markedly different. The former relates to crimes against groups (linked either by nationality, religion, or some other shared characteristic), whereas the latter covers the body of widespread murder and/or persecution that does depend upon a single shared identifying feature.

Sands tracks the development of Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin’s respective theories, including their spells working in the same universities (though at different times), and their attempt to draw support for their ideas about how those theories could be implemented. It is important to understand the historical context against which they were working. Hitler had assumed power in Germany and was already developing plans for what would evolve into the Final Solution.

Interwoven with the stories of Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin’s exploration of the legal implications of crimes against humanity and genocide, and the difficulties in establishing the culpability of nation states, is the story of Sands’s own family. This centres on the plight of his grandfather Leon, who was himself born in Lvov, but who fled to escape the increasingly vicious antisemitism that was manifesting itself there.

This may all sound rather dry, but nothing could be further from the case. Sands writes with clarity and flair. He is a practising barrister, with considerable experience of cases of international law, and also Professor of Law at University College London, so not only understands the importance of the distinction between Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin’s views, but is adroit at explaining them to the lay reader.

The overall impact of this book is astounding. Beautifully written, and deeply moving at times, Sands demonstrates the importance of law, and the necessity of clear thinking when drawing up legislation. I seem to be reading a lot more non-fiction than usual this year, and have read some absolute corkers, but I don’t think any have matched up to this one.

sounds really interesting, Ian, I'll check that one out.

I will pass it on to you when I am back in the office if you like, John.

I will pass it on to you when I am back in the office if you like.

okay thanks, Ian, that's kind of you. Hope you're having a good holiday.

42. The Black Box by Michael Connelly.

I always enjoy reading books set in Los Angeles, having lived in one of the rougher areas of the city for a year, during my student days in the 1980s. Whenever I mention having lived in LA to my colleagues now, they immediately conjure up images of great glamour, until I tell them that I lived in Watts, one of the areas that bore the brunt of the riots in the early 1990s that followed the disgraceful acquittal of the officers involved in the Rodney King beating.

Michael Connelly’s novel series featuring jaundiced detective Harry Bosch, certainly focus on the grim reality of much of life in LA, combining sound, watertight plots with gritty descriptions and highly plausible characters. This book opens with the discovery of the body of a young woman who had been killed during those riots following the court’s verdict in 1991. The body had been discovered by members of the National Guard who had been called in to supplement uniformed police in quelling the riots and widespread looting. It subsequently emerged that the dead woman was a Danish journalist, and the assumption was that she had been covering the troubles but strayed into the wrong location at the wrong time. After the National Guard had called in the discovery, Harry Bosch was one of the officers that had attended the scene, though the subsequent investigation had been taken over by detectives from the local police precinct. Twenty years on the case remains unsolved, although Bosch is working on it again as a cold case.

Connelly has a long track record of writing books that hold his readers’ attention, and this is no exception. The book moves with great pace, though there is always a clear explanation of each development. Bosch finds himself under review for disciplinary issues (a fairly standard element of any Harry Bosch novel – Bosch might be seen as LA’s equivalent of Ian Rankin’s John Rebus: an old school copper who secures results but invariably rubs his bosses up the wrong way.

A good, solid and engaging thriller, and another sound addition to the Bosch oeuvre.

43. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell*.

I suspect that 2017 is going to be the year of Sarah Bakewell, as far as I am concerned. I was enchanted by her ‘At the Existentialist Café’ a couple of months ago, and found this book even more delightful: informative, insightful and immensely entertaining.

Michel de Montaigne lived in France during the sixteenth century and his collection of ‘Essays’ (a term that he coined) is one of the most important and enduring works of the late Renaissance. His life was spent in the pursuit of knowledge and a relentless quest to sate his boundless curiosity. Having been born into the nobility, his father sent him out to be fostered by a family of local peasants for the first two years of his life. Thereafter he was brought back to the family home, but his father insisted that the child be brought up as a natural speaker of Latin, employing a tutor to teach the infant from the onset of his attempts to talk. From his father he inherited a love of books, and a position of relative ease, though he embarked on a career in local government, eventually being appointed joint Mayor of Bordeaux. This was not a sinecure, and his administration required tactful navigation of a time when religious sectarianism was flaring out of control throughout France.

Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ defy definition incorporating elements of autobiography, political commentary and personal observation along with highly imaginative speculation about the nature and wonders of life. The ‘Essays’ were written over a considerable period spanning most of Montaigne’s life, and his position did not remain consistent. While nominally a Roman Catholic, many commentators have speculated whether he was actually an atheist; others suspect him of Protestant sympathies.

Sarah Bakewell’s book is equally hard to categorise. While essentially telling the story of Montaigne’s life, it also presents a high quality literary critique of the ‘Essays’, analyses the prevailing philosophical views of the time and offers an enthralling history of France in that troubled century. She also provides an extensive exegesis of the responses to Montaigne in the centuries following his death. It is, indeed, nothing less than a rhapsodic paean to Montaigne’s work, fired by Bakewell’s extensive knowledge and clearness fondness for the book. It is not, however, a hagiography, and she does not refrain from criticising some of the weaknesses that she identifies in Montaigne’s approach.

Like Montaigne himself, who has been feted for centuries as a surprisingly accessible writer, Bakewell has an appealing lightness of touch, and the book is a joy to read throughout.

44. Hamlet: Globe to Globe by Dominic Dromgoole.*

Dominic Dromgoole was director of The Globe Theatre up until his retirement in 2016, which marked the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In 2014, The Globe marked the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of The Bard’s birth by staging all thirty-seven of his plays in in different languages, featuring theatre companies from around the world. This proved to be a runaway success, securing full houses and almost unanimous critical acclaim. To top this, Dromgoole and colleagues decided to mark the run up to the celebrations in 2016 by taking ‘Hamlet’ to every country in the world in the course of two years.

Right from the start, this plan encountered problems. Visas proved difficult (and expensive), and at any one time each member of the company would have one passport with them with the ‘Mission Control’ team back at the Globe held second (or even third) versions with which to chase up outstanding visas and other documentation for future destinations. There were, of course, considerable difficulties with regard to some countries. The inclusion in their itinerary of North Korea drew considerable negative media attention, though other destinations (Syria for example) would also prove problematical

Domgoole did not spend the whole two years travelling with the ‘Hamlet’ company himself. After all, he still had a full programme of performances at The Globe itself to oversee. He did fly out frequently to catch up with them, and to help with the promotion of the programme, and was, consequently, present at many inspired and inspiring performances, and witnessed bizarre stagings and receptions.

At the most basic level, this book recounts their experiences. It does, however, offer the reader so much more as well. Dromgoole dissects the play and offers intriguing analyses of the character of Hamlet himself, while also flagging up Shakespeare’s mastery, not just with language but with the mystique of stagecraft. There have been many critical analyses of ‘Hamlet” – exegesis of what is possibly Shakespeare’s most challenging play has become an industry of its own. Dromgoole, however, steals a march on many of them because of his own theatrical background, and in particular, his long association with The Globe. Who has a better insight into the theatricality of the play?

He does not stop there, however. As the company makes its way around the world, Dromgoole presents a brief history of women taking on the role of ‘Hamlet’, which provides fascinating background to his account of the company’s performance in Saudi Arabia which was billed as the first occasion in which men and women would act together in a production in that country. Similarly, his description of the performance in Pnomh Penh is accompanied by a potted history of the damage wrought across the country by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. Indeed, each chapter proves similarly informative, with intriguing insights bringing the progress of the worldwide tour to life.

A very enjoyable and informative book, that provides interesting new persepctives on ‘Hamlet’ as a play.

45. Montaigne: Philosopher of Life: How to Believe by Sarah Bakewell.*

Another absolute gem from Sarah Bakewell!

This is a short book, prepared for the Guardian Shorts series, and encapsulate the key elements of Sarah Bakewell's marvellous longer analysis of Montaigne's Essays, 'How to Live'. Bakewell has that happy gift of being able to capture the key aspects of complex issues and present them in a lucid, readily accessible format, without succumbing to the all too endemic plague of dumbing down.

Montaigne is an appealing character - relentlessly curious and continually exploring his own reaction s to different ideas. He more or less created the essay as a format, and four hundred and fifty years on, his work is enchanting new readers today. Sarah Bakewell has done him proud. This is a marvellous primer, but I would also recommend reading bake well's longer work, which is utterly delightful.

I need to get to Montaigne and then to those Bakewell books! Had you read his essays already?

>83 mabith: I studied English at university in the early 1980s and was advised to read Montaigne to gain an insight into prevailing views and philosophical thought in the late Renaissance. Being very lazy back then, however, I only dipped very lightly into the Essays, and don't recall very much about them.
It was actually my deep enjoyment of Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café that prompted me to read her book on Montaigne. I have now, though, bought a new Penguin edition of the Essays and am looking forward to basking in it.

46. All That Man Is by David Szalay.

Throughout most of the book, David Szalay’s novel really seems to be nine separate short stories. Each section focuses on a different man facing a mental quandary, brought about largely by their own actions and behaviours. The men are all very different, varying in age, nationality and social or financial status, yet all find themselves suddenly questioning their values, goals and lifestyles.

Szalay’s mastery is most powerfully evident in his management of the different strands of story. Each of the segments is individually haunting, and the reader (well, certainly this reader) is left baffled about how the separate threads might be resolved. While each story is recounted in the third person, they all demonstrate a unique authorial voice: sometimes funny, occasionally grim, but always masterful. The characters are often far from masterful – the book revolves around the consideration of unfulfilled ambition or unsatisfied desire.

This is a sustained and successful essay in imaginative composition. It could so easily have failed (so many writers bite off more than they can chew when it comes to exploration of form), but there is a satisfying and rewarding cohesion to the novel.

While I have unsatisfied ambition and unfulfilled dreams of my own, I look forward to reading more by Mr Szalay.

47. 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born by Christopher Bray.*

I don't remember much of 1965, having only been born in 1963. Christopher Bray has, however, written an engaging and entertaining account of the year, identifying it as the watershed in which what we now recognise as modern Britain emerged. He focuses on several different aspects of life, building up a comprehensive picture of an evolving society, gradually stepping out of the shadow of post-war austerity, with disposable income starting to rise.

The year opened with the death of two established figures from the past. Winston Churchill, still revered as the leader who had secured victory in the Second World War, and T S Eliot. The latter was less well known to the general public, though to the world of art and literature he had cast a long shadow, being a central figure in the development of the modernist movement, following his publication in 1922 of ‘The Waste Land’.

Meanwhile The Beatles were set to take their musical conquest of the world to a new dimension, moving on from the simple, wholesome music of their earlier albums, to experiment with a more surreal approach, as evidenced by their ‘Help!’ album, and accompanying film. This was also the year the Bob Dylan ‘went electric’ releasing his iconic album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ to acclaim from the critics, even if it provoked disdain from his folk music coteries.

In the field of literature, the year saw the publication of John Fowles’s ‘The Magus’, but also witnessed a major change in the field of espionage. 1965 saw the issue of the last James Bond novel from Ian Fleming (‘The Man With The Golden Gun) while John le Carre continued his exploration of the more realistic aspect of the medium with ‘The Looking Glass War’. Le Carre’is earlier book, ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ translated to the silver screen with Richard Burton offering a career defining performance as Alec Leamas, the down at heel intelligence office locked in a chase after double- or triple-agents.

Within the world of politics, two grammar school boys were at the fore. Harold Wilson was prime minister, while Edward Heath secured the leadership of the Conservative party, succeeding the defeated fourteenth Earl of Home (Sir Alec Douglas).

Bray draws all these disparate threads, and many more, together into a coherent and compelling account. He writes with a lightness of touch that counterbalances his obviously comprehensive research.

Interesting, Ian.. as I was born in 1966, I remember even less of it than you do;). I agree it does seem like a watershed year as earlier years seem more like the 1950s in some ways.

48. Why We Die by Mick Herron.

I am always intrigued by the manner in which we discover authors who go on to join the ranks of our favourites. Earlier this year I chanced upon Mick Herron’s marvellous series of espionage thrillers featuring the glorious Jackson Lamb, who leads the troop of ‘Slow Horses’, intelligence officers who have been condemned to serving out the remainder of their careers with MI5 at Slough House. Several years before embarking on that series, Herron wrote another featuring Zoe Boehm, a down at heel private investigator from Oxford.

I feel a certain sense of relief because if I had read the Zoe Boehm novels when they were first published, I might not have bothered the Jackson Lamb books, and would have missed out on a rare treat. That is not to say that this was a bad book. Herron always constructs his plots well, and there is something appealing about Zoe Boehm’s jaded perspective on life. In this story, Zoe is commissioned to investigate an armed robbery on a local jeweller’s shop. The police are, of course, already investigating the case, but the jeweller expects little success from them. He also indicates to Zoe that the items stolen already had a questionable provenance. His shop was a staging post for local criminals fencing off stolen property, and he needs either to recover the stolen items as soon as possible or face the wrath of the organised criminals who had left them there.

Zoe pursues her investigation assiduously, despite various tribulations including the theft and burning out of her car, and unwelcome run-ins with a former policeman whom she had crossed in a previous novel. The plot moves forward swiftly, and Herron builds up the intensity adeptly. All in all, I am struggling to work out why I can’t get more enthusiastic about the book – all the various components of a good and entertaining novel were there, but somehow I never quite managed to engage with it. Perhaps I had simply read too many books by Mick Herron within too short a space of time.

49. The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan.*

Peter Frankopan has produced an extraordinary work that presents a new perspective on world history. Not only does he weave a compelling account of the history of the Middle East and Central Asia over several centuries, but by doing so he changes, or at least expand, our understanding of current day events.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the routes that traversed ‘the Stans’, those vast tracts that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, allowing the exchange of trade, news and religious views over the centuries.

A comprehensively researched and clearly written account of an area of the world and aspect of history that has too often been neglected.

The Silk Roads sounds fantastic! I'd be picking it up right now if there weren't holds on it at my library.

>90 mabith: Yes, it was amazing - my review doesn't even come close to doing it justice. It took me a long time to finish it - I would read a couple of chapters and then leave it for quite a while before returning to it.

There was a lot of news coverage here a few weeks ago about the introduction of a massive freight train service running from somewhere in Britain through to the far coast of China. The journey would take several weeks to complete, and was being likened to a modern day Silk Road.

That would be an amazing train to ride as a passenger... I think my number 1 dream as a kid was to ride the Orient Express (or any train, honestly).

>92 mabith:. Me too. I love travelling by train. As it happens I am travelling from London to Marseille by train tomorrow, and can't wait 😀

For most of us in the US train travel isn't much of an option.. My sister and I took a train to NYC once (from her boyfriend's home area, not ours). Even though I was 18 by then I was still basically bouncing in my seat from excitement for the entire nine hours of the trip there.

Well I have made this journey a few times but am still as excited about it as a little boy. Five or six hours of quality reading time, too 😀.

50. The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet.

Laurent Binet’s first novel, ‘HhHH’, about the rise to prominence and subsequent assassination of Reichsmarshal Heydrich, saw him exploring the hazy boundary between biography, fiction and alternative history, and deservedly attracted much critical acclaim. This latest book, however, has failed to build on that spectacular start.

The basic premise surrounds the running down of the controversial French philosopher and semiologist, Roland Barthes, as he crossed a road in Paris in 1980. He subsequently died in hospital. The incident drew public and police attention because it occurred immediately after Barthes had left a restaurant in which he had been lunching with the underdog socialist Presidential candidate, Francois Mitterand. Binet uses the novel to explore the suggestion that Barthes had, in fact been murdered, or, indeed, assassinated. As a long-term, fully paid up conspiracy theorist, this might have been seen as absolutely up my street, and, having enjoyed ‘HhHH’, I was certainly looking forward to some salacious speculation.

Sadly I found the book very disappointing. The police Superintendent assigned to investigate the incident is a walking cliché, homophobic, reactionary and disdainful of academia (I am sure such police officers abound, or at least did in 1980), but displays those traits to an excessive degree. Similarly, the academics whom he approaches area all equally two dimensional: self-obsessed, bizarrely and self-consciously outré and deliberately unworldly. Once again, I am happy to believe that such people did, and continue to, exist, but the contrast was too clumsily constructed.

Binet’s plot is sound, and elements of the book are enjoyable, especially the interview with Michel Foucault in a Turkish bath, but the novel lacked sufficient cohesion or grounding in any hint of reality to give any lasting satisfaction. Very disappointing.

51. The Smart by Sarah Bakewell.*

I am amazed that Sarah Bakewell isn’t more widely known. So far this year I have been utterly enchanted by her ‘At the Existentialist Café’, an account of the conversion to existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and their circle, and ‘How to Live’, her biography of Michel de Montaigne and exegesis of his ‘Essays’. She has that happy gift of writing books that are both highly informative and deeply researched yet also immediately accessible and entertaining.

Her first book, ‘The Smart’, is just as accomplished as those others, and recounts the life of an extraordinary woman about whom, I am now ashamed to confess, I previously knew nothing. Margaret Caroline Rudd was an adventuress of particular acclaim. Having been born in modest circumstances in eighteenth century Ireland, and orphaned early in life, she escaped penury through marriage and concerted opportunism, coming to establish herself on the social scene in Georgian London.

Living on her wits (and not reluctant to deploy her considerable physical and social charms), and associating herself in turn with a succession of morally dubious men, she managed to survive in London. At hew lowest ebb she turned to street prostitution, but was able to pull herself up and establish herself as a highly desirable courtesan, in which role she derived considerable fortunes from vulnerable and naïve gentlemen associates.

Such a career might not distinguish her from many other ambitious and resourceful women who had to make their way in a life that was so iniquitously designed in men’s favour. Her claim to fame, or rather infamy, rests in her skill as a forger and her imaginative exploitation of the men with whom she lived, and her ability to capitalise on loopholes in the newly established system of financial bonds and promissory notes. With her confederates in this ploy, the identical Perreau twins, Robert and Daniel (the latter of whom was her common-law husband), she devised a means of living in extraordinary luxury, though the fragility of this wealth would eventually emerge, with the three of them continually having to pass off new bonds to pay off the approaching debts of previous ones. They were, in effect employing an early iteration of a Ponzi scheme, founded on forged certificates, that snowballed beyond their control. It became merely a question of when, rather than if, they would be exposed.

But when disaster struck, and they were called to account for the validity or otherwise of the bonds they had passed, the story goes off on a wholly new tangent, with Ms Rudd demonstrating further depth of resource and spirit.

The book reads almost like a detective story, offering fascinating insights into the financial and social history of the late eighteenth century. Bakewell writes with great clarity, captivating the reader from the opening paragraphs. I feel that there is a television adaptation simply crying out to be made from this book.

52. Sicken and So Die by Simon Brett.

Simon Brett's series of novels featuring down at heel actor Charles Paris have all been entertaining, and this is perhaps the best of them all. I have read it a couple of times previously, but wanted something to cleanse my palate after grappling with the distasteful 'The Seventh Function of Language' by Laurent Binet.

As the novel opens things seem to be going well for Charles Paris. Not only has he landed the desirable role of Sir Toby Belch in a new production of "Twelfth Night" but he seems well on the way towards a rapprochement with his former wife Frances from whom he had been separated for several years, principally because of his drinking and philandering.

Always a committed fan of Shakespeare's canon, Charles has longed to play the part of Toby Belch, and is looking forward to delivering a traditional performance straight out of the old school. Obviously, this is all too good to last, and things start to go awry almost immediately when Gavin Scholes, the benign but almost constitutionally unimaginative director is taken ill, and is replaced with the radical, Romanian "enfant terrible" Alexandru Radulescu. Radulescu is no respecter of theatrical sacred cows, and sets about transforming the production into an avant-garde extravaganza, much to Charles's disgust. However, even Charles has grudgingly to concede that some of Radulescu's ideas, bizarre as they seem, do produce startling effects. Soon, however, more mishaps start to happen, culminating in the sudden death of one of the cast.

Brett has sustained a highly successful career as a novelist and writer of comedy series for both television and radio, and this novel shows him at his best. The wry humour never detracts from a tightly constructed plot, and his depiction of the thespian peccadilloes of the cast amuse the reader but never reduce the story to farce. He clearly knows his Shakespeare, too, and the novel offers intriguing insights into the various relationships between characters in the play. All in all, a highly entertaining and informative jaunt, and a welcome relief after Binet’s prurient tosh.

53. The Power by Naomi Alderman.

There has been a lot of hype about this book, which only increased after it won this year’s Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize. For once, it is absolutely justified. In fact, I wonder whether the various plaudits spread across the cover really tell the full story.

I bought it as a bit of a punt while on a post-payday spree at the flagship branch of Waterstone’s, succumbing as all too often to the enthusiastic suggestion of one of the engaging and knowledgeable staff who seem to abound there. I have occasionally had my fingers burnt and sworn never to listen to them again … until the next time. Well, the woman who recommended this book definitely deserves any commission she might have received from my purchase.

It seems to cross several different genres, excelling in each of them. While reading it I was considering how I might describe it, and found myself wavering between dystopian literature, science fiction, political observation, satire and straightforward thriller. Well, they will do for a start, though there are also moments of wry humour and quasi-religious bliss.

It also classifies as meta-fiction, with the bulk of the book taking the form of a manuscript of anthropological research into the events that culminated in a devastating, world-eclipsing apocalypse, sandwiched by brief correspondence from the supposed researcher and his editor. Their closing exchanges form the crowning glory of an already marvellous novel.

The story revolves around the discovery that, when finding themselves placed under sudden stress, some girls and young women can generate and apply a devastating electrostatic charge. This becomes known as ‘the power’. Having once unleashed the power, young women find that they are also able to release it in older women. All at once, around the world girls find that they can not only protect themselves from physical assault, but can use their charge as an offensive weapon, too.

Alderman describes masterfully the way in which the phenomenon spreads around the world and how different cultures respond. The story focuses on four characters: Allie, who unleashes the power to enable herself to escape from her abusive adoptive parents; Margot, mayor of a northern city in the USA who is ambitious to progress further up the political ladder, though that aspiration is challenged by the sudden awakening of the power in her elder daughter; Roxy, daughter of an East End villain who yearns to avenge the murder of her ‘gangster’s moll’ mother; and Tunde, a Nigerian student who captures mobile phone footage of some early incidents of the unleashing of the power, and launches a successful career as an international journalist as a consequence. The novel unwinds with interpolated narratives following each of these characters, with a few others thrown in, as the story counts down towards an unspecified event.

I don’t want to say much more about the content for fear of inadvertently offering spoliers. Alderman manages the separate threads very capably, interspersing them with facsimile archeolgical notes and addenda, all of which lend a deep patina of verisimilitude. Any dystopian literature, particularly if there is an essentially feminist theme, will automatically draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood. In this case those worthy plaudits are entirely justified. This is, quite simply, an amazing, imaginative and haunting novel.

54. Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook.*

Dominic Sandbrook set out to write a large book recounting British history during the 1960s, but was faced with the problem of determining at which point to start. The obvious answer might have seemed to be either 1960 or 1961. History is, however, a continuum rather than am infinite series of discrete episodes, and Sandbrook decided that he needed to go back into the previous decade in order to set the appropriate context. As a consequence, he ended up writing two huge books, the first of which chronicles British history from the Suez crisis through to the demise of the Conservative government led Harold Macmillan and, briefly, Alec Douglas-Home.

And what a marvellous and engrossing book. There is no aspect of British life that he has not considered. While the principal focus is on the political events that saw Britain emerging from post-war austerity and move through economic growth into relative affluence, Sandbrook also explores the nature of public health and education services, the emergence of radio and television broadcasters, newly popular trends in literature and the arts, and the surge of teenage affluence as a major aspect of the national economy. The breadth of subject matter works effectively – it might too easily have been detrimental to the book, taking the reader off at too many tangents, but Sandbrook identifies cohesive threads across and utilises them well. Despite the sheer size of the book, the reader’s attention never flags.

Sandbrook also has that happy knack of combining his extensive research and detailed analysis of the times with an account that is immediately accessible and engaging. Indeed, at times, the book flowed almost like a novel, so clear was his portrayal of the leading characters. He also effectively demonstrates the cyclical aspect of so much of our history. Following the Suez Crisis, Anthony Eden succumbed to ill health, to be succeeded unexpectedly by Harold Macmillan rather than Rab Butler, who had appeared to have been groomed as Eden’s natural successor. Seven years later, Harold Macmillan would himself step down as Prime Minister to be succeeded by another rank outsider in Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

55. Paradise City by Elizabeth Day.

What a superb book! I have had a few disappointments over the last couple of years, with books that I had eagerly awaited turning out to be far less enjoyable than I had hoped. This, however, represented the other side of the coin. I hadn't come across Elizabeth Day before, but took a punt on the basis of a very favourable review in The Guardian, and found myself smitten by one of the most engaging books I have read for a long time. I found 'Paradise City' reminiscent of both John Lanchester's marvellous 'Capital' (one of my all-time favourites) and Sebastian Faulks's 'A Week in December', though Ms Day brings her own twist to the interlaced narrative format.

The book takes the form of four separate narratives, each focusing on a separate character. It is readily apparent how three of them relate to each other, though the fourth appears wholly discrete from the others. Sir Howard Pink is a self-made millionaire who appears to have everything, though his life has been blighted ever since, eleven years ago, his nineteen-year-old daughter disappeared. As the novel opens he is checking in to a luxurious Mayfair hotel as part of a recurring ritual in which he briefly withdraws from his hectic life to ponder over his loss. During this retreat, he has a dramatic encounter with Beatrice, the focal character of one of the other narratives.

Beatrice is a political refugee, seeking sanctuary from her former life in Uganda where, for reasons that gradually emerge, her life is endangered. As the book starts she is bemoaning the poverty of her life in London which is exacerbated by her work as a chambermaid in the luxurious but curiously impersonal hotel. She is lumbered with unsociable hours and frequently demeaning work, and is scarcely ever noticed by the hotel's guests as she scurries from room to room fulfilling her role. Sir Howard does notice her, however, and their encounter will come to be a pivotal moment in her life.

Esme is a journalist, working on the scurrilous Sunday Tribune, and has just penned a story about business tycoons, including Sir Howard. Though grateful for the free publicity that her article offers, Sir Howard was upset by the paper's use of an old photograph of him. Esme is despatched to take him for an expensive lunch at another top hotel by way of apology, and scents the possibility of a future article. Still relatively new to London, she is plagued by her constant sense of having fallen woefully short of her mother's high expectations for her.

The fourth prop of the story is Carol, a recently-widowed woman in her sixties who lives in a flat in West London. Still slightly shell-shocked by her bereavement, Carol is frequently slightly disengaged from the world around her. The reader is left beguiled, trying to work out how she will fit into the plot.

Elizabeth Day captures the tone of her four principal protagonists with great precision. All of them are beautifully drawn. Sir Howard is at times a perfectly dreadful man, who behaves abominably, yet it is difficult not to feel sorry for him. Indeed, I found it difficult to suppress the odd inappropriate snigger at some of his more appalling political rants! I know that Day is herself a journalist, and her portrayal of Esme's daily grind at the Sunday Tribune resonates with plausibility.

The storylines are well-defined and cohere seamlessly, resulting in a very enjoyable and rewarding book.

Reminiscent of Capital and wonderfully written is all need to hear, definitely going on the to-read list.

56. American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I am not really sure what went wrong with this book. I found the premise intriguing enough, and Gaiman writes in an easy style, but somehow I just couldn’t make myself like it. It was as if there was a slight clashing of gears between the book and my experience of it.

Gaiman’s writing style reminded me of early Stephen King, showing that same knack of readily provoking empathy for the main protagonist, in this case a convict known as Shadow, who is nearing the end of his three year sentence. A model prisoner, Shadow has resolved never to come back inside, promised his wife that he we go straight, knowing that there is a job waiting for him in the gym run by his best friend. His plans fall apart, however, when his wife and the best friend are killed in a car crash just days before his scheduled release. Set free early on compassionate grounds, Shadow encounters someone who calls himself Mr Wednesday, who seems to know far more about Shadow than he reasonably should. After initial doubts, Shadow finds himself taken into Mr Wednesday’s employment as sometime chauffeur and general factotum.

Without wanting to offer too much in the way of spoilers, Shadow finds himself adrift in a world where ancient gods and myths from around the world are alive and locked in conflict. This is clearly a work of great imagination, and I am still trying to work out why it didn’t resonate more strongly with me.

57. The Holy Roman Empire by Peter H. Wilson.*

Despite having read many books about European history, I still had only the haziest idea about what the Holy Roman Empire was. The Wikipedia entry for it very helpfully carries a warning at the head of the page that readers should not confuse it with ‘The Roman Empire’, so I took consolation that I was not alone.

Peter Wilson’s comprehensive book resolves any uncertainties about the nature, extent, achievements and ultimate decline of the Holy Roman Empire. He has produced a deeply researched and clearly written history, from its roots encompassing the western relic of the original Roman Empire. The general consensus dates the start of the Holy Roman Empire to Christmas Day, 800, when Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III. This cemented one of the key relationships that would characterise the history of the Empire. The Emperor and the Pope found themselves in a form of symbiosis, with each dependent upon, though contributing to, the authority and status of the other.

Oddly, the term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ did not emerge until the thirteenth century, because the status of the emperor relied to a considerable extent upon the kudos derived from association with the original empire. It also marked an intriguing early experiment in the concept of international federation. The various lands making up the Holy Roman Empire all had their own, largely autonomous rulers, with the German ‘Prince Electors’ electing one of their number to be elevated to Emperor.

Wilson handles his material well. His exposition is clear, and his prose is engaging. The subject is complicated, not least because of the plethora of unfamiliar names, many of them recast through several different languages, but Wilson retains the reader’s attention, peppering his account with amusing, often bizarre anecdotes.

58. Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance.*

J.D Vance has pulled off a major coup, succeeding in combining in one compact volume a dazzling personal memoir detailing the challenges he faced growing up among America’s white poor in the Appalachians and a socio-economic history of that community that had its own complicated code of honour.

Vance’s own story has more than a few shades of a modern fairy tale. He was raised by his disorganised and dysfunctional mother who passed through a series of ever more bitterly failing relationships before subsiding into severe substance abuse (largely involving prescription drugs). Fortunately for Vance, his maternal grandparents were generally close at hand, as was his elder sister, and between them they were able to shield Vance from the worst of the fallout from his mother’s implosion. Rising above all of this, he secured a place at Yale, graduating from its Law School.

Dreadful things happen to Vance’s family, but he does not succumb to self-pity. Neither is this book a form of auto-hagiography. He is not scared to recount some of his own failings alongside those of other members of his family. What does emerge, however, is a core of familial devotion within Vance’s extended relatives that was strong enough to transcend the privations ranged against him.

While relating his experiences, Vance also analyses the widespread Appalachian or hillbilly community, and mourns the industrial desert that much of the rustbelt has become. The demise of paternalistic employers such as Armco Steel has left a huge gap in the welfare landscape.

Altogether a fascinating, brave and haunting book.

59. The Nix by Nathan Hill.

This novel, Nathan Hill’s first, met with an amazing reception, with ecstatic plaudits from leading critics. Having had my fingers burned too often in the past from books heralded as an instant classic, I wasn’t sure what to expect. On this occasion, I had nothing to fear. This is a great novel.

At times, it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s stunning ‘The Goldfinch’, and there were shades of Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ too, though the overall impact is wholly original. It spans nearly fifty years, with flashbacks to student protests during 1968, from the present day, and the travails of an academic, struggling to engage with lazy and disaffected students, and playing ‘Elfscape’, an online role-playing game that works along the lines of World of Warcraft. The narrative perspective moves around quite a bit in the first few chapters, but a strong theme quickly emerges.

Samuel Andresen-Anderson is the principal protagonist, and is a genuinely empathetic character. Far from perfect, he is beset with irritations, ranging from the cheating and ignorance of many of his students to the family upheaval suffered during his childhood, while still troubles him more than twenty years later. There are some marvellous secondary characters, too. Pwnage (apparently pronounced ‘poanage’) is a relentless gaming junkie, running a whole tribe of characters in Elfscape and committing ever increasing amounts of time and money to the game. Beset with fleeting moments of self-awareness, he regular promises himself that he will move away from this obsessive gaming lifestyle, lose weight and rehabilitate himself into a more orthodox way of life. As the novel opens, Pwnage is as far as ever from achieving this self-epiphany.

Laura Pottsdam is another gloriously drawn character. An ambitious but inveterately lazy student, she has managed to avoid any genuine work so far throughout her academic career, depending upon help from fellow students or, more frequently, her dexterity at cheating, downloading essays from sites on the internet. She spends her time flicking through a social media website, ‘iFeel’, hypothesising on stratagems to advance her career, and making decisions depending upon the feedback her ‘friends’ offer through the site.

Behind all this is the story of Faye, Samuel’s mother, who walked out on her family more than twenty years earlier, and who is catapulted into the public consciousness following a sudden impulsive act. This offer Hill the opportunity for some acute observations about the motives and actions of the student rebels from the late 1960s, while also exposing the hypocrisies of the establishment and the cruelties of some of the police during those troubles.

The writing is fine – clear and accessible - and Hill manages the complex storylines admirably. Moving backwards and forwards between the late 1960s, late 1980s and 2011, the plot never flags. This was a long novel, but very entertaining throughout.

60. The Night Watch by Patrick Modiano.

I didn’t like this book at all. In fact, let’s take the gloves off and tell it straight. I actively and passionately disliked this appalling book. The publisher’s blurb led me to expect a beautifully written exploration of the life of a man caught on a desperate dilemma, living a life as a double agent engaged with both the Resistance and the Gestapo in occupied France during the Second World War. I have seldom been sold a bigger dummy.

The book starts with a garbled and inchoate account of a gathering of ghastly characters behaving in an unrelentingly implausible manner, and then just goes downhill from there. I struggle enough to get through most days without at least fleetingly thinking about hanging myself, without being immersed in such an unwholesome broth of rage, squalor and despair. If this is even vaguely representative of Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre as a whole, then I can't understand how he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps that year the Selection Committee was modelling itself on FIFA.

>107 Eyejaybee: What a shame! The whole trilogy is waiting on my Kindle. I'll give La Place de L'Etoile a go, in the hope that starting at the beginning might help, but your review gives me permission to stop, Nobel Prize winner or not.

61. The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig.

I had waited for this book for a long time. I first encountered Amanda Craig’s books following a chance purchase of ‘Hearts and Minds’ a few years ago, and I was immediately hooked. I read through her earlier novels and then start ed akmost counting the days until this one was published. It didn’t disappoint.

Lottie and Quentin Bredin have been married for a while, living in relative affluence in North London with their two daughters and her older son from a previous relationship. She is a successful architect, working for a popular practice, while he is a journalist, writing his own column in a daily tabloid. But then things start to go wrong. The reverberations of the credit crunch proved long lasting, thinning out the number of potential clients seeking the services of an architect, leading to Lottie becoming unemployed. Then Quentin, who has, meanwhile, been outed as a serial philanderer, loses his regular job, too, leaving him dependent upon occasional freelance work.

The upshot of all this is that while both resolved to divorce, they are unable to afford to live apart. An escape route opens up when Lottie sees an advert for a cottage in Devon available to rent at an unfeasibly low price. They can let their house in London, and from the income that yields, they can cover their mortgage payments and the rent for the house in Devon, with almost enough left over to live on. Buoyed up by the prospects of a solution to their problems, they nevert stop to question the cheapness of the rent for the Devon cottage.

The difficulties they encounter adapting to country life are adeptly worked. Lottie’s son Alexander (known as Xan) finds the transition particularly hard. He had aspired to go to Cambridge to study English but, having just missed out with his A level grades, he is sinking into a depressive resentment against life. Meanwhile his half-sisters struggle to establish themselves at their new school. There are a series of encounters between the Bredins and their new neighbours, all of which demonstrate the gulf between thir lifestyles.

As always with Craig’s books, however, there is a dark hinterland. This is not just a story about lack of harmony between the local and ‘incomers’. There are dark secrets, and deep rifts, throughout the local community, at the heart of which lives Gore Tore, a retired and exclusive rock musician, who also happens to be the Bredins’ new landlord. One thing that everyone in the local community has in common is that they all seem to go quiet whenever the Bredins’ cottage is mentioned.

Craig pulls fall the threads together masterfully. All her characters are completely plausible, and Lottie is particularly empathetic. One trait I have seen in all her previous books is her ability to weave extensively interlaced storylines, and this latest book is no exception. Beautifully written and deeply satisfying.

62. John Macnab by John Buchan.

This is one of my favourite novels, ever, and I seem to re-read it just about every year. Like so much of Buchan's prolific output, it might nowadays at first sight seem rather archaic, with characters romantically hankering after a Corinthian past largely of their own imagining. It does, however, espouse simple values that effortlessly stand the test of any time.

The novel opens on a summer day in the mid-1920s with Sir Edward Leithen, accomplished barrister and Member of Parliament, visiting his doctor seeking a remedy for a dispiriting lethargy or ennui that has recently befallen him. His doctor is unable to identify any physical source for Leithen's discomfort and recalls the bane of the intellectual community in the Middle Ages who were plagued with tedium vitae. His brutal prescription to the beleaguered barrister is that Leithen should endeavour to steal a horse in a country where rustling is a capital crime.

Later that evening Leithen dines in his club and meets an old friend, John Palliser-Yates, an eminent banker, who has been similarly smitten. When the two of them are joined for a glass of restorative brandy by Charles, Lord Lamancha, Cabinet Minister and general grandee, who also claims to be suffering from this disturbing listlessness, and Sir Archibald Roylance, general good chap about town, the four of them hit upon the idea of issuing a poacher's challenge, writing to three landowners and stating that they will bag a deer or salmon between certain dates and inviting the landowner to do their best to stop them. They decide to base themselves at Sir Archie's highland estate, and proceed to challenge three of his neighbours. Seeing a half-empty bottle of John Macnab whisky on the next table they adopt that name as their soubriquet.

As always with John Buchan's works the prose is beautiful - clear and sonorous - and his love of the Scottish landscape comes shining through. Though I have no love of hunting, the descriptions of the stalking manoeuvres are described in close, though never overwhelming details, and the characters all appear entirely plausible. Buchan has often been dismissed as writing stereotypical characters wholly lacking in political or social conscience. This novel triumphantly decries that charge. It positively rattles with social conscience, often dispensed from unexpected sources.

It also offers a heady mix of out and out adventure, humour, and even a love story. A little bit of everything, conveyed in Buchan's unerringly gifted prose. A heart-warming paean to a better ordered time.

63. The Party by Elizabeth Day.

Elizabeth Day has scored a triumph with her latest novel. Martin Gilmour is a successful journalist and art critic, whose recent analysis of modern art has become a best seller. As the book opens he and his wife, Lucy, are arriving at a local hotel, prior to attending the fortieth birthday part of Martin’s childhood friend Ben. Ben is incredibly wealthy, and the party will prove to be a major extravaganza, with many celebrities among the guests, and rumours abounding that the Prime Minister himself might even attend. It soon becomes evident that something significant happened at the party, though it is some time before we learn what the incident was.

The narrative moves between present day interviews at a local police station, reminiscences of Martin’s and Ben’s time at school and university, and entries from the journal kept by one of the characters during their stay at a private clinic. We learn that Ben comes from an immensely wealthy and ennobled family, and that his life has been very easy, littered with entitlement and privilege. Martin’s background is very different. He had been raised by a single mother, his father having died a few months before Martin’s birth. His mother was clearly a forceful but distant person, and there was little emotional succour available during Martin’s upbringing. Throughout his childhood and early adolescence Martin was a loner, until he was sent to Burtonbury, a minor public school to which he had won a full scholarship. This was where he encountered ben, and his outlook on life changed.

The plot moves rapidly as we learn more about Martin’s psychological make-up, illuminated by a few key episodes from his early years. The descriptions of the interactions between the boys at the school are particularly well drawn, as are the developing relationships between Martin and Lucy and Martin and Ben. It is obvious to everyone (with the sole exception of Martin) that Ben has moved on. His interest in Martin’s views and life are superficial at best, though Martin fails, or at least refuses, to acknowledge this. The consequential tension between Lucy and Serena, Ben’s trophy wife, is especially powerful.

As with her previous novel, Paradise City, Day manages the multi-narrative form very adeptly. The emerging storylines keep pace with each other in a delicate balance, enhancing the build-up as the book moves towards its denouement. On top of all that, Day has a beautiful prose style, and a fine ear for dialogue, and the overall impact is quite dizzying.

64. Sashenko by Simon Debag-Montefiore.

Reading this book was rather like riding a bicycle with worn out gears. There were long periods when I found myself struggling to engage with the story and stumbling along with no sense of making any progress. Then there would be a sudden whirring and things would click into place for a while, and I would be utterly caught up with it, racing along perfectly happily, until I went over a pothole or hit the kerb too sharply, at which point the bike slipped out of gear again, and I found myself struggling to make headway again.

The book opens in St Petersburg in 1916, and the plot revolves around Sashenka Zeitlin, a young woman raised in a privileged merchant’s family. Unusually for a woman in her position, her maternal uncle is a professional revolutionary, Mendel, who has inspired the young Sashenka to start reading works espousing social justice and even revolution. As a consequence of her dabblings in the remote hinterland of revolutionary thought, Sashenka finds herself being arrested as she leaves her private school, and she is locked up overnight in a squalid detention centre. The book, which is the first volume in a trilogy spanning the twentieth century and beyond, follows her further adventures.

It is certainly well written – Sebag-Montefiore’s prose is very accessible. For some reason, however, I never quite managed to come to grips with theis book, and I will not be moving on to the subsequent volumes.

65. The Adversary by Emmanuel Carerre.

This was a potentially fascinating story, being the account of the life and gradual implosion of an apparently respectable French doctor, who ultimately killed all of his immediate family and attempted to kill himself. Unfortunately, I found the account rather stilted (which may, of course, be a reflection of the translation rather than the original text).

The story is certainly compelling - what drove Jean Claud Romand to perpetrate such an atrocity, and how had he managed to sustain a life so completely built on deception?

66. The Restless Dead by Simon Beckett.

This novel marks the return, after a break of seven years, of Dr David Hunter, accomplished forensic anthropologist and protagonist of four excellent previous crime novels. Hunter is an empathetic character, having suffered his own tragedies in addition to those which he has helped to investigate.

As this novel opens, Hunter is feeling unwell, but is preparing to travel to a friend’s house to pass a Bank Holiday weekend. Before he departs, however, he is called to attend the retrieval of a dead body from the saltmarshes on the Essex coast. Arriving at the scene he is advised that the body may be that of Leo Villiers, the missing son of a local bigwig. Villiers has always had a shady reputation, though his father has always been on hand to buy off any significant complaints. Leo Villiers has not been seen for a few weeks, and a woman with whom he was generally believed to have been having an affair has also gone missing. The local police and everyone in the neighbourhood suspect that Villiers had killed her, and may then either have committed suicide out of remorse, or, more probably, faked his own death with a view to

Having witnessed the recovery of the body, Hunter sets off to attend the formal autopsy but, owing to a bizarre set of circumstances, he finds himself marooned and carless in the middle of one of the more remote saltmarshes. Then more bodies are discovered

Beckett is masterful at building the tension. He is clearly very knowledgeable about the technical aspects of Hunter’s work, but he does not allow jargon to clutter the work. He is also adept at drawing characters. All the principal figures in this book are utterly plausible. Their reactions to the things that befall them, and their interactions with each other, are never less than entirely credible, and the effect is engaging and gripping. Beckett’s books really deserve to be better known.

67. Timekeepers by Simon Garfield.*

I really ought to know better by now. I made the fatal error, yet again, of allowing myself to be too gullible, and letting the publisher’s blurbs on the cover of the book sell me the dummy. I had read, and enjoyed, a couple of Simon Armitage’s books before.

Indeed, I had found his ‘The last Journey of William Huskisson’, simply marvellous. That book successfully combined an account of the life, and tragically premature death, of that great politician (branded by many as the most talented and accomplished Prime Minister Britain never had) with the story of George Stephenson’s construction of the Liverpool-Manchester railway line. Similarly, his ‘On The Map’ gave an entertaining account of the history of cartography, with some diverting thoughts about the future of mapping now that everyone has the world of GPS plotting available to them wherever they venture through the medium of the smartphone. It didn’t quite match up to his book on Huskisson, however, and I should perhaps have spotted some warning signs.

Garfield has established a reputation as an accomplished popular historian. He clearly conducts meticulous research and establishes a sound understanding of his subject matter. He does, however, have a tendency to try to be funny, and while he may be good at the history, he is not a comic. Unfortunately, in this book I found I had reached, and passed, my tolerance for his attempts to be laconic.

That is not to say that the book was not interesting. He identifies some fascinating aspects about humans’ boundless preoccupation with measuring time. Along the way he gives the reader some well-crafted insights into the development of the calendar (including some developmental cul-de-sacs that, fortunately, were never brought to lasting fruition, such as the French Revolutionary Calendar). He also explains how it was only the dawn of the railway age that led to the adoption of nationally standardised time, to allow for the preparation of a viable timetable.

Further apostrophes chronicle the development of the vinyl long player (LP), and then, in turn, of the compact disc, flagging up the unexpected consequence that the limitations of the medium had a marked impact on the evolution of the content. Until the introduction of the LP in 1948, records played at 78 revolutions per minute only really allowed for about four and a half minutes per side, severely constricting for any classical pieces.

On balance, however, I found that the tone of the writing inhibited my enjoyment of the book. It still intrigued, and occasionally entertained me, but it struck me most forcibly as a missed opportunity. It could have been so much better than it was.

68. Spy Games by Adam Brookes.

This is an action-packed spy thriller that moves between China, Ethiopia, Oxford and Thailand. The pace seldom drops, and the story remains gripping.

Philip Mangan is a world-weary journalist who, following his disastrous engagement in a British intelligence operation in China, has relocated to Ethiopia. He plans to settle there, writing articles about the rapid foreign backed development of the infrastructure. Having moved on from the famine-stricken late twentieth century, Ethiopia is now a rapidly developing country, ripe for foreign-backed capital investment, and, despite a heavy American presence, China is taking a lead. Once an agent, however, always an agent, and Mangan simply can’t stop himself observing and then reporting the various oddities he encounters. His reports, passed through unofficial contacts through the British Embassy, work their way back to Vauxhall Cross where the higher echelons of the Service decide to launch a new operation, drawing Mangan back into the world he had been trying to escape.

Meanwhile, two young Chinese students find themselves in Oxford. Their families, both prominent within the Communist hierarchy in Beijing, have been at loggerheads for decades, but the two of them contrive to meet, despite their respective minders best efforts.

Brookes compares with Charles Cumming at his best – local colour, plausible characters and very soundly constructed plots. Mangan is a particularly sympathetic protagonist – flawed, and far from heroic, but very credible.

69. Vermeer to Eternity by Anthony Horowitz.

This story offers further evidence, if any were needed, of Anthony Horowitz’s boundless flexibility.

It revolves around the issue of whether a painting given to a lawyer by a wealthy French family might be a genuine Vermeer. As usual. Horowitz demonstrates his characteristic attention to detail having clearly researched Vermeer’s works deeply. The story also shows his customary mastery of misdirection. I was completely thrown by the eventual denouement here.

Very amusing and very entertaining.

70 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

It has frequently been said of the Sixties that if you can remember them, you probably weren’t really there. The Eighties, on the other hand, have had a more mixed press when it comes to nostalgia. There were some marvellous highs, some big hair and some glorious music. There were, however, some cultural atrocities, and I guess a lot of us still bear the psychological scars. My principal memories of that dichotomous decade focus on my time as a student which involved a lot of beer, blues music and the expenditure of a ridiculous amount of money playing the early generation of video games: Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaxians were my favourites, although, despite wasting so much money and time on them, I never progressed much further into that world.

That lukewarm embracing of the computer game world proved no barrier to unfettered enjoyment of this book, which serves as a paean to the vast cultural wasteland that was the 10980s.Set in 2044, at a time when fossil fuel reserves are on the point of extinction, long-term recession across the developed world has become entrenched depression, and most of the population of the West have retreated into the sanctuary of, or crucial dependence upon OASIS, a multi-dimensional internet universe where they can, even if only briefly, escape from the woes of the real world.

Then James Halliday, the immensely wealthy creator of OASIS, dies, leaving an estate valued at around $240 billion, with no family to lay claim to it. It then emerges that he has tied his fortune up with a game linked to the OASIS community. Scattered around the internet are three keys that will open three hidden gates. The first person to succeed in opening all three gates will claim Halliday’s fortune. So far, so good – shades of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, and Willy Wonka’s gold wrappers.

As the novel opens, five years have passed since Halliday’s death and the fortune remains unclaimed. The protagonist is Wade Watts, a teenager living in poverty in Seattle. Wade has been raised on OASIS, and attends a virtual school administered through one of OASIS’s programmes. As a lifelong adherent of OASIS he has also read everything he can find about James Halliday, and has spent most of his free time immersed in 1980s culture, in the hope that he might succeed where millions of others have failed.

There is a lot about this book that is predictable, and it has a few weaknesses. The general level of dialogue is ropey, to say the least, and no teenaged computer geek cliché is knowingly overlooked. It is, however, very entertaining. Wade Watts is a likeable character, despite (or even because of) his teenage angst, and the exploration of 1980s popular culture is an engaging as it is occasionally alarming. Did we really live like that? Sadly, yes. #mistyeyed

71. Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden.*

This was an intriguing book, though somehow it didn’t quite work for me. The premise was an excellent one, and seemed designed specifically to appeal to me, which makes it even more disappointing.

Gary Harden and his wife, on returning from five years living and working in Vietnam, decided to walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End. Having made this decision, they planned what seemed the most appealing route, even though that would take the total mileage to around 1,200. Harden recounts his experiences in a fairly perfunctory way, focusing more on his feelings at the time rather than describing in close detail the countryside through which he walked.

He does, however, devote a lot of time to his thoughts about philosophy, offering fascinating morsels from a selection of the most noteworthy thinkers. He draws particularly heavily on Plato, whom he first encountered on a camping holiday as a teenager. Books about walking have become increasingly popular recently, and the combination with the teaching of philosophy is a new and intriguing twist.

My only problem was to do with the tone of the book. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think that there was an underlying smugness that rankled all the way through. While I found his apostrophes about philosophy interesting informative, I simply couldn’t bring myself to like the book. I am quite happy to concede that the fault may lie with me, but there it is.

75. Blood Work by Michael Connelly.

Michael Connelly has a knack of creating very tough yet also empathetic protagonists, the most famous being Heironymous “Harry” Bosch, detective on the Hollywood Homicide Squad. In this book, he introduces a new one, Terrell “Terry” McCaleb, until recently a high ranking Special Agent with the FBI.

As the novel opens McCaleb is a few months into early retirement, and is still recovering from a heart transplant operation a few weeks previously. He has nothing in mind but maintaining his boat (on which he lives), fishing and sailing. Those plans fall by the wayside after he is persuaded to investigate what appears to have been a fairly ordinary shooting in a liquor store in Los Angeles.

Connolly is excellent at constructing plots, throwing in twists that are always as entirely plausible as they are wholly unforeseen. He also develops very credible characters. In this book, we witness the extreme resentment of local detectives towards the perceived ‘intrusion’ into their cases by the FBI. McCaleb’s retired status does not protect him from just such resentment, and the local police forces prove to be one of the biggest obstacles in his pursuit of the killer.

Connolly has more or less created his own genre, combining great writing with watertight plots, solid characters and gripping action. An unbeatable combination

76. Kind of Blue by Ken Clarke.*

Kenneth ‘Ken’ Clarke is currently the Father of the House of Commons, being the longest sitting current member (He was first sworn in as an MP on the same day on 1970 as Dennis Skinner, but takes the honour of being Father of the House because he took the oath of allegiance to the Queen before the ‘Beast of Bolsover’). He has represented the same constituency (Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire) throughout the whole of his time as an MP, and during that period he has held several ministerial posts, including two of the ‘great offices of state’ (Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary).

I used to see Ken Clarke quite regularly, wandering along Tothill Street towards Parliament most mornings, and even came to develop a very British, vague nodding acquaintance with him. To be honest, he generally contrived to look even more unhealthy than me, with his face a vivid shade of puce and dripping with sweat, though he always gave off an airy of cheery optimism. That positive approach reverberates throughout this volume of memoirs, even though, somehow, he managed to overlook any reference to me.

I was amused by his comments about a couple of the civil service buildings that I have worked in (though never crossing with his time as a minister there). Caxton House (formerly one of the locations of the Department for Education and Employment, and now home to the Department for Work and Pensions) is dismissed as the ‘drab department building’ Quite true, of course, but there was no need to labour the point – he may have secured a ministerial exit visa to another, more luxuriously accommodated department but his poor officials were left behind without that avenue of escape), while the old Home Office headquarters and current home of the Ministry of Justice (to which I will be moving in three weeks’ time) is ‘a hideous concrete fortress’

Being a politician, he does, of course, adopt a tone that veers between self-congratulation and defensiveness, and he also gives the impression that at each new department to which he was assigned (and that was a lot of departments), he inherited a morass of inefficiency but left a legacy of streamlined reform simplifying the work of his successor. Despite this, the book is very entertaining and informative. His ministerial CV is certainly as impressive as it is varied, including stints at the Departments for Health, Education and Trade & Industry, along with the Home Office, Treasury and Ministry of Justice, before finishing up as Minister Without Portfolio in David Cameron’s short-lived post-2015 administration.

In the forty-seven years (and counting) during which he has been an MP, he has met a terrific assortment of other leading political figures, and his observations are always entertaining. He also avoids falling into the trap of mindless political partisanship, strewing praise and disdain fairly liberally, regardless of political affiliation.

77. The Dry by Jane Harper.

There has been a lot of hype about this novel, and I think it is all justified as this is one of the finest crime novels I have read for quite a long time.

Aaron Falk finds himself returning for the first time in many years to Kiewarra, the small Australian farming community where he grew up. Kiewarra is in the depths of a drought, and has had no rain for two years, leaving all the local farmers struggling to keep going.

Falk’s trip is not provoked merely by nostalgia, however, and he is dreading the likely encounters with figures from his past. He has returned for the funeral of Luke Hadler, his closest childhood friend who, it appears, had murdered his wife and son before turning his shotgun upon himself. The community is rocked, and seething with anger as it struggles to absorb the atrocity. Falk meets hostility from many of his former neighbours, beyond even what might be expected following such a ghastly incident, and we gradually pick up indications that there had been another atrocity some years ago.

The idea of a detective returning to the scenes of their discordant youth is not new (and was, for instance, explored so effectively in Peter May’s recent Hebrides trilogy), but Harper handles it brilliantly. We are drip fed appetising hints of an earlier crime, and the fact that Falk and Hadler had both lied about their alibis all those years ago.

Jane Harper’s career started in journalism, and she clearly learnt well how to write clearly and concisely, keeping her reader’s attention. The story fairly fizzes along, without any frills. The characters are all too plausible, and the plot is absolutely watertight.

78. To Kill the President by Sam Bourne.

This novel is nothing if not topical. The basic premise is that America has elected to the Presidency a maverick former businessman with no political experience but a hatful of extremely right wing views. He is also perceived as a racist and misogynist, (though he views those labels more as badges of pride rather than slurs) who has filled the senior offices in the Administration with cronies and members of his family. As the novel opens, the President has been engaged in an escalating war of words with North Korea, provoked by its development and regular testing of increasingly powerful ballistic weapons. Five years ago, I think we would have dismissed this scenario as simply too outlandish to be true.

The President’s fraying temper is pushed too far, leading him to burst into the White House Situation Room in the middle of the night and demand that America’s own nuclear weapons be deployed against North Korea. It is only after some deft obfuscation and quick thinking that he is talked down from this terrifying stance, and some of the more balanced member of the White House staff are left thinking that some drastic intervention is required in the interests of world peace. The novel then follows separate narratives tracking the development of a plan to assassinate the President, interwoven with the suspicions of one of the White House staff, a remnant from the previous administration, who stumbles upon the plot and is then torn between her own deep hatred of the current President and all he stands for on the one hand, and her belief in the importance of upholding the constitution and the democratic process.

Some of the critics’ encomia compare this novel to Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of the Jackal’. Yes, there is a plot to assassinate a President, but that is where the similarities end. Forsyth’s book is meticulously plotted, giving intricate detail about how to acquire fake identification papers, buy a high-powered rifle, and smuggle it across several borders. Sam Bourne’s assassin visits a gun fair and spends a morning creating a fake Facebook page.

That is not to say this is a poor book. Far from it. Bourne knows how to write a gripping story, and he brings more life to his story that Forsyth ever managed. This reads like a novel rather than a manual. My only misgiving is that it all seems too rushed, After a careful, well balanced start, setting the context and introducing the principal protagonists, Bourne presses the hammer down and races to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

Amazingly relevant. I see this author is actually the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland.

79. The History Thieves by Ian Cobain.*

Ian Cobain is a respected journalist with a long track record of investigating governments’ malfeasance, and, particularly, their attempts to cover their tracks. His previous book, Cruel Britannia exposed the British government’s participation in the torture of suspected terrorists and the practice of extraordinary rendition.

In this book, he presents a history of the British government’s attempts to preserve state secrets, from the introduction of the first Official Secrets Act through a series of ever more intricate legislation. Cobain asserts, and it is difficult to disagree, that the combined effect of all this legislation is to keep the public in ignorance, and to limit access to official information as far as possible. While officials seem meticulously to have recorded everything that ever happened, they simultaneously strive to prevent anyone from ever reading those dusty files. While papers proliferate, there is a parallel obsession shared by Government and Whitehall to minimise public awareness of what has been done in their name. Under the mantle of the Official Secrets Act, and its legislative spawn, successive governments have been able to muzzle the Press.

There seems to be no partisan monopoly on the obsession with secrecy, with all governments, regardless of political complexion, striving to keep the public in ignorance. One consequence of this has been that, unknown to the British electorate at the time, there has not been a single year since the end of the Second World War in which Britain has not been involved in military action somewhere around the globe.

Unbeknownst to the public, in 1945, after the surrender of Japan, Britain became involved in fighting on behalf of the French in Indochina, combatting the Viet Minh and, essentially, sowing the seeds of the Vietnam War. They did this with the assistance of Japanese prisoners of war who were armed and ordered to fight against the Viet Minh insurrection. Shortly afterwards British troops were involved in a lengthy combat in Aden, though this struggle was never reported back home.

As the archaic British Empire metamorphosed into the post-colonial Commonwealth, and former colonies emerged into independence, one of the foremost priorities for the retiring administrators was to ensure that any documentary archive inherited by the new regimes would not cause embarrassment back home. Britain has always prided itself on the apparently humane and supportive way it relinquished its imperial dominion. Rather than simply withdrawing at once, Britain encouraged the newly independent states to develop, bequeathing an administrative infrastructure modelled on the system back home. This self-congratulatory picture is far from accurate. There was, for example, a culture of organised cruelty throughout Kenya in the years immediately preceding independence, with atrocities by the military establishment seeming to be more the rule than the exception. It was, therefore, imperative that any documentation that might be passed to the new administration should be filtered thoroughly, to excise any official record. Hundreds of thousands of files were either destroyed or repatriated, to end up in secret vaults around the UK. This story was repeated around the globe. Cobain recounts the systematic destruction or concealment of literally hundreds of thousands of files.

In later chapters, he addresses the ill-fated Freedom of Information Act, envisaged by Tony Blair as a means to secure open government. In reality, the plethora of exemptions, and the lack of robust enforcement powers available to the Information Commissioner, have enabled the government largely to continue to obfuscate in their replies. As a civil servant, I was particularly interested in this aspect of the book. In my experience, request under the Freedom of Information Act do still exert considerable power (and certainly lend a burst of urgency as we scurry around looking for the answers), though I acknowledge the thrust of his argument. The Freedom of Information Act is definitely weaker than the public was led to believe when it was passed by parliament. Of especial interest, however, was the fact that a few years ago I drafted a reply to a request under the Freedom of Information Act from Ian Cobain himself. I can’t tell you what it was about – that’s a secret!

The description above may suggest that this book is a conspiracy theorist’s paranoid rant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cobain writes very clearly, as one would expect from a career journalist, and he seems to back up his assertions with a wealth of evidence.

80. Bolshoi Confidential by Simon Morrison.*

This was one of those books that was so nearly very good, but somehow the author just kept missing open goals, snatching a work of mediocrity from the cusp of success.

The basic premise was certainly enticing. In January 2013, Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was attacked in a Moscow street. This prompted considerable interest throughout Russia, dominating the press for several weeks, before it emerged that the attack had been organised by a former dancer in the Bolshoi, driven by years of resentment and jealousies seething within the company.

Simon Morrison uses this incident as the launching point for a history of the Bolshoi Ballet since its foundation in 1776, as if to demonstrate that this was merely the latest in a long series of such scandals. I found this rather contrived, however, and felt that he was struggling to spin a story out of rather weak material. A simple history of the ballet company without the search for recurrent scandal would have been far more interesting.

81. A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre.

John le Carre is widely acknowledged as one of the best writers of spy fiction, though I feel that this rather misses the point. He is, quite simply, one of the finest novelists, in any genre. His ability to create a cast of entirely plausible characters engaged in intricate yet utterly credible plots seems limitless. In this latest novel, much heralded by critics and press, he returns to some of his most enduring and popular characters. A Legacy of Spies is narrated by Peter Guillam, George Smiley’s right hand man from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is, after all, possibly the greatest spy story of them all. Le Carre’s insights into the secret world are as sharp and comprehensive as ever, and the story gleams with his instantly recognisable, though never successfully imitated, dialogue, and a smattering of his socially dysfunctional characters. I presume that the author must now be well into his eighties, but his observations remain as sharp as ever, and while there is an air of nostalgia throughout the book, his setting utterly contemporary.

Now retired and living off his pension on his family’s small farm holding in Brittany, Guillam is surprised to be contacted by his former employers and summoned to London. The contemporary Secret Service has grown sensitive to changing attitudes among both their political masters and the general public, and finds itself operating in a culture in which the Freedom of Information Act, and intense media scrutiny are key factors. In this climate, the Service now finds itself the subject of a civil action arising from the ‘collateral damage’ of an operation it mounted some forty years ago. Being one of the few principal characters still around and contactable, Guillam seems to be prime candidate to be scapegoat.

As a civil servant myself, I recognise the prevailing official view that, if something isn’t documented in the case files, then (officially) it didn’t happen. Guillam is persuaded to read through the (significantly filleted) files covering a couple of old operations, and is grilled, in Devil’s Advocate mode, by the Service’s lawyers. Having embarked upon this exercise, Guillam is overwhelmed with his own memories of the operations under review, many of which are markedly in conflict with the official version as recounted by the files.

His memories flit around a host of characters that have featured in previous novels, and there are many engaging vignettes and fleeting references that will chime with the attentive reader (Guillam’s former flautist lover, for example). There is, however, no requirement to have read any of the earlier books. This operates perfectly well as a standalone novel, as well as being a companion volume to the earlier novels featuring George Smiley. Indeed, I am almost now seriously considering going back to reread the whole Smiley canon.

Another dazzling work from an author who is still at the top of his game, more than fifty years after his first astounding successes.

82. If We Were Villains by M L Rio.

I remember being stunned some twenty years ago by Donna Tartt’s startling debut novel The Secret History. It defied ready classification within existing genres, and launched a slew of imitators, though very few came close to matching it.

The publisher’s plaudits strewn over the cover of M L Rio’s debut, If We Were Villains, compare it to The Secret History, and for once the allusion is justified. The basic scenario is certainly very similar: a group of seven students at a private college in America become obsessed with their studies, and it all ends badly. Instead of the classics, however, the students in this book are all aspiring and highly talented actors and have survived through to the final year of an intensely competitive drama course that focuses exclusively on the works of Shakespeare.

Having been cast together in powerful plays over the last four years the group has become very close, and as with the protagonists in The Secret History, they have come to be viewed by other students as an exclusive and potentially sinister clique. Each semester there are a range of theatrical extravaganzas in which they all participate, which provoke short term rivalries both beyond and within the group. The dominant figure is Richard, a fine actor though hampered by a fragile personality that leaves him incapable of enduring criticism, or of being cast in anything but the leading role in any production. His beautiful girlfriend Meredith is equally accomplished, and while she does not display Richard’s egotistical traits, she does have her own demons to contend with. The rest of the group have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, all perfectly plausible, and captured by M L Rio with great clarity.

The novel is narrated by Oliver, the youngest (and perhaps the most ‘normal’) member of the group, who is looking back at the events of the story from a remove of ten years, during which time he has been in prison. His recollections are detailed, and balanced, and it is easy to believe that he has been reliving these events over the years.

The prose is marvellous, scattered with quotations from Shakespeare’s works. This could easily fall flat, and come across simply as a means of showing how clever and well educated the writer is, but the author manages it marvellously. The quotations are always apposite, and serve to illuminate the characters’ prevailing neuroses.

The comparisons with The Secret History are deserved but should not obscure the fact that this is a compelling and thrilling novel in its own right.

83. The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz.

Anthony Horowitz has been celebrated for the diversity as well as the quality of his output. In addition to television series such as Foyle’s War and Misdsomer Murders, he has written a highly successful sequence of novels aimed at teenagers featuring adolescent hero Alex Rider. He has branched out more recently into fiction for adults (rather a clumsy way of putting it, I know, though I am conscious that the phrase ‘adult fiction’ might have conjured the wrong image), and continues to demonstrate an innovative approach.

The first of his novels that I encountered was The House of Silk which he was commissioned to write by the Estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, and which recounted a ‘lost’ Sherlock Holmes adventure which, for reasons which become evident as the story progresses, Dr Watson had undertaken to defer from publication until all the protagonists were dead. Horowitz captured the feel of Conan Doyle’s original stories admirably, and the book represented a valuable addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon.

Following that success, he was commissioned by the Estate of Ian Fleming to write a new James Bond book, which came to fruition as ‘Trigger Mortis. Once again, he captured the feel and style of the original books – far more capably than Sebastian Faulks, and to my mind almost on a par with William Boyd’s excellent Solo. Indeed, I suspect that writers as accomplished as Boyd and Horowitz probably found it painful to have to lacerate their own laudable style to match the mediocrity of Ian Fleming’s prose.

He followed this with another venture into Holmes’s territory with his excellent Moriarty, which recounted the exploits of that arch criminal and featured a major twist that I certainly didn’t see coming, and then addressed the traditional whodunit with a homage to Agatha Christie in The Magpie Murders, one of the finest example of meta-fiction that I have read recently.

In his latest novel, Horowitz has returned to meta-fiction but with a different twist. He himself is one of the leading characters, which allows him to offer an insight into the modus operandi of a busy professional writer. The novel opens with a description of an apparently healthy middle-aged woman visiting an undertaker to make the arrangements for her own funeral. Six hours later she is murdered in her own flat.

We are then taken across London to encounter Horowitz himself, and from that point on the novel is narrated in the first person by him. Horowitz is approached by Hawthorne, a former Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, who had previously assisted some of the television programmes on which Horowitz had worked, offering advice about procedural issues. Hawthorne describes the woman’s death and explains that he has been retained by the police in the capacity as a consultant to assist the investigation. In the meantime, he wishes to strike a deal with Horowitz. Basically, he wants Horowitz to write a book about his investigation, and demands fifty per cent of the takings.

The relationship between Horowitz and Hawthorne is prickly to begin with, and generally deteriorates from there. They do, however, start to make progress, though Hawthorne is definitely taking the lead. There is always a danger when novelists start to play with the format, mixing fact and fiction and incorporating themselves as character, that the intricacies of the format might predominate, leaving the development of the story to stumble along behind the gimmickry. Horowitz fights clear of that, and delivers a perfectly balanced novel. He states at one point that he is an admirer of Agatha Christie, and he seems keen to copy her spirit of experimentation. It has certainly worked here.

84. The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce.

Well, after a run of great books it was only a matter of time before I turned up a dud, and this proved to be it. I had made the mistake of listening to Radio 2 a few weeks ago (so I suppose I deserve no better), and heard Ms Joyce talking about this book on Johnnie Walker’s ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ programme. She and the other guest, whose name now evades me, were eulogising the old independent record shops that proliferated around the country. Listening to them, I too succumbed to a moment of nostalgia remembering Castle Records in Loughborough where I spent all my pocket money amassing a collection of vinyl records that are now simply cluttering up valuable shelf space and collecting dust.

I had, however, forgotten about this until I came across it by chance while on holiday in St Andrews. In a moment of entirely misplaced enthusiasm I bought it, thinking it would make for a pleasant and diverting holiday read.

Well, I got that one wrong. From the very first page it reeked of insufferable tweeness, and I found each new page an ordeal, weighed down under a nauseating and ever-increasing burden of saccharine. It is more than twenty years since I owned the means of playing any of my hundreds of vinyl records, but each one of them is still far more worthy of their valuable shelf space than this dreadful book which I very quickly consigned to that sad pile of left-behind volumes in the foyer of my hotel.

85. Athenian Blues by Pol Koutsakis.

At the risk of sounding very conceited and self-assured (I know, I know, a dirty word) I think people were very easily satisfied back in the 1970s. After all, just look at any of the re-runs of old episodes of Top of the Pops that proliferate on BBC4.

I think that that acceptance of lamentable mediocrity also extended to our expectations from thrillers. Desmond Bagley and Alistair Maclean achieved great success with formulaic adventure stories that barely even paid lip service to consideration of cohesive and plausible plots or deployment of plausible characters. Before I go any further, I have to admit to having enjoyed them immensely. I was, however, just thirteen or fourteen, and probably couldn’t even spell literary discernment, far less display it.

Unfortunately, forty years on, my tolerance for such pap is now conspicuous by its absence, so I had very little time for this rather chaotic novel from Pol Koutsakis. Not even the novelty of its setting in Athens was enough to rescue it in my eyes, and the feeling of catharsis when I left it in the box of books being collected for a charity shop in a Knutsford supermarket was glorious.

Great review of If We Were Villains - adding it to the wishlist now!

Major book bullet for The History Thieves. How neat to have received a request from that author.

>137 Eyejaybee: I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t refer to my response which was one of the few to which my department replied within the stipulated deadline :).

86. The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel.

This was a speculative purchase, prompted by the combination of a persuasive display in my local newsagent’s shop and the fact that I had finished my previous book earlier than anticipated and didn’t have anything to read on my journey home. Too often in the recent past such purchases have proved misplaced, and I have found myself struggling through turgid prose about two dimensional characters.

I didn’t encounter any such mishaps arose with this book. I can’t really say that I liked it, but I did find it very good. It is steeped in darkness and resonates with unpleasant undercurrents. It is, however, very well written, and draws the reader in right from the first page.

The story is narrated by Lane, and moves between the present day and an unspecified period a few years earlier. Brought up just by her mother in California, and never knowing her father, nor even who he was, Lane had already had a troubled life. Her life takes a further downward turn, however, when she returns home one day to find that her mother has committed suicide. Expecting to find herself consigned to social care, she is surprised to find that her maternal grandparents are eager to look after her. She had known almost nothing about her grandparents, nor about the reasons why her mother had excised them from their lives. With no other viable alternatives on offer, Lane accepts this solution, and travels across the country to Roanoke, her grandparents’ estate in Kansas.

It transpires that her grandparents are wealthy, following the discovery of oil on their land. When Lane finally arrives there, the first person whom she meets is Allegra, her cousin. Allegra displays a certain wildness, and has all the characteristics of a spoiled child raised by over indulgent grandparents, eager to compensate for the past tragedies around which she has had to navigate.

Like Lane, Allegra has no mother, though her is not dead, but missing. Eleanor had run away from Roanoke shortly after she gave birth, and had never been seen again. As Lane establishes her position in Roanoke, she discovers that Eleanor is not alone. Something has gone deeply awry at Roanoke, and all the women born into the house either die or run away.

Moving back to the present day, Lane has returned to Roanoke, whence, we learn, she fled after just one summer there. This is the first time that she had gone back, because now Allegra has gone missing.

The novel explores dark territory, with some aspects that might seem predictable, though there are plenty of other surprises (none of them pleasant) in store for the hardy reader. As I stated at the beginning, I can’t claim to have liked the book, but it was very compelling, and excellently written.

87. Hinterland by Chris Mullin.*

Hinterland is an interesting word. Until fairly recently it was principally used in its geographical sense, to denote an area lying behind, and commercially served by, a port. Over the last few years, however, it has become fashionable to apply the term to politicians’ life beyond public view. This was particularly noticeable in the obituaries for Denis Healey, where the word seemed ubiquitous. Healey certainly had a fair amount of hinterland, being an accomplished musician, and a notable photographer.

Chris Mullin has more than the customary share of hinterland, too. Now best known for his spell as Labour Member of Parliament for Sunderland South constituency from 1987 until 2010, he had already amassed considerable experience of life beyond the Westminster Village. This volume of his memoirs catalogues his work as a journalist and his travels in the Far East, including perilous outings covering the latter years of the Vietnam War.

Although he studied law at university, he never practised, choosing instead to train as a journalist. Quite early in this chosen career he achieved a major scoop, securing an interview with the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Quite early on he came to revel in foreign travel, and exploited the opportunities that his work as a journalist offered to pursue this. His description of a visit to China during the early 1970s is particularly engaging.

During the 1970s and 1980s he became a prominent voice campaigning for civil liberties, and through his journalism campaigned for the release of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. This exposed him to bitter opprobrium from much of the right-leaning press, even after his stance was exonerated when their convictions were quashed.

As a politician, he remained true to his convictions, at the expense of career advancement. He identified himself as a Bennite early on, and remained true to those left-wing inclinations. That integrity almost brought about the demise of his political career before it even started, as it counted against him in the selection process for the candidacy for Sunderland South. The local party organisation conducted an underhand campaign to try to keep him out, and even worked against him once he had secured the candidacy.

Even after he became an established MP, his political ideals proved to be unwelcome baggage within the Labour Party. He did briefly host ministerial posts during Tony Blair’s first and second terms, although that came to an end after he voted against the government’s proposal for 90 days detention without trial for terrorist suspects.

I have read a lot of political autobiographies recently, and have, as a consequence, come to recognise the tendency towards self-congratulation when parliamentary or ministerial careers are under the lens, although that is less marked than in many similar books that I have read. His experience as a journalist serves him well, as the book is very readable. Mullin doesn’t labour points unnecessarily. He knows how to convey a story clearly, and does so, with a refreshingly self-effacing approach when he recounts his personal life.

88. How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F. A. Cup by J L Carr.

I am in my fifties now, so I really ought to know better. I found myself leafing through books in the flagship Piccadilly branch of Waterstone’s in that dangerous period just after payday, when one’s discernment is slightly relaxed, and came across this beautifully packaged Penguin Classic edition of this book. Reading the blurb I made the schoolboy error of believing it.

Part of the problem is, I suppose, the lack of a decent body of literature about football. There have been numerous books that have addressed other sports (notably cricket, of course, ranging from Dickens through Wodehouse to A G McDonnell’s classic village game in England, Their England), but football has been rather poorly served. Unfortunately, this book has not resolved that shortage.

If I might venture into footballing metaphor, the foreword by D J Taylor completely sold me the dummy, suggesting I was in for a comic classic, resonating with sharp observation of provincial life in 1970s England. I remember provincial life in 1970s England (well, I survived it, anyway), but this book did not generate any Proustian moments for me. Far from comic observation, all I encountered was turgid self-satisfaction, with a tedious primness that set my teeth on edge.

Not only will I not be exploring J L Carr’s oeuvre any further, but after this crushing demonstration of how far his tastes diverge from mine, I feel fairly confident that I won’t be reading anything by D J Taylor in the near future, either.

Laugh? I never even started.

89. Munich by Robert Harris.

In his latest book Robert Harris has turned his attention to the Munich Conference in 1938, at which Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, respectively the British and French Prime Ministers met Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to discuss, and try to avert, Germany’s impending invasion of Czechoslovakia. This is a difficult subject for a writer of historical fiction to address. After all, the summit meeting has come to represent the epitome, or perhaps the nadir, of Western Europe’s policy of appeasement that many think simply encouraged Hitler’s expansionist ventures. And that is another aspect of the problem: we all know the outcome.

Harris is, however, sufficiently practised at historical fiction to take these obstacles in his stride. Rather than focusing on the leading players (Hitler, Chamberlain, Churchill etc.), he tells his through alternating narratives based on two senior officials within the rival entourages. Hugh Legat is a Third Secretary from 10 Downing Street, where he has gradually come to secured the confidence of the Prime Minister. Meanwhile Paul Hartmann is a cynical participant in the higher reaches of Hitler’s administration. He was previously in the first tranche of the restored Rhodes Scholar programme and studied in Oxford University, where he had become friendly with Legat.

Known for the depth of his research, Harris manages the development of the plot very effectively. There is an intriguing comparison of the two civil service systems, and the hopes and aspirations of the different sets of officials. The evil of the Nazi administration requires no amplification, but the corresponding team in Chamberlain’s Number Ten is far from flawless, too. Petty and personal rivalries abound, which all adds to the tension.

This is Harris at his best, on a par with his exploration of the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy.

90. Devotion by Patti Smith.*

Reading this book was a strange experience for me.

Patti Smith is an iconic figure for my generation – punk, poet, priestess, hierophant – and her early albums (particularly Horses) rank among the all-time greats. Her performances ripple with a unique blend of eloquence and barely-suppressed rage, and her long and successful career has been founded on her talents as a wordsmith.

This short book seems a million miles away from Patti Smith’s recording career. It comes in three sections, the first of which recounts a trip she made to Paris to promote her latest book. She had first visited the city in the late 1960s, with her sister, and she takes the opportunity to revisit some old haunts, while immersing herself in a biography of Simone Weil, one of her heroes. She then decamps to England, to visit Weil’s grave in Ashfield, Kent. On the face of it, a very simple story, and it only extends to twenty or so small pages, but Smith writes it so beautifully, and conjures such enthusiasm about Weil’s life and work that the reader is completely transported.

The second section is more problematic. At the simplest level, it is a short story about a girl with a troubled personal history who loves skating. There are some marvellous moments, and breath-taking images, but the story itself in simply too implausible to work. An intriguing exercise in style over substance, but one that just didn’t quite work for me.

For the third section, however, Smith comes roaring back with a brief essay about why she writes. Incisive and insightful, she concludes with a killer final line. Bizarrely, the weakest part of the book were the poems that she inserts between the different sections that I found quite excruciating.

91. Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein.*

This is an extraordinary book, that bestowed an added glow of serendipity as I had come across it entirely by chance in the marvellous Daunt Books in Marylebone.

Having grown up as far from the sea as it is possible to get in Britain, I have never been entirely sure exactly what constitutes an estuary, or at what points it stops being a river without quite becoming the sea. Rachel Lichtenstein’s book does not resolve my uncertainty on that issue, but who cares! It is, instead a beautiful prose poem to the Thames Estuary.

Unlike me, Rachel Lichtenstein grew up on the coast, in Leigh-on-Sea, so is familiar with much of the Essex coastline. She is also deeply interested in the history of the area, and, in particular, the history of the people who have plied their lives in and around the Thames Estuary.

Throughout the book, she travels in a variety of craft (old barges, tug boats, dinghies and ferries), and encounters a wide group of fascinating characters who have spent their lives working in and on the estuary. Each different mode of transport represents a different, long-established form of industry that has been supported by the estuary in a delicately balanced economic network which is closely allied to the natural estuary’s own intricate ecosystems.

She meets former bargemen, fishermen, tugboat sailors and dockers, as well as a thriving community of artists and curators, all eager to capture the essence of life on the estuary, and to preserve valuable mementos for future generations. There are some unusual characters among them, including ‘Prince Michael’, owner and sovereign of Sealand, a man-made fortress just beyond the United Kingdom’s territorial boundary which claims to be the world’s smallest independent principality. When not presiding over Sealand, Prince Michael lives in a bungalow on Canvey Island, under the name Michael Bates.

The Estuary has a fascinating history, and is strewn with the remnants of many shipwrecked boats, including the London, whose demise is described in detail in Pepys’s diary, and the SS Montgomery, which sank during the Second World War with more than seven thousand tons of live bombs and chemical detonators on board. The majority of that ordnance remains unrecovered, and may still be live.

The estuary was also the ‘home’ of most of the pirate radio stations that proliferated during the 1960s, many of which broadcast from the numerous forts that had originally been constructed as part of the country’s vital defence network.

Lichtenstein writes with passion but also with clarity. Her enthusiasm is always evident, but is not allowed to compromise the beauty of her prose. This has been one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year. The Penguin edition also has an absolutely lovely cover.

92. Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling.*

Anthony Powell’s twelve novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is one of the great jewels of post war British literature. Largely biographical, and narrated in the first person, it offers a glorious perspective of life stretching from before the First World War until the late 1960s, featuring a cast of hundreds of characters. Often very funny, a bedrock of melancholia also runs through the story. One of the most striking aspects, however, is how little we learn about the narrator himself.

Hilary Spurling, well known for her various literary biographies, was a friend of the Powell family for many years, and had previously published Invitation to the Dance, a handbook to the Music of Time sequence which lists all the characters, analyses their intricate relationships and summarises all the plots and subplots – in itself a Herculean feat.

Her latest book takes the form of a biography that focuses on Powell’s early years and the period during which he wrote the Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Extensively researched, Spurling’s book certainly illuminates the sequence, casting light on many aspects of the characters and the often bizarre mishaps that befall them. Appropriately her style of writing resembles Powell’s own approach to narrative. In his hands, it works majestically, drawing the reader in to his chronicles. Many writers have tried to emulate it, and have simply succumbed into rambling.

It is far from being a whitewash or hagiography, however, and in fact, in many ways Powell comes across as an often unsavoury character, and certainly less amiable than Nick Jenkins, his counterpart from the sequence.

93. Blood Torment by T F Muir.

I had such high hopes for this novel, being intrigued by the prospect of a crime novel set in and around St Andrews and the Fife coast, but ultimately it failed to deliver.

It opened well with Detective Chief Inspector Andy Gilchrist being summoned to attend the scene of an abduction. A three-year-old girl has been taken from the house where she and her mother lived. It transpires that the girl’s mother is the estranged daughter of a former MSP, who had recently been disgraced following reports across the media that he had physically abused his third wife. Having been outspoken on a number of issues over the years, it seems quite plausible that enemies might have sought to get at him by abducting his granddaughter.

Early in the investigation, however, the police identify a potential suspect – a previously convicted paedophile who upon his release from prison in England, had returned to Fife following the death of his mother, whose house he has inherited. He is taken in for questioning but subsequently released in the absence of sufficient evidence to warrant his further detention. The plot thickens, however, when the suspect is found murdered in a local park.

So far, so good, and a gritty and gripping plot is developing. Unfortunately, as with so many current crime writers (and particularly those operating in the ‘Scottish Noir’ field that has become so popular of late), the author just can’t help himself, and has to over-egg the pudding by throwing in a rather fatuous sub-plot between DCI Gilchrist and one of his Detective Inspectors. This implausible back story detracts too much from what might otherwise have been a commendable addition to the field.

Wishing to be generous, I would concede that it is the best novel set in St Andrews that I have read all year, but I might not go much further than that.

94. The Naked Diplomat by Tom Fletcher.*

Tom Fletcher spent the greater part of his Civil Service career as a high-ranking member of the diplomatic service (including several postings as British Ambassador), before ending up working in Downing Street supporting both Gordon Brown and his successor David Cameron. Such an impressive CV has given him considerable insights into the role of the diplomat, which he shares here, together with his speculation as to how the role of the diplomat might evolve with the rapid proliferation of digital technology to replace traditional methodology.

Having been a senior civil servant, he writes with great clarity, and communicates his message very effectively. The book is, consequently, fascinating. He starts by giving a potted history of diplomacy, starting from early examples in China several hundred years ago. As the prototype of successive diplomats succumbed to the death of a thousand cuts, it becomes clear that the penalty for failure has always been severe.

Fletcher’s central contention is that the explosion of social media and digital technology means that the role, and the aspirations, of the professional diplomat must change. He details how, as British Ambassador to Lebanon, he used focused social media campaigns and interactive services to promote Britain and British trade.

Following a terrorist attack on the Iranian Embassy, he tweeted a picture of himself giving blood to help the victims. This was immediately retweeted by the Iranian president. That simple exchange did more to cement relationships between the two countries than thousands of hours of negotiation in formal summits and meetings.

He writes at length about the value of national leaders using Twitter and Facebook to help to communicate their objectives more quickly and to audiences that they might not normally be as easily able to reach. It should be borne in mind, however, that the book was originally published in 2016, before the Twitter-happy President Trump was elected. I would be interested to know how that development has affected Fletcher’s view of the concept of the social media savvy leader.

95. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke.

Attica Locke’s novel paints a rather gruesome picture of rural life in East Texas. I would like to think that she has exaggerated the pervasive racism and the terrifying activities of underground neo-Nazi organisations such as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, although I suspect they are all too realistic.

Her story is very well constructed and written. The main protagonist is Darren Matthews, a black Texas Ranger (I hadn’t realised that the Texas Rangers still existed, believing that they were something from the Wild West past). Although he had been born into near poverty in East Texas, he had ‘escaped’, studying law at university in Chicago. He had, however, decided to participate in law enforcement after the ghastly ‘dragging’ in Jasper, Texas in which an African American was dragged behind a truck until his death.

Having become embroiled in an altercation involving a family friend which was followed shortly afterwards by the murder of a neo-Nazi thug who had threatened that friend, Matthews finds himself suspended pending the outcome of a Grand Jury hearing. In the meantime, a colleague asks himself to visit Lark, a small town in East Texas, which has just seen two murders: one of an African American who had been passing through, and then a second of a young white woman to whom he had been seen talking in the local rough bar.

Upon arriving in Lark, Matthews finds himself up against a wall of silence from the white inhabitants, while the smaller African American community is also less than welcoming. Perhaps predictably, the local Sheriff is plainly resistant to outside intervention by the Texas Rangers at all, let alone from an African American. This is, perhaps, familiar territory, explored in the Virgil Tibbs films, but it is no less powerful for that. Attica Locke writes with great clarity and her characters seem completely plausible.

It is not a pleasant novel, but it is compelling and very powerful.

96. Just Kids by Patti Smith.*

Patti Smith is an icon for my generation: poet, singer and punk priestess with an instantly recognisable voice resonant with relentless rage. There is a ferocity about much of her early work that chimed with the onset of the punk and new wave movements in music. Her prose, however, shows a beautiful sensitivity. Indeed, the brief prologue, which recounts the death of her friend and former lover, Robert Mapplethorpe, is beautifully written, but so sad that I almost found it too hard to read.

This volume of memoirs covers her youth and first few years struggling to survive and establish herself in New York. After some initial adversities, she met and took up with Robert, an aspiring but then totally unknown artist. Their life together was played out against extreme poverty, and every dollar made a difference. At one point she found two quarters embedded in the mud of Central Park, probably in 1968 or 1969, which meant that she and Robert were able to buy lunch that day.

They moved home several times, ending up renting a room in the famous Chelsea Hotel, which offered a striking interface between the famous and the downtrodden. While many of the residents were barely subsisting, and sinking into booze- or drug-driven decrepitude, others were established figures in the artistic hierarchy of the city. For instance, Patti Smith established a passing acquaintance with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom frequently dined at the Chelsea hotel. During that period, Patti Smith saw herself more as an artist or poet than a musician. Indeed, her move towards musical performance only gained traction towards the end of the book.

The principal axis of the book is her relationship with Mapplethorpe, and handles his troubled life with great sensitivity. Unsure of his sexuality, Mapplethorpe experienced considerable anguish, much of which revisited itself upon Smith, as she was the more practical side of the partnership whose conventional work (principally in bookstores) kept the pair of them afloat.
The book does cover some tragic events, but such is Smith’s writing style that the overwhelming message from the book is one of strength and the ability to draw deeply upon resources that may not have been previously apparent to win through in the end.

97. The Circle by Peter Lovesey.

Peter Lovesey is one of our most prolific crime writers, having produced three long separate series in addition to numerous standalone volumes. In the 1970s, he wrote a series of novels featuring the Victorian detective, Sergeant Cribb, which were successfully adapted for television. He later moved on to an amusing set of books featuring the Prince of Wales before he succeeded to the throne as Edward VII. More recently he has tended to write about Superintendent Peter Diamond, the gruff, pragmatic head of CID in Bath, combining elements of the traditional whodunit with the grittier conventions of the police procedural.

His books all succeed in delivering watertight plots against a backdrop of gentle humour, and Lovesey revels in ridiculing and puncturing pomposity wherever he can I am disappointed that he has never enjoyed the mainstream commercial success that his books so patently deserve. I am also surprised that the Diamond novels have not been snapped up for television, as the Bath setting would have similar visual appeal, and international marketability, to the Oxford of Morse and Lewis.

The Circle is not one of the Diamond series, although he does feature very fleetingly. The investigation is (eventually) conducted by Chief Inspector Henrietta (“Hen”) Mallin, an associate and friend of Diamond’s who works in West Sussex, who finds herself faced with what rapidly develops into a series of murders, all through arson, around the scenic Sussex city of Chichester. The victims are all associated with the Chichester Literary Circle, a group of aspiring writers who meet regularly to swap ideas and read each other passages from their latest work. The first victim is a local publisher who had recently attended a meeting of the Circle, and whose house is set alight one evening, with him inside it.

Lovesey puts forward some cleverly drawn characters among the Circle, all of whom have markedly different literary tastes and styles, and he gently satirises their shared propensity to fall into the clichés attendant upon their respective genres. The setting of Chichester gently reverberates throughout the book – this might almost be a tract from the local tourist board.

Taken all together, this is a very enjoyable and entertaining book.

98. Bring on the Girls by P. G. Wodehouse.*

I have been a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse’s book for nearly forty years, having started to read them while I was still at school. His novels are delightful, written with a mastery of the English language that few other writers come close to matching. Yes, they are ridiculous, as removed from reality as is possible, but any reader prepared to suspend disbelief for just a few pages is sucked in and likely to become addicted. I have read some of the Jeeves and Wooster stories several times over, and never cease to be entranced with each return. I would not have thought he was capable of writing dull prose.

Unfortunately, this volume of memoirs proves me wrong. This book seemed more like a feeble attempt to copy Wodehouse’s style, but one undertaken by someone who hadn’t actually read anything that the master had written, but had instead been given a potted description of how Wodehouse’s humour worked.

The book does not attempt to catalogue Wodehouse’s whole life but focuses, instead, on his early years co-writing musical comedies, with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton (the latter of whom also co-wrote this book). It offers some interesting insights into the perils that faced the aspiring producers, and indeed the writers, of musical comedies in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, which proved to be a rackety business Sadly, the effortless cadence and beauty o Wodehouse’s fiction never gets an airing. The tone, which aspires to be charmingly self-deprecatory, simply falls flat, and betrays an unwonted predictability and staleness.

Rather than offering much wanted insights into how Wodehouse wrote, this book has slightly eroded Wodehouse’s stature in my esteem.

Oh, then I'll have to take a pass on that last one - I love Wodehouse too.

99. La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman.

I came to Philip Pullman’s novels with a certain scepticism, having been told by my niece how marvellous they were, and how they weren’t really children’s books at all. I was wone over within the first few pages of Northern Lights, the opening volume of Pullman’s enchanting His Dark Materials trilogy. The wealth of imagination that the story displayed, and the scope for wonder and investigation were considerable, and I readily agreed that my niece was right – they are not specifically children’s books. Pullman writes in a style that is clear and immediately accessible, but without any hint of dumbing down.

This latest novel is the opening volume in a new trilogy, The Book of Dust, that will stand as a prequel or companion series to the original books, and its publication was heralded with considerable hype. I did wonder whether it would prove to be an egregious exercise in cashing in on a successful ‘brand’, but seeing a copy ion my local bookstore I decided to take a punt. Despite having found myself disappointed in similar scenarios before, on this occasion I chose wisely.

The story is immediately absorbing, and the principal protagonist, Malcolm Polstead, is both utterly plausible and totally engaging. He lives in The Trout Inn in Oxford. Not quite our Oxford, but a very similar Oxford located in a parallel universe where history and technology have run along slightly different lines to those of our world. Everyone has a daemon, a sort of spiritual parent which takes the form of an animal. Children’s daemons can change shape, settling into a permanent format during their early teens.

Malcolm is a bright and honest boy, spending his free time, when he is not at school or helping his parents in the inn, either sailing his canoe, La Belle Sauvage, up and down the Thames or helping the nuns in the nearby Godstow Priory. During one of his visits to the Priory he becomes aware of the presence of a baby girl called Lyra who is being looked after by the nuns. He gradually becomes aware from conversations overheard in the pub that the baby has attracted a lot of interest, not all of it benign. Various groups of people are looking for the baby, and the nuns are concerned for her (and their own) safety.

Pullman’s style immediately draws the reader in, and despite the differences between that world and our own (all of which must be deliciously thought provoking for younger readers), one is instantly engrossed. The plot develops steadily, and covers a broad base. Pullman is an acute observer, and knows how children and young adults behave, and creates a frighteningly plausible organisation that is not dissimilar to the Hitler Youth, with members being encouraged to spy on their family and friends, even turning in their parents for stepping out of line.

My one concern about the book was that the ending seemed rather sudden. After building up very steadily, it seemed suddenly to be over, as if the author had misjudged the time available to him before a publishing deadline. I recognise that this might simply reflect the fact that it is one volume in a trilogy, but it came as a slight surprise. That is, however, a minor cavil, and the book was very enjoyable.

100. Ariel: A literary Life of Jan Morris by Derek Johns.*

Before reading this book I didn’t know much about Jan Morris, beyond the fact that she was born, and lived until her early forties, as James Morris. While the gender reassignment, which was undertaken in 1972 when such operations were rare and drew far more attention (often intrusive and hurtful in nature) than is the case now, might be the single most significant event in her life, it does rather tend to obscure her achievements as a writer.

She is generally described as a travel writer but that rather misses the point, too. She doesn’t write about travel, but about destinations. The only book of hers that I had read was her 1975 novel, Last letters from Hav, which made it onto that year’s Booker Prize shortlist. It is a marvellous description of a fictional city state situated somewhere on the Turkish peninsula. Nothing much happens in the novel, but it holds the reader’s attention through its marvellous depiction of city life, across all social strata.

Derek Johns is clearly a close friend of Morris, and an adherent of her writing. He does not, however, allow that to push him beyond biography into hagiography. He shows a cheerful frankness about some of her less morally unassailable deeds (nothing heinous, I hasten to add).

Morris’s writing bristles with its own enthusiasms. Perhaps one of the most widely travelled of journalists, she has probably written about more of the world’s significant cities than anyone else, and she has developed a delightful knack of capturing the salient atmosphere in a few simple sentences.

Johns himself is similarly adept, and writes informatively and engagingly. I picked this up in my local bookshop by chance, and it proved a serendipitous choice.

I read her book "Venice" earlier this year, beautifully written, but a bit disorganised, I thought.

101. A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central by Anja de Jager.

I am always on the lookout for new crime writers, and the prospect of a series featuring an engaging protagonist and an intriguing setting seemed enticing. Anja de Jager certainly delivers with regard to the setting. Her novels are set in Amsterdam, and she captures the atmosphere marvellously. She also clearly knows how to weave a gripping story.

The novel opens with two detectives attending the scene of death of a painter and decorator who has fallen seven floors from a building that he and his team were working on. No-one else was around at the time, and it is unclear either why he was on the seventh floor, or how he came to fall. In the initial absence of any evidence to the contrary, the first detective attending the scene is inclined to write it off as a simple workplace accident. His colleague, Detective Lotte Meerman, who has only recently returned to duty after having been shot, and then subjected to an internal investigation, is less convinced.

Among the dead man’s effects is a key to a left luggage locker at Amsterdam Centraal railway station. When this locker is opened by his widow, she finds that it contains a human skeleton. Subsequent forensic investigation shows that the skull dates back to the Second World War. Some of the bones are less old, however, and it becomes apparent that, rather than being one intact skeleton, there are bones from two different bodies.

Detective Meerman is persistent in the face of opposition from her colleagues, and at best ambivalence from her line manager. She is, however, convinced that there is something deeply wrong here, and that the painter’s death is not the un fortunate accident that everyone else assumes.

The plot is well constructed and original, and Detective Meerman is a generally empathetic character, Unfortunately, like most fictional detectives these days, she is liberally strewn with ‘ussies’, both medical, emotional and psychological. While that may, no doubt, contribute to overall verisimilitude, in this case I found that the backstory predominated to such an extent that they detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the novel.

102. The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth by William Boyd.

William Boyd is one of my favourite authors. Indeed, I consider that he is probably the greatest living British author, and I think I would happily read his shopping lists. The only other contender I ca think of is John le Carré, who certainly deserves to be thought of as so much more than simply a great writer of spy novels. Yet even with his extraordinary, and inimitable prose style, to my mind le Carré just loses out to the scope of Boyd’s imagination and his forensic capacity to lay bare a character’s psyche.

I had, therefore, been eagerly awaiting this book for several weeks, ever since I read in the literary press of its impending publication. I am not generally keen on short stories, and was a little disappointed to find that this was not a novel, but Boyd didn’t disappoint. Indeed, the title story is really more of a novella than a short story, and gives a marvellous portrayal of a slightly feckless but very likeable young woman as she struggles to cope with the strains of living in London on a low income, generated from a series of short term low profile jobs, struggling to find a direction in life and to sustain relationships. The meld of plausible characters and convincing plots is one of Boyd’s trademarks, and he brings it into play here. After one hundred pages I felt I had known Bethany Mellmoth all her life.

The other stories are just as strong, and Boyd is happy to experiment with the genre. One of them unfolds the story of a couple’s relationship in reverse, poignantly flagging up signposts to the reader of impending separation that the characters themselves were too self-absorbed to see. The others are just as strong – there are no weak stories or ‘fillers’ in this collection at all, and it stands as a worthy addition to an already top notch corpus.

103. A Decent Interval by Simon Brett.

This book marked the return of Charles Paris after a break of several years during which Simon Brett concentrated on his Fethering series of novels (with alliterative titles such as "The Body on the Beach" and "Murder in the Museum"), Despite the passage of years, Charles Paris remains instantly recognisable as the down-at-heel and rather mediocre journeyman actor (and he hasn't really aged being still in his mid to late fifties) who is, to my mind, Brett's finest creation.

In this outing Charles lands a part (well, two parts, actually) in a production of Hamlet which is scheduled for a tour of provincial theatres around England before a hopefully triumphant run in London's West End. Charles is gratified to have the roles of The Ghost and the First Gravedigger, and is looking forward to an enjoyable spell of work. The title role is, however, to be taken by Jared Root, recent winner of a reality TV singing competition (clearly modelled on the X Factor) while Ophelia is to be played by Katrina Selsy who had landed the part as her prize for winning a similar television competition.

It soon becomes clear that Jared Root can't act at all, while Katrina Selsey has delusions of stardom way beyond her as yet untested talent. Just before the opening night in Marlborough, first stop on the provincial run of the production, part of the stage set falls down, seriously wounding Root. And then Katrina Selsey dies under strange circumstances. Charles decides to investigate.

The Charles Paris novels are always amusing, filled with Brett's insight into the trials and tribulations of an actor's life (exacerbated by Charles's relentless drinking). This latest in the series is well up to standard, and proved most enjoyable.

104. White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook.*

Dominic Sandbrook set out to write a large book recounting British history during the 1960s, but was faced with the problem of determining at which point to start. The obvious answer might have seemed to be either 1960 or 1961. History is, however, a continuum rather than am infinite series of discrete episodes, and Sandbrook decided that he needed to go back into the previous decade in order to set the appropriate context. As a consequence, he ended up writing two huge books, the first of which chronicles British history from the Suez crisis through to the demise of the Conservative government led Harold Macmillan and, briefly, Alec Douglas-Home.

The second volume picks up in 1964, with the formation of a new Labour government under the leadership of Harold Wilson. At first all goes well, with Britain heading into economic prosperity while the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones spread British youth culture all around the world. The title is taken from a speech by Harold Wilson in which he promised to use the white heat of Britain’s technological revolution to drive a new prosperous society. Of course, nothing ever is quite as it seems, and economic booms seem always to be closely followed by lean times, and Wilson’s administration would certainly find itself put through the wringer as the pound collapsed and he was faced with the humiliation of having to devalue the currency, not once but twice. As I write, the current Conservative Government has gone through the trauma of losing two Cabinet Ministers within a week, and the administration seems to lurch from one crisis of confidence to another as it struggles to deal constructively with the Brexit process. There is a startling similarity with the travails with which Harold Wilson had to contend, though his difficulties were in the context of repeated failure to enter the Common Market. His own Cabinet was riven with animosities, with the added scope for disaster of a raging alcoholic (George Brown) who seemed capable of starting a fight in an empty room, and repeatedly quarrelled and clashed with pretty well all of his Cabinet colleagues at one time or another.

Sandbrook has a great knack for conveying political disputes with great clarity. He is also adept at mingling political and diplomatic history with chapters documenting social and domestic change. He analyses trends in education, domestic relationship, changing attitudes to money and employment, and even the nation’s evolving sexual mores, all in an informed and balanced manner. He writes about complicated issues with great clarity, but never compromises either his academic credentials (the book has almost two hundred pages of footnotes) or his readers’ attention.

This is modern political history writing at its best, and I am looking forward to following his chronicles into the 1970s.

105. Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser.

I must have had a lot more staying power thirty years ago. Sic transit Gloria mundi and all that sort of stuff…

Just to clarify where I am going with this, I mean, of course, when it comes to reading. Nowadays, being so much older, and more than ten thousand days nearer to the grave, I tend to be very ruthless if a book fails to reach out and secure my attention. When I was younger, I seem to have persevered in the face of almost impenetrable lack of accessibility, or rampant triteness of plot.

I had a conversation with a colleague recently, and we somehow found ourselves discussing the works of Antonia Fraser. I mentioned that I had enjoyed reading some of her Jemima Shore novels as well as her historical studies. While sorting out my overburdened bookshelves I had cause to remember that conversation as I came across my copy of this novel, and decided that it might offer some enjoyable nostalgic reading fare for a lazy weekend.

Well, I chose poorly there. Triteness of plot and impenetrable lack of accessibility were out in force. I can’t believe that Antonia Fraser could demean herself by such woeful pap, or that I could ever have enjoyed such an immature and mindless assault on my literary sensitivities. Worst of all, I have been yielding valuable shelf-space to it for more than thirty years. Well that last failing was an error of judgement that was easily rectified, though I felt almost ashamed palming it off on one of the local charity shops.

that's a fantastically damning review, Ian! I've never read any of her fiction, just a couple of her histories on The Gunpowder Plot and Charles II.

106. The Fatal Tree by Jake Arnott.

This is a glorious romp of a novel, set among the criminal underclasses of early eighteenth century London. Taking the form of narratives sent from Newgate Prison to the editor of a journal specialising in salacious stories, it recounts the eventful life of Elizabeth Lyon. Under the soubriquet of ‘Edgworth Bess’, she had forged a successful career for herself in the margins of London lowlife, making her way as prostitute. Pickpocket and general opportunist.

Unfortunately, early on in her sojourn through this alternative society her path had crossed that of Jonathan Wild, famous as the Thieftaker General, though he was in fact one of the worst villains in London, running a criminal network as diverse and extensive as that operated by the Kray twins two hundred and forty years later.

Arnott first established his credentials as a crime writer with his stories set in the Krays’ London that unpicked the glamour to lay bare the squalor. He brings those same skills to bear here, but combines them with a lightness of touch that lends an air of jollity to proceedings. He also liberally peppers his prose with thieves’ argot. This is initially rather irritating, though the attentive reader does adapt to it very quickly, and it lends a verisimilitude to the accounts.

My one cavil was that the book seemed unnecessarily drawn out, with some superfluous complexities thrown into the plot. Still, such a judgement misses the point of the sheer enjoyment that the book provides.

107. Coffin Road by Peter May.

Peter May is one of our most prolific crime writers. In addition to his numerous novels, he has written a huge number of television screenplays for series such as The Bill, and seems capable of swapping format and genre without any difficulty.

In this novel, he has returned to the more remote areas of Scotland, setting this one principally on the island of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It opens with the narrator waking up after having been washed up on a beach during a storm. If this were not alarming enough, as he returns to consciousness he realises that he has no idea who he is. His memory seems to have evaporated. Dragging himself further up the beach he is met by a neighbour who leads him home, where, after resting, he starts to grapple with the task of reconstructing his life.

It gradually emerges that he has been living in Harris for eighteen months, ostensibly researching a book on the disappearance in 1900 of three lighthouse keepers from the Flannan Isles, further out into the Atlantic. Eager to find any clues or landmarks that might trigger his memory, he contrives to visit the Flannan Isles where he discovers the body of a man who has clearly been murdered. He unavoidably comes to suspect that he might be responsible.

Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh a teenaged girl learns that her father might not, as she and her family have been led to believe, have committed suicide two years ago. Unable to broach this subject in any constructive way with her mother, she decides to investigate further. Her research uncovers the fact that her father had been engaged in biochemical research on the impact of neonicotinoids on bees, and that he had, as a consequence, fallen foul of a multinational agrichemical conglomerate.

May manages his plot material deftly (constructing a far more coherent story than might be divined from my clumsy synopsis above), and casts his conspiracy theories in a highly plausible way. I don’t know enough about the science to judge how viable it is, but it worked for me, and May does not allow technical aspects to intrude to the detriment of the story.

Highly capable and very gripping.

108. Living Proof by John Harvey.

This is John Harvey and Resnick at their best!

As usual the action takes place in Nottingham (and I particularly enjoyed the occasional references to Loughborough!), and the beleaguered Resnick is up against it once again. A local festival is celebrating crime fiction and some classic noir films, and popular American author Cathy Jordan, responsible for the immensley successful series of garish and violent thrillers featuring feisty PI Annie Q Jones is the star attraction. However, she has been receiving threatening letters, and the police are approached to render additional security.

Meanwhile a prostitute is attacking her male clients at various venues around the city. Eventually, as the police feared would be the case, a punter is murdered.

As always with Harvey's masterful series of Resnick novels, the plot is entirely plausible and the characters perfectly credible. The readers shares Resnick's weariness and the sheer despair of Lynn Kellog, his long-suffering DC. And, as usual, we are treated to sumptuous descriptions of the marvellous sandwiches that Resnick somehow always finds time to construct!

109. Uncommon People by David Hepworth.*

David Hepworth has a long and impressive track record as a music journalist, and be brought to bear very effectively in his previous book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment. In that book, he offered a detailed annal of that year, analysing the most successful music that was released and setting it in its historical and social context.

In this latest book, he takes a different tack on the upper end of the rock music world. His basic premise is that the age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has now passed into history. Starting in 1955, he moves through each of the next forty years, profiling a range of leading musicians through the prism of one particular day that would prove to be a significant axis point in their careers.

Hepworth is very knowledgeable about his subject, and knows how to construct a compelling argument. His pen portraits of the various stars he selects are clear and engaging, and he manages to bring his subjects into sharp focus. As will always be the case with this sort of book, I did not always agree with his selections, or his conclusions. I could, however, always follow the logic of his arguments.

There were some occasions where I think he felt constricted by his own choice of format, and there were a couple of years for which his arguments were slightly contrived. They were very minor failings, though, and as a whole, the book gives an interesting and coherent insight into the history of rock stardom. I always enjoy reading books by people who know their subject, and can express their own enthusiasm for it clearly, without seeming to preach, and that is a skill that Hepworth has in abundance.

110. State of Emergency: The Way We Were 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook.*

Dominic Sandbrook has that happy knack of combining his considerable scholarship with accessibility. This large book is actually merely the first instalment of what would have been an immense book, detailing British history during the 1970s. Such is the wealth of material available to him, that he had to opt instead for two volumes.

While the basic frame of the book follows the political history during that turbulent period, he consolidates that with detailed consideration of the cultural and sociological context. There is scarcely n aspect of British life in the early 1970s that doesn’t some under his pellucid gaze.

What rapidly becomes clear is that, although the book only covers four years, there was so much going on. The period was bookended by two general elections that would yield surprise results. I was just seven years old in 1970, so have no valuable recollection of the general election. In 1970, no one, least of all Edward Heath himself, really expected that the Conservatives might win the election. Harold Wilson’s government had, like so many Labour administrations of recent years, subsided into internal wrangling, with personality clashes among the front benchers spilling over into policy disputes. His Conservative rivals, however, were also divided, and lacked any clear economic vision, and Wilson had chosen to cut and run, hoping to secure a third term. Sandbrook covers the election campaign with great verve, conveying Harold Wilson’s surprise and disappointment at the outcome.

Heath’s four years as Prime Minister would see major upheavals, all of which reverberated through subsequent history to a greater degree than could reasonably have been expected. He is probably now best remembered for having clashed with the miners, and taking Britain into the Stygian gloom of the three-day week and lengthy power cuts. On a more positive point, he also succeeded, where previous Labour and Conservative governments had failed, at gaining admission into the European Economic Community, negotiating membership from 1 January 1973.

Although the prism of memory renders an image of him in constant strife against the trade unions, he actually had a better relationship with most of the union leadership than his Labour predecessor. Indeed, many people on the right of the party came almost to suspect him of crypto-Socialism. Even Joe Gormley, the relatively moderate national leader of the miners’ union, got on well with Heath, and attempted to maintain constructive relations with him, though these were undermined by the scheming of his more extreme colleagues Mick McGahey, leader of the Scottish miners, and Arthur Scargill, leader of the Yorkshire chapter.

Sandbrook’s analysis shows that Heath’s greatest weakness was his inability to deal with people. Far too prickly, he simply couldn’t communicate, and could never be comfortable in company. He was, also, incredibly unlucky. All the way through his administration he was overtaken by external events over which he had no control (such as the sudden outbreak of war in the Middle East and the consequential surge in oil and petrol prices around the world).

Sandbrook’s analysis of the industrial strife, and in particular the miners’ strikes, is very clear. He encapsulates complex concepts and sequences of events in a lucid and easily absorbed manner. Obviously, writing with the pellucid focus lent by hindsight helps, but he manages his material with great dexterity.

He also knows how to strike the right balance between the factual accounts of the political machinations with insights into the changing cultural and social horizons, offering diverting chapters on the rise of feminism, the lengthening shadow of unemployment and the grimmer aspects of professional football.

This is accessible history of the highest calibre, and I am eager to move on to the next volume.

111. Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand.

I found this novel engrossing, although it was also one of the bleakest books I have read for a long time. Cass Neary, the protagonist is not particularly endearing. Having left home as a teenager, Neary gravitated to New York City where she lived on the fringes of the burgeoning punk scene of the mid 1970s. Stumbling through a number of relationships, and subsiding into sustained substance abuse, she briefly established herself as a professional photographer, mounting exhibitions of her pictures of dead bodies.

Thirty years later, still battling drug addiction, and drifting through life without any purpose beyond making it through the week, she finds herself commissioned to interview Aphrodite Kamestas, who had also been celebrated as a leading photographer back in the late 1950s, before becoming a recluse living on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Maine. Amazed to have been remembered herself, and desperate for the fee, Neary drives through the onset of winter to fulfil the commission, finding herself in a remote former commune. The locals all seem aloof, and she notices a plethora of handbills and notices seeking information about people who have gone missing, some of them dating back several years. Having arrived too late for the last boat to the island on which Kamestas lives, Neary repairs to a local motel. It transpires that that very night, the motel owner’s daughter also goes missing.

Thus, Hand sets the scene for a stark crime novel, strewn with technical insights into professional photography, and littered with popular cultural references. Neary is pragmatic, but far from empathetic, though that does not impair the flow of the novel at all. The Maine landscape and climate loom heavily over the story, almost as characters in their own right. Hand maintains the tension adeptly. I just wish she had somehow relaxed the overpowering sense of bleakness occasionally. This was certainly a good, well-written book – I just can’t say that I enjoyed it!

112. Paddington Abroad by Michael Bond.

I loved the Paddington stories as a child, even though, by the time I was introduced to them in the early 1970s, they were probably already a bit out of date. Indeed, I imagine that they were already rather dated even when they were first published – that is one aspect of their charm. Another is the fact that, unlike the recent films (highly entertaining though they are), all the mishaps and adventures that befall Paddington arise from everyday activities. The normality of the context serves to accentuate the humour and delight of the stories.

I first read Paddington Abroad nearly fifty years ago, at a time when I myself had never been abroad. I was, therefore, utterly intrigued with the accounts of Paddington’s preparations for his first foreign holiday with the Brown family, and enchanted by his adventures once he arrives in France. Now, nearly fifty years later and reading it to my great niece, that enchantment remains intact. The stories work just as well now, and my great niece was as delighted with this book as I had been.

Michael Bond’s trick is to write with great simplicity, and he never patronises the reader, of whatever age. His humour works on to levels, delighting his child readers at the most direct level, but also appeals to parents (and great uncles). Paddington has an occasionally alarming honesty, which, supported by his disarming ‘hard stare’, enables him to cut through facades.

In this volume, some of the highlights include Paddington causing consternation at his bank when he attempts to withdraw some money for the holiday, falling foul of passport control, playing the big bass drum in a parade through a French village, and finally even participating in the Tour de France. All very funny and marvellously handled.

113. Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris.

Jan Morris is renowned for her travel books, or, rather, her books about places to which she has travelled. (She seldom describes her journeys, viewing them simply as a means to an end). This is one of her finest, with the catch being that it is, in fact, a novel, and the slightly old fashioned, cosmopolitan city state of Hav is an entirely imaginary destination. Morris gives us some clues as to its supposed location, and I have tended to think of it as being on a peninsula extending into the Mediterranean from the coast of Turkey.

It is a masterful creation, and is utterly plausible. Morris describes a stay of several months in Hav, during which she became immersed in its chaotic history. Throughout its lengthy history several different forces had invaded and overcome Hav, lending its heady cultural and ethnic pot pourri, which in turn fascinate twentieth century visitors such as Morris.

It is Morris’s attention to detail that lends this book its verisimilitude. She had previously written several similar books about ‘genuine’ cities – her description of the time she spent in Venice is something of a classic of the genre – and she applied the same approach to her creation of Hav. Indeed, in some ways the book resembles a volume from the ‘Rough Guide’ series, although they only appeared several years after Morris’s novel was published.

She writes with great simplicity and clarity – she had, after all, been a foreign correspondent for both The Times and The Guardian for most of her career. She simply describes what her character purported to see, and recounts her encounters with local inhabitants. Nothing much happens, as such, but her distillation of historical and cultural insights is a strong brew, and one that repays the reader’s attention.

114. An English Murder by Cyril Hare.

I really wish that I had not read this book. I have read several books by Cyril hare, and have enjoyed his ingenious plots and well written stories. Unfortunately, this one did not match up at all, and has rather eroded some of my respect for Hare as a master of the vintage whodunit.

Hare’s other novels, and particularly those featuring the languid barrister Francis Pettigrew, were finely crafted stories, often with a legal setting, and stand among the finest of the rich harvest of post-war detective stories. In this book, however, he seemed determined to poke fun at the genre, incorporating every cliché imaginable (a down at heel aristocratic family inhabiting a crumbling stately home that they can no longer afford to maintain, a Christmas setting in which the house is cut off by a drastic snowstorm, and rampant animosities between every character, leaving a plethora of potential suspects when the most unwholesome character is murdered at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve). Unfortunately, Hare does not pull of his parody, and the novel sinks beneath the weight of its own self-ridicule.

Of course, I should have known better, and asked myself why this novel has been out of print for so long, while his other classics have always been available. Rather too late for such wisdom after the fact, though.

115. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zalaeski.

This may well have been the most disappointing book I have read this year. As a keen reader of Tolkien’s academic works, as well as his chronicles of Middle Earth, I was looking forward to some fascinating insights into his philological studies, and his researches into the various tributaries of north Germanic medieval literature. Similarly, I was keen to learn more about C S Lewis, and in particular his medieval researches. After all, his critical analysis, The Allegory of Love, is itself now a classic of the genre.

Sadly, this book fell lamentably short of the detailed analysis promised in the hyperbolic encomia strewn about the cover. The Zaleskis seem to delight in using as many words as possible to say very little, and I found it all very weak and pointless.

116. Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey.

This is Peter Lovesey at his magnificent best, and he manages to combine a gripping murder story with an analysis of the different genres of crime fiction.

As the novel opens, Lovesey's permanently irascible Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has just arrested a bank clerk who has just confessed to the murder of his branch manager, so he is feeling pretty smug. Meanwhile Shirley-Ann Miller decides to go along to a meeting of the Bloodhounds, a group who meet weekly to discuss crime fiction. There are only six other members but it soon appears that they have wide-ranging and passionate ideas about what constitutes the ideal crime novel. Some favour gritty, modern realism while others prefer the traditional whodunnit, particularly the "locked room". One is obsessed with Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (and why not?).

Lovesey uses the differing opinions of the Bloodhounds to illustrate the contrasting genres of crime fiction which he does in an informative but also immensely entertaining way. And then one of the Bloodhounds finds himself inexplicably in possession of the world's most expensive postage stamp, stolen earlier that week. This is merely the start of a series of events that will end in the murder of two of the members and the investigation of the rest. Lovesey weaves his own intricate "Locked room" mystery, and embeds it soundly within a robust police procedural, and adds further grist to the Diamond canon.

Most enjoyable.

117. The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley.*

Like most regular buyers and readers of books, I have come to take with a pinch of salt the reviewers’ plaudits that the publishers liberally strew over the covers of their wares. One such comment on the cover of Andrew Rawnsley’s accounts of the last two terms of the Blair/Brown New Labour administration suggested it was almost a Shakespearean account. I immediately dismissed that as representing the flightier end of PR hyperbole, but I was mistaken.

This is a completely gripping account that had my alternately smirking at some of the bizarre presumptions to which Blair and Brown, along with their respective coteries of henchmen, succumbed, and then almost shouting in rage at some of the more ghastly errors. Of course, that dichotomy could be found in accounts blessed with the pellucid view of hindsight about almost every administration, regardless of political complexion. In the case of the new Labour governments that held sway from 1997 until 2010, there was, however, the distressing lacquer of smugness and odious self-satisfaction among the lead players that lends its own squalid sheen.

Rawnsley has that happy gift of being able to convey different political ideologies and convictions with great clarity. He is, after all, one of Britain’s best established political journalists. It is also clear that he was more sympathetic, both personally and politically, to Tony Blair than to Gordon Brown. The latter emerges from these pages as an emotionally barren bully, haunted by the paranoia obsession that everyone around him was intent upon doing him down. He did, indeed, have a lot of enemies among his Cabinet colleagues, though it is unclear to what extent those enmities were of his own making.

Rawnsley is not slow to criticise Blair, either – there is no hint of hagiography here – and from this account there is little room to manoeuvre away from culpability over the decision to go to war with Iraq without suitably robust evidence.

Rawnsley’s account benefits from the vast range of people involved with the events that he describes to whom he was able to speak directly. Over the years he interviewed most of the principal participants in British politics during the three electoral terms for which New Labour was in power. The book certainly reads more like journalism than academic history, but that is, after all, Rawnsley’s metier. It is a large book, but the story is compelling, and the narrative fairly fizzes along.

I have found myself reading far more non-fiction books than usual this year, and this has been one of the most entertaining and informative of them.

118. Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard.*

Mary Beard is one of our leading academics, and perhaps deserves ‘national treasure’ status for her ceaseless work to promote the value, and continuing relevance, of the great works of Latin and Greek literature. She has, sadly, attracted mindless opprobrium from a small but highly vocal band of inadequates who have subjected her to vicious trolling across social media. Fortunately, at whatever inner cost, she has ignored the moronic trolls, and continued her work to try to illuminate our understanding of the modern world through her exposition of the ancient one.

This book draws in part upon her own experiences at the hands of the trolls, and explores the way in which women have consistently been denied the right to speak, citing examples from the Odyssey and other works of antiquity, and comparing their tone to equally constricting attitudes that still abound today. Clarity of thought and expression were fundamental aspects of successful classical oratory and rhetoric, and Beard demonstrates how vital they remain today, and how women should be alert to them in order to avoid being marginalised.

I always find it a delight to read pellucid and thoughtful prose, and that is evident throughout this book. In our role as drafters of ministerial correspondence, my colleagues and I used to aspire to our ABC mantra of Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity. This book demonstrates how powerful those three writer’s weapons can be.

119. Beau Death by Peter Lovesey.

This is the latest in Peter Lovesey’s extensive and entertaining series of crime novels featuring the frequently querulous Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, head of CID in Bath.

The novel opens with a crowd of people watching in almost hypnotic awe as a construction crew wield an old-fashioned wrecking ball to demolish a dilapidated tenement block in Twerton, near Bath. All at once, while the crowd looks on, a figure dressed in eighteenth century clothes is spotted sitting in one of the attics as the huge ball swings towards it. Once the debris is cleared, a dead body is discovered, and the initial indications suggest that it might date back a couple of centuries to the period of Beau Nash, who first set the town on its path towards popularity among the propertied classes, and its subsequent elevation to the epitome of social elegance in England.

This book might almost be a potted history of Bath, though Lovesey has a light touch, and never allows the novel to deteriorate into a text book. Diamond is a well-established figure: grouchy, quick to bark out orders and almost permanently hungry, yet also intelligent and eventually prepared to accept other people’s ideas. Lovesey is well practised in blending sound plots with enough smattering of the police procedural to seem authentic, but also a light-heartedness that leaves the reader wanting more.

I am surprised that these novels have not found their way onto television. The combination of Bath’s scenic splendours and the quixotic lead character seem custom-built to capture the territory formerly occupied by Morse.

120. Autumn by Ali Smith

Every now and then I read a book and find myself totally at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist. This book has won prizes and drawn almost universal critical acclaim, and the paperback edition is weighed down with several pages of excerpts from gushing reviews. I, however, found it totally impenetrable, written in a self-congratulatory prose style that left me feeling almost physically sick. I have read civil service HR manuals that I have found less tedious and more intellectually and emotionally refreshing.

I would also question Penguin’s decision to present it without double-justified pages. To my perhaps jaundiced eye, the effect was not one of quirky charm; I merely felt that the typesetting was as slipshod as the writing.

121. Star Trap by Simon Brett.

Star Trap is set in 1975 and represents one of the earlier episodes in the investigative career of Charles Paris, down-at-heel journeyman actor.

Charles is recruited to appear in Lumpkin!, a musical loosely based upon Oliver Goldsmith's classic play She Stoops to Conquer. This production has been devised primarily as a vehicle for Christopher Milton, the enormously popular star of one of the leading television comedy series of the time. Charles, however, has not won his role through the customary path of attending an audition and being deemed the most suitable actor for the part. He had instead been contacted by his urbane solicitor friend, Gerald Venables, one of the 'angels' investing in the show, who has been concerned about some odd incidents which he thinks might be part of a greater plot to sabotage the musical. Knowing of Charles's success in solving a couple of previous theatrical mysteries, Venables thinks that he might prove to be a helpful asset to the company management as their man on the inside.

As ever, Simon Brett demonstrates his detailed knowledge of the theatrical world, conjuring an authentic context for the escalating series of incidents that continue to bedevil the show. Personalities and egos clash, and Christopher Milton appropriates more and more of the body of the show to his part, leaving the rest of the cast bereft of any funny or worthwhile lines. He is, however, as Charles continually has to concede (often through gritted teeth following yet another of the star's dreadful tantrums), exceptionally talented, and though he may be hogging ever larger portions of the work to himself, his decisions do seem to make theatrical sense.

As usual with this entertaining series, the plot is well-constructed (and the relevant clues to the eventual denouement are all there), but delivered with a light touch, and Charles Paris remains a very engaging lead character (I think he is too self-effacing to be called a hero).

122. James Bond: My long and eventful search for his father by Len Deighton.

I am struggling now to understand the point of this essay (beyond, of course, enticing suckers like me to pay to download it to my Kindle). I suppose it may eventually feature as a chapter in Len Deighton’s autobiography, but as a standalone item, it seems rather baffling.

In this piece Deighton recounts his friendships with Ian Fleming, famous as the creator of James Bond, and Kevin McClory, who is less widely known these days but played a vital role in bringing James bond to the screen. Fleming and McClory could not have been more different, one debonair, calculating and prudent, the other almost feckless and spendthrift, but the prevailing image of James bond owes much to both of them. While Fleming created the character in his novels, it was the screen manifestation of him that secured the ‘brand’ enduring success.

McClory, along with Jack Whittingham, collaborated with Fleming in the writing of a screenplay for Thunderball, which would have been the first of the James bond films. Fleming then adapted the screenplay into his novel of the same name, prompting a sustained legal dispute with McClory and Whittingham that delayed the release of the film.

The legal wrangles over the appropriate division of royalties and credits for the book were resolved fairly quickly, but they would subsequently prompt McClory to seek a greater share of the returns from the whole James Bond series.

All very interesting, of course, and I had been wholly unaware of the dispute. Less clear, however, is the precise role that Deighton played, and I was left feeling that this essay merely represented an opportunity for some heavy handed name dropping!

Here is a summary of my reading year. I read 122 books in the end - rather fewer than I have managed in most recent years, though that number included several very large history books.

My highs and lows for 2017 (in chronological order of reading rather than preference) were as follows:

New to me fiction read during the year:

1. Slow Horses by Mick Herron (although I could almost have included any of his marvellous novels featunring the grotesque Jackson Lamb).
2. Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash.
3. Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift.
4. The Power by Naomi Alderman.
5. The Nix by Nathan Hill.
6. The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig.
7. A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre.
8. If We Were Villains by M L Rio.
9. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke.
10. La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman.

If I had to pick one out of those, I think it would probably have to be If We Were Villains.

My favourite Non-Fiction books of the year (and for some reason, I found myself reading a lot of non-fiction - far more than I usually manage):

1. The Long and Winding Road by Alan Johnson.
2. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell) (although, as with Mick Herron I enjoyed everything that i read by her this year.
3. Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale.
4. Lonely City by Olivia Laing.
5. East West Street by Philippe Sands.
6. Never Had it so Good and its companion volume, White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook.
7. Kind of Blue by Kenneth Clarke.
8. Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein.
9. Just Kids by Patti Smith.
10. The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley

My favourite re-reads of the year:

1. Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer.
2. Sicken and So Die by Simon Brett.
3. Jumpers by Tom Stoppard.
4. Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel (When will we have a new book from her? I have been waiting for it for ages.)
5. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
6. Right ho, Jeeves! by P. G. Wodehouse.
7. Paradise City by Elizabeth Day.
8. John Macnab by John Buchan.
9. Living Proof by John Harvey.
10. Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey.

And the books I enjoyed least during 2017:

1. Codeword Cromwell by Ted Allbeury.
2. The House at Bishopsgate by Kate Hickman.
3. The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet.
4. The Night Watch by Patrick Modiano.
5. Timekeepers by Simon Garfield.
6. Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden.
7. Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes.
8. The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce.
9. Athenian Blues by Pol Koutsakis.
10. Autumn by Ali Smith.

Interesting lists, Ian. I read 118 books in 2017, so just behind you.