Alexander Chancellor’s books of the year

David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy is a riveting history of a country whose unification only 150 years ago may have been the worst thing that ever happened to it. Still a fragile and divided nation, in which northerners deride southerners as ‘Africani’, its troubles anticipate those of a united Europe, for, like Europe, Italy’s glory lies in the achievements of its parts rather than of the whole; or so Gilmour powerfully persuades us.

For pure entertainment, however, it’s hard to beat Craig Brown’s One on One, which is a chain of 101 stories of chance encounters between famous people. It starts with Hitler being knocked down by a car driven by an Englishman in Munich in 1931 and ends with Hitler meeting the Duchess of Windsor in 1937, meanwhile coursing through 99 other incongruous meetings such as those between Marianne Faithfull and W. H. Auden, and Marilyn Monroe and Nikita Khruschev.