Books of the year II — a further selection of the books chosen by our regular reviewers

Jonathan Sumption

The reputation of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, has never recovered from the pasting he received in Lloyd George’s war memoirs. Lloyd George thought that his deliberate ambiguity about Britain’s intentions led us into the first world war. If you read just one book of history this Christmas, it should be T.G. Otte’s re-evaluation in Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Allen Lane, £35). This beautifully written biography of one of the most humane, perceptive and intelligent diplomats is a wistful reminder of what Britain might have been like if Lloyd George had not destroyed the Liberal party.

If one is not enough, try Ambrogio A. Caiani’s To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII (Yale, £20). It is the story of the struggle, fought with cunning, not force, between the forgotten Roman nobleman Barnaba Chiaramonti, who became Pope Pius VII, and the all-too-well-remembered Napoleon. Of course, Pius was helped by Napoleon’s inability to understand the power of religious sentiment and his grotesque misjudgments in the last eight years of his public career. Still, it is quite something to have been the only man apart from Castlereagh who consistently got the better of the great dictator.

Graham Robb

In a state of mild post-lockdown hysteria, I tittered my way through Anthony Buckeridge’s brilliantly plotted Jennings and Darbishire series (House of Stratus, £7.99 each). I relished Paul Jones’s disabused and well-balanced history of ridiculously resilient End-to-Enders: End to End: The Land’s End to John o’Groats Cycling Record (Little, Brown, £16.99) and I devoured the ‘punk poet’ John Cooper Clarke’s relentlessly deadpan I Wanna Be Yours (Picador, £7.99). This is not a ‘ponderous trudge through the turgid facts of an ill-remembered life’ but the kind of autobiography Rimbaud might have written if he had been a Mancunian stand-up comedian.