Anthony Daniels
J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £17.99) is a dyspeptic vision of a dystopian Britain that has already half-arrived. He is a close observer of our national malaise: indiscriminate consumerism combined with a sense of entitlement, and therefore of resentment. His profound understanding of the place of the teddy bear in our national life made me laugh.
Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (Granta, £20) is a brilliant, subtle and very moving exploration of the ironies of modernisation and nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Greek Moslems were deemed Turks, and Turkish Orthodox deemed Greek, and expelled from their ancestral homes accordingly. Yet another painful reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.
Sam Leith
There were a lot of old favourites performing well this year in fiction. Martin Amis’s gulag story House of Meetings (Cape, £15.99) was terrific, though he must be sick to his new back teeth of hearing it accorded the back-handed compliment ‘a return to form’. As was David Mitchell’s lovely evocation of childhood, Black Swan Green (Sceptre, £16.99). He’ll be sick of people telling him it wasn’t as good as Cloud Atlas, but boo to them. And hooray for Stephen King, whose new novel Lisey’s Story (Hodder, £17.99) was gripping and scary and moving. I’m just about to get properly to grips with Mark Z. Danielewski’s dizzyingly inventive rotational road trip, Only Revolutions (Doubleday, £20), on a road trip of my own. Great services to lovers of poetry were done by John Haffenden and Alice Quinn. The first edited William Empson’s ceaselessly clever and spiky letters (OUP, £40), as well as completing his magnificent biography (OUP, £30). Quinn, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, drew the uncollected work of the peerless Elizabeth Bishop together in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Carcanet, £16.95).
Digby Durrant
How did Siegfried Sassoon at 42 in the throes of a love affair with Stephen Tennant, the most flamboyant homo- sexual in the land, and moving in the same smart circle as the Sitwells and the Garsington set, shut himself off from their world and write Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, that wonderfully innocent and moving account of his utopian Edwardian childhood? Later, in search of that lost innocence but tormented by sexual demons, he became a Catholic, setting up an oratory, sometimes praying while stripped naked and achieving a kind of peace.
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