Spectator books of the year: John Preston on the dramatic story of how Britain reinvented itself

Dominic Sandbrook’s The Great British Dream Factory (Allen Lane, £25) is very long, but I read it in less than two days, my attention never flagging. Sandbrook’s main contention is that as Britain declined as an imperial power, it reinvented itself as a purveyor of popular culture to the world. Embracing everything from Black Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, losing his fingers in a sheet metal press to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, it’s dramatic, perceptive and often extremely funny.

Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (William Collins, £30) is very long too — and somehow manages to be both prim and prurient. But there’s also plenty of fascinating stuff here. It says a lot about Hughes’s baleful allure that — on separate occasions — he was mistaken for Engelbert Humperdinck and the Yorkshire Ripper.