Spectator writers pick their books of the year

Mark Mason

JFK’s Last Hundred Days by Thurston Clarke (Allen Lane, £20) brilliantly captures Kennedy’s entire life through the prism of his final months. Deliberately thrusting his crotch for an official portrait, musing about assassination (he even acts it out in a game of charades, covered in ketchup), folding his monogrammed handkerchiefs to hide the initials because he disliked ostenatious wealth, putting a black marine at the centre of a ceremonial line-up … the hero, like the devil, is in the detail.

Emailing my friend Travis Elborough about his and Nick Rennison’s A London Year (Frances Lincoln, £25), I wrote simply: ‘You bastard.’ Great idea, expertly researched and beautifully packaged (it’s even got a ribbon! No one gets ribbons these days.) Diary and letter extracts every day of the calendar — there’s Kenneth Williams and a bus driver, John Constable and Cromwell’s embalmed head, and Evelyn Waugh with a friend who says ‘West Central’ because ‘W.C.’