The Spectator’s books of 2012, pt 1

2012 is drawing to a close. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month)  of the Spectator’s best books of the year.

A.N.Wilson

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the boring era when DNA and science spoilt the poetry of crime investigation. Canon Chambers, a self-effacing, clever clergyman with a taste for pubs and shove-halfpenny, and an agonised capacity to fall in love with women, is surely a bit as Archbishop Runcie must have been when he came out of the Guards and took orders?  Each tale is beautifully crafted and surprising. I hope for many more volumes.

How England Made the English: From Hedgerows to Heathrow by Harry Mount (Viking/Penguin, £20) is a punctiliously matched piece of topography-cum-history, taking you from Cornish tin mines to the great churches of Suffolk and the Cotswolds, built from wool wealth, to the suburbs of Surrey.