The Spectator’s books of 2012, pt 2

2012 is very nearly finished. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year.

Matthew Parris

There’s been a fad for publishing ‘biographies’ of entities that are not human beings: everything from longitude to the mosquito, and the format can prove forced. But Robert Shepherd’s Westminster, A Biography: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomsbury, £20) chooses a subject with a beating heart. Westminster has developed a most distinct personality since its birth as a swampy Bronze Age island, and Shepherd explains, describes and charts it with great scholarship, of course, but with a smile and a quizzical eyebrow. I love learning how little I knew.

Janan Ganesh’s George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor (Biteback, £20) treads with skill and flair the awkward line between authorised and unauthorised biography. Ganesh, who has an intuitive grasp of the Tory psyche, has obviously had some co-operation from his subject, to whom he is not unsympathetic; but he’s patently his own man, and this is his own book, revealing, penetrating, stylish and superbly written.