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Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke – review

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A rewarding trawl through a watershed decade for career women

The 1950s are often talked about as if they held nothing much for women but typing, cooking and looking after children, when in fact they were an era of enormous progress for career women – British women anyway. This excellent book should go far towards setting the record straight, making it clear that although, in America, the wartime poster girl Rosie the Riveter was shoved firmly back into the kitchen from which she needed liberating by Betty Friedan, in Europe the picture was very different. Not perhaps for all women, but at least for a whole generation reaping the benefit of more and longer education. When Elaine Dundy, actress and novelist, arrived from America in 1949 she wrote of a "place where young people, besieged for six years of war, could finally see that they had a future" – which came to fruition in the 50s. Rachel Cooke, mostly renowned for her penetrating interviews, here looks back at a time when women's lives were undergoing amazing changes and completely demolishes any notion that the 50s were a just a dull and domestic time for women.

By 1957, 33% of married women worked – and they were making names for themselves in unprecedented numbers. They were such as Grace Robertson, a journalist who worked for Picture Post (as I did); she got used to being mistaken for a secretary by visitors and being treated well by her male colleagues, though they would try to get her into bed on work trips. And her girl friends' parents "stopped them seeing me. You could be a nurse, a teacher or a secretary while you waited to get your man. But a photographer? I might be a bad influence".

In 1956, Barbara Wootton, sociologist and criminologist, was a Nuffield research fellow at Bedford College and a governor of the BBC. There was Rose Heilbron, the first woman high court judge (who, as a barrister for the defence of a woman charged with setting fire to her houseboat, secured her acquittal partly by pointing out that a woman about to set fire to a boat and knowing she'd shortly be on the bank would never have put her curlers in). Jacquetta Hawkes was a wonderful archaeologist and, incidentally, JB Priestley's lover; her book A Land was required reading at one time for most of us. Margery Fish was a brilliant gardener who persuaded the National Trust to adopt gardens as well as buildings. There were some women who had enormous influence in politics; Betty Box was a film producer (who when she once asked for equal pay was asked why she needed more money when she had a rich husband – but darned well got it anyway). Alison Smithson was also married; she worked with her husband, and they shared the domestic side – he did all the shopping. Together they designed Smithdon high school, which was highly modern, but loathed by the locals – they said passers-by would be able to see up the girls' skirts.

Such women were the inheritors, perhaps, but not the copies of, the thousands of single women between the wars whose potential mates had perished in the trenches. The girls I was at Cambridge with mostly hoped that they would get married and assumed they'd have careers; this generation of women didn't generally think marriage was an alternative to working, although a few of them were more bisexual or gay than I realised at the time. For example, Nancy Spain, the writer and broadcaster, who certainly faced both ways, apparently had a relationship with Ginette Spanier, the directrice of the couture house Balmain, who was married to a tall handsome doctor. Though Jewish they had somehow survived the German occupation together; he was highly likable though once he saw me eating and turned to my husband to ask how he felt about "being married to Pantagruel".

What makes the book more rewarding than just the individual subjects themselves, good though these are, is the way that Cooke uses long and frequent footnotes to fill in the trends and contexts in which the women lived – including references to other notable women such as Anne Scott-James and her views on the way Nancy Spain dressed – jeans in the office and then "looking absolutely stunning in a Balmain dress".

Not every influential woman of the times found their way into this book: Scott-James is mentioned only in passing and Elizabeth David's enormous effect on the food of Britain might have been more dwelt on; but perhaps the very fact that there are achieving and interesting women left out goes to prove just how many such women there were. I could have done with an index to track down any women I suspected might be included, but that's about the only criticism this excellent encyclopedia of talent deserves.

Rachel Cooke will be speaking at Bristol festival of ideas on Friday 15 November (£7/£6), and at Foyles, London W1 on Tuesday 19 November (free but booking essential; email events@foyles.co.uk).


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The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes by Patrick Keiller – review

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With his streak of nostalgia and distinctive tone, Patrick Keiller offers a worldly and compelling view of Britain's built environment

Early on in this enigmatic, intermittently brilliant collection of essays about the built landscape of Britain and how it has changed in the last 30 years, there is a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

The sentence is as close as Patrick Keiller comes to a manifesto. It also appears in one of the films that made his longstanding cult reputation, Robinson in Space, a 1997 travelogue that turned wide, static shots of car factories, supermarkets and container ports, often seen from a distance or through fences, into a menacingly beautiful portrait of a Britain that is both bleaker and more powerful than we usually think. In another essay here, Keiller tries to explain the power of his footage. "The slightest sense of hyper-reality in the pictures seemed to be enough to unmask their subjects," he writes, "especially if one stared at them a bit."

Despite the ever-swelling crowd of psychogeographers, urbexers, urbanists and architectural polemicists currently nosing around British cities – and London in particular – Keiller remains distinct. Jonathan Meades might be fiercer, Iain Sinclair more atmospheric, Owen Hatherley more romantic, but Keiller often appears the worldliest and most penetrating. This brief book, an initially haphazard-seeming pile of offcuts bundling together contributions to esoteric journals and academic volumes from 1982 to 2010, is studded with deadpan insights that are sharp as nails.

"The UK's most extensive indigenous high-technology industry is weaponry," states a brief passage on how the decline of British manufacturing has been overstated. Another eye-opening paragraph points out that "the road system" functions "as a publicly funded warehouse" for big business, jammed with "goods vehicles moving or parked". A longer piece on the British home, first published in 1998, foresees the present housing crisis: "Under advanced capitalism it is increasingly difficult to produce and maintain the dwelling." His explanation is typically ambitious: "The dominant narratives of modernity – as mobility and instant communication – appear to be about work and travel, not home."

The earliest couple of essays here are too chewy, fibrous with literary and film theory. They were written when Keiller was an earnest young experimental film-maker, keen to show off his cosmopolitanism and broad learning, and yet to find one voice beyond the standard academic. But by the mid-90s, when he entered his 40s, he had developed a distinctive tone both on the page and in the voiceovers for his films: patrician, self‑consciously formal, even fogeyish, yet with an edge – sometimes droll, sometimes melancholy, sometimes simultaneously horrified and awestruck by the post-Thatcher Britain he was describing. "As we felt ourselves losing ground, both politically and economically," he writes, "our sense of loss was partly mollified by observing … changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning."

Keiller was and is on the left, has a streak of nostalgia, and often prefers continental Europe to Britain. In the mid-90s, at the fag end of 18 years of Tory rule and with the country shabby in its public amenities – think of the injury-prone London underground then – yet also crassly gleaming with new private-sector edifices, Keiller's elegant disdain fitted the times. His first wider success, the 1994 documentary London, by turns painterly and grumpy, concerned itself with "the problem" of the capital – in his view, its lack of charisma and of functionality compared to other European cities.

That stance looks too pessimistic now. So does a 2003 dismissal here of "many aspects of English visual and material culture … its inability to produce adequately designed buildings, cars and other consumer goods … its unattractive food". Judging by the slivers of tight-lipped memoir he inserts in the book, Keiller has spent most of the last few decades living in London, but he only grudgingly concedes that the city "seems" to have become "more enjoyable" since the early 90s. Yet characteristically his sternness about the elderly, still half-tatty capital leads to a fresh and counterintuitive thought: "New built environments are usually less socially and economically diverse than older urban fabric, so perhaps the fluidity of London's population is encouraged by this physical stasis."

Keiller does not conduct any interviews to test or explore his thesis. Nor do other voices feature much elsewhere in the book. Most of the time this doesn't matter – he is compelling and authoritative company, switching expertly between description, deep historical perspective, and telling socioeconomic statistics. But, as with his fellow city-explorers and explainers – all of these authors men, possibly significantly – there are moments when the book becomes too much of a monologue. And the emphasis on looking at things rather than talking to people is better at creating vivid panoramas on the page than following the intricacies of social change, which anyway are increasingly hidden from public view in the digital age.

Unusually and refreshingly for the genre, Keiller reflects on some of the limits of his approach. "The meaning in the landscape resides only in the imagination of whoever looks upon it," he writes in an early essay. Elsewhere, in the best and most barbed piece in the book, first published in 2000, he attacks psychogeography itself – then in the early stages of its literary journey from eccentricity to orthodoxy – for its lack of political ambition: "In the UK … we can't rebuild the public transport system, or re-empower local democracy, but we can poeticise our relationship with their dilapidation." Despite living in a country that has generated immense wealth in recent decades, Keiller suggests, we have done too much interesting thinking about buildings and not enough actual building. He admits that he originally wanted to be an architect himself, "but for a number of reasons was unable to".

One consequence of his and others' failure to build, he continues, is a British preference for re-using neighbourhoods and buildings rather than properly modernising them. "In London now, psychogeography leads not so much to avant-garde architecture" – as the school of thought's 1960s French orginators intended – "as to gentrification." I don't think even the coolest estate agents are going to be handing out Keiller texts just yet.


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An Atheist's History of Belief by Matthew Kneale – review

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Matthew Kneale's broad-brushstroke history of religion will be applauded by atheists, but too many big questions are overlooked

At first glance, such a bold title could almost be intended as a joke, a companion volume to A Vegetarian's History of Meat-Eating or A Virgin's History of the Orgasm. But there's nothing funny about this elegantly written, earnest attempt to explain religion, and its god or gods, as the product of our own imaginations. This is, of course, a familiar thesis, but what just about distinguishes Kneale from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is his icy, non-polemical detachment from his subject. His tone – curiously for a writer better known as an award-winning novelist– is that of a scientist performing a dissection in the laboratory.

To be fair, he does start on an individual note. "As the son of a Manx Methodist atheist and a refugee German Jewish atheist," he writes, "I have never been much of a believer." When I read this, I wondered if he was leaving himself a bit of wriggle-room, space for recalling the odd fit of religious enthusiasm by way of teenage rebellion, or even a penchant for visiting old churches or graveyards. But no. This is no more a journey than it is a missionary rant.

What follows is a broad-brush narrative that works its way back through the histories and holy books of the various faiths, predominantly Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but with a respectful nod for Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, and brief parting shots at Mormons and Scientologists. It aims to tell you everything you've ever wondered about religion but never dared to ask.

The blows come in thick and fast, no doubt to applause if you are a fellow atheist. Religious zealots, likewise, will get hot under their dog collars. If they can even get beyond the cover, they will set about producing page-by-page refutations of what Kneale presents as historical fact in his telling of the rise and rise of various creeds.

Since I'm no zealot, though, I put down my pen after making a page of notes. Religious history and matters of religious doctrine are a quagmire of detail, translational blips and misunderstood contexts that traps all those who insist on getting down and dirty. There are bigger questions to ask. As a church-going waiverer, what worried me more was Kneale's failure to confront the very pertinent points he raises.

So, it is easy enough, as he does, to show up the shortcomings of, for example, claiming the New Testament or the Qur'an as historical fact. The gospels, he correctly says, are better seen as a kind of prism, mixing handed-down memories of real events with subsequent additions, wish-fulfilment and crude attempts by the early church to provide its congregations with a rallying cry. But surely the next logical step should then be to try to separate out each of these bogus elements so as to arrive at the core insight the figure of Jesus has been offering so compellingly for 2,000 years to the billions of Christians around the globe.

Are these people all just, as Kneale contends, the hapless victims of a colossal and sustained confidence trick by ambitious or mad clerics? Or is there something in the gospels that reaches beyond manipulative institutions to echoes in listeners' experience, that challenges their deeply entrenched instincts (the imperative in all holy books to love your neighbour, to take just one, which cuts across our natural instinct for selfishness and self-preservation)?

Since he is only interested in structures as he fashions his big, over-arching narrative, Kneale never gets beyond superficially attractive catch-all explanations: that those who are attracted to religion are poor, needy, fearful, or women. I'm none of those, as far as I am aware, and yet it has had me hooked for five decades now.

Debunking the claims of institutional religions and showing their habit of playing fast and loose with their own history is absolutely fair game. Many believers do the same all the time. As Kneale would have found out if he'd ever bothered to ask us. And then he might just have come up with something worth reading – a thoughtful atheist's answer to the really tough question that still puzzles me and many like me: why do we carry on with religion?

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald


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Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle | Will Self

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Will Self takes a walk through the banlieues of Paris and is astonished by the prescience of Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which so accurately describes 'the shit we're in'

A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. It looked tidily enough done; suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint; and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in.

The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city's banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. Not since the événements of 1968 had Parisian street fighting commanded such attention, but whereas the soixante-huitards could be characterised as the vanguard of a stillborn revolution, the young second-, third- and probably fourth-generation immigrants who chucked molotov cocktails at the flics and the CRS during the émeutes neither donned, nor were measured up for, any such ideological camouflage.

Instead, the violent eruption of the Parisian banlieues was anatomised by reference to a body politic sickening with pathological metaphors. Implicitly, explicitly … ineluctably, the rioters were the Muslim Other, which, having been almost accidentally ingurgitated as part of the colonialist couscous, was now playing havoc with Gallic digestion. The French state had found itself – willingly or not – as a fellow-traveller on the neocons' coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and Fukuyama's neoliberal end-point.

Walking from the RER station towards the Seine, I passed not through what the fictive might lead you to expect, but rather low and hummocky hills, the swoop of a B-class road, outcroppings of commerce, small apartment blocks, car parks, duff public sculpture, off-cuts of quasi-open space – over it all an ambiguous miasma of street furniture and signage: this was France, certainly, but a France at once decoupled from any sense of pays, and divorced from the least suggestion of the urbane. In a comparable district of London – picture, if you are able to, Ruislip or Hounslow, Abbey Wood or Enfield – there would be myriad subliminally registered cues, all of which would combine to force on the spectator the unavoidability of her metropolitan condition. In London, the interwar spread of municipal socialism through the arteries of the tube system was accompanied by the soft-modernism of the suburban stations and Harry Beck's matching diagram, which completes their connectivity. In London, the map really is the territory, because the territory really is the map. Not here.

The vexed relationship between the map and the territory suffuses The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which argues that not only authentic social relations, but even the bricks and mortar that frame them, and the tarmac that connects one to another, have all been replaced with their representation; a 1:1 scale model. Moreover, for Debord, as a sequel to the paralysis of "historical development", the contrast between town and country has become submerged in a sclerotic suburbia. He is at pains to point out that this annulling is no cod-utopian "supersession" but rather an "erosion … visible in the eclectic mélange of … decayed elements".

From the beige depths of a heavily shuttered house beside a hillock from which I could spy the Eiffel Tower, a deep, dark voice spoke: "Qu'est-ce que vous cherchez?" I suppose, had I been the ghost of Jane Jacobs I would have experienced this as reassurance: the eyes, even if unseen themselves, remained on the street. But, instead, I muttered pacifications: "Nothing … just having a look … about", then walked on down and around the hill through a scree of crushed fag packets, centrifugally impelled aluminium trim and the petrified tears shed by long dead cars. Dragon's teeth were sewn across the scabrous roadway – I queased between them and found myself within 100 metres of the riverbank. The A15 soared overhead: two pilotis planted this side of the river, the next pair on the far bank, its two carriageways separated by curved air. Up there was the city, conceived of however you so pleased. Down here, however, was this un-place, an inter-zone, under-imagined and thus free to be itself. Sprays of cherry blossom mimicked by tangles of wire and a shaggy pelt of weedy grass. Two small brown kids sat beside an oblong concrete depression filled with dank water, one had her hair tied in pigtails. They were playing with tin cans, cups and a bucket. Beyond them, right on the river's edge was their Paris: a bidonville of shacks built from bits of scavenged packing cases, plastic tarpaulin, car tyres and all sorts of other stuff.

Many of its most sympathetic readers experience The Society of the Spectacle as a concerted howl of disgust. I cannot agree – for me it is the Spectacle that, far from being the creation of some malevolent or false god, emerges instead as the hero of the piece, inasmuch as any hero can be conceived of as the unconscious product of insensate historical processes. The Spectacle, Debord writes, "is the heart of the unrealism of the real society". We are all jammed up against the plate glass of the Spectacle, our faces crushed as we "lèche-vitrine" in search of the same old commodified poison.

The entirely manmade nature of the world from which the individual subject experiences alienation is not, for Debord, a factual programme to be passively viewed on the TV screens of the global village, but a belief that is actively entered into. It is the genius of Debord to have characterised the totalising capability of late capitalism so early in its post-industrial manifestation. The Society of the Spectacle reads – if you will savour a cliche – as fresh as paint. Debord's analysis of time itself as a series of epochs is dizzying: such "pseudo-festivals" as sporting events (the Olympics springs immediately to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future. "Being a star," Debord writes, "means specialising in the seemingly lived." Sound familiar, "Sir" Peter Bazalgette?

But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord's text repays close reading. It is the Spectacle's genius to have "turned need against life" and thus effected "the separation and estrangement between man and man". Hence the Spectacle's embrace of economics as the only form of instrumental – indeed "scientific" – knowledge worth possessing; hence ritual obeisance made before the gods who will confer growth, and hence the fact that more or less any contemporary western politician – from Hollande, to Merkel, to Cameron, to Obama, and back again – who had eyes to see, could find their own Caliban image raging back at them from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle.

At Argenteuil centre-ville, I found echoic pedestrian underpasses, faux-19th century streetlamps of twirled iron and postmodern apartment blocks built of scaled-up children's construction toys. I walked on across the oxbow of Gennevilliers, still feeling that I was nowhere at all in particular – standing beside a grocery store or an office block, then crossing between parked cars. The bridge across the re-encountered Seine that led to Clichy was lined with cheerful window boxes, planted with a gaily patriotic tricolour of blooms pinker, pinker and pinkest. Where there are window boxes there must, of course, be a window – this one framed the mirrored cuboids of La Défense to the west, structures that might have been designed expressly to conform to the Debordian paradigm.

And then, some way past the Porte de Clichy, I was quite suddenly – if at an indefinable point – in Paris, a city to this day that defines itself by the micro-associations of its smaller parts: the awning of an alimentation, a drain cover, the angle of a pissing dog's leg, the furl of paper around a stick of bread, the white apron around a smoking waiter – quite as much as the high extravaganza of its grand boulevards and gold-leafed public buildings. Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again not only by Debord's astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we're still in? – but also wondered how it was that his dérives across the Paris of the time could have so attuned him to the way in which the urban environment of the near future would become quite so decoupled from any element of the felt or experienced life. After all, Paris was by no means the most Spectacular city of the late 1950s and early 60s; indeed, it's still not on an equal footing to London. Unplanned London, which has just arrived at its square miles of parametrically designed junk space, its CCTV-overseen gated business cantonments and Chinese party cadre-owned luxury encampments, its logo skyscrapers and purpose-built "iconic" tourist destinations.

It occurs to me that Haussmann's attempt to impose civic order and authority on the medieval jumble of mid-19th century Paris had not only paved the way for the Spectacle, but it had also afforded its – and his – enemies with the material to rip up for their barricades. There seems a nice congruence between the go-rounds of the Grands Boulevards and centrifugal/centripetal current of French theorising, whereby notions given form in the cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the classrooms of the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure swirl out in widening circles from the metropolis, only to then gurgle back in again, before eventually disappearing up the arses of their originators.

Seen like this, The Society of the Spectacle is at once the bastard progeny of the French Enlightenment – out of Diderot, by means of the Napoleonic Code – and a salutary reminder of how the pursuit of some millenarian ideological purity only ever results – if successful – in the rumbling of tumbrels; or, if a failure, in its wholesale co-option by its stated enemies. That we no longer hear quite so much about "the spectacle" as shorthand for any of the following: the ludic element of consumer society, the post-ideological character of western "democracy", the web-cum-matrix woven by the internet, the glocal character of late capitalism, may be because Debord's concept has now been so thoroughly appropriated – one might fairly say détourned– that there's nothing left of it but its coldly numerical bones.

Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren (and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols' svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would've realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection, such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist theoretical work, written by Debord's greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem), which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle.

The relative success of the Situationist International during les évènements also sowed the seeds for the détournement of The Society of the Spectacle itself. I say relative success because it can be doubted – and will always be disputed – the extent to which Debord and his loose confraternity of freelance bully-boys and wannabe revolutionists actually succeeded in either manning the barricades themselves, or screwing the courage of the mob to CRS's sticking post. But the important thing was that the situationists were perceived as having been in the thick of things – as instigators and ideological choreographers of the distinctively ludic elements of this particular civil disorder. The sneering, de haut en bas reception of The Society of the Spectacle on its publication the year before in French, was followed the year after by its rhapsodic one when it appeared in translation. By then, of course, the game was effectively up – something Debord, a man obsessed by war games and strategising, undoubtedly grasped. The Society of the Spectacle so far as being an animator of events, had in a matter of months become simply another text to be subjected to scores, hundreds, thousands of exhaustive academic analyses. The best that could be said for the thing – from its author's point of view – was that the royalties paid his wine bills, and helped to supplement a lifetime of unabashed – and indeed, self-righteous – sponging.

Of course, The Society of the Spectacle still animates serious protest to this day – or, rather, since to admit to having been one of the Invisible Committee that authored the highly Debordian The Coming Insurrection (2007) is to court arrest on those grounds alone, the very style of the earlier work remains inflammatory. As to its content, The Coming Insurrection has nothing much to add – how can it, when, as I say, never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine – as he would wish – and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants.

The Society of the Spectacle, published by Notting Hill Editions with an introduction by Will Self, is out this month.


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Sex and the Citadel by Shereen El Feki

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Guardian First Book award shortlistee Shereen El Feki (45, British Egyptian) introduces an extract from her book and explains what inspired her to write it

Read the extract here

I have spent the last five years travelling across the Arab region, talking to people about sex: what they do, what they don't, what they think and why. Depending on your perspective, this might sound like a dream job or a highly dubious occupation. For me, it is something else altogether. Sex is the lens through which I study society, because what happens in intimate life is shaped by forces on a bigger stage – politics and economics, religion and tradition, gender and generations – and vice versa.

As I've found, if you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms. And if you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I'm Egyptian and Muslim, but I grew up in the west, far from my Arab roots. I began Sex and the Citadel to help outsiders – like myself – to better comprehend this pivotal part of the world, up-close and personal. But in the end, my book is as much for those inside the region, for the hundreds of men and women who so generously shared their experiences and expertise, and for the many more I have yet to meet.

Across the Middle East and north Africa, sex is bound up in taboo and double standards, shame and silence (by no means a uniquely Arab situation, as I've learned from readers from around the world). But there are also remarkable individuals who are challenging these restrictions, in a delicate balancing act between their desire to make a difference and a deep appreciation of how change happens in the Arab region – by evolution, not revolution, in a gradual push along the grain of religion and culture.

Sex and the Citadel is my contribution to their efforts, on the region's scenic route to democracy – full of false starts and emergency stops, U-turns and detours. It is, I hope, a foundation on which people – especially the young, and women – can question received wisdoms about sexual life, as they have proved so willing and able to do in politics. And I hope it will give them the power to push back against those who argue that to resist today's narrow status quo is to undermine our "traditional" Arab and Muslim values. There is a long history in Islam, right back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, of talking frankly about sex – not just its problems but also its pleasures, and not just for men but also for women. If my book can help others to discover that past, understand the present and imagine a better future, as it has for me, then Sex and the Citadel will have been a job well done.

Extract

If you know only Arabic, don't have the money to consult a specialist, and lack easy access to the internet, your options for explicit advice on sexual matters are limited – all the more so if you're a woman. My friend Azza and her circle were at a loss. In their desperation for details, they turned to me for help. "Ya Shereen, they have so many problems," Azza said. "They are not satisfied with their husbands, but they don't know what to do."

I thought toys might add some fun, even though some local sex therapists are firmly against them. Although there are a couple of shops in Cairo that discreetly sell a few items, supply is sporadic; one shop owner described to me the customs gauntlet he has to run to bring back, tucked away in his suitcase from overseas trips, even the few subtle vibrators he has in stock. In any case, Azza would rather die than be caught buying this stuff in public, so I asked her and her sisters to look on the web and give me a list of items I could pick up on my next trip abroad.

Together, we worked our way through the online catalogue. Dildos were out; Azza warned against anything too phallic, which might make husbands feel dispensable. Ben-wa balls – essentially a pair of ping pong balls inserted into the vagina for strengthening and stimulation – posed a particular problem. "How do you get them out?" Azza asked. "Well, there's a string attached. You remove them just like a tampon," I explained. But it turns out that Azza and her circle don't use tampons. Traditional beliefs about the impurity of menstrual blood, and the perceived health risks of letting it linger in the body, make tampons an unpopular choice with many women. But there was more to it than that. "My friend wanted to try them before she was married, but her mother wanted to kill her: 'You will lose your virginity!'" Azza said. But surely, after a couple of kids each, this was no longer an issue for Azza and her friends? "They are afraid to touch this area. My sister-in-law says when she washes down there after sex, she has fear. This area is always forbidden us, even after marriage."


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Revolutionary women – books podcast

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We're overturning stereotypes on the Books podcast this week, with strong women from 19th-century China and 1950s Britain.

Jung Chang tells us how she became intrigued by the gap between the despotic reputation of Empress Dowager Cixi and the reforming reality. A woman who began as a grade-three imperial concubine in 1852 and wound up controlling the Manchu empire for almost 40 years certainly possessed a ruthless streak, Chang admits, but a ruler who founded a navy, built a railway and abolished foot binding was no simple reactionary.

Rachel Cooke has been rewriting history a little closer to home with her study of pioneering female professionals. She joins us in the studio to explain how she wanted to inspire women in the 21st century with the courage and resolve of working women in the 1950s. Her portraits of women who forged careers in film, journalism, the law and beyond show how they overcame obstacles with a mixture of pragmatism, stoicism and the ability to make the most of the opportunities that came their way.

Reading list

The Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang (Jonathan Cape)
Her Brilliant Career by Rachel Cooke (Virago)


Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century by Paul Collier – review

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Given the evidence, Paul Collier's lively study of mass migration paints a curiously bleak picture of the future

The migration of poor people to rich countries is a phenomenon overloaded with toxic associations, a subject politicised before it has been analysed. This is the starting point for Paul Collier's lively exploration of perhaps the most contentious issue of our age, one that he sees as a natural extension of his influential previous books on the bottom billion people on our planet.

The former World Bank economist, who now advises presidents and prime ministers, thinks people are focusing on the wrong question. He says the key issue is not whether the impact of immigration is good or bad – although if pressed, he would come down on the side of good. He argues, instead, that we should focus on how much migration there should be and, more interestingly, who it really helps.

It definitely boosts those making the move in search of a better life. Their pay and productivity soar, the latter a consequence of moving to a better organised society. They send home huge remittances – almost four times global aid flows at $400bn – that help those left at home through bad times and encourage the spread of improved governance. Yet there can be a psychological cost to what he calls "a decentralised aid programme".

This book underscores the superficiality of "brain drain" claims. Although some of the smartest people leave poor countries, overall educational standards can rise as parents invest in their children's schooling in the hope they might migrate one day. Many educated abroad return; one study found two-thirds of heads of governments in developing nations studied in foreign countries. Collier argues the danger comes in a small nation such as Haiti that has seen 85% of educated citizens leave, although in truth this is an unusual case of such a shattered country sitting so close to the world's richest nation.

He concludes migration is good for those left behind as well as the new host nation, while the only people who suffer economically are, he claims, previous immigrants. Yet drawing on cases such as Haiti, he frets about the damage of faster emigration. For at the centre of his thesis is the idea that migration has an inbuilt inclination to speed up. As a diaspora grows, it becomes easier for others from the same community to make the same move: they can find family members to provide beds, friends to give them work, familiar food.

This may well be true. Yet from this finding he paints a dark picture of dangerous growth and declining assimilation, a curious conclusion given much of the evidence he has compiled. The reality, as shown by countries such as Canada and the US and cities such as London – where one-third of residents are now foreign-born – is that even large, rapid waves of immigration fuel success with surprisingly little tension. It is not enough to talk of American exceptionalism or put forward straw man arguments revolving around uncontrolled immigration.

Collier's logic can lead him down strange paths. Previously, he has praised military coups to remove unpleasant regimes. Now he wants to reduce the rights of migrants to bring in close relatives. He also focuses on cultural differences but ignores class, so essential to understanding the success and failures of immigration to Britain. Yet for all these flaws, Exodus is a valuable addition to the swelling library of books on this subject, written for a wide audience and containing some fascinating data.

One study that found giving mobile phones to households in Niger increased emigration illustrates the incredible impact of technology, for example. Another revealed Senegalese people in Spain send home half their earnings, a higher share than any other migrant community; Cubans in America and Turks in Germany send home 2% of income.

We are only beginning to grapple with the issues raised by modern migration. Collier shows its complexity in discussing the two African countries with the largest diasporas, Cape Verde and Eritrea; one among the best-governed nations on the continent, the other ruled by one of its most ghastly regimes. Although, he remarks astutely, "mass migration… is a temporary response to an ugly phase in which prosperity has not yet globalised".


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The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark by Josh Cohen – review

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Jonathan Derbyshire on the collapse of the distinction between public and private

In Henry James's 1893 short story "The Private Life", the narrator makes alarming discoveries about two members of his holiday party while holed up in a village in the Swiss Alps. After an evening spent listening to the table-talk of the London playwright Clarence "Clare" Vawdrey, he steals up to Vawdrey's room where he sees, "bent over the table in the attitude of writing", the man he thought he'd left downstairs in the company of his friends. Vawdrey, it seems, is double: there is his public self, which according to the narrator is burdened by "neither moods nor sensibilities", and his private, writing self, which remains hidden.

The effortlessly suave raconteur Lord Mellifont, meanwhile, suffers from the "opposite complaint". He is "all public", the narrator says, he has "no corresponding private life". There's nothing behind the pristine mask of his public self: Mellifont is all performance.

Josh Cohen discusses this story in his elegant and suggestive book. For him, James's tale can be read as a premonitory parable of the modern culture of celebrity, at the centre of which is the public's apparently insatiable demand for celebrities to be "no more or less than they appear" – that, like Lord Mellifont, they show us everything. Celebrities themselves collude in this demand and go to considerable lengths, as Cohen puts it, to "disappear seamlessly" into their public persona. They persuade their acolytes that there's nothing left over, no private remainder that, Vawdrey-like, they keep locked away from prying eyes.

This, Cohen argues, is the self-defeating logic of the superinjunction. Self-defeating because, as with the gagging order taken out by Ryan Giggs in 2011, it arouses the very fantasy that the celebrity is seeking to suppress (in Giggs's case, that he had had an affair, and was no longer the willowy adolescent first spotted by Alex Ferguson).

And there's a further paradox here: by treating his private life as territory over which he had to assert ownership, Giggs encouraged the prurient to see it as a prize to be captured. Cohen argues that both sides in the contemporary war on privacy – celebrities and the tabloid press – take for granted a conception of privacy as property (that's why we routinely use the word "invasion" when someone's private life is pried into). The only difference is that one side, the tabloids, is indifferent to property rights. As the former News of the World journalist Paul McMullen put it in a memorable appearance before the Leveson inquiry: "privacy is for paedos".

Cohen calls this the "bourgeois" conception of privacy, since it's all about possession, in this case, of a self. But there's another, darker and more mysterious notion of the private life, he argues – the one bequeathed to us by psychoanalysis (Cohen himself is a practising psychoanalyst, as well as a literary academic). According to this view, "the ego is not master in its own house". We don't own our unconscious selves and psychic health requires us to give up the comforting fantasy of a self that is "integral and complete". We are all Vawdrey, in other words – whether we like it or not (and the demands we make on public figures suggests not).

You don't have to accept the entire conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis to find all this compelling, and in any case, Cohen himself is attractively sceptical about some of the claims that Freud and others have made on its behalf. Cohen's prose has the aphoristic, epigrammatic quality that you find in Adam Phillips's writing about psychoanalysis, and he is less in thrall to his own fluency than Phillips is.

The range of references is impressive, too: Cohen is equally at home discussing Katie Price (below) as he is expounding the thoughts of Hannah Arendt. His analysis of the ur-reality show Big Brother is particularly interesting. Cohen suggests that what made the first series of the programme, broadcast in 2000, such compulsive viewing was not that it collapsed the distinction between public and private, but rather that it tantalised us with "the hope of encountering the invisible other, of burrowing into the obscure marrow of their everyday existence", putting the viewer in the position of James's narrator watching Vawdrey's double at his writing desk. Subsequent iterations of the show, Cohen suggests, sacrificed that quality by filling the house with "needy exhibitionists" and "parading the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and the public realm as entertainment".

There's a moral to be drawn from this about what Cohen calls the "modern malaise". It's not just about entertainment; it's also about our changing attitudes to our inner lives. What is it that connects the neuroscientists at Berkeley who want to map the neural activity of a dreaming person and put it on YouTube with the compulsive tweeter or the obsessive "lifelogger" who records and broadcasts her life, minute by minute?

What is at work is a powerful vision of a world without inwardness, one in which the external record of a life is the same as our experience of it. He quotes something the science writer John Brockman said about the "collective externalised mind" promised by the internet. For Brockman, that's not dystopia, it's utopia. Yet, as Cohen points out, there's another name for it: "totalitarianism" – the slogan of the Khmer Rouge, for example, was "Destroy the garden of the individual".

Cohen suggests that cognitive behavioural therapy, which has grown dramatically in popularity in recent years, nourishes a similar fantasy of total liberation from the burden of the inner life. What many people find so threatening about psychoanalysis, by contrast, is its insistence that the self is never whole. It tells us that our best hope, as Cohen writes at the end of this unsettling book, lies in accepting that part of us will forever remain in the dark.


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The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 by Kenneth Roy – review

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Gripping murder cases, disasters, controversies: this is a lively exploration of a neglected era in the country's popular history

The murder trial may be a popular entertainment everywhere, but in Scotland until relatively recently it had its own special sense of theatre. It was hard to doubt the majesty of the law when, for example, the judge at the trial of the serial killer Peter Manuel entered his Glasgow courtroom every day to the fanfare of trumpets. That was in 1958. Five years later, a judge in Aberdeen walked to the court through a guard of Gordon Highlanders, especially arranged for his inspection and with bayonets fixed, before settling down to hear the case of young Henry John Burnett, who stood accused of murdering his lover's husband. What kind of country were we living in? Duck Soup's Freedonia? Whatever it was, Manuel and Burnett were soon out of it, hanged in Barlinnie and Craiginches prisons, respectively.

Burnett, the last man to be legally executed in Scotland, is just as obscure to popular history as the killers Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen who, six months after Burnett's hanging in August 1963, became the last to go to the gallows in England. Manuel, on the other hand, became Scotland's most famous murderer since Burke and  Hare, as a man convicted of seven deaths and almost certainly responsible for two others in a series of killings that, in the mid-1950s had the industrial lowlands in a fever of fearful speculation. (When his fourth – or sixth – victim was discovered buried in a Lanarkshire field, this reviewer remembers evening newspaper sellers patrolling a local council estate shouting the headline: "Isabelle Cooke's body found … Isabelle Cooke's body found", all the way down Keir Hardie Terrace. She was 17.)

Everything about the Manuel case was gripping: motives were hard to find; the initial incompetence of the police investigation led to the detention of an innocent man for two months; and, most sensational of all, halfway through the trial Manuel sacked his lawyers and began to conduct his own defence. When the guilty verdict eventually arrived, newspapers gave over the whole of their front pages to the murderer's picture, which, thanks to the severity of Scottish contempt laws, had never before been published. That, too, was sensational. As Kenneth Roy writes, it remains the case's "one immutable feature – the face of Peter Manuel with its deep-set black eyes… and its power to go on haunting the national imagination".

The question is: which national imagination? Scotland has certainly produced murderers who have been infamous throughout the UK – bearing Ian Brady and Dennis Nilsen in mind, you might even argue that serial killing was a Scottish specialism. But Manuel, by committing his crimes in Scotland and being tried by a Scottish court, is not among them. When Roy writes of a national imagination, the nation he has in mind is Scotland. This is modern, post-devolution usage. In 1958, the nation held to the same boundaries as the state and roughly described the UK minus the dissenting republicans of Northern Ireland, within which Scotland was … what? A region, perhaps, though of a mysterious, elevated kind, with its own systems of religion, education and the law – and its own crimes and criminals splashed across the pages of its own press.

A history of Scotland during those postwar years is not an easy proposition, which is perhaps why Roy has subtitled his book more modestly as "a life". Histories of Scotland since 1707 have always faced the problem that so much of the story is bound up with the rest of Britain's, and this entwining was never stronger than in the 30 years after 1945, when British institutions such as the monarchy, the trade unions, the BBC and the NHS were at their most respected and popular. To trot out a political statistic often used to puncture the notion that Scotland is inherently leftist: as recently as the 1955 general election, the Conservative and Unionist party won a majority of the Scottish vote as well as of Scottish seats, one or two of which were in working-class districts of Glasgow.

To grow up in that time, as the author and this reviewer did (both of us were born in 1945), was quite naturally to imagine a British inheritance and identity instead of, or more usually as well as, a loyalty to Scotland. Just as economic historians must try to separate Scottish statistics from British ones, so a social history like Roy's has to unwind a thread of everyday Scottish life from a British pattern. One risk lies in overstressing the Scottish part: yes, we laughed readily enough at Stanley Baxter doing his bit in Glasgow radio comedies, but the more powerful influence, leading to many thousands of playground impersonations, was The Goon Show out of London. On the other hand, Scotland was different from England (in some ways more different than now), a difference that tends to get lost in even the richest and subtlest histories of modern Britain as a whole.

By deciding that "the spirit" of the Scottish nation, "though invisible to the naked eye, never quite evaporated", Roy strikes a persuasive balance – reminiscent of James Robertson's splendid epic novel And the Land Lay Still, published in 2010, which covers much the same period and takes a similar line: that under the surface, and just occasionally above it (the removal of the Stone of Destiny, for example), people in Scotland were moving steadily towards a new national consciousness. This is debatable hindsight, but at least with Roy there are few rosy tints. "It would be futile to pretend that it describes a prosperous and well-governed people," Roy writes of his account, adding that in 1975 – the year that North Sea oil came ashore and the book closes – much began to change for the better, long before devolution installed a parliament in Edinburgh.

But this isn't a nationalist narrative or even a particularly political one. Instead, it cures a deficit in Scotland's popular history. Roy's long career as a reporter makes him particularly enjoyable as a sharp and lively narrator of the crimes, controversies, campaigns and disasters that held Scottish attention but often went unnoticed or made only a slight impression in the south. The ferry Princess Victoria goes down in a gale and 133 people are drowned; Isabel Cooke's body is found; the words "a sensible modicum of whisky" become a national catchphrase after a distinguished jurist uses them to defend himself against a drink-driving charge; shipyards close and coalmines catch fire; farewell the trumpets.


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Writers and critics on the best books of 2013

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Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.

William Boyd

By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was answered with great candour and judiciousness. Hook's view of the art world is that of the professional auctioneer. In an A-Z format, it is an entire art education contained in under 350 pages. Wry, dry and completely beguiling.

Bill Bryson

The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M Davis (Allen Lane) is an elegantly written, unexpectedly gripping account of how scientists painstakingly unravelled the way in which a small group of genes (known as MHC genes) crucially influence, and unexpectedly interconnect, various aspects of our lives, from how well we fight off infection to how skilfully we find a mate. Lab work has rarely been made to seem more interesting or heroic. But my absolute book of the year is Philip Davies's hefty, gorgeous London: Hidden Interiors (English Heritage/Atlantic Publishing), which explores 180 fabulous London interior spaces that most people know nothing about, from George Gilbert Scott's wondrous chapel at King's College to L Manze's eel, pie and mash shop in Walthamstow. It is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Derek Randall and worth every penny of its £40 price.

Eleanor Catton

My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press): in style, very similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but the broken ellipses never feel like a gimmick or a game. I was utterly devastated by Colin McAdam's A Beautiful Truth (Granta), and utterly delighted by Elizabeth Knox's sly and ingenious Mortal Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux). My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvellously funny and inventive Heap House (Hot Key), written and illustrated by Edward Carey.

Shami Chakrabarti

Helping to judge this year's Samuel Johnson prize meant getting stuck into some serious non-fiction. The six books that made the shortlist – Empires of the Dead (David Crane, William Collins), Return of a King (William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury), A Sting in the Tale (Dave Goulson, Jonathan Cape), Under Another Sky (Charlotte Higgins, Jonathan Cape), The Pike (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Fourth Estate)and Margaret Thatcher (Charles Moore, Allen Lane)– are among my favourites from 2013. Dalrymple's masterful retelling of the first Afghan war had an eerie modern-day relevance, while Hughes-Hallett's portrayal of the fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a sombre reminder of the perils of political extremism. On a completely contrary note, Goulson's case for the importance of bumblebees will live long in my memory for its sheer passion and scientific detail.

Sarah Churchwell

Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts (Granta) provides a masterclass on the art of the essay from one of its most formidable living practitioners – often, as with the title essay, by sharing object lessons in failure. These occasional pieces offer glimpses into the creative process, the writer's constant search for structure, order and consonance. Even when individual essays did not live up to Malcolm's rigorous standards, the collection as a whole shows how connections emerge from the workings of one memorably searching, restless, ruthless mind.

Jim Crace

The four non-fiction books I most valued this year have an unusual strength and depth in common; the single themes they profess to focus on are also the Trojan horses through which their writers smuggle in a whole wide world of instruction, knowledge and contemporary significance. They are: Spillover, David Quammen's investigation of animal-to-human viruses (Vintage); Falling Upwards (Harper Collins), Richard Holmes's history of ballooning; The Searchers (Bloomsbury), Glenn Frankel's account of the 1836 abduction by Comanches of Cynthia Ann Parker and its unending aftermath; and Mark Cocker's loving and magisterial Birds and People(Jonathan Cape).

Roddy Doyle

George Saunders's collection of stories, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), is spectacularly good. The stories are clever and moving, and the title story is the best piece of fiction I've read this year. The Searchers, by Glenn Frankel, is about the stories behind the story that became the classic John Ford film. It's a history of America, an exploration of racial intolerance, an account of how, and why, real events can become legends. It's also hugely entertaining – as well as huge. My favourite book this year is Paul Morley's The North (And Almost Everything in It) (Bloomsbury). History told backwards, a memoir, a love letter to Liverpool, several to Manchester; the book pushed me to go to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate and made me listen again to George Formby and the Buzzcocks. The book filled my head. It was much too long and occasionally irritating, but when I got to the end I wished there'd been more of it.

Richard Ford

James Salter's novel All That Is (Picador). Not in my (admittedly failing) memory have I read a novel that, at its crucialest moment, made me just stand straight up out of my chair and have to walk around the room for several minutes. Laid into the customary Salterish verbal exquisiteness and vivid intelligence is such remarkable audacity and dark-hued verve about us poor humans. It's a great novel.

Jonathan Franzen

My vote is for Eric Schlosser's Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser's book reads like a thriller, but it's masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he's a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn't think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser's hands it does.

Antonia Fraser

The Poets' Daughters by Katie Waldegrave (Hutchinson) is an engrossing study of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. A double biography is an intricate pattern to achieve, but Waldegrave brings it off triumphantly: she also brings compassion as well as scholarship to her aid, so that at times the story is almost unbearably moving. After reading this book, I went right back to the paternal poetry and read it with fresh eyes.Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press), published appropriately enough as the National Theatre celebrates its 50th anniversary, is another narrative that sweeps you along. While in no sense a hagiography – there is plenty of discreet criticism when necessary – it enriched my sense of this amazing multi-faceted, multi-talented man. When I watch Henry V, for the umpteenth time, I shall gaze into those brilliant enigmatic eyes with even more awe, and a certain amount of apprehension.

Stephen Frears

Best read of the year was Into the Silence (Vintage), Wade Davis's account of the three unsuccessful Everest expeditions, through the back door of Tibet, culminating in the death of George Mallory in 1924. Men from the first world war showing endurance and a capacity for suffering beyond my comprehension. Maybe the prime minister should read it before he makes an idiot of himself. Oh and Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe (Viking). But I would say that since it's about my ex‑wife and our children. Letters from their Leicester nanny. Very funny and sharp.

Malcolm Gladwell

I read so many books this year that I loved – Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher(Princeton University Press), David Epstein's The Sports Gene (Yellow Jersey), and Jonathan Dee's magnificent A Thousand Pardons (Corsair) – but my favourite was a novel I picked up entirely randomly, in an airport bookstore: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (Sourcebooks Landmark). It is a beautiful and elegant account of an ordinary man's unexpected and reluctant descent into heroism during the second world war. I have no idea who Belfoure is, but he needs to write another book, now!

John Gray

Adam Phillips' One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays(Hamish Hamilton). Writing of Ford Madox Ford's hero Tietjens in Parade's End, who in the middle of a conversation suddenly wondered if he was in fact the father of his child but "proved his reputation for sanity" by going on talking without any sign of distress, Phillips comments: "As though sanity for this Englishman was about being apparently undisturbed by one's most disturbing thoughts." Witty and somehow liberating, it's a comment that could only come from Phillips. Covering a wide variety of topics – "On Being Bored", "First Hates", "On Success" and "The Uses of Forgetting" are just a few – these short pieces from the psychotherapist and critic will confirm him as the best living essayist writing in English.

Mark Haddon

The Great War edited by Mark Holborn, text by Hilary Roberts (Jonathan Cape). A collection of photographs from the vast holdings of the Imperial War Museums. I have never seen or read anything that brings the first world war quite so vividly alive. Some of the events of 1914-1918 have been told and retold so many times that the whole conflict has, for many people, acquired an obscuring antique patina. This book strips it all away. It will make me seem a fool, perhaps, but I kept turning pages and thinking, my God, these are real people. These things actually happened.

Mohsin Hamid

Those unfamiliar with the American short-form master George Saunders should go out immediately and pick up a copy of his latest story collection, Tenth of December. Wow. Sharp and fun. Also, we should all be grateful for the New York Review Books Classics series, which this year has brought us Frances Pritchett's English translation of Intizar Husain's famous Urdu novel, Basti. Husain was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International prize, and this, his best‑known work, deserves a UK publisher.

Robert Harris

In 1983, the 50-year lease on a safe deposit box on the island of Mallorca expired. It was opened and found to contain tens of thousands of pages of the diary of a minor German aristocrat, Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), covering the years from 1880 to 1918. These have now been meticulously translated and edited by Laird M Easton, and the result is Journey to the Abyss (Vintage), a 900-page marvel. Kessler, an aesthete and amateur diplomat, travelled relentlessly between Paris, Berlin and London before the first world war and the list of his friends and acquaintances, each vividly described, is staggering: Bonnard, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ravel, Rodin, Renoir, Gide, Monet, Mahler, Matissee, William Morris, Richard Strauss, Strindberg, Rilke, Verlaine, George Bernard Shaw, Hofmannsthal, Gordon Craig, Munch, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Nietzsche (whose death mask he helps make), Walter Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, HG Wells, Augustus John … And then comes August 1914 and Kessler – hitherto the most cultured companion – joins the Kaiser's army and briefly becomes a swaggering German nationalist. An important, underappreciated, unforgettable book.

Max Hastings

Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf (William Heinemann) tells the story of how a young German Jewish refugee serving in the British army – the author's uncle – was responsible in 1945 for tracking down and arresting Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and one of the most dreadful mass murderers of all time. Harding sketches the parallel lives of the SS officer with notable skill. The book is a moving reminder of what an extraordinary amount Britain gained by the Jewish flight from Europe in the 1930s – it could have been still more had we offered a warmer welcome to a host of German scientists who moved on to the US.

Philip Hensher

Volume one of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher(Allen Lane) is an extraordinary reconstruction of a political way of life now completely vanished, written with a clear eye and full of incidental pleasures. (Not least about the surprising number of adoring gay men surrounding her at all stages.) The novel I enjoyed most was Richard House's sensational pile-driver, The Kills(Picador). Catching-up reading brought me Tapan Raychaudhuri's superb memoir, The World in Our Time(HarperCollins India), not yet published in the UK, but full of the tumultuous life of the Bengal delta – a masterpiece.

Simon Hoggart

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Hutchinson). Hard to imagine a thriller where you know the ending before you pick up the book, but Harris's retelling of the Dreyfus case is as taut and exciting as anything by Forsyth or Follett. The tale is told through the eyes of Col Picquart, the head of "the statistical section" within the French secret service, who witnessed Dreyfus's degradation but gradually came to realise that another officer was the traitor. The story of how he went over the heads of his superiors, none of whom wanted to rock the ship of state, is gripping, the evocation of turn-of-the-century France appealing, and the ending is magnificently downbeat, a terrific anticlimax – if that's possible.

AM Homes

Woody Guthrie's Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited by Phillip Buehler (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc) is a hauntingly beautiful book about the five years the American folk legend, songwriter and activist spent as a patient at the Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie, who had Huntington's disease, lived among the mental patients on ward 40. It was here that he was introduced to the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. Photographer Phillip Buehler, who has made a career of exploring 20th-century ruins, first climbed into Greystone through a window. The beauty of the decaying building, thick curls of paint peeling off the walls, light seeping into long empty narrow patient rooms like cells, spurred his curiosity. He located Guthrie's files and, working with archivists and the Guthrie family, was able to put together a portrait of a man, a place and a point in American history when large state hospitals were all too often warehouses for humanity. There are notes from doctors indicating they had no idea who Guthrie was; or they saw him as a wanderer a vagrant, and thought his claims about songwriting were delusions of grandeur. A particular quote from Woody's son Arlo stayed with me – a patient tells Woody that he loved his book Bound for Glory. "You read my book?" Woody asks. "No, I ate your book," the patient says.

Barbara Kingsolver

I love surprise finds, so I'll recommend two debut novels that swept me away.The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker (Blue Door), has the detailed realism of historical fiction, the haunting feel of a folk tale, and is one of only two novels I've ever loved whose main characters are not human. (The other was The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy.) And Susan Nussbaum's Good Kings, Bad Kings (out in March 2014 from Oneworld Publications) is a ferociously honest, funny, completely unstoppable trip through an institutionally corrupt home for disabled teenagers. I had no intention of going where they took me. That's the thrill of fiction.

David Kynaston

Kenneth Roy's The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 (ICS) is by someone who lived through the period but is admirably unsentimental. Well-informed, highly readable, slightly prickly, often opinionated – not least about the seriously flawed Scottish establishment – this feels like something that needed to be written. Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves) by Gillian Darley and David McKie I am far from alone in having the awkward, melancholic architectural writer and broadcaster as one of my heroes: partly for his deep conviction that the built environment mattered, partly for his insistence – in defiance of modernist orthodoxy – that people mattered more. One day no doubt Nairn will get a heavy-duty biography, but for the time being this elegant, rather slighter treatment does the job with charm and just the right degree of critical affection.

John Lanchester

Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina, a collection of letters to her sister from the period in the mid-80s when she was working as a nanny, is funny and sharp and has a distinctive streak of wildness: no book this year made me laugh more. Also funny and sharp, though in a darker vein, is ASA Harrison's he-said, she-said psychological thriller, The Silent Wife(Headline). Finally, the last entry in the funny-sharp stakes are the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I've been reading thanks to Hermione Lee's biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto & Windus). The odd thing is that Lee's book has had more influence on my reading than anything else this year, even though I'm not going to read the biography itself until I've finished the novels. That's because I don't want prematurely to spoil the mystery of how Fitzgerald could have known so much about so many worlds, from pre-revolutionary Moscow to 60s theatre-school London to German Romanticism. (I think I can guess how she knew so much about houseboats and bookshops.) Last recommendation: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False(OUP USA), an extraordinary and very controversial intervention in the current ructions about science and religion, from one of the world's most respected philosophers.

Mark Lawson

On either side of the Atlantic, two octogenarian grand masters of espionage fiction were on high form: John le Carré's A Delicate Truth(Viking) and Charles McCarry's The Shanghai Factor(Head of Zeus) dramatise the cumulative consequences of decades of spying and lying by the victors of the second world war. Drawing on a lifetime of learning, and defying several life-threatening conditions, Clive James translated Dante: The Divine Comedy(Picador) into punchy, theologically serious and frequently funny verse. Julian Barnes reformed the conventional autobiography in Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape), combining essay, fiction and memoir in reflecting on the death of love, while Hermione Lee rethought the conventions of biography in a compelling account of the life and work (and overlaps between) of the until now underrated writer Penelope Fitzgerald. And, as readers migrate to the ebook, two lavishly produced volumes made the case for the physical book: a new edition (including the Olympic Flame bowl) of Thomas Heatherwick's thrilling design compendium Making (Thames & Hudson) and JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (Canongate): an astonishing interactive project that encloses secret books and secret readers within what seems to be a 1949 library book.

Penelope Lively

Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is literary biography at its best – a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist and an illuminating account of the life of a complex and elusive person. I thought I knew both the work and the writer pretty well but have learned much – new insights into the novels, aspects of her life of which I knew nothing. Nobody does elderly men better than Jane Gardam. Last Friends(Little, Brown) is the concluding volume in her trilogy about the legal pack – Feathers, Veneering, Fiscal-Smith – that began with Old Filth. Throughout the series Jane Gardam has switched viewpoints with extraordinary dexterity. Elegant, funny, unexpected – Last Friends ties things up. I am a long-time fan of Adam Thorpe. His versatility is remarkable – historical novels, shrewd forays into contemporary life. And now a thriller, Flight (Vintage). It zips from the Middle East to the Outer Hebrides – brilliant plotting, a mesmerising read.

Robert Macfarlane

Never a man to take a straight line where a diversion was possible, Patrick Leigh Fermor spent almost 50 years not-quite-finishing the final book of his trilogy describing his walk across Europe in the 1930s. It appeared this autumn as The Broken Road(John Murray), two years after his death, brought to publication by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. I opened it expecting disappointment – how could it be as good as its sibling volumes? – and ended it amazed. I read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Granta) three times in my capacity as Man Booker judge, and each time round it yielded new riches. It is a vastly complex novel about investment and return, gift and theft, value and worth, which – in performance of its own ethics – gives far more than it appears to possess. Finally, in minimalist contrast to Catton's maximalist novel, I loved Wolfhou by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, another exquisitely produced pamphlet of place-poetry from Corbel Stone Press, who work out of a cottage in the western Lake District.

Hilary Mantel

Indulge in a big and richly satisfying literary biography, from an artist in the form: Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. It will send you back to the subject's own piquant and elusive novels. But perhaps a book of the year should be a mirror of the times? If so, feed righteous indignation on Damian McBride's Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin (Backbite). Bankrupt of morals and bankrupt of style, it is a nonpareil of peevishness, and self-delusion shines from it like a Christmas star.

Pankaj Mishra

The most remarkable discovery for me this year was Kirill Medvedev's It's No Good(Ugly Duckling Presse), a collection of poems and essays, a brilliant artistic and political response to the depredations of the Yeltsin and Putin era. Italo Calvino's Letters: 1941-1985 (Princeton Press) and Collection of Sand: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) remind us of a type of writerly mind almost extinct in Anglo-America: worldly, invariably curious, quietly passionate and elegant. Julia Lovell's translations of Zhu Wen's stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice and the Football Fan (Columbia) yet again affirm him as one of the most interesting Chinese writers today. This was a particularly rich and exciting year in literary translations from Indian languages; the stories in Ajay Navaria's Unclaimed Terrain(Navayana Publications), and the novels by Sachin Kundalkar (Cobalt Blue, Hamish Hamilton) and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (The Mirror of Beauty, Hamish Hamilton) hint at the yet unrevealed depth and diversity of Indian literatures.

Blake Morrison

Adelle Waldman's first novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (William Heinemann) is memorable for its Austen-like wit, humour, social astuteness and scarily accurate insights into men. Rather than condemn the protagonist (a young New Yorker) as misogynistic and self-obsessed, Waldman sends him up, to devastating effect. Lucy Hughes-Hallett adopts a similar strategy in her terrific biography of the poet, seducer and fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. The pace is hectic, as befits D'Annunzio's life, and I enjoyed the quote from the ex-lover who said his ideal would be an octopus with a hundred women's legs – but no head. Helen Mort's Division Street (Chatto & Windus) is an excellent first poetry collection – lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the northern landscapes that inspired it. Dave Eggers's The Circle, about the abolition of privacy in the age of social media, is a must-read dystopian novel – the future it envisages has all but arrived.

Andrew Motion

Tim Dee's Four Fields(Jonathan Cape) belongs in the tradition of "nature writing", but works with it too – putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it's a deeply attractive book and also an important one. Inside the Rainbow (Redstone Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, is a survey of Russian children's literature from 1920-35, and the subtitle tells us what to expect: "Beautiful books, terrible times". Indeed. But brilliantly clever, seditious, amusing, brave and delightful books as well; their illustrations and jackets are all reproduced here to wonderful effect. JO Morgan's long poem At Maldon (CB Editions) is a riff on the Old English poem, and owes something to Christopher Logue's War Music and Alice Oswald's Memorial– but it is its own thing too: inventive, striking and memorable. And a reminder that Morgan is one of the most original poets around.

Edna O'Brien

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso (Allen Lane) is a brilliant kaleidoscopic rendering of the tormented poet, his times and the city of Paris that "breathes" in his prose and poetry. We meet Baudelaire the dandy, his indecorous mistress Jeanne, both muse and vampire, his mother Caroline and his hated stepfather General Aupick, who, in the bloodshed of 1848, Baudelaire asked one of the insurgents to shoot. It is one of the most satisfying biographies I have ever read. Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber), lovingly compiled by her daughter Frieda Hughes, shows Plath's observation of everyday things – a thistle, a horse chestnut, the willows near Grantchester. It is also salutary to compare the austerity of her poetry with the rapture in her letters to her husband (included here), in which she envisages his presence "come day, come night, come hurricane and holocaust …" Dear Boy by Emily Berry (Faber): from the evidence here, this poet's imagination is rich, playful and restless, with the occasional note of anguish, which Plath would surely approve of, like a glimpse of the first crocus. Last, but by no means least, Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland) is funny, moving and beautifully written.

Susie Orbach

Alan Rusbridger's Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible is a wonderful account of trying to learn a complex piano piece while running the Guardian at the time of WikiLeaks and phone hacking. I had to skip some of the accounts of the fingering he is learning but he eloquently expresses the struggle to take up the playing of this piece – the Chopin Ballade No 1 – and segues into fascinating accounts of different historic pianos and the idiosyncratic manner individual musicians use them, and his various "teachers", who mostly sound very strict, alongside the emergencies from the office. A parallel story of how newspapers can move forward in the digital age runs along the narrative. I am always curious about people's daily lives and their curiosities. This book gives both in abundance.

Ian Rankin

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life(Doubleday) is her most challenging, complex and compelling novel yet. A woman has the chance to live life over and over again in often surprising ways. No Booker listing: no justice. Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard (Faber) is ostensibly a courtroom drama that asks how its sensible, intelligent middle-class heroine ended up in the dock in a murder case – beguilingly written, steely and plausible and occasionally shocking. Niccolò Ammaniti was a new name to me. Let the Games Begin(Canongate) is a wild ride with the fevered quality of Pynchon and Vonnegut as a party to end all parties sees the various characters vying to survive a grotesque uprising. It's a satire on contemporary culture, Italian politics and the writing profession itself. Funny, sharp, and really quite rude. In a similar vein, John Niven's Straight White Male (William Heinemann) is the story of a hugely successful Irish screenwriter and his gloriously incorrect behaviour. There are laughs aplenty, but Niven adds growing poignancy as his hero becomes self-aware. It is Niven's best book, and the protagonist is easily the match of John Self in Martin Amis's Money.

Ruth Rendell

My choice isn't a new book, but it was reissued this year. I'm ashamed that I had never heard of Stonerby John Williams (Vintage) until I found it in a bookshop three months ago. I was stunned by it, it's so good. And yet very little happens in it except joy and pain and sorrow in the American midwest, love and passion and the mistakes everyone makes. It's beautifully written in simple but brilliant prose, a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer.

Lionel Shriver

Three novels stand out for me in 2013: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda (Sceptre), set in Red Hook, Brooklyn; two girls venture out on a pink inflatable raft into the filthy East River and only one comes back. Great writing, great setting, beautifully rendered characters. The Son by Phillipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster): an epic set in Texas that uses, among other things, that white-man-raised-by-Indians routine, and yet incredibly it doesn't feel tired. Totally engrossing. Lastly, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), which teems with fury, and tells a tale of breathtaking betrayal. It's a great study as well in the (possibly?) unreliable narrator. You keep puzzling over whether this woman is completely off her head.

Helen Simpson

Hermione Lee's fascinating biography of Penelope Fitzgerald charts a life that travelled the full 360 degrees on the wheel of fortune – from early promise and privilege down to dramatic middle-aged doldrums then back up to a late-blooming two decades of literary productivity and success. I'm now reading Fitzgerald's last four novels, which are every bit as breathtaking as Lee's concluding chapters describe. I read Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer for the first time this year in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Admired by Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy, these stories seethe with picaresque unpredictability, outlandish but touching monologues and recklessly impulsive characters like the country girl turned femme fatale in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Tom Stoppard

This is the time of year when I try in vain to remember what I was reading up to 12 months ago, and end up choosing three books I've enjoyed in the last 12 weeks. In the present case, these are Nature's Oracle by Ullica Segerstrale (OUP), a biography of WD (Bill) Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist whose insight into the operation of kin selection at gene level suggested how altruism might have emerged from natural selection; a hugely enjoyable novel, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape), who, when he's in his hardboiled vein, writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year; and The New York Times Book of Mathematics, which is what it sounds like: a century of news from maths written up for a general readership, and nobody does it better.

Colm Tóibín

Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale (HarperPress) manages an intimate and careful study of Titian's body of work, plus an intricate knowledge of politics and art in 16th-century Venice and in the Europe from which Titian received his commissions. She captures Titian's vast ambition and does justice to his achievement, but also creates a portrait of an age. Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press) are the second and third volumes of a three-volume biography. Stach reads the work and the life with minute care and sympathy. He has a deep understanding of the world that Kafka came from and the personalities who touched his life, and this is matched by an intelligence and tact about the impulse behind the work itself.

• This article was amended on 28 November 2013. The earlier version misspelled Roberto Calasso's surname as Galasso.


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A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof by Roger Clarke – review

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A well-researched history of hauntings delves into our desire to be spooked

Ghosts, it seems, are as susceptible to trends as any of us, as Roger Clarke's exploration of supernatural activity through the ages ably demonstrates. Clarke writes as an enthusiast for all things ghostly. As a boy he lived in a supposedly haunted house and hungrily sought out other hauntings; he was at one time the youngest member of the Society for Psychical Research, joining when he was just 14. His fascination with the subject is palpable yet his tone is one of journalistic distance, questioning rather than aggressive in his scepticism, as he embeds each sighting and spooking in its social and historical context.

The book hinges on his detailed, well-researched accounts of some of the most celebrated phantoms of the past 500 years – the Tedworth Drummer; the Cock Lane ghost, much referenced by Dickens; the haunting of Hinton Ampner, thought to be the inspiration for The Turn of the Screw; and the various tappings, rattlings and apparitions at Borley Rectory, which once laid claim to being "the most haunted house in England". He's particularly astute in his analysis of the public appetite for such happenings, mapping the Victorian seance craze, the evolution of the ghost story, and the ongoing popularity of ghost walks and ghost tours, bringing things up to the present day with Derek Acorah and the taste for spooks on screen.

The role of class in people's experience of the supernatural is also examined in some depth. But though the extent of Clarke's knowledge is evident, there's a meandering quality to the book at times. And while Clarke's style is for the most part readable, his writing can at times clank like Jacob Marley's chains. But despite these flaws, Clarke's examination of the need people have to believe remains insightful and illuminating throughout.


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When the Time Comes by Josef Winkler – review

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Alberto Manguel hopes this translation of stories about sin and retribution will give an Austrian great the credit he is due

During a lunch with WG Sebald in June 2000, I asked him, since he had written splendid essays on Austrian literature, which Austrian writers he recommended. Immediately he mentioned Josef Winkler, whose work he considered a counterweight to what he saw as Austria's moral infamy. I then read three or four of his novels, which all revolve around the same theme: the deep-rooted corruption of Austrian society, especially the farming society into which Winkler was born in 1953. The themes of medieval Catholic traditions, the hardships of rural life and a loveless family are explored over and over again. Winkler's prose reads like a palimpsest of angry stories, each trying to outdo the previous one in increasing depth and relentless scrutiny. Reading Winkler is like peering harder and harder into one of those painted Flemish hells that seethe with horribly inventive details of sin and retribution.

The horrors of the second world war provided European countries with a gruesome mythology that has taken on different guises in the various literatures. By and large, for the English, the stories that stem from it are documentary; for the French, they lean towards philosophical fables; for the Italians they take on the tone of magical folk-tales. For German speakers, they seem to have a grotesque eschatological underpinning, as if for Anna Seghers, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass and so many others, the experience of the war in this world darkly mirrored, not through religious faith but through literary intuition, the experience of the next. For Austrian writers in particular (Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek), the mindset that made so many of their fellow citizens behave as they did under Hitler did not change much after the war. For Winkler, the period from the Anschluss in 1938 to the division of Austria into four zones in 1945 merely rendered the Austrian ethos more explicit: nothing much changed before or afterwards, except an uncanny ability to dissemble. As the old joke has it, the Austrians' greatest triumph has been to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.

Only three books by Winkler have been translated up to now into English. The third, cleverly translated by Adrian West, with an illuminating introduction, is a good example of Winkler's powerful art. Set in a village in his native Carinthia, it centres on a 90-year-old man whose occupation is to cook bones until they become a greasy, viscous, foul-smelling brew used to smear the eyes, ears, nostrils and bellies of horses, to protect them from pestering insects. The noxious liquid becomes the device by which the many characters and events of the novel are brought into play; like the bones of the dead used by the ancient brewer, the flesh of the living is collected and made to render its stories.

Thus we hear of the artist-priest who decorated a calvary wall with the image of a soul being tortured in hell, that of a villager who, before the war, threw a statue of Christ over a waterfall and who, later, during the war, lost both arms in the trenches. We hear of the hunchback Hildegard, an arthritic hag who forgets to wash, and whose sister Helene is married to a brutal man "who even today venerates Hitler [...] and who, by way of punishment, used to make his daughter Karin – not yet 20 – go alone to the cesspit with a long-handled ladle to gather faeces and throw them into the manure tanker with a rusty bucket, until bloody blisters formed on her hands". We hear of two boys who end their lives together, lovingly embraced, by tying ropes to their necks and jumping into the stream where the blasphemer had thrown the holy statue. We hear of 15-year-old Ludmilla who, upon discovering her first menstruation, flings herself into the nearby rapids.

The recorder of all these deaths (there are many more) is the almost anonymous narrator; the stories are those of his childhood. In opposition to the pastor's credo, who tells the dead: "A deep chasm divides us. None of us can go to you and none of you can come to us," the narrator's mission is to allow the dead to speak again. "I've written 13 books on death," Winkler told an interviewer, "but I always manage to stick life somewhere in them." Baudelaire's "The Litanies of Satan" punctuate this novel, undermining the Catholic litanies that the characters occasionally mouth, just as the occasional memories of the events of the Nazi era are set alongside episodes of ordinary daily brutality.

The standing of Winkler in German-language literature is undisputed. The German writer Martin Walser was euphoric when he discovered Winkler's work; Grass praised him for the intensity of his writing. He has won almost every major literary prize in Germany and Austria. It is to be hoped that this translation will bring his writing to the attention of a wider, curious and intelligent English-speaking public.

When the Time Comes is available from contramundum.net


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The New York Nobody Knows by William B Helmreich – review

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This fascinating street-level tour through the 'melting pot capital of the world' traces the city's transformation – and gentrification

"Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city", writes Iain Sinclair in Lights Out for the Territory. It's a truth that was discovered in 19th-century Paris by the flâneur – that "botanist on asphalt", to use Walter Benjamin's memorable phrase – who turned the city's boulevards into drawing rooms in which to dissect the metropolitan crowd. And now, from Tokyo to London, urbanophiles agree that it is through what Michel de Certeau beautifully termed "the long poem of walking" that you can truly understand that most complex and beguiling feature of modern life: the city.

Sociologist William B Helmreich was born and grew up in New York City. As a boy, he and his father played a game called "Last Stop". It involved riding the subway from the station at 103rd Street near their Upper West Side apartment to the last stop on the line. Then, like intrepid explorers, they would discover the area's secrets on foot. (Helmreich's father died in 2011 at the age of 101.) In a sense, this book is a continuation of that urban game. To write The New York Nobody Knows, Helmreich walked 6,048 miles, covering almost every block in the city's five boroughs: Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx. It took him four years, walking an average of 1,512 miles a year. He wore out nine pairs of shoes.

Helmreich admits that "you have to be a little crazy to explore the city as I did". But big cities do that to you. Their scale and Babel-like hubris seem to demand an extreme response. On his footloose wanderings, he recorded conversations with New Yorkers, including current and former mayors, reassuring his subjects with the words: "It's all right, I'm a professor." His aim was to see how New York has changed since the disastrous years of the 1970s, when the city was almost bankrupt and the murder rate rose to 2,000 per year. That was when Travis Bickle sat in his taxi and ranted against the "whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers and junkies" on the city's mean streets. By the 80s, crime and social deprivation had turned New York into a place of fear. John Carpenter's 1981 film Escape from New York, which depicted a hellish place transformed into a convict colony, seemed to reflect ordinary Americans' horror of their most infamous sin city.

But today the city is enjoying "a tremendous renaissance". The murder rate is down to around 500 annually and, Helmreich writes, "New York is now perhaps the safest large city in the country". Its success, he thinks, stems from two groups of people: the immigrants and the gentrifiers. The former brought an incredible drive and ambition; the latter have transformed how the city is seen, turning it into a fashionable, exciting place, bubbling with new ideas and commercial potential. It is now a city people want to live in, not escape from.

New York has always been what Helmreich terms "the melting pot capital of the world". In 1917, an American journalist boasted: "It is the largest Jewish city in the world, the largest Irish city, one of the largest German cities. New York is the great whirlpool of the races." More than three million immigrants have come to NYC since the 1960s, and Helmreich thinks their determination to live the American dream has created its current dynamism. Indeed, a laudable feature of this excellent book is its celebration of New York's rainbow diversity.

More than a third of its 8.3 million inhabitants were born abroad and at least 170 languages are spoken there. Elmhurst, Queens, is the most diverse neighbourhood, with people from 120 countries. You rarely hear English in Hispanic parts of the Bronx. Likewise in the Chinese neighbourhoods of Flushing, Queens and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There are also at least 600,000 undocumented immigrants in the city, mostly Mexicans and Chinese, all struggling to realise the American dream while working as waiters and washing dishes. Helmreich says most New Yorkers have immense sympathy for their plight. One Hispanic manager from the Bronx tells him: "This country's been founded on illegal activity. End of story."

Over the past quarter century or so, hundreds of thousands of young people – "urban pioneers armed with optimism, hope, and more than a little moxie" – have streamed into New York, reclaiming a city their parents deserted for the suburbs. Gentrification is now one of the key issues facing the city. It began in the 1970s, in Soho, then the East Village in the 80s, followed by north Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 90s. Now gentrification has reached places like "Soha", as real-estate agents have rechristened south Harlem. But gentrification comes at a price. One long-term Harlem resident complains about a new cafe: "I went in there for a piece of cake and it was like four bucks! I can get a whole cake for four bucks. Obviously they don't want too many of us in there." Helmreich admits that gentrification is a complex issue and that there are losers as well as winners. But he thinks it has transformed New York, and that this is one reason why the people he meets on his walks are so optimistic about the future of their city.

In the end, the voices and stories of the people he encounters are what make this book so memorable. He is a modern-day Henry Mayhew, the journalist who documented the hardscrabble lives of ordinary Londoners in the 1840s. The result is a  vivid portrait of the city, a view from the sidewalk of what former mayor David Dinkins called the "gorgeous mosaic" of New York: Hispanic men playing dominoes in a club on Westchester Avenue, in the Bronx, while a naked light bulb "swings wildly back and forth", blown by a noisy metal fan; Hasidic children with skullcaps and sidelocks watching African American kids shoot hoops in the park near where Jay Z grew up in Brooklyn; a procession of some 2,000 people following a statue of the Virgin Mary through the Pelham Bay area of the Bronx; black people playing chess in the light of portable fluorescent lamps in Morningside Park, near Harlem, while a young man in sunglasses beside Helmreich finalises adrug deal on his mobile phone; and a cricket match at a club founded in 1872 in Walker Park, Staten Island, where "the soft strains of calypso music fill the air, mixed in with the smells of curried goat and roti".

It's refreshing to read a book that celebrates so unreservedly the ethnic diversity of a city and entirely fitting that it should be about a metropolis that has always been defined by its cosmopolitan culture. For Helmreich, the city's diversity is the well-spring of its success. When he finds three restaurants in one small area offering food from six cultures – Italy, Mexico, Korea, Japan, China and Spain – Helmreich sounds like a proud father talking about his gifted daughter: "That's New York!"

• PD Smith's most recent book is City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age (Bloomsbury).


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Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal – review

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A black comedy about ageing and Alzheimer's that is more harrowing than hilarious

In Getting On, the TV sitcom about an NHS geriatric ward, a terminal patient being discharged tells the preoccupied doctor that she is looking forward to her holiday in Zurich. Fans of such graveyard humour may also enjoy Lore Segal's Half the Kingdom, another farce about dementia, old age, institutionalisation and death.

With a mordantly ambiguous epigraph from the Brothers Grimm – "if they have not died, they are living to this hour" – Segal portrays the absurd horrors of medically prolonged eternal life. Everyone over the age of 62 who comes into the ER at the mammoth Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Manhattan develops sudden-onset dementia, or, as Dr Miriam Haddad puts it, goes round the bend. If they are discharged, they quickly return in a much worse condition: catatonic, hallucinating, violent, delusional or suicidal. Segal tells their stories in poignant vignettes.

Several of these characters are familiar to Segal's devoted readers from her earlier novels and New Yorker short stories. Joe Bernstine from Shakespeare's Kitchen visits the ER to be treated for symptoms of an unidentified terminal illness. He is immediately convinced that the hospital is the target of an "Alzheimer's epidemic", almost certainly the result of terrorism. The motive for the conspiracy? The terrorists aim to keep the elderly of the west "indefinitely alive" but helpless and raving mad.

In a parody of post-9/11 paranoia, or a Marx Brothers scenario, Dr Haddad's husband Salman, the director of security, hires Joe to infiltrate the hospital and investigate. His 75-year-old writer friend Lucy is assigned to report on contemporary disaster literature, and her son Benedict is told to check on "meteors, apocalypses, and varieties of doomsdays". Lucy also calls everyone in her address book to read them her own short story about death, strangely neglected by the editor of The Magazine.

But the epidemic might be a random occurrence, or even a divine intervention. The Haddads, along with a group of ecstatic interfaith worshippers in the Cedars of Lebanon Interdenominational Chapel, witness a moving finger writing, first, that it is "theoretically possible to live for ever", and then, "Oops!" And obviously the hospital, with its Senior Intake Forms, its Notice of Privacy Practices – which everyone signs and no one reads – its multiple elevators, gift shop specialising in objects that "were not beautiful, useful or interesting", labyrinthine corridors, overworked doctors and uninformed robotic staff, is a mad American medical bureaucracy that drives everyone bananas. Dr Haddad comments that "there is no emergency room that is not liable to raise the stress level to one that can cause temporary dementia, particularly in the elderly".

In more pointedly political asides, a brilliant young intern protests that "the world outside the hospital has no concept that the things we do to keep the patient alive another day, another 12 hours, meet Abu Ghraib standards". On the other hand, in a recent interview Segal has denied any political agenda for the book, and insists her characters are victims of the human condition rather than institutional policies.

Half the Kingdom comes with blurbs promising the "buoyant black humour" for which Segal is famed. Now 85, Segal is herself a heroic survivor. Born in Vienna, she was sent to England on the Kindertransport in 1939, and, as a child, conducted a successful letter-writing campaign to get the rest of her family out of Austria. By 1951, she was living in the US with a career as a writer and teacher. Segal's passionate admirers stress her ability to treat extremity and catastrophe as absurd, and to capture both tragedy and joy. There are some funny lines and spots of joy in the book. But Half the Kingdom is more harrowing than hilarious, and too short and sketchy to be a compelling addition to a now familiar geriatric genre. If you're heading to Zurich on holiday, though, it could be perfect reading.

• Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is published by Virago.


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Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, by Lynne Segal – review

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Lynne Segal offers a powerful manifesto for dealing with the march of time

The mighty Simone de Beauvoir published Old Age in 1970, when she was in her early 60s. A troubled, anguished and angry testimony, it detailed her profound dismay at the sagging of the body; the loss of looks (her own and the admiring glances of others), the absence of desire and the unwilling and uncomfortable contemplation of mortality. Not for her the basic philosophy of Woody Allen: "Old age isn't so bad, when you consider the alternative."

In contrast, Lynne Segal's thoughtful analysis of ageing offers a far more combative, zestful approach. It asks: when suffering from "temporal vertigo", absorbing at once all the ages you have ever been, and dealing with the inevitable loss of loved ones, how do you accept the physical ravages and build on the experiences of the past, to live fully in the present? What does it mean to age well?

Segal, now in her 60s, is a socialist feminist and anniversary professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. For the past 30 years, she has fearlessly taken on some of the loopier ideas of feminism and contributed significantly to a more optimistic agenda for sexual politics. In books such as Is the Future Female?, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men and Straight Sex: The Politics of Desire, she challenged the kind of essentialism that believes that women are somehow "nicer" than men and that, as sections of the sisterhood argued, men are incapable of change.

Social conditioning is, obviously, particularly potent when it comes to the business of growing old. And here is Segal's first challenge. Whom does she define as old? "Late midlifers"? "Early elderly"? At what point does an individual cease being surprised at the wrinkled, chipmunked face in the mirror and begin the period of critical self-reflection that surely must be one of the perks of ageing? What's certain is that the number of years that have passed is no guide in itself; as the writer Penelope Lively says in Moon Tiger: "Chronology irritates me."

Madonna wearily refuses to age, while women are now bearing children in a decade when their mothers were ploughing through the menopause. Old age for Dante began at 45; for Hippocrates, it meant the 50s. Now, 10 million Britons are over 65 and soon centurions will be the norm.

How we age is influenced by society's attitudes and currently "youthism" reigns, but it is also dictated by events in the shape of disease, desertion and unexpected isolation and deprivation. A fifth of those over 65 live in poverty, the majority of them women.

Segal's book is worth buying alone for the vim with which she sees off the "dim-witted" arguments of coalition minister David Willetts and historian Francis Beckett, among others, who insist that the baby-boomers have stolen all the booty and forfeited their children's future. Neoliberals, not the baby-boomers, have done the damage, Segal argues, and there are better ways to share the diminished spoils – a tax on corporate wealth, for one.

To help construct her guide for a "good" old age, Segal calls on an army of poets, writers, academics and activists, perhaps too many, when it's her voice the reader may seek. Her recommendations include remaining politically active (she quotes the inestimable John Berger, in his 80s: "…one protests… in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds"); valuing interdependency; treasuring connections with those who are younger; seeking out joy and ignoring all instructions to opt for invisibility and celibacy.

Until her 40s, Segal and her son lived in a collective in her large house in north London. Then she cohabited more conventionally with her male partner; she was 15 years older and he left her for a younger woman. Now, she has a female partner. Segal quotes from June Arnold's novel, Sister Gin, in which Su, in her 50s, falls for Mamie, a woman in her 80s. "My darling's face has been walked on by life," Su says, as a valediction, not a complaint.

Most of the cast that Segal rallies to explore her theme share an experience of beauty and/or fame, among them the poet Robert Frost ("No memory having starred/ Atones for later disregard/ or keeps the end from being hard"). The majority of those growing older will face other challenges. For millions, especially, perhaps, feminists, paid work, a career, has played a significant part in providing motivation and in forging an identity. Will retirement mean an erosion of a core sense of self? Or, looking back, is it possible to build on aspects of yourself you were never encouraged to value?

Segal quotes the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé, who, among her many achievements, became a psychoanalyst after the age of 60. "All my life I have done nothing but work," she said, near death. "And really, when you come to think of it… why?"

A question that could revolutionise ageing and that deserves an answer long before one runs out of time.


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The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy – review

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Anne de Courcy's account of women travelling to India to marry provides a fascinating window on the British Raj

For a middle-class Victorian family overburdened with daughters, the colonies were a godsend. Out there in India, a mere six months away by boat, were potential husbands by the score. The men ruling the empire were posh, often rich and almost universally frustrated. The best catches (the "turbot and halibut of the matrimonial nets") worked for the Indian civil service, or ICS, which insisted that all staff remain bachelors until after the age of 30. The huge distances, both geographical and ideological, between governors and governed meant that Raj-wallahs were expected to live more like secular monks than young men in a hot country.

On the other hand, British girls were considered to be "on the shelf" if they were still unmarried by their mid-20s. Since the best an unmarried woman could hope for was to work as a governess, they were packed off by the boatload to hunt for husbands and then breed for Britain.

Too intelligent, too poor or too plain to make good matches at home, the "fishing fleet" were trawled round the balls and clubs of Calcutta and Delhi as soon as they arrived. If that didn't do the trick, they were dispatched up country for a further round of speed dating and tiger shooting. Those few left unwed at the end of the process were usually made to pay their own sorrowful passage back to Britain.

Some of those who did stick to the rules of the Raj adapted well and made genuine love matches, but far more settled for "you'll do" arrangements based more on pragmatism than affection. Fraternising with Indians was out of the question, whatever their caste. When the maharajah of Patiala eloped with a fishing fleet girl called Florrie Bryan, she was spurned by both English and Indian society and her son was poisoned.

Anne de Courcy's girl's-eye view of the Raj makes clear the damage imperialism did not just to India but to the imperialists themselves. ICS men had no home leave for eight years, so the offspring of those marriages might not see their fathers for many years in a row. De Courcy includes the accounts of several miserable offspring born in India and incarcerated at boarding schools in England. As an account of husband-hunting, The Fishing Fleet is thorough and serviceable. As an account of how to screw up two societies at once, it's unparalleled.


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Writers and critics on the best books of 2013

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Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.

William Boyd

By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was answered with great candour and judiciousness. Hook's view of the art world is that of the professional auctioneer. In an A-Z format, it is an entire art education contained in under 350 pages. Wry, dry and completely beguiling.

Bill Bryson

The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M Davis (Allen Lane) is an elegantly written, unexpectedly gripping account of how scientists painstakingly unravelled the way in which a small group of genes (known as MHC genes) crucially influence, and unexpectedly interconnect, various aspects of our lives, from how well we fight off infection to how skilfully we find a mate. Lab work has rarely been made to seem more interesting or heroic. But my absolute book of the year is Philip Davies's hefty, gorgeous London: Hidden Interiors (English Heritage/Atlantic Publishing), which explores 180 fabulous London interior spaces that most people know nothing about, from George Gilbert Scott's wondrous chapel at King's College to L Manze's eel, pie and mash shop in Walthamstow. It is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Derek Randall and worth every penny of its £40 price.

Eleanor Catton

My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press): in style, very similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but the broken ellipses never feel like a gimmick or a game. I was utterly devastated by Colin McAdam's A Beautiful Truth (Granta), and utterly delighted by Elizabeth Knox's sly and ingenious Mortal Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux). My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvellously funny and inventive Heap House (Hot Key), written and illustrated by Edward Carey.

Shami Chakrabarti

Helping to judge this year's Samuel Johnson prize meant getting stuck into some serious non-fiction. The six books that made the shortlist – Empires of the Dead (David Crane, William Collins), Return of a King (William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury), A Sting in the Tale (Dave Goulson, Jonathan Cape), Under Another Sky (Charlotte Higgins, Jonathan Cape), The Pike (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Fourth Estate)and Margaret Thatcher (Charles Moore, Allen Lane)– are among my favourites from 2013. Dalrymple's masterful retelling of the first Afghan war had an eerie modern-day relevance, while Hughes-Hallett's portrayal of the fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a sombre reminder of the perils of political extremism. On a completely contrary note, Goulson's case for the importance of bumblebees will live long in my memory for its sheer passion and scientific detail.

Sarah Churchwell

Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts (Granta) provides a masterclass on the art of the essay from one of its most formidable living practitioners – often, as with the title essay, by sharing object lessons in failure. These occasional pieces offer glimpses into the creative process, the writer's constant search for structure, order and consonance. Even when individual essays did not live up to Malcolm's rigorous standards, the collection as a whole shows how connections emerge from the workings of one memorably searching, restless, ruthless mind.

Jim Crace

The four non-fiction books I most valued this year have an unusual strength and depth in common; the single themes they profess to focus on are also the Trojan horses through which their writers smuggle in a whole wide world of instruction, knowledge and contemporary significance. They are: Spillover, David Quammen's investigation of animal-to-human viruses (Vintage); Falling Upwards (Harper Collins), Richard Holmes's history of ballooning; The Searchers (Bloomsbury), Glenn Frankel's account of the 1836 abduction by Comanches of Cynthia Ann Parker and its unending aftermath; and Mark Cocker's loving and magisterial Birds and People(Jonathan Cape).

Roddy Doyle

George Saunders's collection of stories, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), is spectacularly good. The stories are clever and moving, and the title story is the best piece of fiction I've read this year. The Searchers, by Glenn Frankel, is about the stories behind the story that became the classic John Ford film. It's a history of America, an exploration of racial intolerance, an account of how, and why, real events can become legends. It's also hugely entertaining – as well as huge. My favourite book this year is Paul Morley's The North (And Almost Everything in It) (Bloomsbury). History told backwards, a memoir, a love letter to Liverpool, several to Manchester; the book pushed me to go to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate and made me listen again to George Formby and the Buzzcocks. The book filled my head. It was much too long and occasionally irritating, but when I got to the end I wished there'd been more of it.

Richard Ford

James Salter's novel All That Is (Picador). Not in my (admittedly failing) memory have I read a novel that, at its crucialest moment, made me just stand straight up out of my chair and have to walk around the room for several minutes. Laid into the customary Salterish verbal exquisiteness and vivid intelligence is such remarkable audacity and dark-hued verve about us poor humans. It's a great novel.

Jonathan Franzen

My vote is for Eric Schlosser's Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser's book reads like a thriller, but it's masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he's a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn't think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser's hands it does.

Antonia Fraser

The Poets' Daughters by Katie Waldegrave (Hutchinson) is an engrossing study of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. A double biography is an intricate pattern to achieve, but Waldegrave brings it off triumphantly: she also brings compassion as well as scholarship to her aid, so that at times the story is almost unbearably moving. After reading this book, I went right back to the paternal poetry and read it with fresh eyes.Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press), published appropriately enough as the National Theatre celebrates its 50th anniversary, is another narrative that sweeps you along. While in no sense a hagiography – there is plenty of discreet criticism when necessary – it enriched my sense of this amazing multi-faceted, multi-talented man. When I watch Henry V, for the umpteenth time, I shall gaze into those brilliant enigmatic eyes with even more awe, and a certain amount of apprehension.

Stephen Frears

Best read of the year was Into the Silence (Vintage), Wade Davis's account of the three unsuccessful Everest expeditions, through the back door of Tibet, culminating in the death of George Mallory in 1924. Men from the first world war showing endurance and a capacity for suffering beyond my comprehension. Maybe the prime minister should read it before he makes an idiot of himself. Oh and Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe (Viking). But I would say that since it's about my ex‑wife and our children. Letters from their Leicester nanny. Very funny and sharp.

Malcolm Gladwell

I read so many books this year that I loved – Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher(Princeton University Press), David Epstein's The Sports Gene (Yellow Jersey), and Jonathan Dee's magnificent A Thousand Pardons (Corsair) – but my favourite was a novel I picked up entirely randomly, in an airport bookstore: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (Sourcebooks Landmark). It is a beautiful and elegant account of an ordinary man's unexpected and reluctant descent into heroism during the second world war. I have no idea who Belfoure is, but he needs to write another book, now!

John Gray

Adam Phillips' One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays(Hamish Hamilton). Writing of Ford Madox Ford's hero Tietjens in Parade's End, who in the middle of a conversation suddenly wondered if he was in fact the father of his child but "proved his reputation for sanity" by going on talking without any sign of distress, Phillips comments: "As though sanity for this Englishman was about being apparently undisturbed by one's most disturbing thoughts." Witty and somehow liberating, it's a comment that could only come from Phillips. Covering a wide variety of topics – "On Being Bored", "First Hates", "On Success" and "The Uses of Forgetting" are just a few – these short pieces from the psychotherapist and critic will confirm him as the best living essayist writing in English.

Mark Haddon

The Great War edited by Mark Holborn, text by Hilary Roberts (Jonathan Cape). A collection of photographs from the vast holdings of the Imperial War Museums. I have never seen or read anything that brings the first world war quite so vividly alive. Some of the events of 1914-1918 have been told and retold so many times that the whole conflict has, for many people, acquired an obscuring antique patina. This book strips it all away. It will make me seem a fool, perhaps, but I kept turning pages and thinking, my God, these are real people. These things actually happened.

Mohsin Hamid

Those unfamiliar with the American short-form master George Saunders should go out immediately and pick up a copy of his latest story collection, Tenth of December. Wow. Sharp and fun. Also, we should all be grateful for the New York Review Books Classics series, which this year has brought us Frances Pritchett's English translation of Intizar Husain's famous Urdu novel, Basti. Husain was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International prize, and this, his best‑known work, deserves a UK publisher.

Robert Harris

In 1983, the 50-year lease on a safe deposit box on the island of Mallorca expired. It was opened and found to contain tens of thousands of pages of the diary of a minor German aristocrat, Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), covering the years from 1880 to 1918. These have now been meticulously translated and edited by Laird M Easton, and the result is Journey to the Abyss (Vintage), a 900-page marvel. Kessler, an aesthete and amateur diplomat, travelled relentlessly between Paris, Berlin and London before the first world war and the list of his friends and acquaintances, each vividly described, is staggering: Bonnard, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ravel, Rodin, Renoir, Gide, Monet, Mahler, Matissee, William Morris, Richard Strauss, Strindberg, Rilke, Verlaine, George Bernard Shaw, Hofmannsthal, Gordon Craig, Munch, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Nietzsche (whose death mask he helps make), Walter Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, HG Wells, Augustus John … And then comes August 1914 and Kessler – hitherto the most cultured companion – joins the Kaiser's army and briefly becomes a swaggering German nationalist. An important, underappreciated, unforgettable book.

Max Hastings

Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf (William Heinemann) tells the story of how a young German Jewish refugee serving in the British army – the author's uncle – was responsible in 1945 for tracking down and arresting Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and one of the most dreadful mass murderers of all time. Harding sketches the parallel lives of the SS officer with notable skill. The book is a moving reminder of what an extraordinary amount Britain gained by the Jewish flight from Europe in the 1930s – it could have been still more had we offered a warmer welcome to a host of German scientists who moved on to the US.

Philip Hensher

Volume one of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher(Allen Lane) is an extraordinary reconstruction of a political way of life now completely vanished, written with a clear eye and full of incidental pleasures. (Not least about the surprising number of adoring gay men surrounding her at all stages.) The novel I enjoyed most was Richard House's sensational pile-driver, The Kills(Picador). Catching-up reading brought me Tapan Raychaudhuri's superb memoir, The World in Our Time(HarperCollins India), not yet published in the UK, but full of the tumultuous life of the Bengal delta – a masterpiece.

Simon Hoggart

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Hutchinson). Hard to imagine a thriller where you know the ending before you pick up the book, but Harris's retelling of the Dreyfus case is as taut and exciting as anything by Forsyth or Follett. The tale is told through the eyes of Col Picquart, the head of "the statistical section" within the French secret service, who witnessed Dreyfus's degradation but gradually came to realise that another officer was the traitor. The story of how he went over the heads of his superiors, none of whom wanted to rock the ship of state, is gripping, the evocation of turn-of-the-century France appealing, and the ending is magnificently downbeat, a terrific anticlimax – if that's possible.

AM Homes

Woody Guthrie's Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited by Phillip Buehler (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc) is a hauntingly beautiful book about the five years the American folk legend, songwriter and activist spent as a patient at the Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie, who had Huntington's disease, lived among the mental patients on ward 40. It was here that he was introduced to the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. Photographer Phillip Buehler, who has made a career of exploring 20th-century ruins, first climbed into Greystone through a window. The beauty of the decaying building, thick curls of paint peeling off the walls, light seeping into long empty narrow patient rooms like cells, spurred his curiosity. He located Guthrie's files and, working with archivists and the Guthrie family, was able to put together a portrait of a man, a place and a point in American history when large state hospitals were all too often warehouses for humanity. There are notes from doctors indicating they had no idea who Guthrie was; or they saw him as a wanderer a vagrant, and thought his claims about songwriting were delusions of grandeur. A particular quote from Woody's son Arlo stayed with me – a patient tells Woody that he loved his book Bound for Glory. "You read my book?" Woody asks. "No, I ate your book," the patient says.

Barbara Kingsolver

I love surprise finds, so I'll recommend two debut novels that swept me away.The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker (Blue Door), has the detailed realism of historical fiction, the haunting feel of a folk tale, and is one of only two novels I've ever loved whose main characters are not human. (The other was The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy.) And Susan Nussbaum's Good Kings, Bad Kings (out in March 2014 from Oneworld Publications) is a ferociously honest, funny, completely unstoppable trip through an institutionally corrupt home for disabled teenagers. I had no intention of going where they took me. That's the thrill of fiction.

David Kynaston

Kenneth Roy's The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 (ICS) is by someone who lived through the period but is admirably unsentimental. Well-informed, highly readable, slightly prickly, often opinionated – not least about the seriously flawed Scottish establishment – this feels like something that needed to be written. Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves) by Gillian Darley and David McKie I am far from alone in having the awkward, melancholic architectural writer and broadcaster as one of my heroes: partly for his deep conviction that the built environment mattered, partly for his insistence – in defiance of modernist orthodoxy – that people mattered more. One day no doubt Nairn will get a heavy-duty biography, but for the time being this elegant, rather slighter treatment does the job with charm and just the right degree of critical affection.

John Lanchester

Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina, a collection of letters to her sister from the period in the mid-80s when she was working as a nanny, is funny and sharp and has a distinctive streak of wildness: no book this year made me laugh more. Also funny and sharp, though in a darker vein, is ASA Harrison's he-said, she-said psychological thriller, The Silent Wife(Headline). Finally, the last entry in the funny-sharp stakes are the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I've been reading thanks to Hermione Lee's biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto & Windus). The odd thing is that Lee's book has had more influence on my reading than anything else this year, even though I'm not going to read the biography itself until I've finished the novels. That's because I don't want prematurely to spoil the mystery of how Fitzgerald could have known so much about so many worlds, from pre-revolutionary Moscow to 60s theatre-school London to German Romanticism. (I think I can guess how she knew so much about houseboats and bookshops.) Last recommendation: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False(OUP USA), an extraordinary and very controversial intervention in the current ructions about science and religion, from one of the world's most respected philosophers.

Mark Lawson

On either side of the Atlantic, two octogenarian grand masters of espionage fiction were on high form: John le Carré's A Delicate Truth(Viking) and Charles McCarry's The Shanghai Factor(Head of Zeus) dramatise the cumulative consequences of decades of spying and lying by the victors of the second world war. Drawing on a lifetime of learning, and defying several life-threatening conditions, Clive James translated Dante: The Divine Comedy(Picador) into punchy, theologically serious and frequently funny verse. Julian Barnes reformed the conventional autobiography in Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape), combining essay, fiction and memoir in reflecting on the death of love, while Hermione Lee rethought the conventions of biography in a compelling account of the life and work (and overlaps between) of the until now underrated writer Penelope Fitzgerald. And, as readers migrate to the ebook, two lavishly produced volumes made the case for the physical book: a new edition (including the Olympic Flame bowl) of Thomas Heatherwick's thrilling design compendium Making (Thames & Hudson) and JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (Canongate): an astonishing interactive project that encloses secret books and secret readers within what seems to be a 1949 library book.

Penelope Lively

Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is literary biography at its best – a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist and an illuminating account of the life of a complex and elusive person. I thought I knew both the work and the writer pretty well but have learned much – new insights into the novels, aspects of her life of which I knew nothing. Nobody does elderly men better than Jane Gardam. Last Friends(Little, Brown) is the concluding volume in her trilogy about the legal pack – Feathers, Veneering, Fiscal-Smith – that began with Old Filth. Throughout the series Jane Gardam has switched viewpoints with extraordinary dexterity. Elegant, funny, unexpected – Last Friends ties things up. I am a long-time fan of Adam Thorpe. His versatility is remarkable – historical novels, shrewd forays into contemporary life. And now a thriller, Flight (Vintage). It zips from the Middle East to the Outer Hebrides – brilliant plotting, a mesmerising read.

Robert Macfarlane

Never a man to take a straight line where a diversion was possible, Patrick Leigh Fermor spent almost 50 years not-quite-finishing the final book of his trilogy describing his walk across Europe in the 1930s. It appeared this autumn as The Broken Road(John Murray), two years after his death, brought to publication by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. I opened it expecting disappointment – how could it be as good as its sibling volumes? – and ended it amazed. I read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Granta) three times in my capacity as Man Booker judge, and each time round it yielded new riches. It is a vastly complex novel about investment and return, gift and theft, value and worth, which – in performance of its own ethics – gives far more than it appears to possess. Finally, in minimalist contrast to Catton's maximalist novel, I loved Wolfhou by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, another exquisitely produced pamphlet of place-poetry from Corbel Stone Press, who work out of a cottage in the western Lake District.

Hilary Mantel

Indulge in a big and richly satisfying literary biography, from an artist in the form: Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. It will send you back to the subject's own piquant and elusive novels. But perhaps a book of the year should be a mirror of the times? If so, feed righteous indignation on Damian McBride's Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin (Backbite). Bankrupt of morals and bankrupt of style, it is a nonpareil of peevishness, and self-delusion shines from it like a Christmas star.

Pankaj Mishra

The most remarkable discovery for me this year was Kirill Medvedev's It's No Good(Ugly Duckling Presse), a collection of poems and essays, a brilliant artistic and political response to the depredations of the Yeltsin and Putin era. Italo Calvino's Letters: 1941-1985 (Princeton Press) and Collection of Sand: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) remind us of a type of writerly mind almost extinct in Anglo-America: worldly, invariably curious, quietly passionate and elegant. Julia Lovell's translations of Zhu Wen's stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice and the Football Fan (Columbia) yet again affirm him as one of the most interesting Chinese writers today. This was a particularly rich and exciting year in literary translations from Indian languages; the stories in Ajay Navaria's Unclaimed Terrain(Navayana Publications), and the novels by Sachin Kundalkar (Cobalt Blue, Hamish Hamilton) and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (The Mirror of Beauty, Hamish Hamilton) hint at the yet unrevealed depth and diversity of Indian literatures.

Blake Morrison

Adelle Waldman's first novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (William Heinemann) is memorable for its Austen-like wit, humour, social astuteness and scarily accurate insights into men. Rather than condemn the protagonist (a young New Yorker) as misogynistic and self-obsessed, Waldman sends him up, to devastating effect. Lucy Hughes-Hallett adopts a similar strategy in her terrific biography of the poet, seducer and fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. The pace is hectic, as befits D'Annunzio's life, and I enjoyed the quote from the ex-lover who said his ideal would be an octopus with a hundred women's legs – but no head. Helen Mort's Division Street (Chatto & Windus) is an excellent first poetry collection – lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the northern landscapes that inspired it. Dave Eggers's The Circle, about the abolition of privacy in the age of social media, is a must-read dystopian novel – the future it envisages has all but arrived.

Andrew Motion

Tim Dee's Four Fields(Jonathan Cape) belongs in the tradition of "nature writing", but works with it too – putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it's a deeply attractive book and also an important one. Inside the Rainbow (Redstone Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, is a survey of Russian children's literature from 1920-35, and the subtitle tells us what to expect: "Beautiful books, terrible times". Indeed. But brilliantly clever, seditious, amusing, brave and delightful books as well; their illustrations and jackets are all reproduced here to wonderful effect. JO Morgan's long poem At Maldon (CB Editions) is a riff on the Old English poem, and owes something to Christopher Logue's War Music and Alice Oswald's Memorial– but it is its own thing too: inventive, striking and memorable. And a reminder that Morgan is one of the most original poets around.

Edna O'Brien

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso (Allen Lane) is a brilliant kaleidoscopic rendering of the tormented poet, his times and the city of Paris that "breathes" in his prose and poetry. We meet Baudelaire the dandy, his indecorous mistress Jeanne, both muse and vampire, his mother Caroline and his hated stepfather General Aupick, who, in the bloodshed of 1848, Baudelaire asked one of the insurgents to shoot. It is one of the most satisfying biographies I have ever read. Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber), lovingly compiled by her daughter Frieda Hughes, shows Plath's observation of everyday things – a thistle, a horse chestnut, the willows near Grantchester. It is also salutary to compare the austerity of her poetry with the rapture in her letters to her husband (included here), in which she envisages his presence "come day, come night, come hurricane and holocaust …" Dear Boy by Emily Berry (Faber): from the evidence here, this poet's imagination is rich, playful and restless, with the occasional note of anguish, which Plath would surely approve of, like a glimpse of the first crocus. Last, but by no means least, Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland) is funny, moving and beautifully written.

Susie Orbach

Alan Rusbridger's Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible is a wonderful account of trying to learn a complex piano piece while running the Guardian at the time of WikiLeaks and phone hacking. I had to skip some of the accounts of the fingering he is learning but he eloquently expresses the struggle to take up the playing of this piece – the Chopin Ballade No 1 – and segues into fascinating accounts of different historic pianos and the idiosyncratic manner individual musicians use them, and his various "teachers", who mostly sound very strict, alongside the emergencies from the office. A parallel story of how newspapers can move forward in the digital age runs along the narrative. I am always curious about people's daily lives and their curiosities. This book gives both in abundance.

Ian Rankin

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life(Doubleday) is her most challenging, complex and compelling novel yet. A woman has the chance to live life over and over again in often surprising ways. No Booker listing: no justice. Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard (Faber) is ostensibly a courtroom drama that asks how its sensible, intelligent middle-class heroine ended up in the dock in a murder case – beguilingly written, steely and plausible and occasionally shocking. Niccolò Ammaniti was a new name to me. Let the Games Begin(Canongate) is a wild ride with the fevered quality of Pynchon and Vonnegut as a party to end all parties sees the various characters vying to survive a grotesque uprising. It's a satire on contemporary culture, Italian politics and the writing profession itself. Funny, sharp, and really quite rude. In a similar vein, John Niven's Straight White Male (William Heinemann) is the story of a hugely successful Irish screenwriter and his gloriously incorrect behaviour. There are laughs aplenty, but Niven adds growing poignancy as his hero becomes self-aware. It is Niven's best book, and the protagonist is easily the match of John Self in Martin Amis's Money.

Ruth Rendell

My choice isn't a new book, but it was reissued this year. I'm ashamed that I had never heard of Stonerby John Williams (Vintage) until I found it in a bookshop three months ago. I was stunned by it, it's so good. And yet very little happens in it except joy and pain and sorrow in the American midwest, love and passion and the mistakes everyone makes. It's beautifully written in simple but brilliant prose, a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer.

Lionel Shriver

Three novels stand out for me in 2013: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda (Sceptre), set in Red Hook, Brooklyn; two girls venture out on a pink inflatable raft into the filthy East River and only one comes back. Great writing, great setting, beautifully rendered characters. The Son by Phillipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster): an epic set in Texas that uses, among other things, that white-man-raised-by-Indians routine, and yet incredibly it doesn't feel tired. Totally engrossing. Lastly, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), which teems with fury, and tells a tale of breathtaking betrayal. It's a great study as well in the (possibly?) unreliable narrator. You keep puzzling over whether this woman is completely off her head.

Helen Simpson

Hermione Lee's fascinating biography of Penelope Fitzgerald charts a life that travelled the full 360 degrees on the wheel of fortune – from early promise and privilege down to dramatic middle-aged doldrums then back up to a late-blooming two decades of literary productivity and success. I'm now reading Fitzgerald's last four novels, which are every bit as breathtaking as Lee's concluding chapters describe. I read Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer for the first time this year in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Admired by Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy, these stories seethe with picaresque unpredictability, outlandish but touching monologues and recklessly impulsive characters like the country girl turned femme fatale in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Tom Stoppard

This is the time of year when I try in vain to remember what I was reading up to 12 months ago, and end up choosing three books I've enjoyed in the last 12 weeks. In the present case, these are Nature's Oracle by Ullica Segerstrale (OUP), a biography of WD (Bill) Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist whose insight into the operation of kin selection at gene level suggested how altruism might have emerged from natural selection; a hugely enjoyable novel, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape), who, when he's in his hardboiled vein, writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year; and The New York Times Book of Mathematics, which is what it sounds like: a century of news from maths written up for a general readership, and nobody does it better.

Colm Tóibín

Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale (HarperPress) manages an intimate and careful study of Titian's body of work, plus an intricate knowledge of politics and art in 16th-century Venice and in the Europe from which Titian received his commissions. She captures Titian's vast ambition and does justice to his achievement, but also creates a portrait of an age. Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press) are the second and third volumes of a three-volume biography. Stach reads the work and the life with minute care and sympathy. He has a deep understanding of the world that Kafka came from and the personalities who touched his life, and this is matched by an intelligence and tact about the impulse behind the work itself.

• This article was amended on 28 November 2013. The earlier version misspelled Roberto Calasso's surname as Galasso.


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The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London by Hannah Greig – review

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How the aristocracy reinvented itself – and why culture is power

Toffs have always seemed to know how to keep the best things for themselves, especially when everyone is sure that their power is waning. It has long been conventional to see the 18th century as the period in which Britain passed out of the control of the court and the aristocracy. Commerce became the power in the land; new codes of politeness welded the propertied classes together, and these included more and more of "the middling sort". The patrons and philanthropists of this self-consciously modern society were the merchants and men of trade whose portraits were painted by Hogarth. Many of its cultural heroes – Samuel Richardson, David Garrick, Hogarth himself – came from humble backgrounds. The ancien régime was gone.

Hannah Greig's scholarly study of high society in the period corrects this impression. She shows how the 18th‑century aristocracy used fashion – and the willingness of the classes immediately below them to be dazzled by fashion – to assert their influence anew. Thus the nice borrowing from French that gives this book its title. One small triumph of the ever-adaptable English upper class was to get this term, with its unmistakable tone of self-applause, accepted. There was a cluster of other words for those who embodied style and inhabited the rapidly spreading West End of London: "people of fashion", "the great world" and, best of all, "the ton". The press stoked the public fascination with the most glittering members of this class.

By examining the diaries, letters and memorandum books of individual aristocrats, Greig shows how an old ruling class rebranded itself. Her examples and anecdotes are almost all taken from manuscript sources – we witness aristocrats talking incautiously to themselves and hear them, as if in cahoots with each other, forging a modern "group identity". The press (another 18th-century invention) was in love with "fashion". The aristocrats who came to London for "the season" (which corresponded with the sitting of parliament) aped each other's displays of "taste". They did not purchase an item because of who made it or who sold it – but because someone else already owned it. And their wealth began to look like glittering modishness. (The ultimate possession was diamond jewellery, which became the very symbol of membership of the beau monde.)

Looking fashionable was a full-time occupation. In the book's opening case study the Earl and Countess of Strafford take a year simply to equip their property in St James's Square with the requisite furnishings. The countess (perhaps because of her distinctly non-aristocratic origins) was evidently showing off her taste as much to her husband as to his acquaintances. Some of the most interesting stories are of those who were in fact arrivistes. You would never know from Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton and Duchess of Argyll, that before she snared the enraptured Duke she was, as Horace Walpole put it, an "Irish girl of no fortune". Yet the periodical press seem to have decided that the age's widely celebrated "beauties" were natural aristocrats, whose origins were easily forgotten.

In recent years historians have emphasised the inclusiveness of 18th-century urban culture. Pleasure gardens, exhibitions and assemblies were open to all who could buy the tickets and display themselves in the necessary finery. At Vauxhall Gardens or the London theatres the city goldsmith's wife and daughters could rub shoulders with the highest in the land. From the novels of Tobias Smollett and Fanny Burney to the satirical prints of Rowlandson we derive images of a society in which grand and vulgar took their pleasures together. Greig gives us a different, subtler picture. Those in the beau monde may not have been able to isolate themselves completely from the classes below, but they developed ways to remain aloof. Enthusiastic participants in the London season, such as the Duchess of Grafton in the 1770s, kept memorandum books listing their hugely expensive round of engagements. She was not mixing with the "middling" sort: she was requiring them as spectators of her privilege.

Newspapers announced the great names attending the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, where visitors could listen to music, watch fireworks and fountains, and parade themselves. Greig shows how members of the beau monde attended these venues in order to advertise their prestige and confirm their superior status. Aristocrats did knock elbows with tradesmen, but it was not about mixing. The urban bourgeois and the provincial tourist would go to ogle his or her betters. In the playhouse spectators were divided between the different parts of the theatre, the ticket prices stratifying the audience. Private boxes were rented for the season by the leaders of the beau monde at vast expense. They wanted to be seen by the merely genteel and to dazzle them. Leaders of the fashionable world exhibited their political affiliations by being seen at the playhouse in certain company. Prospective marriages were announced by a couple's appearance in the same box.

It has become accepted wisdom that the court had ceased to be the focus for the ruling class of Georgian Britain, yet Greig's account indicates how attendance there was still a crucial ritual. The press reported the court costumes of the leaders of fashion who paraded outside the entrance to St James's Palace with delight and admiration. The "drawing room" of the monarch was notionally open to all who appeared in suitably elaborate garb, but those who aspired to bask in the royal presence were filtered by a series of flunkeys and only the truly fashionable were certain to get through.

The life of these self-consciously modern wielders of privilege was not merely pleasure and ostentation, however. In a chapter on politics, Greig reads the letters and diaries of aristocratic ladies to find them tirelessly manoeuvring to make or renew political contacts on behalf of their powerbroking husbands. From the letters of society ladies one sees that mutual "visits" or encounters at the opera (then, as now, the most select of cultural venues) were ways of testing political affiliation. For in one respect fashionable aristocrats were not united: they belonged to political factions. Sexual or financial misdemeanors might be forgiven, but political disagreement could cause real offence. "The Duke of Argyle came in and I rose from my seat to make him a curtsey but he tossed his head the other way and passed by me with two or three of the most stately strides I ever beheld." This is Lady Hertford in 1742, taking great pleasure in the angry offence of her husband's disappointed rival for political office. All the political wives in Greig's book are satisfyingly combative and cheerfully devious in the furthering of their husband's political interests.

Greig is herself aware of the danger that we take these self-delighted individuals at their own estimation. We stay not just within their world but within their own documentation of it. The reader who relishes the urban culture of 18th-century Britain will reflect that there was a world elsewhere, in which fashion was also determined by men and women who were not born to be great. Yet as an anatomy of the self-preserving nous of a traditional elite this is a persuasive, because superbly documented, study. It shows how an established ruling class recognised that, in a changing world, culture was power.

• John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen? is published by Bloomsbury.


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Bob Stanley's 10 best music histories

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From the frantic birth of rock'n'roll to the rages of punk, these books capture the excitement of popular music

One of the reasons I wanted to write Yeah Yeah Yeah is because it didn't already exist.

There wasn't a book that followed pop music's development from the start of the 1950s, when the introduction of vinyl records, the "hit parade", the weekly music press and the Dansette – the first portable musical hardware – created the modern pop era.

There were plenty of books out there on genres, micro-genres, even specific songs, and some of these are among my favourite books. Without the 10 I've listed here, all big inspirations, Yeah Yeah Yeah would have been much harder and much less fun to pull together.

Love Is the Drug by John Aizlewood

Aizlewood edited this book about fan worship, written by fans who mostly ended up as DJs (Steve Lamacq) or journalists (Sheryl Garratt) or both (Danny Kelly). Each writer describes their first pop love, which can either be forbiddingly cool (Kelly grew up in Dalston, split equally in the 60s between Irish and Jamaican communities, and so came to love reggae at an early age) or quite the opposite (Garratt's essay on Rollermania). Best of the lot is Mick Houghton's piece about falling in and out of love with Billy Fury, betraying him for the Beatles in 1963, and still feeling a sense of shame 30 years later.

How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll by Elijah Wald

This covers the pre-rock era, and the rise of American popular music through parlour songs, spirituals and ragtime. Wald has more time for musicians and ordinary listeners than swing buffs and revisionists. Best of all, he takes on the conventional history of jazz (he has a rare respect for the white "king of jazz" Paul Whiteman, largely ignored by modern critics) as well as rock, which we don't reach until the book is more than halfway through.

Revolt Into Style by George Melly

The first book specifically about British pop culture, published in 1970, is a fabulous period piece. Melly was on the outside, as a jazzman, but observed the rise of modern pop with interest; his is a pretty unique perspective. He describes the "castrating process" of Tommy Steele's career move from rock'n'roller to all-round entertainer, and Swinging London as "of use only to the lazy and least talented". He's no snob, though: "There's nothing wrong with camp if it doesn't put on airs."

Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record by Richard Osborne

In theory, Vinyl is an academic book, but I found it a very easy read – there was plenty to discover. Osborne talks about how 78s were made from the secretions of beetles found on the Malay peninsula and in French Indochina, how record labels were first created (yes, the paper labels themselves), and the reasons why Johnny Marr might regard 7-inch singles as "mystical objects" while a Pink Floyd fan urged NME readers in 1974 to lobby their MPs so "seven inch records must be made illegal". Anyone who has an obsession with records as physical artefacts will love this.

Pop From The Beginning by Nik Cohn

Written in three weeks flat at the start of 1969, this was a chronological dash through pop's first 15 years, from Bill Haley to Crosby Stills and Nash (who Cohn thought were weedy and unlistenable). He is never scared to have an opinion that goes against the grain and even if I don't agree with him most of the time (PJ Proby gets a whole chapter!), the pulp thriller style gets the excitement of the period and the pace of change across with a huge amount of panache.

The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

Marsh celebrates the 7-inch single, listing what he considers to be the 1,001 greatest 45s in order (I won't spoil it by telling you what's number one). I love the intriguing, unlikely connections he makes to show how the story of pop can be seen as a whole: Nolan Chance's eerie doo-wop hit The Wind is described as "a prophecy of Michael Jackson 20 years before he came along … if it had arrived in a meteorite shower it couldn't have been any spookier". The only thing wrong with the book is its clunky title, but then it was written in the mid-80s when pop was a dirty word.

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner

The story of recorded music, and how we've listened to it since the days of Edison. It turns into something of a polemic once it reaches the digital era, but you can understand Milner's frown. The romance of radio waves, magnetic recording tape and gramophones is strong, and the digital age seems rather puny and unexciting when set alongside these progressive, physical, scientific advances.

England's Dreaming by Jon Savage

Though there are other good books on punk – John Robb's oral history for one – this is definitive. Which is most impressive when you consider that no two people have ever agreed on exactly what "punk" is. Savage looks at it as much from a sociological perspective as a musical one. He reanimates the Sex Pistols' huge social impact in 1977, set against the "pathetic scrap of bunting" of the Queen's silver jubilee, using quotes from John le Carré, Guy Debord and his own teenage diaries.

Faking It by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor

I like Girls Aloud as much as I like Nick Drake – authenticity is a bugbear of mine. The notion that you have to be a tortured genius to make great music seems hideously outdated, yet certain types of music are still treated as more important and more serious than ones that tend to sell in quantity. Faking It has all the ammo you need to shoot down Mercury music prize advocates. It reveals how the supposed realness of the blues was basically a white enthusiasts' construct, and explains why Nirvana felt the need to apologise for being popular.

Revolution In the Head by Ian MacDonald

I've avoided straight biographies on this list, but the Beatles' story is the perfect pop story, and – by going through every Beatles song chronologically – no one tells it better than Ian MacDonald. It's wildly unpredictable. MacDonald has a problem with George Harrison's general moodiness, and describes Helter Skelter as a "drunken mess", but you don't have to agree with him. His writing is so good that, against all odds, it'll make you listen to the most overplayed songs in history all over again.

Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop by Bob Stanley is published by Faber, £20.


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Bavarian U-turn over academic reprint of Hitler's Mein Kampf blurs ethics

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Preventing the proliferation of Mein Kampf may feel the right thing to do – but it risks impeding those trying to demystify it

Last week, a number of news headlines suggested that the German state of Bavaria was trying to "ban" Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. In fact, no such thing had happened. What had taken place was that Bavaria's minister president, the Christian Social Union (CSU) politician Horst Seehofer, had gone back on a commitment to fund a critical, academic edition of the book, set to be published just before copyright runs out on 1 January 2016.

The finance ministry of Bavaria, where the publishing house behind Mein Kampf was officially registered when it was liquidated in 1945, has owned the copyright to the work since the end of the war, and has in the past denied any requests for publication.

In 2012, however, the Bavarian parliament had announced that it would help fund a critically annotated academic publication of the book produced by the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, which has been worked on since 2009. A year ago, finance minister Markus Söder told the political magazine Cicero that "we want to make clear what rubbish is written in this book, and what fatal consequences it had", adding that "we have to demystify this book".

Now, after investing €500,000 in the project, the CSU seems to have had second thoughts about the Bavarian crest appearing in the academic edition, reportedly after complaints from Holocaust survivors.

This seemed politically inconsistent, but not quite the draconian measure it was made out to be. Perhaps, given Bavaria's status as the "birthplace" of national socialism, it was even the ethical thing to do. Most legal experts suggested that the publication of the academic edition would go ahead as planned, just with a bit less money.

But a small notice in German papers last Friday, which has so far passed by the English-language media, makes this tale a bit more interesting. It said that the Bavarian finance ministry last week threatened to take legal action against an academic at the Technical University of Berlin, who had uploaded a PDF of Mein Kampf to the university's website.

In Germany, academics' freedom to do their research, Wissenschaftsfreiheit, is embedded in Article 5 of the Basic Law, and Bavarian minister for education and cultural affairs, Ludwig Spaenle, had promised that "academic freedom would not be touched" by the political U-turn over the Mein Kampf question. But suing an academic seems to suggest otherwise.

Christian Gizewski a research professor at TU Berlin describes himself as a "general historian" specialising in ancient history. For years, he told me over the phone, he had wanted to "expose Hitler's prejudices and show that there was no sound historical basis to his ideology about race". The author of Mein Kampf, Gizewski said, never really tried to get his head around the history of the Jewish people or what Aryan really means. "He was a sweary demagogue, not a historian".

Initially, he uploaded a summary of Mein Kampf to his website hosted by TU Berlin. But, he said, it would have been unscientific to have a commentary on a book without specifying which edition it was referring to. Therefore, in 2011, he uploaded a PDF of Mein Kampf to his site. "It's very easy to find online already, after all."

No one complained for two years – until Thursday, when the Bavarian finance ministry rang and asked him to take the PDF off his website. "I tried to explain to them why I had academic reasons to upload the text, but they weren't interested", he said. "They just inferred that I was a Nazi".

On Friday, TU Berlin switched off the entire website for three days. On Monday, they switched his site back on, but without the PDF of Mein Kampf. A spokesperson from the university said that it considered Gizewski's action a breach of copyright.

But Gizewski argued that as a qualified academic he was perfectly within his right to reproduce a historical source text as long as he did not make a profit from it. He pointed to paragraphs 52 and 52a of German copyright law – which, for example, allow lecturers to photocopy books for seminars. He also said he he wanted to fight his corner if the case went to court: "I will keep on running this website."

"It should be in everyone's interest, that the whole work is taken apart back to front. Of course there are people who will abuse this book, but surely we have to distinguish between them and academics who look at it for sound academic reasons."

Gizewski could be accused of eccentricity (there is also a long letter to Social Democrat party members on his site, explaining why they should have voted against a coalition with Merkel's party), and perhaps of wilful mischief – he could have just linked to one of the thousands of other scans of Mein Kampf you can find on Google. But from talking to him there seems little doubt that he has a genuine academic motive.

At the very least, this episode illustrates the ongoing absurdity of the situation around the publication of Hitler's book in Germany. The Bavarian finance ministry can call up Christian Gizewski because he happens to live in Germany. But it can do nothing about the thousands of scans uploaded outside Germany that remain just a keystroke away for those within the country.


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