Books of the year

In no particular order, these are ten books of 2003 that I particularly enjoyed. I have cheated slightly in counting among them some books that were published either at the end of last year or in paperback this year. Their common characteristic is that I read them in 2003.

1. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Not a conventional biography, but an original, scrupulously-researched and horrifying study of the pathology of an absolute ruler and his hangers-on. Could almost be entitled Everyday Life with a Despot and his Coterie.

2. Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens. Uncompromising, unanswerable and – despite the gravity of the subject – often witty advocacy of the Anglo-American liberation of Iraq. Also well worth reading is William Shawcross’s Allies, a powerful defence of Bush and Blair’s Iraq diplomacy and a suitably contemptuous dismissal of a venal French President.

3. Brian Moore: A Biography by Patricia Craig. Impeccable biography of the excellent and underrated favourite modern novelist of Graham Greene. An Irishman who took Canadian citizenship and lived in California, Moore never quite achieved in his lifetime the readership that he deserved. His lapsed Catholicism is a continual but never obtrusive theme. I particularly recommend his first and most celebrated novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (avoid the unsatisfactory film version with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins), about an alcoholic Belfast spinster, and The Colour of Blood.

4. The Murder Room by P.D. James. A couple of months ago The Independent columnist Johann Hari advanced the singularly unconvincing case that Agatha Christie was a sophisticated theorist of conservatism (I criticised it here). He picked the wrong detective novelist. Whereas Christie’s novels are rarely anything more than dreary and pedestrian puzzle books, Baroness James’s have an appropriately conservative sense of sin – the notion that once the murder has been solved and the criminal caught, the society the novel depicts nonetheless can’t be as it was before. The latest novel about Commander Adam Dalgliesh is not her best – the identity of the murderer is surprising, but the rationale for the murder seems a bit flat to me – but it’s still detective fiction of the highest class.

5. Selected Works of Merton H. Miller: A Celebration of Markets (two volumes: one on finance, one on economics). These volumes comprise articles and academic papers by the late Chicago economist, who won the Nobel Economics Prize in 1990 for his work on the capital structure of corporation. Not everyone will thrill to ‘Decreasing Average Cost and the Theory of Railroad Rates’, but there are some apt and elegantly-written non-technical pieces as well. In ‘How Much University Research is Enough?’, Miller states:

Economic theory predicts that in a world with no permanent technological secrets, all market-driven economies will converge to the same standard of living eventually, though it may take decades, and perhaps even centuries for those starting furthest back. But since we in the United States start at the front of the pack, the rest of the converging world must always be gaining on us.

Much dangerous nonsense about declining national competitiveness (whatever that is) and supposed unfair trading practices by other countries is uttered in American political debate (see the campaign web site of the ridiculous Richard Gephardt). It could be avoided through an acquaintance with the economic wisdom of Merton Miller.

6. Arafat's war by Efraim Karsh. Definitive and depressing indictment of a corrupt and brutal man who bears responsibility for the fact that there is no independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. See also the same author’s Rethinking the Middle East, arguing that the peoples of the region must be the authors of their own fate.

7. Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan. Handsome selection of poems from the prolific output of Ireland's greatest poet before Yeats, marking his bicentenary. Mangan is now little read and indeed scarcely known; the young James Joyce said of him 100 years ago:

But the best of what he has written makes its appeal surely, because it was conceived by the imagination which he called, I think, the mother of things, whose dream are we, who imageth us to herself, and to ourselves, and imageth herself in us - the power before whose breath the mind in creation is (to use Shelley's image) as a fading coal.

8. Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey by Giles Radice. A triple biography ought not to work, but this one is first-rate. Giles Radice, a former Labour MP, argues persuasively that the moderate Left lost a historic opportunity by failing to alight on a single leader among the trio of Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey. I agree, though I don’t think it could have been Crosland, whose social democratic economic philosophy was shown to be inadequate in the IMF crisis of 1976. Nor did Jenkins have the bite to be an effective Prime Minister (and his record as Chancellor was nothing like as distinguished as he believed, though he was an admirable reforming Home Secretary). Denis Healey, on the other hand, was an outstanding Chancellor (though I admit this is a minority opinion) and a skilled if not especially genteel politician. I believe that had he been Prime Minister he would have undertaken the industrial relations reforms and economic restructuring that Britain needed in the 1980s, but perhaps without some of the social dislocations that accompanied Mrs Thatcher’s premiership.

9. Free at Last! Diaries 1991-2001 by Tony Benn. I read this volume – much of which is Pooterish, and some of it absurd – having altered my opinion of Benn after his television ‘interview’ with Saddam Hussein. I’d previously thought of Benn as an unimaginative politician but a decent man. His flights of political fantasy (e.g. that Britain's far-Left groupuscules are unfairly-maligned idealists) can be attributed to many things, but I don’t believe malevolence is the explanation. His disgusting genuflection before the Butcher of Baghdad does, however, merit a more severe indictment than merely that he’s incorrigibly silly. Yet this most recent volume of diaries shows – once you strip away the politics – a man of touching family loyalty, love of his late wife, and vulnerability and loneliness on his bereavement. There is also a priceless vignette of unintended humour in which John Pilger and Noam Chomsky earnestly lament to each other the media censorship of their opinions.

10. Adenauer: The Father of the New Germany by Charles Williams. Outstanding biography of Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, who navigated that country’s passage from deserved obloquy and crushing defeat to a civilised, pro-western constitutional democracy. Adenauer was a man of many imperfections. He was hectoring and politically sectarian. As a Christian Democrat, he failed to see that his Social Democratic opponents were as reliably anti-Communist as he was (though it has to be said that it took some years before the SPD leadership understood, as Attlee and Bevin did, that a democratic socialist Europe was unattainable and that the democratic Left had to ally with the United States). But for all that, he transformed his nation and purged German conservatism of its traditional authoritarianism and nationalism.

Comments

[sa]

"In Denial"

[sa]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893554724/qid=1072194511/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-7915864-3056923?v=glance&s=books

[Jamie]

I 100% agree about Regime Change. Even on the rare occasions when I don't agree with Hitchens (Israel perhaps) I still enjoy reading him just for the wonderful prose style.

[David Duff]

Oliver,
You are 'doing a Norm' on us with your list of best reads for the year. Here are some of mine in no particular order - and like you, they may have been published earlier but I read them this year.

"Against the Idols of the Age" an anthology by Roger Kimball of the writings of the late, great David Stove, the only philosopher apart from Machiavelli to make me laugh out loud with delight.

Anything by Alan Furst! I read one of his earlier in the year but I cannot remember the title and just today I spotted his latest, "Blood of Victory" in paperback so perhaps it will appear on my next year's list. His evocation of war-time Europe is palpable and his description of the cosmopolitan, artistic and political middle-classes as they ebbed and flowed around the marching armies is spot on.

This year I managed to get a copy of "The White Rabbit", a 1950's book telling the story of Wing Cdr. Yeo-Thomas who served with unbelievable courage in S.O.E. and his real-life description of life in occupied France and Eastern Europe demonstrates just how meticulous Furst has been in his research. (For old, out-of-print books, try www.abebooks.co.uk)

Earlier this year I directed "Flare Path" by Rattigan (a little diamond of a play that still has the capacity to grip and move even a 'post-modern' audience!) and as part of my research I read Max Hasting's "Bomber Command". I could hardly bear to finish it. The bravery of those young men whose losses were both terrible and terrifying... there are no words!

Finally, and at the risk of sounding a bit of an oiler, your writings on this blog, Oliver, have been a constant and scintillating pleasure.

Merry Christmas,
David Duff

[Tom Steinberg]

Did you know that a younger, more artistic, but still fearsomely erudite branch of the Radice clan is now a blogger? http://harpist.typepad.com