From cookbooks to cricket, biographies to Sunday Times bestsellers, Country Life contributors name some of their favourite books from last year.
Michael Billington
I learned most this year from Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans. Sub-titled ‘The Faces of the Third Reich’, it offers compelling pen-portraits of 22 leaders of the Nazi movement. The author’s conclusion is that they were not psychopaths, but, by and large, members of the bourgeoisie traumatised by Germany’s humiliation in the First World War. For light relief, I turned to Rupert Everett’s witty collection of short-stories, The American No, which shows he is as magnetic a writer as an actor.
Michael Billington is a theatre critic.
Tiffany Daneff
Sue Prideaux’s biography of Paul Gauguin (below), Wild Thing, stays in the mind and is one of those books you keep recommending to friends, not because they are art enthusiasts, but because it is so engrossing.
The author had access to rediscovered memoirs and reveals the falsehood in recent claims of misogyny and racism. Her portrait uncovers a man of huge intelligence and integrity whose obstinate pursuit of truth changed the way we see the world—and led to his untimely death.
Tiffany Daneff is Country Life’s Gardens Editor.
Mark Diacono
James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool is a brilliant biography of sorts, of three musical geniuses whose 1959 coming together created the seminal jazz album Kind Of Blue. Restaurant critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner’s first cookbook, Nights Out At Home, shares his interpretation of the restaurant dishes that have stolen his heart (and stomach) —opinionated, funny and serious. Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why rock stars never retire by David Hepworth charts how, starting with Live Aid, music changed and we/society changed with it—unputdownable.
Mark Diacono is the author of several books and regular gardens contributor to Country Life.
Kate Green
‘This is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road,’ says Oliver Smith in his prologue to On This Holy Island—what a relief! This is an interesting modern take on the pilgrimage, incorporating Lindisfarne (Lindisfarne Castle, below) and Wembley.
Petroc Trelawny adopts a similarly non-self-indulgent approach in Trelawny’s Cornwall and the result is extremely moving. You feel every step of David Nicholls’s tenderly funny novel You Are Here and Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘state-of-the-nation’ door stopper Caledonian Road was equally satisfying.
Kate Green is Country Life’s Deputy Editor.
John Lewis-Stempel
Giving your true love a partridge in a pear tree might be tricky, but there are two acceptable book substitutes to place under the tree. The Return of the Grey Partridge by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Edward Norfolk recounts the fascinating and persuasive story of the rehabilitation of the gamebird on the latter’s ducal South Downs estate. The paradox of saving Perdix perdix? Peppering is a game shoot, where, crucially, apex predators who feast on the bird are controlled. And Tarquin Millington-Drake’s gloriously glossy photo album, Living with Greys, is as captivating as the beloved bird itself.
John Lewis-Stempel is a writer and farmer, and regular Country Life contributor.
Steven King
I know, I know—I wrote Reschio: The First Thousand Years, so I probably shouldn’t be writing about it here. It’s included on this list at the request of Country Life’s kind-hearted Travel Editor, Rosie Paterson.
You can decide for yourself about the merits of the book. The merits of its subject, the Reschio of the title, a large estate in rural Umbria, however, are beyond dispute, and have nothing to do with me. (Best-case scenario, from my point of view: go to Reschio, pick up a copy of the book when you’re there and leave with ecstatic feelings about both.)
Steven King primarily writes about travel for Country Life. You can read some of his work here.
Mary Miers
Paul Gough’s Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist stands out among the biographies for its fresh material about a well-covered period in British art, beautifully written and illustrated, and revelatory about a painter who has too long been overshadowed. It is excellent on the complex relationship between the Spencer brothers and how Gilbert emerged from the shadow of the more famous Stanley to become a highly regarded observer of rural life.
Mary Miers is Country Life’s former Art & Books Editor.
David Profumo
I greatly enjoyed two detective novels—not a genre I often read. From the witty, perceptive Kate Atkinson came Death at the Sign of the Rook, the sixth to feature her beguiling sleuth Jackson Brodie, in a country-house saga. The quite dissimilar Irish policeman St John Strafford is the versatile Irish writer John Banville’s protagonist in The Drowned, a darkly compelling procedural that is unnervingly astute about human foibles.
Pink salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) spawning near Kinak Bay, Alaska
Julian Pullan has self-published a serious, well-researched and lively volume about salmon fishing: Right Place, Right Time is available from Amazon and would be ideal for any angler’s stocking policy.
David Profumo is the author of Country Life’s Reel Life column.
Carla Passino
On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman army led by Sultan Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople and swarmed into the city. Ever since, Europeans have painted the ‘Turks’ as infidels, crumbling and morally corrupt. Diana Darke vigorously challenges this perception (and other historical myths) in The Ottomans: A Cultural Legacy, newly published in paperback. She highlights the often forgotten architectural, artistic and scientific successes achieved by the Ottomans and considers how they were rooted in a social structure that was in certain respects groundbreaking for the time.
Carla Passino is Country Life’s Art & Antiques Editor.
Charles Quest-Ritson
Two excellent new books. First, for gentlemanly gardeners, Thomas Pakenham’s The Tree Hunters chronicles 300 years of plant hunters and their aristocratic patrons who loved making arboreta.
Second, for general readers of a curious temperament, Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants is a fascinating analysis of how the pre-industrial peasant classes lived or survived, worked or died, with an emphasis on Poland, Italy and poor, oppressed Ireland.
Charles Quest-Ritson is a garden writer and horticulturalist.
Agnes Stamp
What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci is a funny, often poignant reflection on life, death and grief through the medium of food. Simon Schama meets ‘Horrible Histories’ in David Mitchell’s paperback romp through England’s monarchs in his hilarious Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens.
A treat for equestrians is my colleague Kate Green’s Badminton Horse Trials at 75. Superbly illustrated (mostly by the brilliant Kit Houghton), it celebrates the champions (two-legged and four) that have tackled eventing’s ultimate test. Finally, Gavin Stamp’s Interwar, my late father’s swansong, edited posthumously by his widow, Dr Rosemary Hill, is the definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz.
Agnes Stamp is Country Life’s Assistant Features Editor.
Jack Watkins
Bill Bowes—balding, bespectacled and ungainly—was an unlikely fast bowler; Dudley Carew thought he ambled to the crease ‘like a cart-horse indignant at being prodded out of its normal stride’.
Bill Bowes photographed at Old Trafford, Manchester, shortly after being repatriated from a POW camp in Germany
However, the Yorkshireman played 15 times for England, including on the infamous Bodyline tour of 1932–33, and became a respected journalist. Jeremy Lonsdale’s nicely judged An Unusual Celebrity: The Many Cricketing Lives of Bill Bowes is a window on a time when Test and county cricket, so despised by today’s administrators, was supreme.
Jack Watkins is a regular Country Life contributor.
