My Best Books

Everything changes,” sighed that great ironist, the French poet Paul Valéry, “except the avant-garde”. In Britain, we are nearing the notional centenary of an avant-garde moment at which modern life – or so its artistic cheerleaders supposed – made a nonsense in all its velocity, complexity and relativity of the old ways of depicting it. Speaking in 1924 about new means of portraying people in the novel, Virginia Woolf memorably announced that “On or about December 1910, human character changed”. The seemingly solid, in-depth, full-dress portraits of Victorian fiction and its inheritors told lies. On this view, the 20th-century personality demanded from its fictional investigators something more like an expressionist colour-field – or even a cubist collage.

I *Human Chain, the first collection from Seamus Heaney since he suffered a stroke in 2006, the completeness of the poet’s recovery is affirmed by the book’s quiet intensity, while a sense of human frailty has led him to draw his subjects closely about him in a freshly considered intimacy where elegy and affirmation appear inseparable.

One of the most striking things I heard about Tony Blair as I was writing my biography of him was from John Lloyd, a comrade in arms of Blair’s in the Hackney South Labour Party and my former editor at the New Statesman. I said that I thought it was one of Blair’s great strengths that, not only did he seem “normal”, but he actually was. “I don’t think he is normal,” said Lloyd. “He doesn’t think he is normal. He thinks he is exceptional.”

Considering that 30-odd titles have appeared in Reaktion’s superbly realised Animals series, it has taken a surprising time to reach the king of beasts. Still, it was worth the wait. Jackson has produced a fascinating volume of leonine revelations.

The story of a top clown beset by melancholia written by a former stand-up comedian who has “twice sought help for depression” might sound a singularly resistible volume, but you turn the pages entranced by a dazzling yarn.

For anyone who seeks to understand how power works in the modern world, the most important name in Tony Blair’s A Journey appears on the first line of the first page of acknowledgements. Our former PM pays tribute in the opening breath of his memoirs to Bob Barnett, the “lawyer, friend and negotiator extraordinaire” who acted for Blair in place of an orthodox literary agent and eased his passage to that £4m-odd deal with Random House. Look more closely at Robert B Barnett, the conciliatory Washington Svengali who so amiably works both sides of the political street, and you will truly get a glimpse of the kind of clout and sway that transcends mere party politics.

Writing about books that were important to him, Patrick White once said that one seems to “go on living in them for ever, possibly because they give glimpses of a heartbreaking perfection one will never achieve”. Such was the case when, as a young aspiring novelist, I first read ‘Voss’ 50 years ago and watched its pages open like a vast geological fissure in the domesticated landscape of English fiction. Not that the book is perfect – its scale is too grand for that – and its terrain is Australian not English. But just as that continent’s early explorers found its native species so strange they hardly knew how to see them, so White’saccount of a venture to the deep interior of both land and soul speaks to dimensions of experience so rarely examined that he felt hardly anybody would “understand what I am on about”.

Faulks’s eighth novel, and first set wholly in the present, gazes hard into the heart and mind of Britain today – and comes back to conclude that there’s almost nobody at home. It binds seven central characters into a web of plot connections over seven pre-Christmas days in London.

In a work “aimed squarely at the general reader”, Phillips tells the story of the Crusades from 1095 to Bush’s response after 9/11 that alienated moderate Islam. As Phillips reveals, earlier crusaders were better informed