Review of 2025: Part 1 – Books

Being a brief survey of the fiction and factual books I inhaled this year, in rough descending order of how much I liked them. But first, as is customary, I force you to read things I wrote.

Here were my best bits of 2025:

1. After a half-decade of nagging, I got to sit down with my favourite writer, Adrianne Lenker, to talk about words and love and healing and sex. What a joy to do.
2. This long, long read with Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station, in which she ruminates extensively on mental illness and the climate crisis, and is simultaneously a hoot.
3. A piece I've been unwittingly working on since I was four years old: a loving but revisionist take on Bob Dylan's extraordinary first five years, written to coincide with the release of that fucking terrible biopic.
4. Blurbs on four of my favourite lesser-known films of the '40s, for Little White Lies:

5. Some words for the Guardian about deeply loving John Ford, and his semi-obscure Western, Wagon Master.
6. My favourite hour of the year, watching Susanne Sundfør in Oslo.
7. My labour-of-love essay about tempestuous actor Margaret Sullavan and her remarkable partnership with the great romantic director, Frank Borzage, for Indicator's Blu-ray of Little Man, What Now?. In print only, in this limited-edition release, but here's an excerpt:

Now let's talk about some writers who are famous:

FICTION

My favourite novel of the year was also the most difficult in its way: Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903). It's an exercise in delayed gratification: like his contemporary and friend, Edith Wharton, James knows exactly what he's doing, and which button to push, but he won't do it until he's damn well good and ready, in this case because it takes an appropriate age for his hero to lay himself wide open. That figure, Strether, is a wonderful creation, an emissary from small-town America who finds in Paris that prudism was mostly something they tried to do to him. But as his worldview is changed by the miracle of the City of Light, so it is perhaps disfigured by desire. James writes here with such obscure and elusive syntax, though once your brain clicks into sync with his, your load lightens a little. I found the book emotionally overwhelming, and it came at a time when I needed it.

I also loved Small Bomb at Dimperley (2024) by Lissa Evans, whose historical novels are one of my great joys. It's such a beautifully-drawn book: moving and deftly funny, with at least three gloriously-rendered characters. Evans is able to conjure a world, and a specificity of emotion, in a way that is just remarkable to me, and her latest is second only in her oeuvre to Old Baggage. Here, the clarity of her characters' inner lives, and the deftness of her resolutions, is intoxicating, with the latter rooted in a sort of happy fatalism.

While that book takes place in the days just after the war, Ėric Vuillard's The Order of the Day (2017) shows us what came before, and how. It's a slim, profound and devastating book about cowardice and civility: their symptoms and their consequences. A brief chapter about Hollywood is crammed so full of factual errors as to be meaningless (the truth, which would fit the author's argument much better, is that America had barely breathed a word on screen against Nazism before 1939), and consequently puzzling in its implications, but the rest of the book is stunning.

Returning readers will know that at times of extremis I engage in my most Tory-coded behaviour: reading P.G. Wodehouse. Aside from The Code of the Woosters, which will surely never be beat, Summer Lightning (1929) is my favourite so far (I'm reading the Jeeves and Blandings series in order, then picking out the odd one from the rest of his canon). It took Wodehouse a while to perfect his voice and another while to misplace it: in between he wrote perhaps the funniest books in the English language. Almost every sentence here is honed to within an inch of its life, for the maximum comedic impact. How often do you laugh out loud reading a book? A few times a year? I laughed a half-dozen times during Summer Lightning. In his preface, the author winkingly addresses the quite rreasonable accusation that his books are all the same, and yes, it's once more doddering Home Counties patriarchs, rakish rogues, young love in peril, a butler, several thefts and a pig, and that's how we like it. About the purest escapism it's possible to find.

In comparison, Jeeves in the Offing (1960) rather paled, though it does have perhaps the single greatest joke of the series, an observation made in strikingly modern style, which I won't spoil here by saying anything other than that it refers to Lot's wife. Reader, I pissed myself. The novel's other great virtue is its sense of memory: the way Wodehouse brings in successful ruses from previous books, which here proceed to go uproariously awry, is thoroughly warming.

A startling realisation I made this year, while reading Deep Cuts (2025) by Holly Brickley, is that all I really want in a modern lit novel is for two perfectly-matched people to fall in love at college and then be kept apart by their flaws for 250 pages. Is that so wrong? My real-world interest in first-person arts writing is close to zero (you can do so much more interesting, creative things in the way you write about and tightly around the art), yet Brickley's heroine finds a way. The author's ventriloqiused musical opinions are interesting, her characters alive, and her relationships affecting. It's a book that really chucks your emotions around. That is, when you're not noticing the mannered and sometimes mundane writing. At the sentence level, it is all quite Creative Writing MFA, with a hotel room that's “all right angles and gunmental grey”, a boss who is “all sharp angles”, and an Eskimo having all those words for snow while we have just one for love. We're also asked to get dewy-eyed over a noughties indie scene that in contrast to the '90s of Dog Man Star and Dummy, produced almost nothing of value. But I'm now going to lay my cards down on this table and tell you that, in all honesty, it's hard to really care about trite phrasing or structural familarity or the idealisation of underwhelming music while I'm bawling my fucking eyes out. It really got its claws into me, this one.

If we know one another, I have probably chewed your ear off at some stage about my literary idol, Penelope Fitzgerald. For a while, I've been rationing her books to one a year, as there aren't many left. Innocence (1986) was the first of her four immortal period miniatures, and almost impossible to pin down, even if that is my job. It's a richly erotic book that begins in the 16th century with a tall tale about small people, then guides us through a series of misunderstandings, and visions of happiness, riotous love, and innocence for both better and worse. It didn't affect me quite like The Beginning of Spring or The Gate of Angels, but no-one else could have written it, and isn't that the point.

Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) is the old down-in-a-dungeon dystopia, which here flowers into something spare yet impossibly rich, narrated by a character who struggles to see herself as human but is – and throws a bright light onto what that means. It's a simple story but the way Harpman compresses and expands time is something to be studied. In a way, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) also expanded time, in that it took me fucking ages to read. It's Dostoyevsky's 1,000-page familial saga of love, faith, betrayal, insanity and murder, which he had intended as a mere prologue to a greater work (lol), sadly cancelled by his death. The book (in the Ignat Avsey translation) is often dazzling in the moment, but as a whole it sways and sometimes plods on its way to... what, exactly? Beyond its diversions and highly literal asides, I found its purpose and meaning frustratingly elusive.

By contrast, I read Andrew Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes (2003) in an hour or two. That one's touching, clever and extremely romantic, if just occasionally a little too pleased with its sense of neatly-wrapped whimsy.

That was also a flaw of The Unfinished Harauld Hughes (2024) by Richard Ayoade, whose books do seem to be the kind of thing you can get greenlit if you're on the telly. In this instance, though, the result was so enjoyable that that begins to resemble a solid commissioning strategy. Ayoade thought it would be funny to write the entire works of a fictional Angry Young Man playwright called Harauld Hughes (Pinter with a touch of Ted Hughes), and capped the project by penning this faux biography. It's essentially a literary collage within the neat framing device (with its many easy laughs) of the making of a BBC-style 'going on a journey' celeb-fronted doc, and with more absurd jokes than I was expecting. For the most part, it expertly pastiches, rather than thinly parodying, though it slips into the latter with details like And...? – a take-off of Lindsay Anderson's if.... – and a rehash of Michael Billington's mea culpa/obituary tribute to Pinter. The point, and the knack, is to satirise and, in this case, celebrate the milieu: what would the point be of simply changing a few words? For the most part, though, I liked it: just clever and funny and fun. Those are not words that one can apply to the author's 2014 book, Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey (2014), which is by contrast completely half-arsed, and extremely irritating. It contains six good jokes* and the unimprovable contention that Lucozade Sport is "medicine for athletes" but the basic gimmick doesn't work, the relentless comic self-deprecation begins to feel more like self-obsession, and the general air of "will this do" extends to regular fart jokes, sloppy copy editing and endless padding, including the nadir of the form, 'space for notes'. What's ironic is that Ayoade's sincere thoughts about film, as heard periodically as a podcast guest, are so much more interesting than his alter-ego's pseudo-comic ones. The author has often referred to himself a perfectionist, but if he had more than one pass at this, I would be very concerned.

I loved The House on Utopia Way (2025) by Stefan Mohamed, one of my favourite writers. It contains all of his trademarks: yes, the offbeat slang, DJ beats and regular ingestion of pharmaceuticals, but also that quiet and offbeat emotionalism, and his tentative and melancholy hope for something better than All This. The book is a satire of modern Britain, spliced with sci-fi noir, spiked with a playful spirit, and populated by talking magpies. There is one passage in particular that is so daring and so virtuosically brilliant, as the narrator gasses himself in a nest of Nazis, and the tenses and first/second/third person of the writing begin to wobble.

Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is a little like Northanger Abbey, in that it manages to succeed as a comedy even though it's spoofing books that none of us remember. It starts slowly but possesses a spiralling sense of absurdity, and some killer running gags. Gibbons' post-modern *** system for highlighting award-worthy passages is also such an amazing idea, and the passage in which our heroine is confronted by her pursuer’s man-centred revisionist take on Wuthering Heights is quite unbelievably funny.

And then there was Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), which is nothing if not a howl of despair. Finally following up his freewheeling, countercultural Catch-22, Heller essays the experience of being a human, at least a human within the management class of mid-'70s America, and has this question: what is it all for? The book is exhausting in both the incessant swelling of its stream of consciousness, and its purposeful unpleasantness. Here is every dark thought you've ever had, and many that you haven't. Now and then it is inspired: usually in its moments of sorrow, but occasionally in that wild and splenetic misanthropy. One gets the impression that the author is being mischievous on the subject of race, satirical about office life, and sincere in his misogyny, but honestly who knows? Behind the narrator, he wields a muscular libertarianism, lampooning the stultifying conformity all around, and smirking at what passes for freedom in this world (adultery and the chance to harbour dark impulses in secret). Women, and girls, are uniformly despised: sex objects deemed disgusting for their desire or for their lack of it. Yet there are flashes of beauty: in the realisation that his fat, spotty, vindictive teenage daughter is just a child; and that his adorable and adored nine-year-old son will stop when leading in a relay race to let the others catch up. There are, too, great reservoirs of pain, as that same son offers a second cookie to a new friend and is met with suspicion and balled-up violence, in a passage that is perceptive in a way I wish it wasn't. Heller is being (purposefully?) longwinded, and swaggering in that uncertain way you do when you're following up a masterpiece, breaking into mid-sentence brackets that last for seven pages. But by the end, his Difficult-with-a-capital-D book has accrued an unexpected cumulative impact, its tendency towards repetition being revealed as relentlessness, and its author chalking up a tally of occasional but dead-eyed potshots at the state of the nation. I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed the book, but I'm glad I read it. It is funny now and then, but dominated, in the memory, by the unapproachable vileness of its voice, and the haunting idea that something happened to these people, some time, but that they – and we – still don’t know quite what.

In a similar vein, though taking up far less space on the shelf, was The Lost Daughter (2006) by Elena Ferrante: a cleverly conceived and impressively chilly book, told from the interesting perspective of a cold and quietly sadistic mother, which I would struggle to recommend to anyone hoping to have a pleasant evening.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) by Michael Ondaatje is exactly the sort of thing I like (a smashing together of real sources and fake, mixing shards of poetry with news reports and abstract prose), just not done as well as I wanted. At times it's startling but an air of pretentiousness regrettably invades, as the Bonney of the book swings wildly between uncouth illiteracy and having his mouth and mind filled with obscure imagery and improbably long words. My secondhand copy contained a touching inscription but I guess the recipient possessed my view of the book, and the manners of its anti-hero.

Gregory McDonald's comedy-mystery, Fletch (1974), is naturally dated in its sexual politics and provides barely a single laugh from its hero's endless, laboured quipping, but the more obscure details of its mystery are fun, and dialogue-heavy books are a pleasure of mine (as well as being what I write). I read the sequel too, Confess, Fletch (1976), which decamps to Rome, but does much the same thing. That'll probably be enough for me.

If you're an Orson Welles obsessive, then you'll have heard of Badge of Evil (1956) by the pseudonymous Whit Masterson, which was transmuted into the writer-director's 1958 masterpiece, Touch of Evil. Since I was writing a two-page feature on the film (coming soon!), I went first to the book: a pacy, well-plotted and rather banal pulp novel, absent the deep and resonant humanity that Welles began to pour into the project.

The Wishbones (1997) by Tom Perrotta is kind of hilarious. No, not in a good way, thank you for checking. This was his debut, and while I loved his second outing, Election, and largely enjoyed Little Children and The Leftovers, it is really desperate stuff. It feels, in fact, like a spoof of a certain type of book; the exhausted last breath of a terminally ill genre: the white male comic novel. The main character is a man struggling with the scaling down of his dreams. He’s a case of arrested development, deathly afraid of commitment and, after becoming engaged to his long-term on-off girlfriend in a panic, is drawn to a funny-looking free spirit. He smokes weed sometimes. Yet while almost every observation and turn of phrase seems to be hackneyed, just now and then, and within the narrow boundaries of the genre, Perrotta alights on something that does chime, say on the physical oddity that keeps us beguiled, granting a glimmer of the talent that, against almost all initial evidence, turned out to be there. The Wishbones is a quite aggressively unfunny book, with a nauseatingly mawkish final act. But it's easy enough to read if not to accept; curiously you broadly care what happens, even when what happens is so witlessly telegraphed.

I'd never read a John Grisham book before, but always imagined they'd make for fun escapism. Absolutely not! Because I've read few books in my life that are worse than The Last Juror (2010). It's all so clunkily-phrased, and resembles nothing so much as a bad first draft, while cursed with a desperately dull 200-page midsection that simply consists of killing time until we can get to the twist. Everything that happens is so studiously, piously and exhaustingly liberal, and yet so unwittingly misogynistic. There are lots of descriptions of food.

Somehow, though, that wasn't the worst novel I read this year, Because Samantha Harvey's Orbital, winner of last year's Booker Prize (!), was an almighty fucking chore. I think two pages are enough to grasp and appreciate its perspective, after which it goes on for another 135 that feel more like 8,000. It is a book that often uncannily and unwantedly approximates the experience of having someone peer at a globe and describe bits of it to you. "I wanted to write A Month in the Country in space," Harvey said. Yet it's hard to imagine two books more different than J.L. Carr's perfectly-balanced novel, with its bucolic background and exquisite, intimate story of being renewed and ripped apart by love, and Orbital, which consists of an almost perpetual extreme-long-shot of the Earth, interrupted now and then by unmemorable and distant characters. At risk of sounding philistinic or simply unpleasant, I thought it was unspeakably bad.

FOOTNOTE:
*the racist, the end of the chubby alien's speech, Ayoade being capable of great acts of kindness, the Polanski joke, the space midges, the index

***

NON-FICTION

My favourite non-fiction book of the year was Street-Level Superstar (2024) by Will Hodgkinson, who spent a year with cult indie artist, Lawrence, a shambolic and self-sabotaging hero, cursed by ill luck but occasionally rescued by angels. Its subject is not a cosy or an easy figure, but lifelong fan Hodgkinson is clear-eyed about Lawrence's faults and misty-eyed about his lyrical brilliance, writing with a love that comes blazing through. The book doubles as a tour of unloved Britain, taking an obscure pride in this perverse and perplexing place.

Here's everything else, grouped handily by themes such as 'film' and 'misc':

History and politics

The pick of the bunch here was Andy Beckett's magisterial history of the New Left, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024), which begins with socialist MP Tony Benn's moment of revelation in 1968, and interweaves his story with those of four Labour politicians from Greater London who followed in his wake: Corbyn, John McDonnell, Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott, all of whose lives will take the most improbable twists. It's an astute, witty, even-handed and consistently inspiring book, finding shreds of hope in a litany of failure, as my side of the argument is generally required to. While Beckett arguably has a rose-tinted view of Benn (as indeed do I), the author makes a case that the MP was little short of a seer, anticipating and forecasting the possibilities and the maladies of the future, without ever being quite able to build the consensus to meet them. Certainly the privileged Benn seems a class apart (no pun intended) from his political inheritors: Corbyn's flaws are depicted as vividly as his strengths, while Abbott comes across fairly poorly, her trailblazing credentials somewhat undermined by the fact that she is constantly late. It is a frequently dazzling work, and the section on Livingstone and O'Donnell's Greater London Council, expanded from Beckett's Promised You a Miracle, is scintillating: model historical writing, making the complex not just understandable but pulsatingly exciting. Yet the subject that all early historians of the Corbyn era struggle with is antisemitism, since acknowledging that it was a major problem would serve to undermine every meaningful tenet of the movement. Beckett treads a line, implying that the issue was exaggerated without ever explicitly saying that.

The three books I read focusing on the Corbyn/Starmer years all took different stances on that issue (which I will not be relitigating here, as I don't have a being-shouted-at kink), and all have fairly obvious virtues and vices. Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (2025), written by broadsheet political reporters Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, is probably the best of the three: a compelling, chilling pageturner, phrased and paced like a thriller, though transparently part of the gossipy 'insider' ecosystem that is leading us to calamity. It's also weighted lazily against the genuine left, though flattering labels and a proximity to the authors don't provide much cover when the 'moderates' behave like this. There remains something singularly embarrassing about that wing of the party, who insist on speaking in stylised, terse obscenities and seem to imagine they're in The Thick of It or The War Room. The fact that neither they, nor their appointed leader, apparently believe in anything beyond the factionalism detailed here rather explains everything that has happened since. The book also has a few prosaic flaws. Its very framing is somewhat misleading (though perhaps that's how you write a bestseller), the story told as if Labour came from nowhere, via a miracle of organisation, rather than cradled their Ming vase while the Tories repeatedly shot themselves in the face. And while Get In is dramatically written, it was apparently done so in such a hurry that several passages are almost indecipherable, and others not fact-checked (Maguire has since read a book about Huey Long, and is now positioning himself as an authority on 1930s America, but refers here to the FDR anthem, 'Happy Days Are Here Again', as "a Barbra Streisand song"). I found reliving this raw recent history rather depressing, so quite why I then read two other books on largely the same subject is beyond me.

Owen Jones' This Land (2020), variously subtitled as The Story of a Movement and The Struggle for the Left is a polemic, the point of which is to argue that the appetite is there for left-wing ideas, but that Jeremy Corbyn’s operation as leader between 2015 and 2020 was largely pathetic. Jones makes a vaguely convincing case, but while he’s right that Brexit was a major reason for Labour’s catastrophe in 2019, it also probably helped them two years earlier. I canvassed a lot during that campaign, and can't quite square my own impressions of Momentum activists with the wet-eyed depiction of them here, though the organisation's Beth Foster-Ogg does provide the book's biggest laugh, explaining just how badly the Conservatives mangled their own platform: "The only Tory policies you could sum up in 10 seconds were fox hunting, legalising hunting rhinos, and the dementia tax." It's the rhinos, isn't it. The chapter on antisemitism is painful, because of what it lays out, the author's transparent anxiety, and his contortions. It also seems incomplete on both sides, omitting the Panorama documentary, swerving some of Corbyn's most unsavoury former contacts, and declining to mention Simon Heffer (the sympathetic biographer of his close friend, Enoch Powell) claiming on LBC that Corbyn wanted to re-open Auschwitz. Jones was once a caseworker for John McDonnell, the left-wing veteran who served as Corbyn's chancellor and is portrayed extremely sympathetically here. While Jones is right that McDonnell did grow into his role, it also remains true that the shadow chancellor's stunt during the 2015 budget response in which he waved Chairman Mao's Little Red Book around was quite possibly the stupidest thing that anybody in Britain did during that decade years. During the Corbyn period, Jones turned from a journalist into a media outrider and external spin doctor. I can understand why, but it did damage his credibility; this is his attempt to reclaim it, by revealing and acknowledging things he had previously sought to explain away. He is also trying desperately to find silver linings, but the truth is that, while the playing field was certainly comically unlevel, and while I'm determined not to stop trying, it does feel rather like we had one chance and we blew it.

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy (2025) by Paul Holden would have worked well as an eight-page pamphlet outlining the startling new information that this South African investigative reporter uncovered about current UK chief of staff Morgan McSweeney soliciting undeclared billionaire funding of his Labour Together project, which he used to undermine the then leadership of his own party through the use of secret astroturfing projects. Unfortunately, this information is housed in a 600-page, conspiracy-tinged monument to left-wing cope, its author fixated on a wider 'stabbed in the back' myth, and incapable of acknowledging that we also made a lot of mistakes. As I said in last year's round-up, any writer who keeps saying, "Remember..." or "Recall..." is heading down the rabbit hole. He thinks the antisemitism was mostly made up. His book has a separate footnotes section online.

Along with Karamazov, the biggest book of the year and the one that I spent most time with was Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992). Like Get In, it's the story of a political campaign: in this case the 1992 US presidential primaries. Unlike Get In, it regards the start of the campaign as being during World War Two. It is slightly overwritten, and certainly overlong, but also revealing and insightful, interested primarily in the psychology of the candidates, rather than their policy platforms, and has obvious peaks and troughs dictated by whether the author is wrangling scandals, fuck-ups and defining moments of courage, or the more mundane business of running, or living. Throughout, Cramer writes in a distinctive, almost breathless style, his clauses piling upon one another with cumulative effect, and sentences littered with his singular vernacular of 'diddybops', 'big-feet' and ‘Hart facts’. Bob Dole is surely the most interesting character: a funny, (mostly) right-wing hatchet man with an astonishing back story, though Gary Hart too is fascinating: an ideas guy with a brilliant mind and a tragic flaw so vast and unatoned for that no-one will ever trust him again. The other candidates each have their moments, and if they aren't such vivid company, most of them have been touched by a humanising tragedy (perhaps because we all are, or because it gives these men a motivation that is ultimately What It Takes). George H. W. Bush, who will win, is a privileged, clubbable oil man who believes in nothing beyond civility, love of those in his immediate vicinity, and his right to govern; a young(ish) Joe Biden is an orator searching for ‘connection’ with concepts and people; Dukakis, who will get the Democratic nod, prizes process and political cleanliness over everything else, and can never accept he got it wrong; and Dick Gephardt is the presentable, insinuating congressman trying desperately to locate his killer instinct. We don't even get to Bush v Dukakis, or Bush's first term, until the epilogue and afterword, but that is rather Cramer's point.

My interest in American politcians of the interwar era continues unabated, but despite the shape of its story, and the familiar faces in support (Frances Perkins! Robert Moses! FDR!), Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (2001) by Robert A. Slayton mostly scratches around on the surface. Its best moments deal with the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 (still the reason workplace doors open outwards), and Smith's estangement from, and subsequent reconnection with, the man who bestowed upon him his nickname of "The Happy Warrior": Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After reading, and treasuring, Team of Rivals last year, I narrowed my focus to Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008) by Allen C. Guelzo, but found it disappointingly dry. It's a thoroughly researched volume, impressively analytical on the content of the speeches, and just occasionally drops you vividly into the centre of the action, but it's also full of pointless digressions, and written in often strangulated prose. It's the sign of a poorly-written history book when you can picture the author shuffling his sources in the archive, rather than feeling them push you gently you into the distant past.

I'm a glutton for books about historical hoaxes, mysteries and conspiracy theories. The best this year was Selling Hitler (1986) by Robert Harris, an author who I gather is mates with Roman Polanski, which is a strange thing to be. Still, it's an uproariously entertaining caper of hubris and self-delusion, and how that affects and infects at least five people involved in the creation, verification and exploitation of the phony 'Hitler diaries', the most expensive literary hoax of all time. It's a complicated story transformed into a pageturner and told with staggering panache, as Harris effortlessly marshals the facts, and his gallery of grotesques: a relentlessly cheery, womanising forger who can't tell the truth to save his life, a gaggle of hapless, self-interested publishers, and a deranged Neo-Nazi reporter who owns Goering's old yacht and dreams of one day meeting Martin Bohrmann, whom he imagines is still alive.

Geoffrey Gray's Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (2011) was a lot of fun too: familiar in format, but highly enjoyable, as it regales us with the story of the titular figure, who hijacked a plane, demanded an exorbitant government ransom, then parachuted out with his winnings, never to be definitively identified. Gray does a fair job of outlining the various candidates for the role of the skyjacker, though the revelations do begin to bleed into conspiracy theories, and a conceit about the author losing his mind as he tries to uncover the truth seems a little forced.

One can't say the same about CHAOS: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders (2019) by Tom O’Neill, in which a journalist is assigned by Premiere magazine to write a feature about Charles Manson, and instead goes decidedly bananas across 20 years, racking up half a million pounds of debt, while disappearing down various rabbit holes, some markedly more convincing than others. It's a feat of research, certainly: O’Neill at one point proves beyond any doubt that the CIA fabricated the documents it submitted to a congressional inquiry; and at another that Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son and the producer of The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’) was far closer to Manson than he ever admitted. He also methodically demolishes the chief prosecutor and true crime author Vincent Bugliosi’s credibility. But in the end it is not the chronicle of a coherent investigation leading to concrete conclusions, it is a book about an author facing the unimaginable, and spinning wildly out of control, few of his many threads leading anywhere but to still more questions. In the end, he had to hire a co-author to help him pare down half-a-million-pounds' worth of research to something small you could buy in a shop. Incidentally, I cannot read or watch anything that focuses on the details of the Manson murders, as I just find it too upsetting, but this one deals with those elements in 2-3 pages and then moves on to the investigation. The recent Netflix adaptation of the book, directed by the great documentarian Errol Morris (more of whom below), apparently does much the opposite.

Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today (2025) by Phil Tinline has attracted raves but didn't do much for me. It traces how a prank by the editorial team of the left-wing satirical magazine, Monocle (led by Victor Navasky, whose Naming Names was a favourite book of 2015) became a touchstone for generations of Holocaust deniers, survivalists and terrorists. The story, which was new to me, is fairly interesting, but some of the resultant connections feel pretty tenuous, and the book is written in a plodding style that consists largely of ticking off facts.

Film and music

By far my favourite film book of 2025 was Memo from David O. Selznick (1972), compiled by the film historian, Ruby Behlmer. It was the other contender for my non-fiction book of the year, and is among the best ever published about the movies. Had someone concocted it as an epistolary novel, it would be a work of genius. As it is, it's a considerable feat of scholarship and incisive editing, giving us incomparable access to the mind of megalomaniac speedfreak, David O. Selznick: brilliant creative producer, pass-agg personal-sleight-compiler, and world-class keyboard warrior (even if he did have a stenographer). It is not, though, just a great portrait of a fascinating figure, but a window onto the making of landmark cinematic works, most commercially Gone with the Wind and Rebecca, but also lesser-known gems like The Prisoner of Zenda and Portrait of Jennie. Selznick emerges as a remarkably astute and incisive observer not merely of industry trends and cinematic finessing, but of the very art of story construction. I don't agree with him, though, that recycling classical music for film scores is better than creating original material, and I think he only wanted to do that because it would save him money.

I really liked The Friday Afternoon Club (2024), the 'family memoir' of Griffin Dunne, who I knew as the star of Scorsese's nightmare-logic masterpiece, After Hours, but is also, variously, the son of the true crime journalist and closet homosexual, Dominick Dunne; the nephew of Joan Didion and the guy who wrote The Studio; the best friend and deflowerer of Carrie Fisher; the producer of Chilly Scenes of Winter; and the brother of Dominique Dunne, who starred in Poltergeist and was murdered by her ex-boyfriend at the age of 22. His memoir, which covers all of these things, but lingers longest on the last, is wise, honest, beautifully balanced when dealing with the complexities of human nature, and cheerily unrepentant about all the whoring and coke.

For me, the high points of cinematic biography are Joseph McBride's Searching for John Ford, John Kobler's Damned in Paradise: The Life of John Barrymore, David Stenn's books on Jean Harlow and Clara Bow, and Lee Server's borderline legendary Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care. I've gone back to Server repeatedly since reading that as a student, but none of his other books compare. Handsome Johnny: The Criminal Life of Johnny Rosselli, The Mob’s Man in Hollywood (2018) is probably the least of them. Given my fixation on 20th Century Fox in the '30s, I knew Rosselli as the walking-red-flag-of-a-husband to their contract player, June Lang (seen to best effect as a Hawksian woman in Road to Glory), but his mad life took him from Hollywood strikebreaking to Vegas to trying to kill Castro for the CIA. It's written in the argot, and from the viewpoint, of his subject, one of the great virtues of Server's style, and there are these fantastic little references, such as to Luise Rainer's Oscar-winning telephone call in The Great Ziegfeld, that treat film historians like fellow insiders. Yet it has few of the direct quotes that daub biographies with their colour, and all feels less authentic than usual, with padding and imprecision in the writing. As for 'Handsome Johnny' – I suppose these things are relative.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation and, as friends of Paul Dano can tell you, a bellend. His ruminations on the films that made him (rather than the films he made), Cinema Speculation (2022), is just that: a succession of personal reflections and piping hot takes. It is, like the author himself, both irritating and brilliant, being at once self-indulgent, self-parodic, unsual, entertaining and slightly embarrassing. He lauds Pauline Kael, patronises Bernard Herrmann's Taxi Driver score, dismisses The Friends of Eddie Coyle with the adolescent parentheses "(overrated)" (in fact, the best crime film of the New Hollywood era), and rejects both '50s and '80s cinema as repressed and repressive, without considering how those decades are defined by the puncturing of societal norms in films like Bigger Than Life, Man of the West and To Live & Die in L.A.. Yet when he isn't making absurdly oversized statements and then having to either double down or undercut them with anxious asides, he can also grant you an entirely new perspective, memorably arguing that Don Siegel "didn't shoot action, he shot violence", and making a strong if peculiar case for The Outfit as the best Parker adaptation. Most of the other titles he celebrates are fairly obvious, but the notable exception is a superb chapter on John Flynn's excoriating, Rolling Thunder (a film I will return to in my round-up of the year's best movies).

It's hard to envisage the sort of strange soul who wouldn't be entranced by the story of Kevin Jarre, the winner of the 1989 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Glory), subsequently booted from his first film as writer-director, Tombstone, partway through filming, to be replaced by a boorish, perma-swearing, blockbuster-minded Greek called George Cosmatos. The question is: was Jarre – whose screenplay gives the film most of its special feeling – a meticulous Fordian stylist whose authenticity and old-fashioned sensibility would have created a Western masterpiece were it not for meddling studio beancounters, or a novice director completely out of his depth, who micro-managed his cast to the point of distraction, and wasn’t shooting enough coverage to successfully edit a movie? The Making of Tombstone: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Modern Western (2018) goes some way to answering that question, only for author John Farkis to get distracted telling us things like the names of all the horses pulling a stagecoach on set, and the names of most of the saloons in Tombstone. It doesn't help that the bulk of people he interviews are extras recruited from a society of Civil War re-enactors, which at first affords us an interesting viewpoint, but ultimately means a lot of detail about exactly which revolvers were used by various people in 1881, a subject that rather outstays its welcome. While the making of the film remains a remarkable (and sad) story, the effect is muted by that muddled execution. As for Jarre's dialogue, we could have done with more showing and less telling. For more on the film, you can read my review here. I would love to have seen Jarre's version, but if I had to trade away Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday to get it, sight unseen, I'm not sure I'd dare risk it.

I found Michael F. Blake's The Cavalry Trilogy: John Ford, John Wayne, and the Making of Three Classic Westerns (2024) frustratingly flat. It felt like a typed synopsis of what can be found in the various archives, rather than a book, and comes saddled with a maddening structure that essentially walks you through each film, confusingly, three times. As a reference for those who can’t get to those archives, though, it is valuable, with a focus on the changes between script and finished product that clue you into Ford’s method, gifts and predilections, while the author’s close friendship with Harry Carey, Jr. allows Dobe to add a few nice details and anecdotes along the way. My rewatches of the three films are here: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950).

Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (2007) by David N. Meyer is a deeply moving biography, equipped with punchy opinions (its author loathes The Eagles and Jim Morrison), a searing moral clarity, and some exquisite phrasing. But though Meyer knows how to start a chapter with a bang, his writing and editing gets looser as he progresses, while a musical taste that at first appears agreeably discriminating leads to him dismissing or ignoring a lot of his subject's work. Yes, Gram squandered some of his potential, but you can argue that and still recognise the 50-odd classic songs he left behind for us. While music is, of course, subjective, it does also seem bizarre that the author is so fascinated by the blending of country and soul, yet doesn't write in any detail about Parsons' landmark covers of 'Do Right Woman' and 'Dark End of the Street' (the latter surely the greatest synthesis of those genres), focusing at their expense on the self-penned, satirical, misunderstood but entirely disposable ‘Hippie Boy’, and finding space to criticise the production of The Gilded Palace of Sin no fewer than four times. There's the odd error too (a reference to Harry Smith's field recordings, which they were not), but then we all make those. Despite those minor flaws, Twenty Thousand Roads does give us a sense of the man, and some explanation of his self-destructive lifestyle, born of simple hedonism, a romantic idea of the fucked-up poet, and an inheritance of vast psychic and emotional pain. The two moments that stay with you, months after reading, are the way he somehow meets the moment at guitarist Clarence White's funeral, and the letter that he wrote to his sister, Little Avis, following the deaths of their parents: "The best thing we can do is learn from the past and live our lives the right way, so, in time ... we will be real people, not sick or haunted by what life has done to us."

There was one other great talent to come out of The Byrds, but John Einarson's 2005 book about him (Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of The Byrds' Gene Clark) doesn't quite do him justice. It's ironic that an artist renowned for his inexplicably literate turn of phrase should get such a functionally-written biography, and one where the lack of editing applied to quotes can make it read like an accidental oral history. The narrative we're usually fed about Clark is that he quit the band because he was the Byrd who wouldn't fly (being scared of aeroplanes), but went on to make the cult album, No Other, in a coke blitz; it failed and that broke him. In fact, as this well-researched book shows, he was a bipolar alcoholic for whom success was generally more destructive than failure. Though we got extraordinary music along the way, and sometimes from the most inauspicious circumstances, Clark's life was really one long downward slide, pausing only in Mendocino, where he found the simplicity he craved; going back to LA periodically for career reasons tended to end very very badly. He was dead at 46.

Julian Palacios's Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe (2010) has similar strengths and failings. Pink Floyd's original frontman was a progenitor of Englishness in rock, undone after a fleeting heyday by what was probably drug-induced schizophrenia. Palacios's attempt to make some sense of it all is, at once, valuable and mystifying. His book is deeply researched, which is its great virtue, while also being digressive, repetitive, moving, ambitious and pretentious, as well as littered with typos and grammatical howlers (the author frequently contradicts himself, has an aversion to the definite article, applies clauses to the wrong words, introduces characters only after they've first appeared, and at one point adds a full stop to Chuck Berry's name). Dark Globe goes huge on context, with an incredible agglomeration of detail affording many new insights, but an enormous cast of characters who frequently obscure or take us away from Syd. Just occasionally, Palacios places you right there at the UFO club or the Roundhouse, with Syd before you on the stage, a gift that is not to be underestimated. Barrett fans continue to bicker over whether that or Rob Chapman's Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head (2010) is the definitive work. Certainly Chapman's book has the most remarkable sting in its tail, with two startling and profoundly moving revelations worthy of Janet Malcolm. One involves the discovery of Syd’s annotions in a psychology textbook (the suggestion being that he was, belatedly, grasping for an understanding of what had happened to him, perhaps even trying to heal himself), while the other reveals the lifelong survival of his madcap sense of humour. I wasn't entirely persuaded by the book's argument that Barrett was pushed out of the Floyd because of uncommercial intransigence rather than losing large parts of his mind (having made this point, it’s then difficult for Chapman to square Syd’s subsequent insanity), and Dark Globe does study the causes and symptoms of the artist's’s mental illness at far greater length. But Chapman's grounding in the history of literature and particularly poetry offers a valuable new perspective on the art, finding parallels with John Clare, William Cowper and Gerard Manley Hopkins during an extensive study of Syd’s lyrics. When Barrett's old friend, and replacement in the band, Dave Gilmour, helps Syd complete his solo records, I always get all choked up.

The other great purveyor of Englishness in '60s beat music gets the Johnny Rogan treatment (unnecessarily long) in Ray Davies: A Complicated Life (2015). It is a book in which Davies the man, as opposed to Davies the artist, fails to do a single pleasant thing or exhibit a single positive trait until the tail-end of the 1980s, and, after that, only rarely. Rogan hammers away endlessly at the idea that his subject is driven, manipulative and miserly, though the author is, admittedly, aided in his efforts by virtually every interviewee, several of whom have an obvious axe to grind, and many of whom don’t. While the writing lacks both poetry and emotion, the book is expertly researched, easy to read and neatly argued, with some fresh reaction from Ray and his brother Dave, and instances of welcome detective work (were the sales of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society really as bad as the reappraisal narrative always implies? It seems not). I came out of this one feeling rather exhausted and a little sad. Perhaps I didn’t need to meet the man, at least this version of him, since I have the songs. There’s a poignant moment in the book when he says much the same thing.

"Bored shitless" is a strong phrase, so let's just say that you can tell Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair's mammoth The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1 – 1969-73 (2022) began life as a detailed log of Macca's studio recordings. If you want to know which instrument was on which Paul McCartney track of the 4/8/16 track recording, which tracks were then bounced to free up others, which takes were marked best, and which mixes were then preferred and pulled to master, then I have some great news for you. Do we need to know the names of all the members of the public (and yet nothing else about them) who feature in the JPMcCartney TV special? Apparently you do. It's undeniably a formidable feat of research, as far as tracking Macca's movement and activities is concerned, but it is seriously anal and delivered in the most repetitive factual prose. Most damagingly, while you get a sense of what it's like to be around Macca (he's grumpy, stingy, and frequently threatening to be naff, whether in interviews or on record), you rarely get under his skin. Always, though, there is that miraculous gift for melody. And while this is not a period where he created a large amount of great music (and nor did he really do so ever again), there are six or seven songs with moments of brilliance ('Maybe I'm Amazed', 'Little Lamb Dragonfly', a couple of tracks on both Ram and Band on the Run), usually stitched together from several unfinished pieces. The problem narratively is that this music is never approaching an artistic apotheosis, nor even getting noticably better, so there is no satisfying arc. Nor are there many opinions about the songs, aside from discussions about which elements make up for which other elements. So, yeah, mostly bored shitless. Also, Linda may be navigating a sexist world, but she nevertheless comes across appallingly.

Sport

Unlike most journalists, Duncan Hamilton really cares about the writing, and his noted love of J.L Carr shines through in the wonderful, gently experimental and deeply moving final chapter of Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough (2007). This memoir, based on those decades as a regional sports reporter frequently embedded with Old Big 'Ead, is thematic, which sometimes works well and is at others a shortcoming, since Clough changed so much over time, and the stories and quotes often aren't sourced to any period in particular. Hamilton says he doesn't really know what Clough was like, even if at times he understands what makes him tick, and while his book can be insightful and intuitive, that depiction of his subject as a mass of unresolved contradictions manages to be both mature and frustrating. How many of these quotes, too, are half-remembered or reconstructed at a distance of decades? And how curious to name the book not after one of Clough's many legendary sayings, but one of your own lesser witticisms. He knew him, though. One unexpectedly enjoyable side detail: the former England stalwart Billy Wright 'catching strays', in the modern parlance, being depicted as a snivelling creep whose century of national caps was largely a result of his cringing obsequiousness.

All I did before the age of 14 was read books, play football and watch football. My favourite players were Bryan Robson and Lee Sharpe, and the latter's autobiography, My Idea of Fun (2005), is of course next to Karamazov on my ranked list for 2025. I would argue it is more consistent overall, and also has a clearer viewpoint (his idea of fun). It's written from Sharpe's mildly jaundiced and indignant viewpoint that he was seen as someone who threw it all away (I didn't think that, but had heard the rumours that he was on drugs and his 'viral meningitis' was a cover for being caught dealing at United). Rather, he was my childhood idol: it was his goals I celebrated most avidly, and his goal celebrations I copied in the playground. Despite the cheery title, Sharpe's book is a poignant read (it forms an interesting triumvirate with Ben Thornley's autobiography and that immortal biography of Adrian Doherty). I knew about the injuries and Alex Ferguson's mismanaging of him, but not the complete lack of technical training he received and his resulting insecurity at a time before sports psychology was in vogue. The ending also plays a little sad, since he expects to be embarking on a glittering new career in TV, which at this point was almost over. Some googling, though, suggests that a young family and a second career as a golf pro has been a more than adequate replacement. I've always loved, and will always love, those players who care about the magic of the moment, not their salary or the number of squad-member medals they accrue. Sharpey was one of those. And he was always lovely with starstruck kids hanging around the dressing-room door (Richard Burin, aged seven).

That view of football also powers Danish Dynamite: The Story of Football’s Greatest Cult Team (2014) by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen and Mike Gibbons. The book does rather read as if it was written in one draft, with some clunky puns and metaphors, but the story is pretty good, there are great intros to each new chapter, and the climactic moral about glory (as opposed to success) is how I see sport – and life. Sensational cover too.

England currently seem surprised by how badly the Ashes is going. If only they had read the title of The Toughest Tour: The Ashes Away Series, 1946 to 2007 (2010) by Huw Turbervill. I wouldn't advise reading the rest of it, though, it's kind of crap. I was expecting something psychological and piercing, full of insight and telling detail. Instead I got a by-the-numbers trawl through postwar overseas Ashes matches, series-by-series, published by Telegraph Books as an obvious cash-in ahead of the 2010-11 contest. There are a few new interviews with old players but a book on this subject has no right to be this dull.

Misc

I continued the noble work of Janet Malcolm completism by devouring The Purloined Clinic (1993), her first collection of essays, and for the longest time a curiously unsatisfying one, until at last you see her genius begin to blossom. It starts with a wodge of four pieces on her favourite topic of psychoanalysis, which are all fairly technical, and written in strangely straightjacketed prose. The book reviews that follow are better, but limited as art in themselves, until Malcolm gets around to Michael Fried and lands on not only a scales-from-the-eyes observation about the theatrical nature of cultural criticism, but on another that displays her gift for the beautifully rendered epigram, as she ridicules "the illusion that art is natural and involuntary as breathing rather than as wrought and as willed as cheating at cards". Then finally we get to the really good stuff: three instances of the showboating long-form journalism upon which her considerable reputation rightly lies. 'One Way Mirror', about the phenomenon of family therapy, is still too tied down by theory, but shows how much more memorable and enjoyable her work is when mixing analysis with reportage. The other two pieces are classics. 'A Child of the Zeitgeist' (also included in her second essay collection, 'Forty-One False Starts') was her first masterpiece: a deep, intuitive and gossipy feature about the New York arts scene; 'The Window Washer' is her astonishing examination of post-communist Prague, with Malcolm returning to the city of her birth, and writing with extraordinary intimacy and perception. It focuses on her relationships with a rude and abrupt hero of the struggle, and a dignified professor tortured by his earlier cowardice, while allowing space for the Proustian rush caused by a guidebook that Malcolm had packed by mistake, and the sight of a swan surrounded by rats in a city park, the bird's plight, its defiance and its hostility an unforgettable metaphor for landlocked and unlovable Czechslovakia.

Reading Chekhov (2001) disappointed, though. It's by far the least effective of the writer's three literary biographies, feeling curiously forced, and oddly turgid in places.

Malcolm's greatest and most provocative work was The Journalist and the Murderer, about the court case between a convicted killer, Jeffrey MacDonald, and the reporter Joe McGinniss, who pretended to believe in his subject's innocence, before using his subsequent access to obliterate him in the book, Fatal Vision. The case continues to fascinate. MacDonald was a Green Beret doctor who, a few months after the Manson killings, claimed that a group of hippies chanting, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs", had killed his wife and two infant children. When the case finally reached a jury in 1979, they didn't believe him; he's been in jail for the murders ever since. Enter Errol Morris, the greatest documentary maker of our era, who has become characteristically obsessed with the case. In the '80s, he wanted to make a documentary that would have mixed scenes from the TV adaptation of Fatal Vision (which featured On the Waterfront alumni, Karl Malden and Eva-Marie Saint) with alternate versions reflecting MacDonald's defence, and starring the same actor, Gary Cole. The problem, TV executives told him, was that MacDonald was guilty. Instead Morris spent decades compiling a book, The Wilderness of Error (2013), which combines trial transcripts, his own incisive background interviews, ruminations on the wider significance of the case (judicially, morally) and a handful of typically memorable tangents. He also occasionally shows his arse, stumbling in his analysis of the stab marks on a pajama top, and omitting two notable DNA findings (a bloodied hair under Colette MacDonald's fingernail; the identity of the nighttime urinator who might have precipitated the attack). The author isn't quite trying to convince us of MacDonald's innocence, though (a good job, really, since MacDonald almost certainly did it), which at this stage isn't possible. Rather, he's arguing that there's no way the suspect received a fair trial. And he's right: evidence was suppressed, a witness gagged, no motive even credibly suggested. This beautifully and imaginatively designed book is full of piercing insights, righteous anger and unforgettable detail, all of it in a potentially questionable cause, but utterly irresistible all the same. The result is the greatest documentary that Morris never made.

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (2025) by Naomi Alderman was among the most thought-provoking things I read this year: a deeply compassionate guide to navigating this age of 'information crisis', full of fascinating connections, novel perspectives, and qualities like empathy that currently seem in short supply, if just occasionally straying into the realm of "I reckon".

And, finally, I read the first non-fiction book from Small Bomb at Dimperley (see above) author, Lissa Evans: Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted (2025). It's a warm anecdotal memoir, broken down by episode, that might not mean much to anyone who doesn't know every episode inside out from their teenage years, but who cares about them?

***

Thanks for reading. Part 2 will be about movies, and out any day now.