There was bad behaviour to be found in all sorts of books published this year, from the highest to the lowest.
In Lady In Waiting (Hodder & Stoughton £20), Anne Glenconner, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, reminisced about her husband, Colin Tennant, who was always flying into a rage. ‘I once asked him why he screamed at people, and he replied, ‘I like making them squirm. I like making them frightened.’
Margaret Thatcher and Dennis at Robinsons Brewery, Stockport in 1983. Charles Moore’s authorised life of Margaret Thatcher, Herself Alone, covers her final term in office, her tumultuous downfall and her sad, bitter decline
On honeymoon, Tennant took poor Anne to a cock fight. For some reason, the cockerel flew onto her head, and dug its claws into her scalp, causing blood to spurt out. Rather than shoo the bird away, Colin flew into one of his raging furies, shouting at Anne that she had ruined the fight. She praises his ‘intense charm, quick wit and intelligence’ but she offers precious few examples.
On a more lowly level, the lifestyle of the humble mole was written about by a professional molecatcher, Marc Hamer. His wholly original book, How To Catch A Mole (Harvill Secker £12.99) taught me all about the little mole, much of it unappealing. For instance, if two moles bump into one another in a tunnel, each will try to tear the other apart, using their huge hands, each of which has two thumbs. And who would want to be a worm when a mole is around? Moles store live worms in underground larders, having first bitten their heads off. Sad to say, The Wind In The Willows was a whitewash.
One of the year’s most enjoyable biographies was The Lives Of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury £35) by William Feaver. Not since Caravaggio has a painter got into quite so many scrapes, or with quite such verve. Freud kicked Cyril Connolly in the shins, punched Churchill’s son Randolph, hit the Dowager Lady Dashwood and beat up Laurie Lee, proclaiming, ‘I had blood all over my hand from my great victory.’
Feaver chatted with Freud on an almost daily basis for decades, so in a way this book is a work of collaboration. Unlike most subjects, Freud kept urging his biographer to make him seem worse. ‘Sometimes I think you make me more moral than I am,’ he complained, explaining, ‘I don’t suffer from guilt.’ By the end of this rollicking 700-page volume (covering only his youth), you realise he wasn’t joking. There’s appalling behaviour on virtually every page, but also a diabolic sense of fun, as well as amazing powers of seduction. ‘Sometimes, instead of counting sheep, I count Lucian’s children,’ says one old flame.
An even longer biography reached its close this year, with the third and final volume of Charles Moore’s authorised life of Margaret Thatcher. Herself Alone (Allen Lane £35) covers her final term in office, her tumultuous downfall and her sad, bitter decline. She shared Lucian Freud’s ruthless sense of purpose, and his capacity for intense concentration, but none of his joie de vivre. Everything was work, work, work and when her work was brought to a halt, nothing remained.
Moore is brilliant at showing quite how solitary a figure she was, admired by many but loved by few – perhaps nobody. Her children, spivvy Mark and clod-hopping Carol, rarely visited her in her final years. Her husband Denis also emerges as a cold fish; towards the end of his life he formed a secret friendship with, of all people, Mandy Rice-Davies.
I read all 700-or-so pages of David Cameron’s ‘long-awaited’ (ahem) memoir, boringly titled For The Record (William Collins £25), but nearly three months on, I can barely remember anything about it. For some reason, prime ministerial autobiographies tend to be highly forgettable. Perhaps it’s because life in Number 10 passes at such a frantic pace that, once it comes to an end, they can’t recall any of the interesting details. Cameron is full of regrets at having triggered Brexit: ‘I failed… I know there are those who will never forgive me… I am truly sorry.’ But, despite it all, he seems to retain a bouncy self-confidence: unlike other former prime ministers, he is happy in his own skin.
Princess Margaret and Anne Glenconner on Mustique in the Seventies. In Lady In Waiting, Glenconner, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, reminisced about her husband, Colin Tennant, who was always flying into a rage. ‘I once asked him why he screamed at people, and he replied, ‘I like making them squirm. I like making them frightened.’
The most over-rated book of the year was Three Women (Bloomsbury Circus £16.99) by Lisa Taddeo, a non-fiction account of men mistreating women in today’s America. Given the subject, it was almost bound to attract rave reviews from the expected quarters (‘I could not put it down’ – Gwyneth Paltrow) but I found it slightly dreary. The author’s voice is so intrusive that it is often hard to tell one woman’s story from another’s. In her introduction Taddeo claimed, unconvincingly, that she searched high and low for the stories of these three put-upon women, and then spent eight years writing them up, but they strike me as the sort of thing you hear on American daytime TV all the time.
This year, there were three masterpieces set in the English countryside. In On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Persons (Chatto & Windus £16.99), the art critic Laura Cumming told the curious story of how her mother, growing up in a village in Lincoln, was kidnapped. It’s a complex story of family secrets, beautifully written, and illustrated with a number of old black-and-white photographs in which the clues lie buried.
Nature writing is currently enjoying a resurgence, perhaps because our countryside suddenly seems in such peril. If you’ve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious. Unlike some nature writers, who are too bound up in themselves, he notices tiny little details, and then converts them into words. ‘Their shoulders are dandelion yellow,’ he writes of bumblebees in A Claxton Diary (Jonathan Cape £16.99), ‘but much of the abdomen is a soft-apricot plush. They look like animate furry fruit bonbons.’
In The Making Of Poetry: Coleridge, The Wordsworths And Their Year Of Marvels (William Collins £25), Adam Nicolson looked at a year in the life of those two great poets. But this is more than a biographical glimpse: it is a meditation on the English countryside and on poetry itself. Every page hums with life. Of the song of an owl, he writes that it is ‘muted, like a trumpet with a cushion in its mouth… If a cough could sing, it would sound like this.’
Finally, a little gem of a book chronicling that most gullible of all species, the human being. Screen Time by Dafydd Jones (Circa Press £14.95) is a collection of colour photographs, bleak and humorous, of people transfixed by mobile phones. Whether they are at parties or in the park, they are all in company, but peculiarly alone, their zombie faces lit by the cool blue light of the mobile.