Three or four years ago the Christmas gift book market was defined by weedy parodies and half-baked satires, the sort of books no one really welcomed in their stocking. This year, against all expectation, there is a terrific choice to be had, so thankfully all those second cousins thrice removed making sudden surprise Christmas visits can be happily catered for without too much strain.
It is perhaps stretching the definition of gift book to breaking point to include Craig Brown’s One on One (Fourth Estate, £16.99) into the mix, but he has form in the genre, and One on One’s format fits the bill. Each chapter describes a meeting between two famous people, and strung together they make a daisy chain that starts and ends with Adolf Hitler.
Hitler first meets John Scott-Ellis in Munich in 1931. Brown sets the 18-year-old old-Etonian Scott-Ellis’s story up with particular brilliance, first quoting a letter his father wrote to his mother to complain of the boy’s lack of ambition, and general wooliness. He signs off by urging his wife to “shake the little brute up a bit”.
You read this and shrug, until you discover that the boy then went on to run Hitler down in a newly bought Fiat. If only his mother had shaken him up! He’d have been tearing down the Briennerstrasse at 100 miles an hour instead of “very slowly” and everything would have been different.
Each “one on one” involves a similar, perfectly chosen vignette with an endlessly intriguing cast: Mark Twain, Andy Warhol, Evelyn Waugh, Nikita Khrushchev, Princess Diana, even George Lazenby! This is a delightful page turner, informed throughout with wit and learning.
Of which there is also an abundance in Pyg, by Russell Potter (Canongate, £12.99). It is more the packaging of the book that makes it gift-like, since the story – about a pig called Toby who thrives in the 18th century – is a heartfelt (though perhaps overly self-interested) blast against eating meat. Toby is an extremely intelligent pig and tells his story in high style: he complains, for example, that men name horses, but not pigs “as their only moment of note was most commonly their being served for supper… every one of them nameless save by such ephemeral sobriquets as loin or roast”. It would be perfect for a vegan or a vegetarian, though not for a child or anyone sensitive, as it might make them sad when they see the Boxing Day ham.
Being sad – or at least depressed – seems to be a constant with Roger Lewis, whose What am I Still Doing Here? (Coronet, £20) aims to repeat the success of the surprise bestseller Seasonal Suicide Notes, his diaries. Suicide Notes was full of acerbic misanthropy, enlivened by Tarmac black humour, but this time there is a sense that he is striving for effect, though he does make a very fine joke about Sir Bruce Forsyth being knighted and choosing for his motto Dulce Te Videre, Te Videre – Dulce! though I had better not steal that one, since it is the best in the book.
On the same lines but richer and more involving is Low Life, by Jeremy Clarke (Short Books, £12.99) which the publishers are happy to admit is a rehash of his popular Spectator columns. Some of them don’t come to much – ending in pathos and disappointment – but they are full of off-colour colour and he is a charming, modest and thoughtful writer on everyday calamities, such as having your girlfriend leave you (on the advice of a Dido song) for an English bull terrier, or getting brown sauce all over your new girlfriend’s flat.
Nowhere in The Household Tips of the Great Writers (Mark Crick, Granta, £12.99) does it tell you how to clean that sort of stain up, but, brilliantly channelling the spirits of literary luminaries such as Hemingway, Brontë, Plath and Zola, Mark Crick can tell you how to board an attic (in the style of Edgar Allan Poe), cook Rosti (à la Thomas Mann) and divide bamboo with Isabel Allende. It is all great stuff, and you find yourself laughing, until you realise that he is entirely serious and that if you follow, say, Pinter’s advice on puttying a window, you will, by the end, have puttied a window. Is that genius or madness?
And there’s a fine line between the two in I Rest My Case…, more unpublished letters to The Daily Telegraph, edited by Iain Hollingshead (Aurum, £9.99), which cover subjects such as Olympic tickets and Pippa Middleton’s bottom. More letters crop up in Dear Me, a collection of letters written by celebrities to their 16-year-old selves, edited by Joseph Galliano (Simon & Schuster, £12.99). Some of them are interesting, though I drew the line at Graydon Carter’s advice to himself to “partner well”.
Later I searched through The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (Icon, £12.99) to find the root of that horrible expression, but with no luck, and was instead diverted by some top-quality trivia about the unusual connections between words, how one leads to another.
Did you know that we owe – albeit circuitously – the Vikings for bringing us Starbucks? No? Well it’s not quite true of course, but the name is Viking, and it means sedge stream. Starbucks is better, isn’t it? It’s a Wonderful Word, by Albert Jack (Random House, £12.99) does the same job, but is rather less upmarket.
It is all very well knowing how words came to mean what they do, of course, but when it comes to putting them together in the right order, you need to turn to You Talkin’ to Me? by Sam Leith (Profile, £14.99), a history of rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama. It’s not strictly a gift book, but Leith has dabbled with gift books before (who can forget his imperishable Dead Pets?) and this requires more than a cursory glance to appreciate its genius properly, but Leith’s great gift is the ability to plunder the everyday to illustrate the rarefied.
So, for example, he uses Cartman’s unforgiving song about Kyle’s mum being a b---- in South Park to provide examples of epistrophe, auxesis and anadiplosis. He describes the development of rhetoric beautifully, and even after the most cursory dip into this, you begin to hear the world in a completely different, illuminated way.
On a more austere note, Atrocitology; Humanity’s 100 Deadliest Achievements, by Matthew White (Canongate, £20) is full of the sorts of facts and figures that men like to have at their fingertips when they are at the pub. It is essentially a compendium of deaths. Did you know, for example, that roughly 3.5 million died in gladiatorial games during the Roman era? Roughly the same number as were killed during the Hundred Years War. Or that during the Time of Troubles five million died? I’d never heard of the Time of Troubles, but White explains the hows and whys rather brilliantly.
Elsewhere, lovers of the past will appreciate History’s Daybook, a thumping collection of 366 quotes to accompany each day of the year (plus a bonus) taken from various speeches and histories and edited by Peter Furtado (Atlantic, £25). On my birthday nothing much has happened since 1642 when Charles I went to Parliament to arrest some men, only to find them flown.
Cities of the Classical World, by Colin McEvedy (Allen Lane, £25) will also delight any historian. It’s a superb gazetteer of 120 centres of ancient civilisation from Alexandra to York, and is full of terrific nuggets such as Lincoln having its origins in a camp laid out by the IX Hispana legion sometime around AD60.
For those with very short attention spans and a love of alcohol, such as myself, I highly recommend a collection of F Scott Fitzgerald’s writing On Booze, (Picador, £9.99) which is cautionary in its way. Here he is writing about 1922-1923: “the Plaza was an etched hotel, dainty and subdued, with such a handsome head waiter that he never minded lending five dollars or borrowing a Rolls-Royce. We didn’t travel much in those days.” You can’t help thinking that he’d have made more sense, and perhaps noticed more, if he hadn’t been drinking. Still it’ll be Christmas soon.
Buy your books To order any of the featured books, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1515
