My books of the year

I have to confess that this year I read more reports, articles and speeches than I did books. Many of them had a common protagonist: a skinny young politician with a funny name. You get the drift.

I did, however, find time for Le Carré's masterful Karla trilogy, and I have his new novel (which critics have hailed as his return to Smileyesque form), A Most Wanted Man, sitting beside my bed. I hoovered up one or two Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, and I enjoyed The Road to Cana, the second in Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord' trilogy. As readers of The Interpreter and the FT know, I thought Ted Sorensen's autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, was a remarkable piece of history. I'm very much looking forward to the latest from Australia's Sorensen, Graham Freudenberg: Churchill and Australia.

In anticipation of Obama's inaugural address, I'm reading Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer.