Best books to give for Christmas

Here our experts round up some of the top page-turners to give this Christmas, including film, cookery, wine and this season's best-sellers
First in the franchise: “The name’s Bond James Bond” — 007 speaks the much-quoted line for the first time in Dr No in 1962
Bond Archives/Taschen
7 December 2012

For filmgoers

There’s only one film book published this year that you conceivably, actually, need to read, as in cover-to-cover, and that’s David Thomson’s The Big Screen (Allen Lane, £25). It’s a personal, critically acute history of the entire motion picture medium that comes bang up to date to a world where porn, video games and mobile phones shape what we see more effectively than any auteur or mogul. As ever, Thomson wears his scholarship lightly but his prose sings with brio:

I was particularly taken by his description of Laurence Olivier as a flag blown in his own breeze.

By contrast, Adam Smith’s Rough Guide to 21st Century Cinema (Rough Guides, £14.99) is one to dip into, probably in the downstairs loo. It consists of robust, middlebrow analysis of individual films released since the Millennium — a heartening number of them good — interspersed with thematic musings on actors, directors, the problem of piracy, etc.

Since the celebrity biography market has prolapsed, books by or about actors are thin on the ground this year. The best-written and most enjoyable is Rupert Everett’s second memoir Vanished Years (Little Brown, £20), in which the actor continues to lacerate himself and everyone around him with gay abandon and exquisitely tooled, bitchy prose. Here, we go from his disastrous turn on The Apprentice to triumph on Broadway in Blithe Spirit, via pen portraits of Isabella Blow and Natasha Richardson, and fond reminiscences of drugs and shagging. Best moment: half-recognised by Brits in an all-naked Berlin gay bar, Everett introduces himself as Jeremy Irons. But his description of his father’s decline and death is moving because it is unsentimental.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall (Simon and Schuster, £20) is as thuddingly solid as the man himself, 600-plus pages of remorseless forward motion with no room for self-doubt and only accidental spasms of humour. It covers his three careers, in bodybuilding, film and politics, in sapping detail, and reveals a phenomenal will to power. The level of the prose (ghosted by Peter Petre) can be judged by Arnie’s description of his first meeting with Maria Shriver, the wife it was recently revealed he betrayed: “She had on an attractive outfit that was both evening-y and casual”.

Donald Spoto doesn’t crunch the language like that in The Redgraves (Robson Press, £20). But his quest for accuracy, not least in nailing the myths this family of actors spread about themselves, leads to a pedantic tone. The Redgraves are and were luminous performers with inflammatory political views and a tendency to marry people of the wrong persuasion. Their story is full of sexual repression, betrayal, scandal and tragedy. Why, then, is this book so boring?

Onwards, to the books which are meant to be looked at rather than read. It was the 50th anniversary of the James Bond films this year, or hadn’t you noticed? Taschen has marked the event with The James Bond Archives (£135), which is the size of a tombstone but rather more desirable. An intentionally covetable object of desire, it features interviews with the creators of each film, meticulously stitched together by Paul Duncan, and accompanied by rare photographs and a few frames of celluloid clipped from an original print of Dr No.

Much the same ground is more haphazardly covered by Roger Moore in Bond on Bond (Michael O’Mara, £25), in which the old smoothie’s chunterings about the franchise seem to have been transcribed verbatim by his ghost Gareth Owen, then made to fit the pictures. But a portion of royalties goes to Unicef, so we can’t complain. Meanwhile, James Bond: 50 years of Movie Posters (Dorling Kindersley, £35) is an attractive and exhaustive illustrated record of the graphic art used to promote the films, including the emblematic paintings of Robert McGinnis and Dan Goozee.

More anniversaries. It is 100 years since Edgar Rice Burroughs dreamed up a nobleman raised by apes in the jungle, an event commemorated in Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration (Titan, £29.99). Author Scott Tracey Griffin skips ably back and forth between the films, the books and the comics but this is predominantly an anthology of extraordinarily homoerotic muscle-queen cover art. The 40th birthday of Francis Ford Coppola’s milestone gangster movie is celebrated, if that’s the word, with The Godfather: The Official Motion Picture Archives (Carlton, £30). This has the publisher’s trademark “enclosures” — removable facsimiles of script pages, posters, correspondence etc — but they look cheap here and are yoked to a by-the-numbers story of the film and its creators by Peter Cowie. An offer that I, for one, can refuse.

Paolo Mereghetti’s MovieBox: Photographing the Magic of Cinema (Thames & Hudson, £19.95) is an anthology of portraits, candid snaps and behind-the-scenes shots roughly grouped by theme. It’s a bit of a jumble but there are some pleasing images, such as the weary technician towing a model ship from the disastrous Raise the Titanic, as if it were a heavy, metal metaphor. More coherent and attractive is Sid Avery: the Art of the Hollywood Snapshot (Reel Art Press, £45) — beautiful sets of more or less informal monochrome shots of Hepburn, Hudson, McQueen et al, but also lesser figures such as William “The Tingler” Castle. Lovely.

Nick Curtis

For cooks

Scandinavians take Christmas seriously — and unlike Brits, they have a sense of the Advent season as being something other than a prime shopping opportunity. Trine Hahnemann is Danish and her Scandinavian Christmas (Quadrille, £16.99) is splendidly evocative. It covers traditions of the region in terms of a succession of biscuits, cakes and breads and goes on to winter punches and the traditional Scandinavian dishes of the season — yes, we’re talking pickled herring. One small caveat: you need to check out her cooking times, but that’s true generally.

A hefty hardback cookbook comes to around £25 nowadays, so they are something of an investment, but there are ways of making these things look cheap. In the case of J. Sheekey's Fish (Preface, £25), you can probably justify the expense by comparing it with the cost of a main course at that restaurant — a dish of lemon sole or a plate of Dublin Bay prawns, say. On that basis, it’s something of a bargain. Some dishes are simple, as in the restaurant — the baked vacherin is, as it says, more of a temperature suggestion — but others (the spiced butter with the slip sole comes to mind) are complex, and take concentration and effort. Mind you, given the price of good fish right now, it’s worth taking the trouble. If you love the restaurant, you’ll love the book.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s first cookbook was the staple of a thousand London dinner parties; his latest, Jerusalem (Ebury, £27), based on the culinary heritage of his native city and that of his partner, Sami Tamimi, has the same palette of lively, combative Middle Eastern flavours and extraordinary culinary vivacity. The great thing is, he’s both rooted in tradition and sufficiently assured to play with it — this man is incapable of producing a bland dish. I wanted to cook from this again and again. It’s a homage to a city whose flavours and smells, he says, are his and Sami’s mother tongue. The two of them express the hope at the close “that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together if nothing else will”. If only.

Another place with a formidable culinary tradition is Turkey, with its diversity of regions and its Ottoman heritage. Nur Ilkin learned to cook from her grandmother and honed her skills as a diplomat’s wife and The Turkish Cookbook (Grub Street, £25) is a very good introduction to a food culture that most Brits know chiefly from kebabs. The only problem really is that it’s structured around seven separate areas of the country, which makes sense in one way, but doesn’t make it easy to navigate.

The most weighty book of the lot is Salma Hage’s The Lebanese Cookbook (Phaidon, £29.95), an exhaustive compendium of Lebanese cuisine. This book is uncompromising in its fidelity to the way things are done in the Lebanese kitchen and there aren’t any concessions to the London palate. I may as well admit that my spinach turnovers were a failure, but you can’t fault the comprehensiveness of this book. As you’d expect, the meze are very good.

It was rough luck on Nigella Lawson that her homage to Italian food, Nigelissima (Chatto, £26), comes out in the same year as a real cracker of an Italian cookbook, Polpo, from the restaurant of the name. But most people buy Nigella for the woman herself. This is her take on Italian food which, she cheerfully admits, is quite often simply inspired by Italian influences, or indeed Italian-American ones. I should warn you right now that you may as well not bother with the recipes if you don’t have pink vermouth in the house. But although, as ever, none of the recipes loses anything in the telling, there are some pleasing dishes here which she flirts you into trying. I like her panettone Christmas pudding.

Mark Hix’s book, On Baking (Quadrille, £20), has a picture of a tart tin on the front, which makes you think it’s going to be a cake and pastry book. In fact, it’s a number of dishes simply baked in the oven; cakes are only a part. It’s a slightly confusing collection, then, united by a cooking method, but as you might expect there are some good things in there.

Annie Bell’s Baking Bible (Kyle, £25) is going to be a kitchen staple. The recipes are reliable and there is just so much cake in there you want to make. One to keep, not give away.

Melanie McDonagh

For tipplers

For some years it has been an axiom of much wine writing that it should strip away wine “snobbery”. Which is fine — yet great wine, especially, is complicated. It’s hard to write about it in an intelligent way that’s accessible to someone who knows almost nothing.

The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov makes a good fist of it in How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto (William Morrow, £16.99). Asimov aims his writing at the “21st-century connoisseur” — keen on wine yet not a wine geek or, heaven forfend, a wine snob.

Many of his criticisms of the industry are on target. He slams huge press tastings (of course no one can taste properly after 100-plus wines). He cheerfully admits to getting blind tastings totally wrong (I’ve seen extremely senior wine folk do the same). And he pokes fun at ludicrous food matching, such as the Californian pinot grigio that one critic advised pairing with “barely seared albacore with green zebra tomato salsa”. But in the end I liked Asimov’s book most because of his honesty, gently self-deprecating humour and fascinating journalistic autobiography: he is a journalist first and a critic second.

US critic Jay McInerney is a very different writer. His latest collection of wine pieces, The Juice: Vinous Veritas (Bloomsbury, £14.99), is culled from the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere over the past few years (annoyingly, it doesn’t say when they were first published). But while he sometimes assumes more knowledge than Asimov, his writing is most notable for its self-consciously hip tone: this is the author of Bright Lights, Big City, the zeitgeisty New York-set 1984 novel.

Thus of one iconic champagne he writes: “If Dom Perignon is the Porsche 911 Carrera of the wine world, then DP rosé is the 911 Turbo.” He’s better on wine personalities but his ageing-hipster take on the wine itself grates again and again.

I’d rather critics wrote about wine in plainer terms, even if it bores the wine geeks. Wine blogger Matt Walls does an excellent job in this respect with his Drink Me! How to Choose, Taste and Enjoy Wine (Quadrille, £12.99). It’s a commonsensical beginners’ guide without being patronising. The section on tasting is particularly good, as is advice on negotiating wine lists, what to buy in a convenience store, and food matching. The country-by-country surveys that follow are similarly crisp.

In more traditional territory are revised editions of two classics on Bordeaux with very different approaches. Stephen Brook’s The Complete Bordeaux (Octopus, £45) is a serious survey, though he is at pains to take in the less-famous zones as well as the grandeur of the Médoc and St Emilion. He has a comprehensive general introduction, including a case study of the 2010 vintage, followed by estate-by-estate entries. It’s a fine reference work, but you’re more likely to dip into Oz Clarke’s Bordeaux (Pavilion, £25), with its clear layout, lavish photos and excellent maps. There’s inevitably a lot less detail than in Brook, though Clarke’s sections on winemaking and the business of Bordeaux are good — and all enlivened by his easy wit (I particularly like the photo of him contemplating a huge foie-gras-stuffed cabbage).

For the true wine geek, though, there’s Jancis Robinson’s Wine Grapes (Allen Lane): at £120 and more than 1,200 pages, it’s certainly this year’s heftiest wine book. For anyone serious about wine, this is an endlessly fascinating volume — and a beautifully designed one too. Robinson and co-authors Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz cover 1,368 grape varieties, from the commonplace to the obscure. Even wine snobs will struggle to place ones such as the book’s first entry, Abbuoto (a rare central Italian red). Thank goodness.

Andrew Neather

London bestsellers

FICTION

1. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, £20): Book of the year.

2. Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin (Orion, £18.99): Rebus redux.

3. The Nightmare by Lars Kepler (Blue Door, £14.99): More Nordic noir.

4. Dear Life by Alice Munro (Chatto, 18.99): Lifelike.

5. The Racketeer by John Grisham (Hodder, £19.99): Jailhouse law.

Dark horse — Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber, £18.99): Nature in Appalachia.

NON-FICTION

1. Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, £26): Very fast food.

2. Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury, £27): See food books review today.

3. Running My Life by Seb Coe (Hodder, £20): Coming first.

4. Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper (John Murray, £25): Buccaneer.

5. Polpo by Russell Norman (Bloomsbury, £20): Venetian grub.

Dark horse — The Deadly Sisterhood by Leonie Frieda (Weidenfeld, £25): Medici ladies.

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