Books of the year 2025

Julian Barnes There was a certain moral sniffiness to reviews of Joan Didion’s Notes to John (Fourth Estate), but the text itself – memos for her husband summarising her exchanges with a wise and brilliant psychoanalyst, Roger MacKinnon – has a candour which refutes any charges of exploitation. I also greatly admired Jenny Uglow’s A Year with Gilbert White (Faber & Faber), a lovely progress through and around the naturalist’s famous diary. White can make the arrival of some semi-obscure bird or the hibernation habits of his tortoise into enthralling and weighty matters. Margaret Drabble John H Goldthorpe’s The Making…