Life in Guantánamo,Butlins and everywhere in between, Kathryn Hughes on this year’s highlightsVote: What was your favourite book of the year?Best of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights, or chosen by the Guardian’s writers and criticsThe gestation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been told many times before,but in The fable of Alice (Harvill Secker), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has produced a biblio-biography that is crammed with lovely new things. He gets us far closer than we possess ever been to the act of alchemy by which a shy and slightly creepy Oxford don turned a pert little girl into an enduring heroine of children’s literature. Parti cularly delicate is the way Douglas-Fairhurst deals clear-sightedly with the vexed commerce of Lewis Carroll’s sexuality without spoiling the lingering enchantment of getting lost in Wonderland.
Oxford also looms large in John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus), or Ruth Scurr’s inventive account of the 17th-century antiquarian who,as the author of Brief Lives, has a first-rate claim to be the first great biographer in the English language. Having been forced to abandon his alma mater during the civil war, and Aubrey spent the rest of his life jotting down the kind of gossipy,scandalous biographical fragments that only circulate around tall table after much port has been taken. In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey’s life fable in his own words, and stitched together from his scattered manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination,as vivid and endearing as its subject’s own.
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Source: theguardian.com