On the brink of the Second World War, before the bombers came over, the poltergeists of Britain were smashing glass and breaking the furniture. None was more tricksy than the “Croydon Poltergeist”, whose case is explored in The Haunting of Alma Fielding (Bloomsbury Circus): Kate Summerscale’s well-researched book brings insight and sensitivity to material darker than is usually admitted. On a sweeter note, the most enjoyable book I’ve read this year is Ferdinand Mount’s elegant and funny Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca (Bloomsbury Continuum). All family memoirs promise secrets – but, I swear, this socialite’s secrets are jaw-dropping.
The former Observer and BBC investigative journalist John Sweeney is also an accomplished writer of thrillers, and The Useful Idiot (Silvertail Books) may be his most impressive to date. It’s a retelling of the story of how the Welsh reporter Gareth Jones uncovered the catastrophic man-made Soviet famine of 1932-33, and like Agnieszka Holland’s superb 2020 film Mr Jones, sticks much of the time to actual events. I came across a rare academic masterpiece this year in the form of James Maffie’s Aztec Philosophy (University Press of Colorado). As Maffie shows, the Aztecs produced a tradition of philosophical inquiry comparable in intellectual rigour with that of the ancient Greeks. But rather than seeing it as a search for eternal truths, the Aztecs viewed philosophy as being concerned with how humans can keep their balance in a slippery world of ever-mobile energy – quite different from the dominant Western view, and to my mind more useful.
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