Book reviews: good buys

Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Penguin, £20) takes the laurels for biography this year. In addition to the wonderful vitality of the subject and the perennial interest of the dossier he left on himself, Tomalin gives a gripping account of non-diary Pepys, too, constructed from what (relative to the journals) seem sparse resources. The task of writing about this supreme self-observer must have been daunting, but Tomalin's skill and intelligence are more than up to it, and this is a thoughtful and eloquent study.

Selina Hastings's Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto, £25) is another great subject, beautifully written. Lehmann's action-packed sex life and high-octane personality leave one wondering how she had time to be sensitive and write novels; against the odds, Hastings brings the life and work together. Roger Lewis took on larger-than-life Anthony Burgess (Faber, £20) and came out with honour, while Carole Angier and Ian Thomson were the year's most prominent head-to-headers, both producing biographies of Primo Levi in the same month and together cementing the reputation of this melancholy genius, whose memoir of Auschwitz they both claim as a pivotal text of the 20th century.

I very much enjoyed Jenny Uglow's study of late 18th century ingenuity and enlightenment, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (Faber, £25), full of lively stories, steel, steam and mad inventions, and the life of another man of science, Philip Henry Gosse, by Ann Thwaite (Glimpses of the Wonderful, Faber £22.50), whose struggle to maintain his religion in the face of his own discoveries was sadly revealing about the iron grip of fundamentalism.

Ann Thwaite's miniaturist approach is in stark contrast to the broad sweep of A.N. Wilson's The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), a spirited overview of the age, packing in a wealth of material. And the oddest and most archetypal Victorian, Thomas Carlyle, was shown from an unusual perspective in Rosemary Ashton's inspired double biography of him and his wife, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage (Chatto, £25).

Poets have done well this year: Robert Ferguson produced the first full-length study of The Short Sharp Life of TE Hulme, mentor to the modernists (Penguin, £20); Dominic Hibberd wrote on Wilfred Owen (Weidenfeld, £25) and there was an oblique view of Yeats in Ann Saddlemyer's life of his wife Georgie, Becoming George (Oxford, £25). TJ Binyon's erudite Pushkin (HarperCollins, £30) explains the poet's posthumous rise to demi-god status in the Soviet Union, while Fiona MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend (John Murray, £25) shows the extremes of celebrity our most glamorous poet reached. There was also a welcome re-issue of Penelope Fitzgerald's Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (Flamingo, £8.99), the best account so far of the poet who struggled against mother, madness, fate and the family parrot. Addicts of the doorstopper biography will find a congenial read in Bevis Hillier's John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love (John Murray, £25), the second volume of a trilogy that appears to leave no stone unturned. But as an antidote to the encyclopaedic approach, try Francis Wheen's quirky and highly amusing book about a Hungarian con man who arrived in London in the Seventies in the guise of a female academic, Who Was Dr Charlotte Bach? (Short Books, £9.99). A bizarre story of underworld and underwear, worth getting for the illustrations alone.