History/politics
A.T.Q. stewart reached back into prehistory to begin his sweeping survey, The Shape of Irish History (Blackstaff, £16.99 in UK), which Marianne Elliott called "lucid, immensely readable and often irreverent". Closer to our own time, Haughey's Millions: Charlie's Money Trail by Colm Keena (Gill & Macmillan, £7.99) offers a cool account of the hottest political topic of the past couple of decades, while Evil Empire: John Gilligan, his gang and the execution of Veronica Guerin by Paul Williams (Merlin, £7.99) is a scathing denunciation of the State's response - or lack of it - to organised crime in Ireland.
2001 was also the year of the Jack Lynch biographies. Jack Lynch: Hero in Crisis by Bruce Arnold (Merlin, £22.80) and Nice Fellow: A Biography of Jack Lynch by T. Ryle Dwyer ( Mercier, £20 ) should keep readers going until historian Dermot Keogh's biography, which is due in about two years' time. And if you want to look back on the whole of 2001 in one fell swoop then The Irish Times Book of the Year (Gill & Macmillan, £17.99 ), edited by Peter Murtagh, which will be reviewed on these pages shortly, has managed to capture most of it between covers.
Ann Marie Hourihane's She Moves Through the Boom (Sitric Books, £7.99) takes a short, sharp look at the Celtic Tiger - a beast which, according to some commentators, is destined for the mists of prehistory any day now.
The US presidential election seems like a long time ago, too, but it's re-run with vivid immediacy in Jake Tapper's Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency (Little, Brown, £16. 99 in UK), while dirty dealings European-style are exposed by Paddy Woodworth in Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Cork University Press, £19.95), a study of the fate of the Basque separatist movement in a supposedly democratic Spain. Paul Preston found this account as unputdownable as a thriller yet one that never loses sight of the significance of its subject. Peter Bergen was just putting the finishing touches to his book Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £18.99 in UK) when the planes flew into the World Trade Centre in New York. He revised his final chapter to take account of the tragedy, and his lively, well-informed account comes complete with a face-to-face encounter with the terrorist leader.
The first and second World Wars showed no sign of ceasing to inspire books in 2001, good and not so good, but the word Kevin Myers used for Hew Strachan's The First World War, Volume 1: To Arms (Oxford, £30 in UK ) was superb.
Crime
Three very different landscapes played leading roles in three of the year's most stylish crime novels. P.D. James returned to the beautiful, desolate East Anglian coast for Death in Holy Orders (Faber & Faber, £17.99 in UK), her classic English detective story featuring dastardly deeds in a theological college.
In John Connolly's The Killing Kind (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99 in UK), US super-sleuth Charlie Parker was on the case in Maine - and a chilling case at that, weaving death and spiders in a murderous mix - while the discovery of a wooden doll in a miniature coffin on the Gothic crags of Arthur's Seat posed a historical conundrum for Edinburgh detective John Rebus in Ian Rankin's The Falls (Orion, £16.99 in UK).
Science/Technology
Warning: this book's title may not be entirely accurate. The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam, £20 in UK) is a kind of sequel to A Brief History of Time, in which Stephen Hawking unravels the astonishing theoretical breakthroughs that have taken place since his 1988 bestseller appeared on the shelves. In Rocks of Ages (Jonathan Cape, £14.99 in UK), science heavyweight Stephen Jay Gould takes a light-hearted look at the science-versus-religion debate, while a natural selection for evolutionists would be Annie's Bow: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution by Randall Keynes (Fourth Estate, £16.99 in UK), which examines how the death of Darwin's daughter at the age of 10 contributed to the great scientist's religious disillusionment.
Essays
A vintage year for the genre, with essayists of every hue sharpening their nibs on a diverse range of topics. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Allen Lane/Penguin, £20 in UK) sees historian Roy Foster dissecting Irish fiction in what Fintan O'Toole called a "combative, incisive, supple and immensely enjoyable collection".
There's a typically acerbic selection from novelist Martin Amis, The War Against ClichΘ: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Jonathan Cape, £20 in UK). "For real solace and real pleasure, Martin Amis is your man," said John Banville. From the departure of the colonial powers in a late-1950s blaze of optimism to the recent ravages of drought, AIDS and ethnic conflict, the immense, tragic story of Africa unfolds in Ryszard Kapuscinski's extraordinary The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life (Allen Lane/Penguin, £18.99 in UK); and the lucid wit of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee's Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 (Secker & Warburg, £17.99 in UK) prompted Gabriel Josipovici to declare him "as good a critic as he is a novelist" - which, let's face it, is pretty good.
Frank Kermode pleased many with his well-mannered, well-argued Pleasing Myself: Essays from Beowulf to Philip Roth (Allen Lane/Penguin, £20 in UK); George Steiner cast a cool eye on poets, painters and mathematicians in Grammars of Creation (Faber & Faber, £16.99 in UK), and Promises, Promises (Faber & Faber, £10 in UK) saw Adam Phillips revisit the field of psychoanalysis with characteristic playfulness. And just in time for Christmas came Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings by Dennis O Driscoll (Gallery Press, £13.78).
Biography
A legend in his own lifetime, Patrick Kavanagh has remained something of an enigmatic figure to subsequent generations, as many of the details of his life were never made public - until now. Like her subject, Antoinette Quinn was born in Monaghan, and her sympathetic-but-stern Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Gill & Macmillan, £25) impressed John Montague as "a brave, strong book".
Brave and strong were precisely the qualities offered by Britain's wartime leader, Winston Churchill, and Garret FitzGerald praised the breadth and scope of Roy Jenkins's enormous book, Churchill (Macmillan, £30 in UK), pointing out that "between them the octogenarian Jenkins and his subject span the period from the reign of Queen Victoria to the era of bin Laden". Strong leadership in its most extreme form appears to be endlessly fascinating to the reading public. Gabrielle Ashford Hodges offers insights into the childhood and family background of a dictator in Franco: A Concise Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20 in UK), while in The Hitler of History: Hitler's Biographers on Trial (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20 in UK), John Lukacs studies 100 biographies of Hitler and concludes that the Hitler industry shows no sign of slowing for a long time. Antonia Fraser, meanwhile, turned her attention to a woman who, though never interested in fame and fortune, became one of the Western world's most conspicuous victims. Marie Antoinette (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25 in UK) is a vivid, provocative attempt to rehabilitate the doomed queen.
In The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale, £25 in UK ), G.E. Bentley, who has been at the centre of Blake studies for 50 years, produced what Thomas Kilroy hailed as a definitive biography. In Iris Murdoch: A Life by Peter J. Conradi (HarperCollins. £24.99 in UK), Niall MacMonagle found a biography that sent one back with increased understanding to Murdoch's work. And in Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter managed to unravel a complex man's complex tale (Macmillan, £20).
It was a big Bob Dylan year, with Howard Sounes's The Life of Bob Dylan (Doubleday, £17 99 in UK) and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina by David Hajdu (Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK). For diehard Nirvana fans came Heavier than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross (Hodder & Stoughton, £17 99 in UK). Finally, while you mightn't think there'd be much left to say about her, Andrew Morton's Madonna (Michael O'Mara, £18 in UK) spills a secret or two.
Memoir
Memoir appears to be where it's at in the books world these days, with self-portraits pouring off the presses by the yard. When they're good, of course, they're very, very good, and there's a portrait of the poet as eminently likeable guy in John Montague's Company: A Chosen Life (Duckworth, £14.99 in UK), crammed with anecdotes, beautifully written and generous to a fault.
My Time in Space (Lilliput, £15.99 ) takes Tim Robinson from his Yorkshire childhood to a British airstrip in Malaya: "infuriating and satisfying with nuggets of poetry and passages of pure gold" was reviewer Mary O'Malley's conclusion.
For an entertaining vignette of Irish literary life past and present, try Oughtobiography: Leaves From the Life of a Hyphenated Jew by David Marcus (Gill & Macmillan, £19.99), while The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, edited by John Lahr (Bloomsbury, £25 in UK) brings the critic to life in what's almost a page-turner. In The Gatekeeper (Allen Lane/Penguin press £9.99 UK), left-wing literary theorist Terry Eagleton takes a swipe at liberalism, while Eamon Delaney hits a lighter note with his sketches of life in the Irish foreign service and at the United Nations in An Accidental Diplomat: My Years in the Irish Foreign Service, 1987-1995 (New Island, £10.99). And then there was Nostos by John Moriarty ( Lilliput, £25), marketed as an autobiography - but much more besides.
If you want to know who said what to whom - and when - in the soap opera that is Posh-and-Becks, Victoria Beckham's Learning To Fly (Michael Joseph, £16.99 in UK) is pretty essential reading.