Books of the Year 2020

Two novels wittily bring out the realities of university life: Leaf Arbuthnot’s Looking for Eliza (Trapeze) is a beautiful and brilliantly written story about friendship across the generations in Oxford; Tim Parks’s semi-autobiographical Italian Life (Harvill Secker) marvellously exposes the bizarre intrigues of the professorial baroni within Italian universities. Turning to history books, Fernando Cervantes in his superlative Conquistadores (Allen Lane) subtly recasts Columbus, Cortés and Pizarro as ambiguous figures rooted in medieval ideas of holy war as much as in greed for gold. He explains that these conquerors had many native allies in Hispaniola, Mexico and Peru, while recognizing hideous Spanish atrocities against Aztecs and Incas who were in their own way bloodthirsty empire-builders. Finally, Judith Herrin’s glittering account of Ravenna (Allen Lane) vividly demonstrates how the city acted as a bridge between East and West in the early Middle Ages.