William Dalrymple, Author: Best of Books 2025: My Choice

Thant Myint-U produced my favou­rite biogra­phy this year, Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s (Jugger­naut). It is a brilliant portrait not just of a great and unjustly forgotten man, but of an entire age that feels very distant now: an era of optimism and idealism. Peacemaker is a model of biographi­cal thoroughness and insight, beautifully written and artfully shaped, and it tells its extraordinary story with an enviable mixture of writerly skill and scholarly authority.

Fara Dabhoiwala’s remarkable global history of free speech, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea (Allen Lane), is ostensibly as different a book as can be imagined from his first, on the origins of sex, yet it shares its predecessor’s wit, fluency and dazzling erudition. Constantly surprising, and full of subtlety and nuance, it reminds us quite what a new and innovative idea free speech was when it was first upheld as a civilised goal in the 18th century. “For most of history,” he reminds us, “freedom of speech as we understand it today was not an intel­ligible concept, let alone an ideal.” Examining who in history could speak, and who was silenced, Dabhoiwala reminds us of the crucial relation­ship between speech and power. Eye-opening, thought-provoking and deeply enjoyable, What Is Free Speech? is a work of great profundity and brilliance.

I also loved poet Jeet Thayil’s family memoir, The Else­whereans (Fourth Estate). It contains writing of great skill, precision, and wit, taut as a coiled spring, and laced with pin-sharp, pitch-perfect dialogue.

Hot Butter Cuttlefish (Penguin Random House) by Ashok Ferrey is delightfully witty, wry, knowing social comedy, as spicy and satisfying as kottu roti with extra nai miris. It reminded me of VS Naipaul’s early Caribbean novels like The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira. A wonderful addition to Sri Lankan fiction.

I learned a great deal about the ancient history of Gaza from the essays collected in the catalogue of the brilliant Paris exhibition Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5000 ans d’histoire (Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5000 Years of History). Looking to more recent events in Palestine, Anne Irfan has just produced an excellent primer, A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon and Schuster), while Jean- Pierre Filiu has just published a supplement to his wonderful history, Gaza, called A Historian in Gaza (Hurst & Co). All three books count as es­sential reading to under­stand what is happening in that most troubled and tragic region.