Matthew d'Ancona's In It Together, an insider account of the coalition, was given a schoolmasterly dressing down by Peter Oborne in the Spectator (which D'Ancona used to edit): "At times the book has the air of Jennifer's Diary, which faithfully though uncritically recounted the exploits of posh people at the back of the Tatler … D'Ancona is open to the accusation that he is being used to settle Whitehall scores … He could have gone to the schools where Gove's education reforms are being put into practice. He could have explained the intellectual basis of Osborne's economic policies … and in doing all this, he could have placed the coalition in the political and moral history of our time. Instead, he has focused on personalities … and as a result In It Together is a tremendous disappointment." Janan Ganesh in the FT praised the book for lively phrasemaking, a contrast to turgid Westminster-speak, but argued, too, that it "teems with brief, tetchy exchanges – between Cameron and Johnson, Clegg and Osborne, an adviser here and a civil servant there – that don't quite merit the sense of high drama that D'Ancona conjures". Chris Mullin in the Times, meanwhile, worried that "Osborne, who is, I suspect, one of the author's principal sources, gets off much too lightly".
According to Martin Fletcher in the Independent, Douglas Coupland's novel Worst. Person. Ever. "attempts to lockdown and waterboard the 21st‑century media 'type'. Raymond Gunt (the rhyming slang is fairly obvious) is a down-at-heel cameraman whose latest job is filming reality TV show Survival on a remote Pacific island … The novel is a scatological bunfight of excess and debauchery … It's riotous, frequently very funny and Ray … is not unsympathetic." Robert Collins in the Sunday Times hailed it "an outrageous comic riot, delivered as a tear-inducingly funny and pitch-black farce." What made Helen Rumbelow in the Times react so very differently? "I feel like I knew Douglas Coupland, or rather that he knew me … But oh, Douglas … now you've hit 50 what has happened to you? … The author announced the book on Twitter saying: 'It's filthy, sweary and juvenile. It really is.' But no, it really is. It also feels dated and lazy. Dated because Gunt is reminiscent of a character out of an early-career Martin Amis novel, a repellent London geezer obsessed with sex, self and scatological variations of the same."
"Tune In is the first volume in a history that Mark Lewisohn – long one of the leading scholars and archivists of the Beatles – intends to be three volumes. It is more than 900 pages long, even though it stops at the end of 1962, before they have recorded their first album. And I may as well tell you now: I think it is a triumph … not only an enthralling account of the group's origins, far superior to anything that has gone before, but also an essential piece of social history." Daniel Finkelstein in the Times joyously aired his love of the Beatles, and other reviewers felt similarly. Peter Aspden in the FT, for instance: "I can think of no greater praise for Tune In than to say that it gives the Beatles the beginnings of the biography they deserve." "In a world of recycled Fab Four facts the research … is exemplary," wrote Ninian Dunnett in Scotland on Sunday, "drawing on first-hand interviews and exhaustive trawling of archives both familiar and obscure. His footnotes may be bursting … with references to other biographies; but when Lewisohn challenges the rest … I'm with Lewisohn."
