In 1955, Sylvia Plath attended the Advent Carol Service at King’s College in Cambridge. Like countless other visitors, listeners and viewers before and since, she was entranced by “the tall chapel, with its cobweb lace of fan-vaulting” lit by “myriads of flickering candles”, and above all by the “clear bell-like” voices of the choristers, with their “utterly pure and crystal notes”. The American poet told her mother in a letter that “I never have been so moved in my life”.

If you're seeking ideas for new playlists and diverse suggestions for reading - and when better to look than at this time of year? - then beware: you may be overwhelmed by the infectious enthusiasms of Ed Vulliamy, hyper-journalist, witness-bearer, true Mensch and member of the first band to spit in public (as far as he can tell). Anyone who in a single paragraph can convincingly yoke together Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn, the blues of both Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson, and Bob Marley is clearly a seer as well as an eclectic true original.

It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as well as engineer, independent detective and free spirit.

If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the Anglosphere. With a handful of exceptions, the sort of cultural and political notables invited to select their favourite reading overwhelmingly endorse titles from the UK or US. For our book-tipping elite, it seems, a hard literary Brexit happened decades ago. Yet publishing history tells a different story.

In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, a high-powered publisher and politician named Charles Darke quits his posts, regresses to a child-like state, and frolics in the woods like a ten-year-old. It often seems as if the British ruling class has nurtured, and still nurtures, more than its fair share of Charles Darkes. We could all name the Peter Pans of politics today. Less transparent, however, are those figures who do not act like spoilt, entitled kids in the public sphere, but remain privately enslaved to the child within.

Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up last year to help rectify the acute, and long-standing, gender imbalance among authors translated into English, is supported by the University of Warwick. This year, the panel of judges again consisted of Professors Amanda Hopkinson and Susan Bassnett – both eminent translators, and teachers of the art – and myself. 

Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people.

The master of the Southern California police procedural is back.

What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie, and this surprising book, his second after a delightful autobiography, is multi-layered, filled with tips for acting, on stage and screen.

The intrepid philosopher Julian Baggini has travelled the world, going to academic conferences, interviewing scores of practicing philosophers from academics to gurus, trying to figure out and pin down – well, just what his book’s title suggests. He is an advocate for the possibilities inherent in a very carefully controlled pluralism: you cannot just pick and mix, for the fruit needs its parent plant to fully flourish. Context is crucial, but so is understanding.