After the best books of 2014 – the best reviews?

Another year is fading out to the accompaniment of triumphal lists of favourite books – (largely male) publishers' hits and misses, dullness distilled on Goodreads, more interesting selections from friends of the new Irish journal Gorse and Galley Beggar Press, and so on. The Telegraph's recommendations for Christmas gifts include links to the original reviews, presumably to help you decide if your brother/mother/lover/significant other is going to get along with, say, the "studied unreality" of Andrew's Brain by E. L. Doctorow.

There seems to be no escape from list-mania this year. But never mind the books – what about the reviews?

I try to believe that there is a certain knack, if not an art, to writing book reviews – and that insight does not automatically equate with invective. It's neither about being nice or nasty for their own sake – it's about representing your own reading of a book honestly. The TLS's J. C. once put it like this, partly prompted by the appearance of what was supposedly the "most pointedly brutal review" of 2012, Zoë Heller's gentle NYRB meditation on Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton:

"The reviewer’s chief responsibility is to the potential purchaser of the book, who, unlike the reviewer himself, is asked to pay hard-earned cash for the product. The most difficult task for a reviewer is to remain true in writing to the feelings experienced while reading, to convey them in elegant, entertaining prose."

It is not just, in other words, about wielding a critical hatchet, although that can sometimes seem to be what reviewers are encouraged to do – to attract attention to their own talents rather than weigh up those of a given author. Entertaining though the shortlisted pieces can be, the Hatchet Job of the Year isn't all there is to it. At least, these were my vague thoughts on the subject in an especially idle moment just before Christmas.

Surely my fellow TLS editors would agree? As they tried to get on with the proper business of commissioning reviews for 2015 and obliterating Oxford commas, I found myself asking them – what were the best reviews they'd read this year, outside the pages of the TLS itself? The most elegant and entertaining, perhaps those that they thought remained true to "the feelings experienced while reading" the book in question?

Well, I didn't ask everyone – sensing danger, perhaps, some had already knocked off for the holidays – but perhaps that's just as well:

"Splashing through the Puddles", Michael Hofmann's LRB review of The Zone of Interest, emerged as by far the most popular choice. "It's elegantly done", one enthusiast assured me. "Not a total hatchet job, either . . ." – despite remarks such as "It elicits not one but both types of unwelcome reaction from the reader: both the 'so what?' and the 'I don't believe you' and sometimes both together . . .".

The managing editor came forward to express his admiration for Jeremy Noel-Tod's Literary Review account of Philip Larkin: Life, art and love by James Booth. Others relished Tom Holland's Sunday Times review of Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong (a "well-deserved" drubbing) and – more scalpel than hatchet, I thought, clutching at a straw – Edward Mendelson's NYRB essay on "The Strange Powers of Norman Mailer" (point of fact: published in 2013). But then the intern came forward dutifully to remind me of two bloody encounters with the Guardian – Nick Cohen on Russell Brand ("long-winded, confused and smug") and Will Self on Julie Burchill ("There isn't a shred of reason in this text"). (To quote/paraphrase the Guardian against itself, it could have been more of an editorial challenge – and perhaps more of a service to the art of book reviewing – to find a pro-Brand or Burchill voice; it is difficult, particularly in the latter case, to imagine what could be said in her favour.)

And hadn't I caught David Sexton on – what else? – Martin Amis's Zone of Interest . . ?

After all this blokeish spite, which had lived on for months in both male and female memories, apparently, it was a relief to reach a classicist's desk. What book review had stood out for him, I asked, in 2014? Nothing from our own pages, mind . . .

He looked off wistfully for a minute.

“I thought that Emily Gowers piece on graffiti was really good . . .”

Well, he is the Editor. What else is he going to say?