Samuel Johnson: A Life by David Nokes Faber and Faber, £25; Buy this book; 415pp An anniversary calls for a Life; and so, in this tercentenary year of Johnson’s birth, David Nokes makes a sound job of the Great Cham of Literature. The huge delight and the difficulty bedevilling any biographer of the Great Lexicographer is Boswell. Moonstruck by Johnson, Bozzy stands between the writer, the reader and the subject, and somehow has to be got around. One of the ways this may be done is to deal more closely with the acquaintances of Johnson that Boswell found resistible or irrelevant, and we might have wished for more from these in this book. Nokes finds Boswell resistible and sometimes misleading, so he tries to get around him — but in vain.

Renegade: The Making of Barack Obama by Richard Wolffe Virgin, £17.99; Buy this book; 356pp Just as some critics have suggested that giving a Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama may have been premature, so it may be thought that accounts of his political life will be provisional. Even so, this one, based on direct interviews and informed observation, will be valuable in future assessments. Wolffe, an experienced journalist, was there when the Obama campaign for the presidency got wheels and stuck around when it started to roll. This is probably the first worthwhile blow-by-blow narrative of a testing two years for Obama, his family, his supporters and his rivals within the party, written with wit and authority.

Charles Dickens by Michael Slater Yale, £25; Buy this book; 696pp Dickens was as large in personality and as various in activity as the characters in his novels. Though naturally subject to the charms of a man to whom he has devoted the lifetime of a scholar, Slater is rigorous in his self-imposed brief to discover Dickens not only in his fiction, but also through the mass of his other, lesser-known, but characteristic and revealing, writings. He could be an enchanting man, literally a seducer, but it was always best to be wary of Dickens who, as Slater frankly admits, could be dishonest in his closest relationships and could rewrite them in his own mind or, indeed, in his own hand. This is a classic biography to last out a generation.

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