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Like his fellow Britons, George VI dreaded another war so soon after the slaughter of the trenches. But in 1939 this nervous, sickly, stammering man forced himself to confront the inevitable and became an unlikely symbol of national resistance

In the build-up to the coronation of George VI in May 1937, London's 26,000 busmen went on strike. They wanted shorter hours and better conditions, as well an inquiry into the dangers to their health of the new larger buses, which travelled at a dizzying 30mph instead of just 12mph. The general secretary of their union, future Labour minister Ernest Bevin, conscious of the nation's patriotic mood as the coronation loomed, urged them to think again, but they walked out anyway. With no buses, London's trams were packed to capacity, while the streets were full of illegally parked cars and the railway stations flooded with commuters.

Yet as the big day approached, short-term inconveniences were forgotten.

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

The Flatpack film festival's Odeon bus tour unspooled the story of the rise and fall of Oscar Deutsch's 1930s art deco picture palaces

"Yellow 33, yellow 31, white 61, blue 42, white 62 ..." The voice of bingo, like time, marches on. Under a giant digital scoreboard, players in rows scan their cards. To the back of the auditorium, up a flight of stairs affixed with an Invalift, pensioners hunch over video gambling terminals. Outside the gents hangs a rack of pamphlets, How to Stay in Control (tip no 1: "Stop all gambling"). The roast dinner is a steal at £3.99, but nobody's hungry. Their eyes are glued to their cards and screens.

If they looked up, they'd see slim neon wall lights, stylish saucer lamps and a smooth, sloping ceiling with elegant fluting. It might be hard to imagine now, but this used to be one of the glitziest places a Brummie could go in the...