18 NOVEMBER 2000, page 54

D. J. Taylor

My fictional discovery of the year was Ben Richards, a writer whom, to my shame, I had never come across until reading a review in the TLS. A Sweetheart Deal (Headline Review,......

Christopher Howse

I gingerly stuck my nose into Lord Acton by Roland Hill (Yale, £25), being suspicious of the bee in the historian's bonnet about power, which made him bend over so far backwards......

Julian Mitchell

Three diarists. Victor Klemperer's To the Bitter End (1942-45) (Weidenfeld & Nicol- son, £20) includes an astonishing descrip- tion of the night Dresden became a fireball. The......

Alan Judd

If, like me, you cannot see a manhole with- out wondering what's down there, you must read the new edition of London Under London, a subterranean guide by Richard Trench and......

Rupert Christiansen

Both the best and the worst was Gavin Lambert's Mainly about Lindsay Anderson (Faber, £18.99), a self-congratulatory, gar- rulous ramble through Lambert's own life that also......

David Gilmour

Graham Robb is one of the most stylish and stimulating of biographers. He is also chasteningly prolific, and his Rimbaud (Picador, £20) follows Balzac and Victor Hugo in a line......

Hugh Massingberd

I managed only to last a few weeks as this magazine's restaurant critic (retired hurt) and, judging by the startling revelations in Anthony Bourdain's rip-roaring Kitchen......