Noel Malcolm

I have particularly enjoyed reading John Paget's Hungary and Transylvania (2 vols, John Murray, 1839) even though I had to go to a library to do so. (Reprint pub- lishers,......

Raymond Carr

I much enjoyed Noel Annan's Our Age (Weidenfeld, £20) though my enjoyment was tinged with sadness as I read the pen portraits of so many friends now dead. I particularly......

John Whitworth

The best new things I have read this year are Kit Wright's poems, Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, £6.95). The method is eclec- tic (a poem about the absence of God, written in the......

Anne Chisholm

Unoriginally but unavoidably, my most satisfying and pleasurable read for a long time was provided by A.S. Byatt's Possess- ion (Chatto, £13.95). A capacious book of great......

John Mortimer

It's been a good year for Dickens. The social observation still seems as acute, his gallery of hypocrites, frauds and self- important jacks-in-office are still around us, and......

James Buchan

Though I make my living from reading new- books, I haven't had a lucky year. At the aeropittura exhibition at the Italian Academy, I found the English edition of Marinetti's......

Ross Clark

I read no more enjoyable book published for the first time this year than John Kennedy Toole's novel The Neon Bible (Viking, £12.99; now also in Penguin paperback), the story of......