1 DECEMBER 1990, page 39

Harriet Waugh

The only two books that have given me unalloyed pleasure this year have been Robert Gray's The King's Wife (Seeker & Warburg, £17.95) and the poet Paul Dur- can's new volume,......

John Osborne

The best present I gave myself this year was Mark Girouard's The English Town (Yale, £19.95). A sumptuous wallow of a book, it bursts with prints, paintings and photographs,......

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,......

Hugh Trevor-roper

British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume V: Strategic Deception by Michael Howard (HMSO, £12.95). An elegantly written and highly diverting account of one of the......

Anthony Blond

A copy of Bread and Circuses by Paul Veyne (Allen Lane, £20) should be stuffed in the Xmas stockings of both Sir Alan Walters and Mr Nigel Lawson, for they would learn how well......

Michael Davie

Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, was tempor- arily in charge of a sophisticated computer system on the Berkeley campus of the University of California when he became aware that an......

David Wright

My first choice is the late W. S. Graham's Uncollected Poems (Greville Press Pam- phlets, £7.50). These include the last poems of a not quite neglected, but grossly underrated......