Taki

Wow! What a year for books. Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography by Tom Bower (Macmillan, £18.99) gave me almost as much pleasure to read as I will experience if the old phoney......

Martin Gayford

Hilary Spurling's marvellous The Unknown Matisse (Hamish Hamilton, £25) reveals the creator of so much tranquil, joyous colour and space as a driven neurotic and martyr to......

Peregrine Worsthorne

Class in Britain by David Cannadine (Yale University Press, £19.95). By far the best study of this slippery subject that I have ever read, most unusually making the case for......

Leanda De Lisle

The funniest book I've read this year was William Sutcliffe's novel Are You Experi - enced? (Penguin, £5.99), about teenagers backpacking in India. It performed the mir - acle......

Ursula Buchan

The best non-fiction book that I have read this year (apart from James Buchan's Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money which consanguinity disqualifies me from recommending) is......

Sheridan Morley

In a good year for biographies, Scott Berg's Lindbergh (Macmillan, £25) flies solo above the best; Berg is effectively writing the his- tory of 20th-century America through a......