22 NOVEMBER 1997, page 42

Juliet Townsend

Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring Restoration London by Liza Picard (Weidenfeld, £20) which ranges 'from Poverty to Pets, from......

Samuel Brittan

The books I read for pleasure are rarely those first published in the past year — if only because I do a lot of my reading on trains and therefore find the more lightweight......

Andro Linklater

Jim Crace's Quarantine (Viking, £16.99) was by a country mile the best fiction I read this year. Not since the death of Angela Carter has an English novelist succeeded in......

D. J. Taylor

My series of annual puffs for succeeding volumes of Pierre Coustillas, Paul F. Matheisen and Arthur C. Young's magisterial edition of The Collected Letters of George Gissing......

The Spectator Bookshop

All the books reviewed here are available from THE SPECTATOR BOOKSHOP Telephone: 0541 557288 Facsimile: 0541 557225 We accept payment by credit card ACCESS/V1SA/AMEX/SWITCH or......