Paul Johnson
The book which made me laugh most in 1991 was A Dubious Codicil (Chatto, £12.99), the second and concluding volume of Michael Wharton's autobiography: very indiscreet, wicked......
Theodore Dalrymple
Richard Pipes' history of the Russian Revolution (Collins Harvill, £20) is unlikely to be superseded for a long time. It moves seamlessly between incident and analysis. It has......
Anthony Powell
I liked Michael Shelden's Orwell (Heinemann, £18.50 ). The story is told in a readable, straightforward manner, but Shelden is utterly wrong to suppose Sonia Brownell married......
Hilary Mantel
The great book of 1991 has yet to be written; it would be a novelist's account of the fall of Margaret Thatcher. A tale so harrowing, instructive and dramatic is too good to be......
Philip Glazebrook
Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (Sinclair-Stevenson, £13.95). A complex and wholly convincing novel set in Africa (a chimpanzee research station) in the present and in the......
Anita Brookner
Not an adventurous year. All the established novelists appeared at their most characteristic, and therefore their most predictable. I was delighted to discover, quite by......
Caroline Moore
Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Macmillan, £15.99) is the sequel to The Light Years. No loss of creative momentum here: this family chronicle is elegantly written and......
Michael Davie
Two books this year suggest that old- fashioned straight reporting, when the story takes precedence over the opinions or Personality of the writer, is still the best: John......
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