Auberon Waugh

The best novel I have read this year (not counting Teresa Waugh's Sylvia's Lot, Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.99) was Craig Brown's The Hounding of John Thomas (Century, £14.99),......

Julie Burchill

My favourite novels were Dependence Day by Robert Newman (Century, £8.99) and Essays in Love by Alain de Botton (Macmillan, £12.99, Picador, £5.99). In an age when pop stars......

Gabriele Annan

The three books I liked best have all been about time passing. Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes (Michael Joseph, £20) is the fourth and last of his magisterial Ages, which begin......

Jeffrey Bernard

Nelson: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert (Viking, £20). Nelson has always been one of my heroes, and that most likely applies to many others as well. In some ways he......

Theodore Dalrymple

Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Night- mare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (William Morrow & Co) seeks to explain both the existence and the conduct of the American......

Paul Johnson

This has been an exceptionally good year for art books. Three in particular have won my admiration. The most sumptuous is a study of Uccello (Thames & Hudson, £60), written by......