Peter Levi

Richard Mabey's nightingale book (Whistling in the Dark, Sinclair-Stevenson, £9.99) is enchantingly fresh and strange; it is a triumph of curious information and of intelligent,......

M.r.d. Foot

The first volume of Martin Gilbert's The Churchill War Papers (Heinemann), covering his spell at the Admiralty from September 1939 to May 1940, is a tremen- dous mine of......

Anne Chisholm

Reading, as a Booker judge, 115 novels this year has not in the least spoiled my appetite for fiction, but I will discreetly confine my comments here to non-fiction books. Three......

John Grigg

Two excellent memoirs: John Rae's Delusions of Grandeur (HarperCollins, £16.99) and Alistair Horne's A Bundle from Britain (Macmillan, £17.99). Rae, who was headmaster of......

Andro Linklater

The most enchanting book I read this year was the re-issue of Cecil Lewis's Sagittarius Rising (Greenhill Books, £15.95), a poetic memoir of his first world war experiences with......

Raymond Carr

I much enjoyed and admired No Mosley's The Green Book of Poetry (Frontier Publishing, £14.95), not so much for its message as for its remarkable selection of poetry from a wide......

John Mcewen

The Great Age of Watercolour by Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles (Prestel, £48). Superb memento of a wonderful exhibition which should be produced every time someone says the......