28 NOVEMBER 1998, page 48

Bruce Anderson

This year, I reread Anna Karenina. That greatest of all works tends to discourage any promiscuous taste for fiction, but this has been a good year for political books. Hugo......

Petroneila Wyatt

Exceptional for imagination alone is Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (Vin- tage, £6.99). Golden places himself in the mind and body of a pre-war apprentice geisha girl......

Jonathan Keates

The book which made the biggest impres- sion on me this year was in fact a free, one- off magazine produced by the Italian clothing company Benetton, devoted to the theme of......

The Best Thing Since Michelangelo?

Philip Hensher CARAVAGGIO: A LIFE by Helen Langdon Chatto, £25, pp. 436 C aravaggio represents something of a problem to the majority of art historians. Their general instinct......