Frederic Raphael
The Promised Land (Macmillan, £20) is Nicholas Lemann's study of the accelerated black migration from the southern states to, in particular, Chicago, with all its expected, and......
Richard Ingrams
A. J. P. Taylor's Letters to Eva (Century, £20) gave a fascinating picture of the man as historian and his complicated private life. Not only a touching love story but also a......
Alastair Forbes
Not, like Sir Raymond Carr (The Spectator, 23 November), possessing a beautiful bas-bleu ducal daughter-in - law (relationship undisclosed, doubtless for reasons of space) to......
J. L. Carr
Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (Fontana, £4.99) is a marvellous story told lightly. (Much artifice always needed to pull that off.) Then Ellis Peters' Summer of the......
Fiona Maddocks
Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (Faber, two volumes, £75) was a mighty achieve- ment, but hardly......
Francis King
The most remarkable, though not the best, book of the year was John Osborne's Almost a Gentleman (Faber, £14.99). A Japanese scientist once described to me, during a fuel......
Harriet Waugh
The best first novel of the year is undoubt- edly Fraser Harrison's High on the Hog (Heinemann, £13.99). It follows the fortunes of the Albion family, who are pig farmers, over......
Ross Clark
Although the gross overproduction of biographies continued apace this year, I have to admit to enjoying Adrian Vaughan's new life of Brunel. Although not a great literary work,......
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