Francis King

Best and worst? It is easier to list the books that I am most likely to remember and those that I should most want to forget. In the first of these categories: 1) A Cruel......

More Books Of The Year

A selection of the best and worst books of the year chosen by some of the Spectator's regular reviewers. Christopher Booker 1984 has been a memorable year for biographies, with......

John Keegan,

Most books about spying, special opera- tions, the secret world work much better as fiction than they do as fact. Colonel Z by Anthony Read and David Fisher (Hodder and......

A. N. Wilson

Everyone has been telling me for years that I ought to read Les Caves du Vatican by Andre Gide. I did so this year for the first time and thought it was a complete dud.......

Richard Ingrams

No doubt thanks to my part-time involve- ment in the affairs of the Wallingford Bookshop (Mrs M. Ingrams Prop.) I have read a great many more new books than usual this year.......

Allan Massie

The best new novel I read during the year was Kingsley Amis's Stanley and the Women, the Master in his best form for several books: funny, sharp, intelligent and oddly moving. I......

A.l. Rowse

Best book of the year to me was Barbara Pym's autobiography, A Very Private Eye, a revelation of a remarkable, and remark- ably nice, woman. I was glad to find that she had had......