CHRISTMAS BOOKS I

Books of the Year

The best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors

John Fowles

I'm currently enjoying Albert Camus' posthumous novel (and reminder of a remarkable past European), The First Man (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). This year I've also enjoyed my Dorset neighbour Peter Bensen's A Private Moon (Sceptre, £15.99), his clipped, wry picture of Brighton — and much else about contemporary England.

But the book I've most savoured this Year is Philip Marsden's The Bronski House (HarperCollins, £16.99), an odd but splen- didly imagined fish, part novel and part reverie. It deals with that strange part of Eastern Poland that borders Russia. There, as in the book, all frontiers — both of nation and of genre — blend. As with his previous book about Armenia, The Cross- ing Place, Marsden has a dazzling gift for poetic evocation — and for reminding us that Britain is not an island.

John Bowen

Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter by W. Stephen Gilbert (Hod- der, £18.99) is one of those rare biogra- phies in which the biographer knows from the inside the professional world of his sub- ject. Gilbert has personally experienced all the processes by which television drama is made, from the first lovey-dovey lunch to the final sell-out by the Head of the Department. He is not fooled, knows how much of Potter's work was slapdash, how he cared little for character and nothing for women, the extent to which the whole oeuvre was a reworking of themes of sexual disgust, that Potter allowed himself to be used by the media and manipulated that use, consciously creating himself as the television dramatist (you need no other); yet the biography is informed with Gilbert's genuine admiration and even affection for his unlikeable but talented subject.

The same affection is to be found in an historical oddity, Innocent Espionage by Norman Scarfe (The Boydell Press, £25), compiled from the diaries of the two La Rochefoucauld brothers touring England with their tutor in 1785. Both the brothers, like so many who vow to keep a diary, gave up; the tutor persisted. Mr Scarfe's foot- notes are a joy.

Anita Brookner

Head and shoulders above the rest were Kazuo Ishiguro's The Uncorrsoled (Faber, £15.99) and Francois-Olivier Rousseau's L'Heure de Gloire (Grasset, £18.95). I also enjoyed Brian Moore's The Statement (Bloomsbury, £14.99), written with his usual urgency and control, and a novel which was completely unheralded, Denis McFarland's School for the Blind (Penguin, £6.99). Of the non-fiction titles Aileen Ribeiro's The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750-1820 (Yale, £40) is a rich and scholarly work and one of Yale's most elegant productions. Biggest disappointment: Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (Cape, £15.99), not because it is distasteful but because it is exaggerated. Less might have meant more, but perhaps not; the subject is exhausted in the first chapter.

Oleg Gordievsky

The book which I have found to be the most thoughtful, interesting and intelligent published this year is Margaret Thatcher's The Path to Power (HarperCollins, £25). It is simultaneously both an encyclopaedia of British political life of the 1960s and 1970s, and its reinterpretation. It is an engrossing portrait of how the stage was prepared for the epoch-making and revolutionary trans- formation which Great Britain and the whole of Europe (particularly Eastern Europe) underwent with the active and at times decisive participation of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. She, and with her, her readers, can feel justifiable satisfaction that the free-enterprise revolution, which she started, now extends from Vietnam to Estonia, from Siberia to Albania.

Another outstanding book this year was also written by a woman. It is Yevgenia Albats' KGB: The State Within a State (I. B. Tauris, £10.95). Although many books have been written about espionage (and in this country it is an industry), this book is unique. British and American authors who have written about Soviet/Russian espi- onage have concentrated on the activities of the KGB abroad. Its foreign branch, however, represented only one fiftieth of the size of that sinister organisation. The brilliance of this book by Albats, a young Russian author, is that she was not only able to unravel the intricacies of the KGB's domestic departments, but also to trace their tangled evolution and the resurgence of their influence in the last two to three years. Although the KGB's archives are hermetically sealed, Albats managed to get inside information from numerous dissi- dents among the officers of the KGB. The KGB is leaking increasingly, so we should expect new revelations about its activities both in Russia and abroad, including this country.

A rather disappointing book was The Enemy Within: The War Against The Miners by Seumas Milne (Pan, £5.99). A talented and resourceful author, he collected an enormous number of facts, quotations and newspaper cuttings. However, influenced by ideology and conspiracy-theory thinking, he, as often happens in such cases, came to entirely incorrect conclusions. Neverthe- less, I am grateful to him for faithfully describing the role of Soviet institutions (e.g. CPSU, the Embassy in London, the KGB) in allocating funds to Arthur Scargill and his trade union.

Andrew Barrow

The most exciting, disturbing book I have read this year is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (Vintage, £5.99), a true-life upper-class murder mys- tery set in Savannah, Georgia. Jolly inter- esting about the international antiques trade too.

The most difficult book I attempted was Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Faber, £15.99). Like many would-be readers and reviewers, I got horribly stuck around page 120 of this mighty tome, but would heartily recommend struggling on with it, if only for the wonderfully thoughtful prose and intermittent flashes of unselfconscious genius.

The most personal and yet all-embracing book to come my way was Elisa Segrave's The Diary of a Breast (Faber, £9.99), which will bring cheer to anyone suffering from a serious illness. I make some 50 or 60 appearances in the touching role of ex-husband but that shouldn't put readers off.

John Simpson

After a long wait, the trilogy has been com- pleted: John Julius Norwich's wonderful, sad, detailed, rational history of the extraordinarily irrational Byzantine empire has reached its terminal year of 1453 with Byzantium: Decline and Fall (Viking, £25). Nothing better has been produced on the subject. It is, quite simply, a delight.

Philip Mansel has done us all an impor- tant favour by looking at what happened after John Julius Norwich leaves off. Con- stantinople: City of the World's Desire (John Murray, £25) is the complex story of the capital of the Turkish empire from 1453 to 1924. Intelligently written, lushly produced, outlandishly interesting.

From the Sublime Porte to the — if not ridiculous, then certainly very homely. Pim- lico County History Studies have produced their volume on Suffolk. It's well-trodden territory, but for my money (and at £10 for a paperback, it's quite a lot of money) Miles Jebb has produced the best account of my own county for the end of the century.

Keith Waterhouse

I seem to have spent much of my reading year ploughing through Neal Gabler's enormously fat biography of Walter Winchell (Picador, £20), the first, and the last, of the old Broadway columnists. Winchell was an all-powerful egomaniac who could make or break reputations with a couple of lines of type — but at his funeral his daughter was the only mourner. Nearly 700 pages seems a lot for such a hollow man, but what makes the book so fascinating is that it is also a study of newspaper gossip and the culture of celebrity in the era of the Great White Way.

My bedside reading has been In the Six- ties edited by Ray Connolly (Pavilion, £16.99), an anthology of the swinging decade's journalism. Plums include Rees- Mogg's 'breaking a butterfly' leader, Pene- lope Gilliatt on Paul Slickey journalism, Tynan on the Chatterley trial, the Sunday Times Insight team on the Profumo affair, Maurice Richardson on the Moors Mur- ders, Nicholas Tomalin in Vietnam, James Cameron on the Six Day War and Hunter Davies on the Beatles. Memory Lane joins Penny Lane.

Nigel Nicolson

I read Remembering my Good Friends, the autobiography of George Weidenfeld (HarperCollins, £7.99), with anxiety and delight. Delight that so full a life should be so amply recorded, and anxiety that I might emerge from it with discredit. I need not

I'll have the rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.'

have worried. Lord Weidenfeld is as nice about me as he is about all his friends, per- haps too nice, some critics have said, about too many friends, but how could he be accused of name-dropping when his became the name to drop? Then I much enjoyed Innocent Espionage edited by Norman Scarfe (The Boydell Press, £25), the diaries of two French youths during their tour of England in 1785. Each night I return to a Trollope novel, currently Phineas Redux (Oxford World's Classics, £6.99). Having discovered Trollope only late in life, I have abandoned all other novelists for him, and have to discipline myself not to touch him before 9 pm.

Frances Partridge

The most striking feature of Evangeline Bruce's Napoleon and Josephine (Weiden- feld, £25) must surely be her brilliantly con- vincing portrait of Josephine in terms of an irresistibly sweet nature, dazzling taste, social style and sexual promiscuity. Napoleon is perhaps less successful: the monster blood is over-emphasised to the detriment of the powerful brain that creat- ed the Code Napoleon, the doting husband and his 'enchanting' smile. Less of the well- ploughed political ground — and therefore of rib-crushing bulk — might have been welcome, but as a history of morals and manners of the period it is immensely enjoyable.

Penelope Fitzgerald's new novel, The Blue Flower (Flamingo, £14.99), is set in the same period, but the Revolution barely gets a mention. Based on the life of the poet-philosopher Friedrich von Heiden- berg (or Novalis) it has the value of con- ciseness so uncommon today, and is elegantly written, with delightful humour and this author's inimitable talents for visual description, simile, and drawing characters by their spoken lines alone. Schiller, Fichte and Goethe appear in the cast, and I can't resist giving the book the high praise of comparison to Elective Affinities.

John Mortimer

Books calculated to make you laugh out loud are thin on the ground in this over- serious literary season. So I was particular- ly grateful to David Lodge for Therapy (Seeker, £15), a frequently hilarious account of the menopausal and hypo- chondriacal life of a balding TV script- writer. It is also a touching tribute to middle-aged love and marital sex. I enjoyed Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules (Viking, £17.50), a journey round the Mediterranean where Homeric legends still hover round the bleak railway stations and on the rusty car ferries. I was also grateful for Richard Ingrams' elegant and revealing portrait of Mug- geridge (HarperCollins, £18), a character who always seemed on the verge of laugh- ter, particularly when he was talking about religion.

Margaret Forster

I feel a little uncomfortable about admit- ting this — it sounds so ghoul-like — but I have always been drawn to books about people who have been imprisoned, whether in prisoner-of-war camps or, as were the recent middle-east hostages, in terrible individual circumstances. This being so The Railway Man by Eric Lomax (Cape, £15.99) was a natural choice of mine for a likely book of the year. And I was not disappoint- ed. This is the best book about this kind of harrowing experience that I have ever read. It deals lightly with the physical suffering but goes deeply into not only the ever- lasting mental anguish but the whole sub- ject of revenge — the desire for it, the attempts to cope with this desire and the final dealing with it. The writing is plain, unvarnished, but has a certain elegance all the same.

Most overrated. It has depressed me no end to find I cannot recognise The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie (Cape, £15.99) as the brilliant novel it is hailed as. Linguistic tricks in plenty, but for me a novel is more than that. I hate thinking the fault lies in me, but gloomily fear that it does. I must, I must try harder still.

Sebastian Faulks

Lost in Music (Picador, £12.99), Giles Smith's wonderfully funny pop-music memoir was the book I most enjoyed. You would not have to know who Nik Kershaw is to laugh out loud at the chapter about him.

Next, Palimpsest (Deutsch, £20), Gore Vidal's memoirs. Vidal's grandfather Senator T. P. Gore must now have joined Dora Carrington on a list of those in whom public curiosity is terminally satisfied, but this wide-ranging book is every bit as inter- esting as one might have hoped. The grave themes that run through it are the more welcome for the fact that they are not included at the expense of any gossip. In Andre Malraux (Hutchinson, £15.99), by Curtis Cate, the story of Malraux's extraordinary life is sufficiently exciting to overcome a certain plainness of treatment. Malraux, writer, adventurer, thinker, lover, Resistance fighter, is the Frenchman all those of his generation would have liked to be, and one can almost forgive those who rewrote the dodgy bits of their own lives in the light of his example.

Alan Judd

Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein (Vintage, £19.99) was enjoyable, educative and chastening, the latter because of Wittgenstein's awesome integrity. The philosophy is integral without being intrusive and is clearly described. The book's triumph is to render Wittgenstein's life and passion both sympathetically and objectively. I'd never thought of attempting Gibbon's Decline and Fall until led into it by the gift of G. M. Young's life of the great man. A beautifully written biography, commend- able short (178 pages), yet it leaves you feeling you've got everything important. Never did chance and nature conspire to shape a life so aptly to its purpose. Out of print, I think, but my edition published in 1948 by Rupert Hart-Davis.

Finally, Decline and Fall itself: not over- rated, I was happy to discover. Incompara- ble. Dip into it anywhere and you surface an hour later only because of pins and needles. You'll love and revere the man and might even pick up a thing or two. Everyman's Library edition is handsome and cheap (six volumes, £50).

Philip Glazebrook

Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer by Patrick French (Harper- Collins £20). I knew I admired the Younghusband who crossed the Karako- ram with less tack than a hiker would take up Snowden, but I thought I was bored by the rest of Younghusband — the mystic, the Tibet-taker, the cracked sage. French makes the whole man interesting, the whole biography enjoyable. The admixture of his own physical researches — e.g. into the mountains which were Younghusband's inspiration — blows fresh air through the book, while his chair-bound researches provide the telling quotations which sub- stantiate this fond, familiar and rather cheeky view of a formidable eccentric. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall by John Julius Norwich (Viking, £25). Third and final volume of an account of the Byzantine Empire which well conveys a sense of the darkness and confusion of the times with- out boring or benighting the common read- er. Norwich's nonchalant lucidity is achieved by a strong narrative linking hero- ic figures, and by the infectiousness of his own imaginative interest in the events and personalities of Byzantium's last 400 years.

Nigel Spivey

Reactions vary from the apocalyptic to the careless, but anyone engaged in higher education will concede that illiteracy is ascendant. By 'illiteracy' I don't mean that modern students can't spell (though that is also often the case), but rather that they've a minimal acquaintance with quality litera- ture (even those doing Eng. Lit. as a degree). Two books stand out as signals of protest at this phenomenon. The first is direct: Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (Macmillan, £20). Bloom looks like a bull- frog with dyspepsia, but his sensibilities are both solid and nice. His stand against the `culture' of Rap crap and comics needs all the allies it can get. The second is implicit: Ian MacKillop's F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Penguin, £25). When you take away all the quotidian vanities of Leavis, his wife, his devotees and his foes, you are left with the single powerful message that good writing makes the world a better place. Not a new tenet: but an increasingly obscure one.

Mark Steyn

Most of the Sinatra 80th birthday books are about his chicks, his Mafia links, his toupees — about everything, in fact, except the reason he's worth writing about. The only birthday book that counts is Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song is You (Scrib- ner, $30, coming here soon), an opinionat- ed, combative guide to his recorded legacy from the Thirties to the Nineties. I'd quib- ble with Friedwald on this or that album track, but we're agreed on this: these are the best recordings of the best songs of the century. It's that simple.

If the 0. J. verdict tells us anything, it's that the policy of the last 30 years — of encouraging us to hyphenate our identities (African-American, Latino-American) and think in terms of group rights rather than individual rights — has been a disaster. Dinesh De Souza's The End of Racism (Free Press, $30) is a fine indictment of the present generation of race activists.

My favourite novel was Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism (Minerva, £5.99), set in a fictional Iowan county where nothing much happens. He's been compared with Garri- son Keillor, but don't let that put you off. He's far better at conveying character, the turn of the seasons, lives of quiet despera- tion, and he's not trying so damn hard to be loveable.

I'm not sure if it's the most overrated book, but it may be the least deserved best- seller. After his ferocious assault on Ameri- ca in The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson turned to Britain in Notes from a Small Island (Doubleday, £15.99) and pulled every punch. The guy wimped out: count how many times he uses the word 'nice'.

The most bungled sequel of this or any year was After Zenda by John Spurling (Deutsch, £14.99), in which he turned Ruritania into a sort of easy- listening Bosnia. You could have pulled any number of neat switches on Anthony Hope's doppelganger theme — for example, have the Ruritanian play the Englishman this time. Instead, Spurting junked it completely and put nothing in its place.

Eric Christiansen

Felicia's Journey by William Trevor (Penguin, £5.99) contained two memorable characters, a homicidal catering manager and a door-to-door missionary woman. Mr Trevor gets praised for everything he writes; but to be precise, this book has the desolate feel of an off-peak tea-break in a fog-bound motorway service-complex, somewhere near Tamworth. Great stuff.

Another memorable downer was Brian Moore's Cold Heaven (Flamingo, £5.99), which seems to be the Californian up- dating of Lazarus. He is only a pawn in a four-round contest between an unreformed Catholic God and a glumly adulterous Mrs Lazarus, who would rather be in another novel. It ends in a draw. Highly recom- mended irritant for Voltairean uncles and nephews.

But the chill of the year was Penguin's reissue in a small square format of Alistair Gray's Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (60p) which concerns the futility of litera- ture, and the frightfulness of power; a good lesson in economy of language for the ver- bose teenage dissident, should you have one about the place at Christmas.

Helen Osborne

In this bleakest of years two books have made me laugh aloud. No mean feat. Colin Clark's The Prince, the Showgirl and Me (HarperCollins, £16.99) is the fresh, even innocent, and always rattling good diary of his job as a young third assistant-dogsbody on Rattigan's daft Ruritanian movie with its doomed coupling of Olivier and Mon- roe. More soon, please.

Older, if not wiser, but equally funny is Simon Gray's Fat Chance (Faber, £5.99), the playwright's spiky exorcism of Stephen Fry's amateur and disastrous bunk from Cell Mates earlier this year.

Cleared for Take-Off (Viking, £16) is Dirk Bogarde's heroic coda to his five volumes of autobiography. Fortitude and reflection, stoicism and rectitude are thin on the ground these days, so for those of us (most of us) who go through love, death and the whole damn thing, this is a book of spirited consolations, deceptively casual, finely written.

Mary Killen

I was emotionally drained by the Letters of John Betjeman, Volume II edited by his daughter Candida Lycett Green (Methuen, £20). Laughter (lots of it), stimulation (masses) and Mrs Green's commentary made me cry six or seven times with proper hacking sobs. It wasn't at all mawkish, it was just that she loved her Dad so much. She has marshalled a staggering number of jokes, revelations and fascinating facts into a densely packed yet lightly readable whole. Incomparable value for money.

Deeply enjoyable also was The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries (Macmillan, £14.99) edited by Hugh Massingberd, king of knowing all facts without having to look any of them up and possessor of a photographic and phonographic memory. Massingberd is England's premier heritage expert and social historian. This collection of highlights from his reign as obituaries editor of the Telegraph concentrates on some of our best eccentrics and is recent history made hilarious.

Normally I feel a bit squeamish about Will Self, but his The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz produced as a 60p Penguin Classic made me feel he really is a genius.

Hilary Corke

I tend to wait for hardbacks to subside into paperbacks, as I do for new films to get themselves on the telly; so that my annual `I think you'll like .1 .J. He's a bastard's bastard.' hot meats are mostly everyone else's cold mutton. Almost all my brilliant new books of 1995 saw the light in 1993. But Dr Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars (Macmil- lan, £15.99) is one of this year's lambs. He celebrates seven extraordinary people who haven't, in most cases, got `something wrong with their heads' so much as some- thing most uncomfortably too right autistic or brain-injured geniuses with ludi- crous memory, draughtmanship, musicality.

I know too beyond possibility of disap- pointment that I shall grossly enjoy the Betj Letters Part II (Methuen, £20) when the wretches finally send it, wishing that every single one of them had been addressed to myself. And while we are on about it, dear publishers, we now have the complete Letters, half the Life, the texts of the best prosings, the flightiest bits of the snap-albums: but when, when, a halfway decent edition of the poems?

David Gilmour

Gladstone's reputation was bolstered by the publication of two highly distinguished works in 1995. In the spring H. C. G. Matthew, the editor of the Grand Old Man's diaries, brought out Gladstone 1875- 98 (OUP, £25), his second volume of out- standing biographical essays. And in the autumn Roy Jenkins published Gladstone (Macmillan, £20), a splendid and entertain- ing life which depicts the absurdities as well as the greatness of that quintessential Vic- torian statesman.

Hanan Ashrawi's This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (Simon & Schuster, £17.99) is an eloquent and often moving narrative of the author's transformation from teacher of literature to leading spokeswoman of the Palestinian cause. It is also a sceptical and useful analysis of the Middle East 'peace process' which, as Ashrawi demonstrates, is not nearly so close to a satisfactory conclusion as many people like to believe.

Francis King

My abiding love of, and interest in, my childhood home of India may have had something to do with my enjoyment of Lee Langley's A House in Pondicherry (Heine- mann, £12.99); but, if it has had, then much else has also done so. This is a seductively eventful and vivid novel, in which, from the 18th century to the present day, a host of characters — Indian, English, French, half- caste — jostle each other to detonate one comic, or grim little drama after another.

My most enjoyable work of non-fiction is Jeffrey Meyers's biography Edmund Wilson (Constable, £20). An irascible, lascivious bully, Wilson was, in my view, the finest critic of his time. Some people might think that Meyers devotes too much attention to Wilson's turbulent sex-life; but for me this amazingly persistent, industrious and per- ceptive biographer does full justice both to the unlikeable man and to the admirable writings.

Hilary Mantel

I enjoy the mordant work of the American writer Pete Dexter, who wrote the frighten- ing Paris Trout; his new book The Paperboy (Viking, £15), is about a young journalist's involvement with a Death Row psychopath. I hear you say 'this is not very enticing'; but you would find it a precise, layered, intelli- gent book, its disturbing tone enhanced by Dexter's dry wit.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum (Dou- bleday, £14.99) is a debut novel by Kate Atkinson of astonishing confidence and skill. It is, put simply, the story of an ordi- nary York family from the turn of the cen- tury to the present day: this summary does no justice to its capacious, vivid, almost operatic nature. Acutely observant, over- flowing with good jokes, it is the work of an author who loves her characters and sets them playing with a gleeful energy. It will give enormous pleasure to a wide range of readers: it is a coat of many colours, warm enough for the deepest winter.

Richard Cobb

David Gilmour's Curzon, (John Murray, £25) is everything a biography should be: beautifully written, deeply researched and, though long, one would wish it even longer. The author makes Curzon interesting in an unexpected way. Curzon was a semi-failure who never quite made it to the top. The book illustrates dramatically Kitchener's effectiveness as an intrigant thanks to his access to the Court. He ruined Curzon's effectiveness as Viceroy.

Sir Julian Critchley's autobiography, A Bag of Boiled Sweets (Faber, £6.99) is good- humoured without ever being sharp. There are a great many laughs, mostly at the author's expense. There is a wonderful description of the Bonaparte family on their annual trip to the mausoleum at Farnborough: little dark men in double- breasted blue suits looking like members of the mafia accompanied by tall blonde females. One wishes Sir Julian a happy retirement in Ludlow despite his disabili- ties.

P. J. Kavanagh

Ever since the Reformation tried to take the superstition out of religion, versions of it, in diverse form, have been leaking up through the surface of English secular writ- ing. Glen Cavaliero's The Supernatural and English Fiction (OUP, £18.99) examines how, in writers from the Brontës to Peter Ackroyd. It could almost be called `Varieties of Religious Experience', and he neatly distinguishes the supernatural from the paranormal. He shines a bright torch into unexpected corners and throws up a thousand ideas.

A writer Cavaliero inevitably deals with is John Cowper Powys and Petrushka and the Dancer (Carcanet, £25) is the helpfully edited Journal of that old mage, from 1929- 39. It was written for Powys's companion, Phyllis Playter, and as a portrait of daily living shared, and of a relationship, it could hardly be more fascinating. Jon Stallworthy's Louis MacNeice is a must, I think, as is Peter Levi's Edward Lear (Faber, £20 and Macmillan, £20).

Among novels Alan Massie's The Ragged Lion (Hutchinson, £15.99) is an affection- ate and convincing continuation of Sir Wal- ter Scott's own Journal which, among other things, suggests that old lion's flirtings with the supernatural.

Poetry: A first collection, Gwyneth Lewis's Parables and Faxes (Blood- axe, £6.95) is brisk, spiritually alert, deft and entertaining; a talent to look out for.

Raymond Carr

As a child I was fascinated by press photographs of Austen Chamberlain in his frock coat, silk hat and monocle. The letters to his sisters, superbly edited by R. C. Self in The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters (CUP, £35) reveal, not the aristo- crat of the photographs but a bourgeois addicted to the bourgeois occupation par excellence — gardening — too decent a man to be adept at climbing the greasy pole of politics.

I much enjoyed Noel Annan's Changing Enemies (HarperCollins, £18). Concerned with wartime intelligence and the post-war regeneration of Germany, it is a quite splendid example of how personal reminis- cence can enrich historical understanding in the hands of a gifted writer. Eminently readable, it would make a suitable present for intelligent friends.

The most over-praised book was Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (Harper- Collins, £30). I was castigated for not pointing out in my Spectator review with sufficient force how Schama's self-indul- gent propensities could weary the reader. He runs at his fences and careers off across the countryside on too loose a rein.

A book I shall read is the collection of Daily Telegraph obituaries (Macmillan, £14.99). Anything that reminds us of death in a civilisation obsessed with prolonging life as long as possible and whose cities are dominated, not by cathedrals but by hospi- tals, should be compulsory reading.

Philip Hensher

Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist I've always been fond of; even by her elevated standards, The Blue Flower (Flamingo, £14.99) is exceptional. A fictional life of the German romantic poet Novalis, it has an extraordinary quality of restrained, telling response to the brute facts of the physical world. There's nothing so boring as a sense of research being carried out; but in very few details, you have an overwhelming sense of what it was like to be rich and uncomfortable in 18th-century Germany.

Other than that, a superlative retrospec- tive of the paintings of Cy Twombly in New York and Berlin spawned a good catalogue by Kirk Vamedoe which is taking up a lot of my time (Thames & Hudson, £38). I can't think of many better painters now at work than Twombly, the vast open spaces of his canvases finely poised between mon- ument and doodle, between American energy and Italian antiquity. And a very entertaining biography by Philip Hoare of Noel Coward (Sinclair-Stevenson, £25) was a gift to the anecdotalist; I bored everyone stiff with the story of Talullah Bankhead at Eton, the story of the telegram Noel sent to Gertie on her wedding, etc, etc.

The most overrated book of the year? Easy; Delia Smith's Winter Collection, an awful book, utterly failing to teach anyone how to cook, just how to assemble dishes to instruction. No one is more responsible for the rise of the pernicious idea that cooking is something you do for dinner parties. 'In any other country,' I read one of her fans saying the other day, 'she would be Dame Delia by now.' No; in any other country she would be howled off the screen.

Peter Levi

The best books I have come across this year in prose and the most readable are Lady Ranfurly's To War with Whitaker (Mandarin, £5.99) and Thekla Clark's Wystan and Chester (Faber, £12.99). They are both in their very different ways minor classics, memorably funny, warm-hearted, courageous and extremely well-written.

Michael Longley, whose photograph on the back flap resembles a furiously angry Father Christmas, is a poet who continually approaches greatness; now he has written a classic, and not a minor classic, called The Ghost Orchid (Cape, £7).

Simon Jenkins

Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct (Penguin, £8.99) is simply the best popular science book I have read in years. When- ever I sense electronics dragging me away from words, grammar and sentences towards gadgets I take comfort in his view that coherent grammar is intrinsic to the human make-up. He takes us way beyond Chomsky. To the selfish gene can now be added the grammatical gene.

John Martin Robinson's Treasures of English Churches (Sinclair-Stevenson, £25) was a revelation of a different sort: unearthing the glorious contents of Britain's neglected vernacular museums, the parish churches. David Kynaston's two- volume history of the City of London (A World of its Own, 1815-1890, and Golden Years, 1890-1914, Chatto, £25 each) bring alive its golden age in the Victorian and Edwardian period as vividly as Dickens. History-through-anecdote has become a cliché in the hands of writers such as Fernandez-Armesto (of Millennium). In Kynaston's scholarship it triumphs.

Theodore Dalrymple

Mark Mazower's Inside Hitler's Greece, now published in paperback by Yale (£9.99) is a brilliantly vivid account of those terrible years. Reading this book, I felt transported both in time and place, as if I had been actually present when the Germans marched into Athens. An unwavering eye for detail, and wonderfully clear writing, make this a masterpiece.

Perhaps there are better literary biogra- phies than Joseph Frank's Dostoyevsky, the fourth volume of which was published this year by Robson Books (£27.95), but I have never read one. Professor Frank's massive erudition never gets in the way of his judg- ment — a singular quality in an academic. He makes the deep significance of his sub- ject abundantly clear.

The worst book I have read this year is the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips' On Flirta- tion (Faber, £14.99). That so inflated a rep- utation should be founded on such tortured prose is to me a great mystery.

Richard Lamb

I found Louis de Bernieres' novel Captain Correli's Mandolin (Minerva, £6.99) fasci- nating. There is something of Angus Wil- son and Evelyn Waugh in the story of how happy Greeks and Italians were during the war on the enchanting Greek island of Cephallonia until the Germans came. A What do you want to see, Casualty, Chicago Hope, Cardiac Arrest, Hospital Watch or Intensive Care? gifted Italian musician and a talented Greek girl fall in love against the haunting background of the worst ever Nazi war crime which was the slaughter of thousands of surrendering Italian soldiers in cold blood by the Germans.

David Fraser's Will: A Portrait of William Douglas Home (Deutsch, £17.99) brings the playwright and his plays to life. He was a delightful man who wrote plays for 55 years, and had 45 produced against Shake- speare's 38. His like will not be seen again, and Fraser has done well for his friend.

Margaret Drabble's Angus Wilson (Seek- er, £20) entranced me, although some reviewers found it too detailed. The success of his novels was dramatic, as was the way in which the reading public suddenly reject- ed him. The tale of Angus bursting into the glamorous post-war London literary world is beautifully done.

Tom Hiney

For those of us who consider James Ellroy to be the greatest writer in the world, the publication of American Tabloid this year (Century, £15.99) was as eagerly anticipat- ed as a pay rise. There are always lots of clever novelists to be had, but Ellroy has once-in-a-generation class; exhilarating, enthralling and dumbfounding rather than just impressive. The most memorable non- fiction book of the year was Stoker by Don- ald Watt (Simon & Schuster, £9.99). After escaping three times from German POW camps, Watt was sent to Auschwitz to stoke the furnaces on which gas chamber victims were thrown. On release he told friends and regiment that he had been in a Ger- man hospital: it was only in 1987 that he finally admitted to his wife what had hap- pened to him. It took Holocaust historians a year to verify his mind-numbing account of the death camp. This is Watt's well- written testimony and everyone should try to find time to read it.

Anthony Blond

The Hidden Huxley edited by David Brad- shaw (Faber, £7.99). Aldous Huxley was not a lucky man. He died the day Kennedy was shot and a late work, daft, almost soppy in praise of psychedelia, seemed unworthy of the genius of Brave New World, 30 years before. This collection of pieces from defunct journals like Nash's Pall Mall Gazette and Time & Tide was an eye-opener. I was delighted by his omni- science, clarity and compassion, for he grew from a mocking elitist on the Riviera into a concerned New Dealer, changing his mind but not his mentality.

The Young Disraeli by Jane Ridley (Sinclair-Stevenson, £20). Scion of a bril- liant house, Jane Ridley has sprung fully- armed (and well-connected) into the front rank of biographers with this one, fun to write and fun to read. Her description of Mary Anne Disraeli's hysterical, but suc- cessful bearding of Baroness Lionel de Rothschild is knee-rattling.