BOOKS OF THE YEAR A further selection of the best

and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors

Jane Gardam The most extraordinary and important biography I have read this year is Gaudi by Gijs van Hensbergen (HarperCollins, f.24.99), the lunatic, genius and possibly saint said to be 'the most famous architect in the world' who towers over Catalonia and Barcelona like his shrine to the Holy Family that is still rising higher above the city 75 years after his death. A vivid, painstaking portrait of an almost mediaeval figure brooding over the 20th century.

Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney (Little, Brown, £16.99) was my favourite novel. I liked Mike Jackson's Five Boys (Faber, 116.99) but mostly because it was the same comedic mind at work as in his first novel which was on the Booker shortlist. The Underground Man. I adored The Ram in the Well, by June Knox-Mawer (Murray, £16.99), about her passion for North Wales. Most welcome book to me was Sylvia Townsend Warner's uncollected short stories, The Music of Long Verney, with a foreword by her New Yorker editor William Maxwell (Little, Brown, £14.99). These, just published, look like buried treasure.

Harry Mount

A century ago, the Colosseum was covered in rare Asian flowers, sprouting from seeds that had fallen off the hides of tropical ani

mals slaughtered in the arena a few thousand years earlier. For that fact alone, In Ruins (Chatto, £12.99) is a knockout. Christopher Woodward unturfs hundreds of other great revelations along these lines, burrowing through novels, paintings and brick and mortar carcasses across the world, and invokes the same sweet feeling of melancholy and pleasure that dying buildings bring on.

But this must take second place to the funniest publication of modern times — The Onion, the American spoof newspaper that prints all the news that should be printed but never is. 'Loved Ones Recall Local Man's Cowardly Battle with Cancer' is a typical headline. As is 'AsianAmericans Defying Traditional Stereotypes — More and More are Lazy, Stupid.' This year's anthology (The Onion: Dispatches from the Tenth Circle, Boxtree, £9.99) will be read by a lot of students and not enough grown-ups.

Jonathan Cecil Hugh Massingberd's Daydream Believer (Macmillan, £16.99) is a delight. The blurb gets it right; it is a 'beguiling mixture of the funny and the sad', also 'peculiarly charming': an eccentric's autobiography and view of metropolitan life in the late 20th century. As Massingberd charts his progress from schoolboy cricket fan, would-be

squire, unenthusiastic law student, clubman, social observer, genealogist, journalist and wit, he forever modestly plays 'fall-guy' to the heroes he worships — some famous, some pleasingly obscure — but ends up, for all his comic self-deprecation, a hero himself.

Wendy Cope's latest poems in If! Don't Know (Faber, £14.99) are, as ever, drily humorous and technically impressive with sometimes an added tenderness and poignancy.

A welcome reprint is Max Beerbohm's Seven Men (Prion, £8.99). Like the very different P. G. Wodehouse anthologised in What Ho! (Hutchinson, £16.99) and excellently introduced by Stephen Fry, Max is funny without effort. Sadly, many contemporary humorists flaunt their puns, one-liners and ribaldries like so many red roses.

Roger Lewis It has been a year of witches. I used to know Joan Smith when she was Mrs Francis Wheen. She'd arrive at my children's parties in black fishnet stockings and geranium lipstick like Angelica Huston. (Why?) Though I have reservations about her as a personality (she doesn't like people much but is soppy about cats) I always enjoy disagreeing with her pronouncements. Moralities: Sex, Money and Power in the 21st

Century (Penguin, £14.99) is the equivalent of meeting the authoress in the alarming flesh at one of those High Bohemian receptions where there's a lot of melodrama, shouting and plate-smashing.

Miss Smith is exasperating — and bracing, just like Rebecca de Winter. I adored Sally Beauman's Rebecca's Tale (Little, Brown, £16.99), a sort of literary detective story which picked apart the Daphne du Maurier original, filled in the missing links, questioned anew the characters' motives and took the tale off in thrilling directions. (It's rather like a fictional extrapolation of John Sutherland's essay, 'Where was Rebecca Shot?') The murky psychology of Maxim and Rebecca de Winter, the wild Cornish seascapes and the meditation on love and death would seem to form Iris Murdoch's territory. Her biography by Peter Conradi (Iris Murdoch: A Life (HarperCollins, £24.99), to which I'd much looked forward, despite the richness of the subject matter was very dull fare. Conradi seemed to believe that Murdoch had been the only pretty and bouncy girl at Oxford ever to have had romantic flings. His humourless attempts to disentangle her farcical cat's cradle of affairs and crushes made little sense. Conradi took the dame too seriously. She wasn't really an intellectual heavyweight; she was a scatty Catherine Cookson with bits of undergraduate philosophy thrown in.

My biography of the year is Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones (Constable, £20), a gripping 700-pager, immaculately researched, which at a stroke consigns all those academic books which have taken TSE's theory of the impersonal nature of his art to the rubbish heap. This sensational book shows just how autobiographical the poet's words were. Breakdown, hysteria, sexual jealousy, betrayal: all this was going on in the marriage of Tom and Viv, and it is in all of Eliot's work. That Eliot colluded in his difficult wife's incarceration in a lunatic asylum would seem to come straight from a gothic novel. Clearly he wishes she could have been drowned as a witch.

Finally, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Faber, £16.99) is a portrait of a ghost city, a sepia prose poem of a book which moved me to tears. When I look at Jan Morris's long list of publications (and this is her last opus), [think she can claim, as Sherlock Holmes did as he was about to go over the cliff, 'If my record were closed tonight I could still survey it with absolute equanimity.'

David Crane

It does not come cheap, but elegantly and authoritatively written and stunningly illustrated, Frank Salmon's Building on Ruins (Ashgate, £44) deserves a wider audience than the specialist reader. His subject is the influence of Rome on 19th-century British architecture, and he is equally good on both sides of the equation, as much at home with the topography and ruins of Rome as he is with the public buildings they inspired in Britain.

At the opposite end of the scholarly spectrum is 18 Folgate Street (Chatto, £20) by Dennis Severs who died last year. Nothing on the page could capture the fun of Severs's personality, but with its inimitable mix of brilliance and dottiness the book will bring back fond memories for anyone who visited the house.

Redcoat (HarperCollins, £20), the story of the British soldier from the Seven Years War through to the Mutiny and Crimea, is consistently entertaining, full of brilliantly chosen anecdotes, and rattling along at a good light infantry pace.

John Mortimer

In these grimly tolerant years Paul Bailey's Three Queer Lives (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99), an account of eccentrics who camped in the shades of the prison house, was a little gem. I particularly liked Arthur Marshall who, when an officer in the war, referred to Field Marshal Montgomery as 'a dashing little hockey mistress' and told his fellow officers that the initial 'C' in his own name stood for Cynthia. 'Damn silly name for a man,' said a gloomy major, but called Marshall Cynthia every evening in the mess.

Ken Tynan's Diaries (Bloomsbury, £25) were continuously entertaining, although

the author, whom I always thought I liked and admired, emerges as a highperformance operator with no deep or genuine feeling for much except spanking and cigarettes.

The Uncommercial Traveller (Dent, £30) was a marvellous edition of Dickens's journalism, an author who kept his erotic fantasies entirely to himself.

Patrick Leigh Fermor Like everyone, I was totally carried away by Simon Sebag Montefiore's life of Potemkin, Prince of Princes (Phoenix Press, £9.99). It made a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing suddenly cohere in a vast picture of European history where none of the characters tallied with one's previous ideas of them. Most of them turned out better than one had thought them, and infinitely more interesting.

In Charles Allen's Soldier Sahibs (Abacus, £10.99) the reader is transported to the fascinating world that immediately predated the journeys of Kim and the lama, when they listened to the already half-mythical tales about Lawrence and Nicolson and all the extraordinary heroes who brought order out of chaos and secured a further three quarters of a century for the Raj and left an honourable record when it ended.

In a few generations, all this links up with An Unexpected Light (Picador, £7.99) by Jason Elliot, who first went to Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, soon after he left school. He has now returned for a longer spell and written an astonishing book about it. He is historically and linguistically an erudite writer whose masochistic travels on shambling nags or disintegrating trucks on overhanging zigzags scatter his pages with magical evocations of wild ranges and ancient cities, that shine through the daily tonnage of bombs. It should be required reading for everyone concerned. Perhaps he is still there.

D. J. Taylor I much enjoyed Ferdinand Mount's Fairness (Chatto, £16.99). To my mind Mount is one of the great underrated modern English novelists, drenching the 1960s and 70s with an elegiac twilight that never once disguises the underlying note of dissatisfaction. Elsewhere, David Kynaston brought his four-volume history of the City of London to a magisterial conclusion with A Club No More (Chatto, £30). A transatlantic import that had the edge over most homegrown competition was Brady Udall's The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint (Cape, £10).

Christopher Howse

This summer I went to see where a burglar with a ladder climbed into a church by night and stole a silver shoe. The burglary took place on 20 November, 1534, at Morebath, on the edge of Exmoor, and I was so keen to inspect the scene because of the extraordinarily vivid picture given in The Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy (Yale, £15.95). The voices all come through one voice, that of the Sir Christopher Trychay, the vicar of the parish from 1520 till his death in 1574, who left a fat and remarkably unguarded record of those years, including the tale of that silver shoe.

Another very distinctive voice is that of Oliver Bernard, the translator of Rimbaud. His selection of his own poetry, Verse &c (Anvil Press, £9.95) includes graffiti collected from the walls of the Sorbonne during the evenements and a remaking in modern English of the mediaeval lyric `Quia Amore Langueo'. Oliver Bernard has found a place among the leading poets of the later 20th century.

There are plenty of new books that are worse edited and far less well written than much journalism. But a book I have just caught up with, now republished, is Victoria RI by Elizabeth Longford (Sutton, £30). Like Kenneth Rose's books it never falls below two striking things per page.

Jane Ridley

Gavin Stamp's Edwin Luiyens: Country Houses (Aurum Press, £35) is a superb study, an incisive, perceptive analysis of Lutyens's architecture, beautifully illustrated with black-and-white contemporary photographs from the Country Life archive. This is definitive. Andrew Roberts's Napoleon and Wellington (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) explores the curious relationship between two military giants who fought each other only once, but whose struggle epitomised an era. Acute and intelligent, it's the perfect Christmas present for anyone who likes reading history.

Martin Amis's Experience (Vintage, £7.99). new in paperback this year, is a dazzling biography-cum-autobiography, which relates the life of Kingsley Amis alongside the story of Amis fits. It's a gripping read, stylishly written and composed, and it left me feeling that Martin Amis must be nicer than I thought. My turkey is Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (Virago, £7.99), which also came out in paperback this year. I found this plain dull — nothing wrong with that, but what a strange choice for last year's Booker prize.

Alan Judd

Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (CUP. £17.95) challenges conventional nasty man/nice planet thinking on the environment. Lomborg was a member of Greenpeace who set out to refute what he thought were American attempts to minimise environmental dangers. But he was also a statistician who could not ignore truths. He found that received environmental opinion is based on distorted statistics presented by pressure groups and that there are at least as many reasons for optimism as for pessimism. Accessible to the layman but with full scholarly apparatus, this book ought to diminish the BBC's enthusiasm for quoting Greenpeace as some sort of independent arbiter, but I doubt they'll read it.

Lord Alanbrooke was one of our greatest soldiers and the publication of his war diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) was historically important. Although the ground was well covered by David Fraser's excellent biography, it's good to see the unexpurgated originals and fascinating for anyone interested in the second world war.

David Hughes

Though no lover of crowds, I hope I will be one among many who hail Atonement (Cape, £16.99) not only as Ian McEwan's masterwork (thus far), but also as the one British novel this year to possess the sweep and scope and inescapable purpose that stamp fiction that goes on mattering: the grand tradition. In clarity and in the cut of his humour, Richard Ford runs him a fairly close second in my book with A Multitude of Sins (Harvill, £15.99), a collection of ten stories that play variations on our human failure to live up to our humanity, especially in love. Meanwhile, the novelist who of all the good and grand exemplified in life the magnificent absurdity of being human is given a full run for our money in Flaubert (Faber, £25), Geoffrey Wall's finely tuned and aptly brief biography. My find of the year (how could I have missed him?) writes with more excitement than any of the above: Robert Wilson, whose several thrilling paperbacks are triumphs of plotting. After some riotously violent comedies of crime committed in Africa, his last book, A Small Death in Lisbon (HarperCollins, £6.99), reads like Raymond Chandler let loose on the Nazis.

The year's non-starter: The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (Bloomsbury, £25), extracts in newspapers sadly convincing me they could be taken as read.

Raymond Carr

My book of the year is Laurence Kelly's recently published Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial Russia's Mission to the Shah of Persia (I. B. Tauris, £24.50). Not many of us had heard of Griboyedov. He turns out to be the writer of the most popular play in Russia, a composer of some note, a gifted linguist and a friend of Pushkin's. Kelly's description of the literary and social life in St Petersburg and Moscow in the early 19th century is fascinating in itself and a portrait of a doomed generation of young, cultured aristocrats. Among his friends, the Decembrists, Griboyedov was always hard up and he became a professional diplomat in Persia. Offending Muslim tradition, he and his whole staff bar one were murdered by a fanatical Islamic mob.

[like Hound Music by Rosalind Belben (Chau°, £15.99). It is a somewhat quirky but vivid and moving description of the fox-hunting world before the Great War. I dislike Stella Rimington's Open Secret (Hutchinson, £18.99). It succeeds in combining boringness with vulgarity.

Stuart Reid Aside from Friends, Voters, Countrymen by Boris Johnson (HarperCollins, and a snip at £14.99), the book that meant most to me this year was Eugenio Corti's The Red Horse (Ignatius Press, £22.95). It was published in Italy in 1983 but has only just been translated into English. Its subject is the second world war and the struggle against the social and cultural barbarism that followed it. Corti served with the Italian army on the Russian front (and later with the Italian resistance), and his vivid account of defeat and retreat in the Soviet Union dominates the book. But what is truly remarkable about this huge novel (more than 1,000 pages of tightly set text) is that most of the leading characters are serious Christians. In The Red Horse, Italian soldiers resist sexual temptation, since fornication — the very meat of a decent war yarn — is a mortal sin. Death is to be feared not principally because it is likely to be painful but because it leads immediately to judgment. In one harrowing battle-scene a young (and devout) country boy is mortally wounded: his last moments are filled with terror, 'not so much of death but of what might be beyond death'. It is all rather scandalous, really, even scary. This is perhaps not the sort of book that one would allow one's wife or servants to read, and it is certainly not one for sensible folk who are suspicious of fancy foreign notions about honour and eternity. But those of an open-minded and adventurous disposition will find much to ponder in Corti's profound analysis of the most wicked years of the most wicked century in history. (It is sometimes hard work, mind: you won't see off The Red Horse by a swimming pool in Tuscany.) Nothing I have read since last Christmas — apart from Boris, that is — has made me laugh much, though Tony Blair's speech to the Labour party conference was a hoot. There ought to be a book about St Anthony of Islington next year: With Tomahawk and Trouser-press in the Hindu Kush.

Hugh Lawson-Tancred

The completion of the sequencing of the human DNA last year remains a brilliant beacon of hope in our murky world. Kevin Davies's The Sequence (Weidenfeld, £20) is a compelling review of the politics and psychology of the epic struggle between the commercialist Craig Venter and a phalanx of public institutions including our own revered Sanger Centre, the incalculable promise of the benefits to be derived in the coming decades and the deep and perplexing issues of how the emerging knowledge is to be reconciled with the competing claims of the market, society, science and God. Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind (Random House, £20) addresses a central conundrum for Darwin — why should nonproactive, momentumless evolution have gone to the indulgent extravagance of producing the peacock's tail, the bowerbird's nest and the human frontal cortex? He argues eloquently and, to me, persuasively that sexual rivalry produces a spiralling arms race of capabilities which, in propitious circumstances, can bootstrap its way up through a vertiginously ascending virtuous circle, from the late hominids, for example, to the Greeks in little more than a million years.

On the liberal construal of the year, I must urge anyone who was not yet done so to read Antonio Damasio's masterly The Feeling of What Happens (Vintage, £8.99), a contribution to the clarification of the very idea of a biology of the mind worthy of Aristotle, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (Vintage, £8.99), a panoramic demonstration of how the diversity of human development is to be attributed to a complex gamut of factors, which do not include race. A similar service is more implicitly performed for its local subject by Stephen Inwood's exuberantly readable A History of London (Macmillan, £15).

For overbilling, I offer Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages (Cape, £14.99), which by its very candour illustrates the perennial folly of its avowed project of harmonising science and religion.