Digby Anderson
This year I have experimented with buying books not directly for their author, topic or literary merit but by colour. Green books have turned out to be a great success. One......
Robert Macfarlane
Three books, all non-fiction, particularly impressed me this year. William Fiennes's beautiful travelogue The Snow Geese (Picador, £14.99) went some way towards closing the gap......
P. J. Kavanagh
Journals, honest self-examinations day by day, observations of internal and external weathers, can be fascinating. Philip Toynbee's two, Part of a Journey and End of a Journey,......
M. R. D. Foot
Saul David's The Indian Mutiny (Viking. £20) is a rarity: a sound history book without a dull page in it. He torpedoes the leftwing myth that it was an Indian movement of......
Francis King
This year brought a number of good works of fiction. It also brought one great one. Andrei Makine's A Life's Music (Sceptre, £12.99) is no more than 106 pages long; but......
John Mortimer
The Booker shortlist for the year 1847-48 could have included Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair. The Communist Manifesto might have been entered for Whitbread.......
Christopher Howse
A great treat was Discovering Aquinas by Aidan Nichols (Darton, Longman & Todd, £12.95). Aquinas, perhaps the cleverest man who ever lived, has not been well served by some of......
Philip Hensher
The fiction I enjoyed most this year was Claire Messud's masterly The Hunters (Picador, £12.99), an astonishing display of technical virtuosity and revealed feeling, and A. L.......
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