Francis King
In his Skin Lane (Serpent's Tail, £10.99) Neil Bartlett shows eerie skill in his evocation of a small, secret pocket of the City of London devoted to the skin trade way back in......
Rupert Christiansen
David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 (Bloomsbury, £25) is one of the most vividly imagined, brilliantly researched and hugely entertaining books of social history I......
Jonathan Mirsky
Grand Cancd Great River: The Travel Daily of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Poet, translated with a commentary by Philip Watson (Frances Lincoln Ltd, £20). A beautifully written and......
Piers Paul Read
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £17.99), a risky but in my view wholly successful departure for this author of mellifluous, well-crafted novels — witty, intelligent,......
Allan Massie
I haven't read a better new novel this year than Clara's Tale by Pierre Peju (Harvill Secker, £12.99). Excellently translated by Euan Cameron, this is a meditation on the......
Anita Brookner
Death of the novel — again. This conclusion was reached after reading the ramshackle performances of J. M. Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year, Harvill Secker, £16.99), Michael......
P. J. Kavanagh
A poetry highlight of the year was a new Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber, £30, edited by Peter McDonald). The previous Collected (1966), by E. R. Dodds, MacNeice's......
Philip Ziegler
Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, £30) is an informed and scholarly study of a great architect, a wide-ranging conspectus......
William Leith
This year, I felt galvanised and excited by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan (Allen Lane, £20). Taleb, whose background is in finance, believes that, in the modern......
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