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......
Sebastian Smee
I read, on a friend's recommendation, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (Picador, £8.99) this year. Strange, thwarted, entrancing book. It calls itself a novel, but it reads......
Sam Leith
Nicola Barker's visionary epic, Darkmans (Fourth Estate, £14.99), is a really strange and lively and unsettling book that at first I hated, then loved, and now can't get out of......
Philip Hen Sher
The book I loved best all year was Daljit Nagra's wonderfully inflected collection of poems, Look, We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, £6.99). When I had finished it, half the book......
Justin Cartwright
Graham Greene, A Life in Letters by Richard Greene (Little, Brown, £20). At a time when British fiction is stuttering, this is a very good moment to look back on the life and......
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
This was a vintage year for history books, none better than David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 (Bloomsbury, £25), a cracking read with powerful resonances for those......
Digby Durrant
Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (Headline, £8.99) about his extraordinary forebears starting with the Brute, his greatgreat-grandfather, who always carried a whip with an......
David Gilmour
The most enjoyable book I have read this year is Vic Gatrell's City of Laughter (Atlantic Books, £35), a work which is as boisterous as its subject — sex and satire in......
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