Nigella Lawson

At times this year I thought I'd never get beyond the instructions printed on the side of the Pampers packet. And when time to read is difficult to find, the effort has to be......

M. R. D. Foot

I would have liked to include Mirjam M Foot, Studies in the History of Bookbinding (Scolar Press, £69.50), but suppose that being married to the author ought to inhib- it me.......

Amit Chaudhuri

James Kelman's A Disaffection (Seeker, £11.95, Picador, £6.99) is the best novel I have read recently. Kelman uses pidgin Glaswegian to evoke the deluded, selfish, and extremely......

Mary Killen

The Letters of John Betjeman, Volume I edited and with vivid linking passages by his daughter Candida Lycett-Green (Methuen, £20, £9.99) give hours of happy reading. Wayland......

Richard Cobb

The two books which I have most enjoyed reading in the course of this year are both by Oxford teaching historians, both published by the Oxford University Press and are both......

Nigel Spivey

It is with a sense of revenge placated that I have been reading Louis-Jean Calvet's Roland Barthes: A Biography (Polity, £29.50). What, Roland, of la mode de l'auteur? You who......