Ross Clark

The most entertaining tale of the year was contained within the pages of Radar at Sea: The Royal Navy in World War II by Derek Howse (Macmillan, £25). Apparently our defences......

Christopher Howse

Easily the best book I have read this year is The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion, 1400-1580 by Eamon Duffy (Yale, £29.95) which shows that popular devotion was......

Penelope Lively

Darryl Pinckney's High Cotton (Faber, £5.99) is an exuberant, maverick account of growing up in the South: 'No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro,' it begins. Shrewd,......

Blair Worden

Cormac McCarthy's novel, All The Pretty Horses, first published in 1992, would have been my book of that year had I read it then. It is now in paperback (Pan Macmillan, £5.99)......

Isabel Colegate

I have enjoyed Gesualdo Bufalino's Blind Argus (Harvill, £7.99), a marvellously inventive and exuberant Sicilian novel. The translation by Patrick Creagh is quite exceptionally......

William Scammell

John Murray is the only novelist I know with a direct line to Rabelais and Flann O'Brien. Radio Activity: A Cumbrian Tale in Five Emissions (Sunk Island Press, P 0 Box 74,......

Rupert Christiansen

Rather dismally, perhaps, the new book I admired most this year was the first trans- lation into English of Chekhov's Journey to Sakhalin (Faulkner, £12.50), an account of his......