Raymond Carr

I am temperamentally unsympathetic to long books. They cannot be comfortably read in bed and reviewers, alas, are not paid by weight. The two books I have chosen weigh together......

Robert Blake

Alan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Harper Collins, £20) has written one of the great historical works of the century. It was an idea of genius to trace the......

P.j. Kavanagh

Apart from a belated discovery of the interest of Roy Fuller's last poems (Consolations, Seeker, £5.95, and Available for Dreams, CollinsHarvill, £11), which do not properly......

William Scammell

Derek Mahon's Selected Poems (Viking/Gallery, £14.99) brings together as fine a body of work as has been written in the past 30 or 40 years. His coolly classical ironies (The......

Frances Partridge

My own taste is for biography and letters, and in this department two very enjoyable books stand out: James Lees- Milne's The Bachelor Duke: The Sixth Duke of Devonshire (John......

Piers Paul Read

Lawrence Stone's Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (OUP, £19.95) is an interesting and scholarly study of our chaotic and hypocritical attitude to marriage until, In the 1960s,......