Christopher Hawtree

Most of my reading this year has, of course, been in Victor Silvester's Modern Dancers' Handbook, but I have also en- joyed Justin Cartwright's Look At It This Way (Macmillan,......

Eric Christiansen

Before the Storm by Theodore Fontane, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (OUP, £6.95). The World's Classics did it again: published a fine big book at a realistic price. This is......

Robert Blake

Richard Mullen's Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World (Duckworth, £25) is the model of a literary biography — sensible, balanced, readable and based on years of scholarly......

Anita Brookner

I greatly admired and enjoyed A.S. Byatt's Possession (Chatto, £13.95) which de- serves its nomination as novel of the year. It is good to see a woman novelist de- ploying such......

Jonathan Cecil

Frances Partridge's latest collection of diaries, Hanging On: 1960-1963 (Collins, £15) is, as ever, beautifully written and observed. Neither sparing nor pitying her- self, her......

Alan Watkins

A good year for political biography. I missed John Grigg's The Young Lloyd George when it first came out in 1973. It has now been reissued in paperback (Methuen, £12.99) and......