Philip Glazebrook

Life with a Star by Jiri Weil (Collins, £12.95). This pitiless account of a Prague Jew's life under the Nazis chills the read- er's heart. It is not that the horrors are laid on......

Ferdinand Mount

A late and luscious windfall, The Sub- Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (£18.99), has just been published to mark the 90th birthday of Hubert Butler, Kil- kenny squireen,......

P. J. Kavanagh

To mock wittily is fairly easy, but to be wittily serious, allowing the seriousness to show under the gloss of the wit, is more difficult, and is delightful in Hilary Man- tel's......

Charles Glass

Books of journalism rather than new fiction dominated my better reading this year. So much good journalism probably left little time for modern fiction. The collected works of......

Anthony Powell

As it happens, two of the books I most enjoyed this year are about India: Hilary Spurling's Paul Scott: A Life (Hutchinson, £18.99) and V. S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies......

Peter Levi

I have mostly been re-reading old favourites like Homer and Catullus, and, for work, flopping about lethargically in memoirs of Tennyson's friends. But I enormously enjoyed......

Paul Johnson

I don't recall a year in which I have been sent so many bad books to review. One I did enjoy in 1990, but had no opportunitY to notice, was Clive Aslet's The American Country......