Gabriele Annan

J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron (Secker, £12.95) was very impressive. It convinced me that this is what dying will be like. So it's made a difference to my life. The only other book......

Piers Paul Read Three Excellent Books Which Look East:...

Moscow! by Christopher Hope (Heinemann, £14.95), a poignant, funny and wonderfully written account of the state of the Russian soul; William Palmer's The Good Republic (Secker,......

Richard Ingrams

Boswell the Great Biographer edited by M.K. Danziger and Frank Brady (Heine- mann, £25) brought to an end (at long last) the series of 13 volumes of Boswell's complete diaries.......

Frances Partridge

Attempting to survey the year's books with an impartial eye is a depressing task. So many of them, yet so few that are memor- able from a distance, possibly because of a lack of......

Colin Thubron

If ever there was a time for two books on the heart of the USSR and Central Europe, it is now. Susan Richards's re- markable Epics of Everyday Life (Viking, £15.99) is an......

John Bayley

New novels can be like love affairs. If it happens one can hardly say why, and the most apparently eligible may make no impression. All the Booker shortlist left me cold in......

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......