Cressida Connolly

Annie Freud's poetry collection, The Best Man That Ever There Was (Picador, £8.99), has been a highlight of 2007. It's hard to believe that these troubling, hilarious, totally......

Jonathan Sumption

David Cannadine's Andrew Mellon (Allen Lane, £30) is a striking portrait of a great American misanthrope, which will be much enjoyed by those who persist in believing that money......

Jane Ridley

The best heavyweight biography that I have read this year is Tim Jeal's Stanley (Faber, £25). Wise, fair and deeply researched, Jeal's book sets the record straight on the great......

Bevis Hillier

In 100 years' time I think the period of Eng. Lit. from 1959 (when the first volume of George Painter's life of Proust appeared) to now will be regarded as the Age of Biography.......

Andrew Taylor

On one level, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) by David Peace is a murder mystery; on another it is a grimly effective exploration of Tokyo a year after the end of the second......

Patrick Marnham

The Laughter of Mothers (Harvill Secker, £12), the latest collection of poems by Paul Durcan, takes us further through the story of his life in Dublin and Mayo, and tells us......