Jane Ridley

Paula Backscheider's Reflections on Biogra- phy (Oxford, £30, paperback £14.99) received little notice when it came out late last year, but don't be put off by the fusty, dark......

David Pryce-jones

Roger Kimball has a Voltairean wit and clarity as an expositor of ideas. He thinks that today's culture is putrid, and in The Long March (Encounter Books, $23.95) he shows how......

Patrick Skene Catling

Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas (Faber, £25), seems as complete, candid and justly balanced as if it had been published after Saul Bellow's death. It is possible to imag- ine......

Stuart Reid

The book that gave me most satisfaction was Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion by Robert Coles (Perseus Books, $16.50), which I found in the gift shop of an old church in Lower......

John De Falbe

Robert Edric's terrifying The Book of the Heathen (Anchor, £9.99), set in West Africa in 1897, has impressed me most this year. Not for the faint-hearted, perhaps, but — wow!......

Roger Lewis

Nigella Lawson, whom I've never met in the picturesque flesh, is hard to dislike. She's beautiful, in an Edward Burne-Jones sort of way, and well-connected (my friend Jonathan......

David Hughes

For sensuality I go for Reflections on Blue Water (Harvill, £18), the latest of Alan Ross's fine reports on foreign parts, this time celebrating his lifelong liking for Ital-......