Patrick Leigh Fermor

It didn't matter that, in spite of a second reading, the denouement of Bruce Chatwin's Utz (Cape, £9.95) is still an enigma: the vigour of the writing, the images, the sinister......

A. N. Wilson

Brian McGuinness's biography of Wittgen- stein in early years made a great impress- ion on me (Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921, Duckworth, £15.95). `What we cannot......

Colin Thubron

No book this year has absorbed me more pleasurably than Jan Morris's part-history, part-descriptive Hong Kong (Viking, £14.95), an elegant, knowledgeable and affectionate......

Robert Kee

By far the most important book for me this year has been Roy Foster's Modern Ire- land: 1600-1972 (Allen Lane, £18.95), a brilliant compendium of incisive and con- structive......

Francis King

The novel to stay most vividly in my mind is one which was first published in France in 1873 but which had to wait until this year to appear in England: The Abbe Tigrane by......

Philip Glazebrook

The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta (Collins, £10.95) paints a gloomy but en- thralling portrait of a Sardinian provincial town and its society. By the power of this large......