Frances Partridge
In a year somewhat barren of imaginative works, I choose one which illuminates both the painter's vision and the writer's mind: Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writ- ings by......
Harold Acton
My choice of three best books of the year is determined by their rich variety of period, style and scholarship. Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman (Hamish Hamilton, £15), Marie......
J. L. Carr
I enjoyed Jonathan Raban's miscellany, For Love and Money (Collins Harvill, £10.95), because here in Kettering, apart from 98-year-old Edmund Kirby (who used to give H. E. Bates......
Peter Levi
I hate the idea of choosing one, every December, among all the year's poets, particularly this year which 'has produced five or six excellent slim volumes, all by friends of......
J. Enoch Powell
Naming the 'two best books' of a year is an intolerably pretentious proceeding. What I can do without bad conscience is to men- tion the two books which have proved the biggest......
Anita Brookner
Not a spectacular year for fiction, although many big names were represented. I found them a bit short-winded, with the excep- tion of two very different examples: Philip Roth......
Piers Paul Read
The Polish Way by Adam Zamoyski is an excellent history of Poland, handsomely published (John Murray, £17.95). The Case of Thomas N. (Deutsch, £9.95) is an austere but......
Rupert Christiansen
Michael Ignatieff's The Russian Album (Chatto, £12.95) is the painful study of the marriage of his grandparents and their expatriation from Russia after the Revolu- tion,......
Francis King
I had been looking forward to Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield (Viking, £14.95) for a long time. She brings out the flashy and rubbishy elements in both the character and......
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