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......

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Mine, in order of reading, start with Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians (Viking, 07.95); it casts a blaze of light on the shadowy tract of history when the Roman Empire......

Isabel Colegate

Books I have enjoyed this year have included Rebecca West by Victoria Glen- dinning (Weidenfeld, £14.95) — can there ever have been a more perspicacious yet kindly biographer of......

Charles Glass

My wife, Fiona, who is a more voracious reader than I am, asked me to read Brian Inglis's The Unknown Guest: The Mystery of Intuition (Chatto & Windus, £12.95), which I hope to......

Christopher Howse

Why bother reading new books when you haven't finished the old ones? Be that as it may, it was a great pleasure to see Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm (Collins, £9.95) come out in......

Anne Chisholm

The best new book by an established writer I have read is Ian McEwan's The Child In Time (Cape, £10.95), a haunting story full of emotion and drama, both political and personal.......

Gabriele Annan

The new writing I enjoyed most was the first chapter of Michael Ignatieff's The Russian Album (Chatto, £12.95) where he explains his compulsion to write a memoir of his......