Alastair Forbes

No doubt a genuine Old Fogey should in this space be plugging the work of a younger specimen of that alleged genus, and it is true that, as a modest founding contributor to the......

Harriet Waugh

I have read very little non-fiction this year but a great many entertaining novels. Out of these, Beryl Bainbridge's Watson's Apology gave me greatest pleasure. It is a......

Kay Dick

Non-fiction best: honours equally divided between Hilary Spurling's Secrets of a Woman's Heart and T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd. Dame Ivy told me that if she was ever to write......

A. N. Wilson

Everyone has been telling me for years that I ought to read Les Caves du Vatican by Andre Gide. I did so this year for the first time and thought it was a complete dud.......

Peter Quennell

The appearance of a new biography always raises my hopes, particularly if its subject is a writer, and it helps me to understand the genesis of a book that I have long admired.......

Christopher Fildes

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (Penguin) must be the best book of the year 1136. The kings start with Brutus, and go on to Lear, Cole (old), and Arthur.......