Our critics choose their books of the year

Beryl Bainbridge

The book I am most immersed in this Christmas season is John Birt's autobiography, The Harder Path (Time Warner). Forget whether you think he dumbed down, or indeed helped to destroy, the Reithian idea of the BBC, and simply follow the life story of a clever Catholic lad brought up on the outskirts of Liverpool. Disregard at least 300 pages, unless you work for the BBC, and concentrate on his childhood and the love he had for his parents. I think he's telling the truth, as he sees it.

J G Ballard

As Americans work themselves up towards the second Bush war, the rest of us might usefully take a hard look at who we really are. John Gray's Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (Granta Books) is a clear-eyed assessment of human nature and our almost unlimited gift for self-delusion. A deeply provocative and unsettling book. Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (Penguin) is another overdue wake-up call, puncturing the modern myth that we are largely creatures of our upbringings. Sadly, as Pinker shows, the savage within us is rarely noble. Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a scientific detective story, a brilliant cross between Edgar Allan Poe and Gray's Anatomy. Why are our hearts on the left side? Why do clocks go clockwise? Why are men's testicles unbalanced? An exhilarating read.

Joan Bakewell

Straw Dogs by John Gray is an absorbing book, full of challenging ideas you want to argue with. But there is hardly time before Gray rushes you on to his next set of defiant claims: "We may well look back on the 20th century as a time of peace." Worrying but, strangely, not depressing. In 2002, the Arts Council made an award for translation. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, translated by George Bird (The Harvill Press), reached the shortlist of six. (The winner was W G Sebald's Austerlitz.) It's a dark fable of life in post-Soviet Russia, with that frantic despair and resigned humour you find in Gogol. But if it weren't so Russian, this penguin would be a friend of Wallace and Gromit. Panorama: 50 years of pride and paranoia by Richard Lindley (Politico's) is a classic text about a legendary programme, with a terrific mix of the early struggles, the highs and lows of a supposed golden age, and heartfelt polemic against the marginalising of the current affairs flagship, which now goes out late on Sunday night. Media folk will enjoy the gossip and the name-calling. But the broader public will be given an honest insight into one corner of television's history.

Lynn Barber

Two biographies of minor 20th-century writers gave me great pleasure, though for very different reasons. Selina Hastings's Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto & Windus) is a near-perfect example of the traditional literary biography, told with wit, intelligence, clarity and just the right degree of acerbity. Roger Lewis's Anthony Burgess (Faber and Faber), on the other hand, is a mess, a Tristram Shandy of a narrative, with more digressions than drive. But there are passages of such brilliance - especially when he rails against his subject, whom he has come to hate over the 20-year course researching this book - that I found it exhilarating as well as infuriating. Lewis is a mad obsessive, more of a stalker than a biographer, but he certainly brings new life to what can otherwise seem a rather tame genre.

Hugo Barnacle

Truer Than True Romance by Jeanne Martinet (Ebury Press) was an anthology of those terrible old American romance comics for girls, but with all the captions and speech-bubbles rewritten by a wised-up modern woman to produce absurdly funny parables of self-delusion, lost airline luggage and bad hair. Spies by Michael Frayn (Faber) was a compelling variation on The Go-Between, showing wartime suburban intrigues from the viewpoint of a small boy in firm possession of the wrong end of the stick. The Bat Tattoo (Bloomsbury) by Russell Hoban worked ideas about art and life into a story of middle-aged romance, which makes it sound pretty ordinary; in fact, it was rich and strange. New in paperback, Going Out Live by Mark Lawson (Picador) is a media satire about the tabloid humiliation of a TV host. It seems even more painfully well-observed than it did on first reading.

Peter Bradshaw

Jonathan Franzen's show-stopping The Corrections (Fourth Estate) rolls over the opposition like a tank - but that was last year. The best fiction of 2002, for me, came from Claire Messud, whose The Hunters (Picador) is an intriguingly paired set of novellas, beautifully constructed and conceived. Reading her is like an encounter with a higher order of intelligence. For my money, Zadie Smith

did not disappoint with her second novel, The Autograph Man (Random House), a witty account of celebrity obsession. In show business, the movie mogul Art Linson's What Just Happened?: bitter Hollywood tales from the front line (Bloomsbury) gave a hilarious account of producing films like Fight Club. And for sheer laughs and terrific writing, Frank Skinner's autobiography (Arrow) was superb. His account of losing his virginity to a Birmingham prostitute is one of the most remarkable pieces of confessional writing I have ever read.

Jason Cowley

I greatly admired Ignorance by Milan Kundera (Faber), a story about two emigres returning to Prague after a long absence, in which the author combines all of his old irony, his gift for essayistic disquisition and playful eroticism with a new and sombre awareness of transience and mortality. Published in France before the events of 11 September 2001, Platform (Heinemann; translated by Frank Wynne) is a work of thrilling confrontation, in which Michel Houellebecq once more proves the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity. John Gray's anti-humanist polemic Straw Dogs is as enthralling as it is provocative. Is there a more consistently interesting thinker in Britain?

Amanda Craig

Allison Pearson's searing comedy about working motherhood, I Don't Know How She Does It (Chatto), perfectly describes the exhaustion, frustration, and redemption that children bring to ambition. Philip Hensher's ambitious and absorbing account of Victorian Afghanistan in The Mulberry Empire (Flamingo) makes him outstanding and exciting. Kate Jennings's Moral Hazard (Fourth Estate) is a prescient little satire about a young writer's struggle to support her senile husband by working on Wall Street. My favourite, however, is Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor (Macmillan), an exquisite tale of revenge, love, beauty and honour set in 13th-century feudal Japan. Violently pleasurable, it's the first of a trilogy, and, like Tolkien, leaves adults and adolescents alike completely desperate for the sequel.

Edwina Currie

Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (Sceptre) tells of a man who attempts to return to his roots in South Africa, with tragic consequences for himself and those he befriends. Shades of William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach, I thought, but exquisitely moving. Linda Grant's Still Here (Little, Brown) tackles the same theme of return, this time to modern Liverpool, with flashbacks to the firebombing of Dresden thrown in. Linda's mother and mine were great friends, so I was pleased to find her perceptions of the world we both grew up in razor-sharp. I also caught up with Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten: memories of a chemical boyhood (Picador) and relished the stinks and flashes of teenage chemistry that seduced me, too; what oddities we must have seemed to our contemporaries, but how irresistible is the magic of science for its own sake. This is Michael Frayn territory, but the book I am reading now is by his distinguished missus, Claire Tomalin - Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self (Viking). Pepys wrote his diary for only ten years as a young man and no full version was published until 1970, 300 years later. But the picture he painted of events and people is more vivid and durable than any official chronicle. So may it be for us all.

Patricia Duncker

It's been a wonderful year for fiction by women and I have been spoilt for choice. I read the new Donna Tartt, The Little Friend (Bloomsbury), with great pleasure, astonishment and delight. It is the Middlemarch of the Mississippi, packed with hard drugs and lethal snakes. Yet more sinister and menacing is Bella Bathurst's first novel, Special (Picador), which casts a disturbing eye over the sexual behaviour of teenage girls. Carol Shields's Unless (Fourth Estate) didn't win the Booker, but I think it should have done. Among the gentlemen, George Szirtes is the poet of my choice. His collection English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe Books) is scary and masterful.

Antonia Fraser

Alistair Horne is the distinguished historian of French battlescapes from Verdun to Algeria. Now he turns his great narrative gifts to construct the story, marked with both beauty and violence, of the capital itself. Reading Seven Ages of Paris: portrait of a city (Macmillan) is like taking an exciting trip in a French balloon - the appropriate image on the cover of the book. The private malice of Cecil Beaton, as revealed recently in the full version of his diaries edited by Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld), did not take me by surprise. At the age of 23, I was seconded by the publishers for whom I worked to "assist" him in writing The Glass of Fashion (Cassell Illustrated); there had been some quarrel with the previous adviser, as I remember it, a grand literary figure. When Beaton photographed me for my (first) wedding as a reward, he gazed at me in all my finery, pointed the camera and said, languidly: "Open piggies." What, me with my big blue eyes? You will get plenty of malice and fun, as well as some unexpectedly touching passages about illness and age, in The Unexpurgated Beaton. Ideal reading, I would have thought, for the long Christmas family holiday.

Maggie Gee

The most enjoyable book I have read this year was in proof, but it comes out in January - watch out. Cauvery Madhavan's second novel, The Uncoupling (BlackAmber Books), is a subtly comic, warm and believable portrait of an Indian marriage under stress as Balu and Janaki do the Allsights "European Kaleidoscope" coach tour. Beautifully shaped and paced, it's a terrific read.

Richard Gott

I cannot remember such a good publishing year, or one in which the reader has been so spoilt for choice. I enjoyed, and was informed by, two post-9/11 books that illuminate the Muslim world: Malise Ruthven's A Fury for God: the Islamist attack on America (Granta) and Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms: crusades, jihads and modernity (Verso). Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography, Interesting Times (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), is a wonderful read, and could be given to anyone as a present, regardless of their political persuasion (indeed Tories might derive more pleasure from it than the ranks of new Labour). For aficionados of Latin America, and for those who want to understand the background to Lula's victory in Brazil, Cutting the Wire: the story of the landless movement in Brazil (Latin America Bureau) by Sue Branford and Jan Rocha is an original and timely contribution to contemporary history.

John Gray

A book I've been dipping into throughout the year is Alexander Herzen's My Past and Thoughts (University of California Press). It's hard to imagine exhausting this mine of memories and observations. Herzen's portraits of those he knew - Bakunin, Marx and Turgenev, among many others - are unforgettable; his reflections show a mind of the rarest freedom and originality. In a year awash with memoirs showing no trace of thought, Herzen is an unfailing delight.

Eric Hobsbawm

Of my three books of the year, two were written long ago, but have been republished in 2002. Norman Lewis's Naples '44: an intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth (Eland Books) was first published in 1978. Restrained, funny, sad and humane, this superb record of war in Italy, by a shockingly underrated writer, may be read in anticipation of another American occupation of a defeated country. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Picador) hardly needs a commercial. Who would not give their life to write about anything as Babel wrote about revolutionary Russia? (He himself did, in Stalin's time.) My only choice from this year is Joseph Stiglitz's Globalisation and Its Discontents (Allen Lane), a powerful critique of the "Washington consensus" about globalisation and the International Monetary Fund's attempt to carry it into practice, by the recent Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Anthony Howard

The palm for biography of the year has to go to Claire Tomalin for her Samuel Pepys. A model of industry and research, it is also beautifully written, as is only to be expected of a former literary editor of the New Statesman. The political biography I learnt most from was Edward Pearce's Denis Healey (Little, Brown). Thorough and exhaustive, it earns the right to take its place alongside Healey's autobiography, the classic Time of My Life, published 13 years ago. For comic relief, try Playing to the Gallery by Simon Hoggart (Guardian/Atlantic Books), a collection of the parliamentary sketches he has written since "year zero" of the Blair revolution. Even as politicians grow ever more serious, at least one critic in the gods has managed to retain an irrepressible bump of irreverence.

Stephen Howe

Kanan Makiya's The Rock (Constable) is a complex meditation on history, identity and faith which helps to illuminate many of the agonies over Iraq, Palestine and much more. Valentine Cunningham's Reading After Theory (Blackwell) is a witty, erudite polemic against the pomposities and absurdities of literary theory. If a booklet accompanying a CD can pass as a book, the lyrics of Billy Bragg's England, Half English (Cooking Vinyl) propose more stimulating and varied ideas about who we, in these islands, are or might become than most heavyweight political texts have ever done.

Kathryn Hughes

It's been a particularly good year for books about beautiful, damaged women. Fortunately, these make rather good Christmas presents, especially for any beautiful, damaged women whom you happen to know. Selina Hastings's biography of Rosamond Lehmann is a luxurious, gossipy read which pays a great deal of attention - as did Lehmann herself - to her rackety love life. One of her most important lovers was C Day Lewis, who also found time to sleep with Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose memoir Slipstream (Macmillan) is full of unsuitable men. Sonia Orwell did not, as far as anyone knows, sleep with C Day Lewis (who, quite sensibly, hated being called "Cecil"), but she was beautiful enough to bewitch the smartest part of wartime London. Hilary Spurling's brief biography The Girl from the Fiction Department (Hamish Hamilton) is unashamedly partisan and aims to rescue Sonia's reputation from the dark hole into which it has recently fallen.

Mick Hume

Two of the year's best books - Kirsten Sellars's The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton Publishing) and David Chandler's From Kosovo to Kabul: human rights and international intervention (Pluto Press) - examine the sea change in international politics in which, if Bush could pitch his war against Saddam as a human rights crusade, most of his critics would support it, with or without UN approval. Those trying to get an intellectual handle on our dumbed-down society could start with James Heartfield's The "Death of the Subject" Explained (Sheffield Hallam University Press). The award for worst book of the year goes to John Gray's Straw Dogs. A plague on any philosopher who writes about humanity as, well, a plague.

Andrew Hussey

When Platform by Michel Houellebecq was originally published in France, five days before the twin towers catastrophe, Houellebecq was at the centre of a fierce row, provoked by his public declaration that Islam was the most stupid of religions. By the time Platform was published in English, Houellebecq was on trial in Paris for "incitement to hatred of Muslims" (he was subsequently acquitted). And then the Bali bomb exploded. It would be too much to claim that Platform, which culminates in the massacre of western tourists at an Asian holiday resort, is prophetic. It is only a novel, albeit an extraordinarily good one. But it does seem that Houellebecq is one of the few novelists working in any language who properly understands the tensions of the present age. He is also utterly fearless in articulating them. Vive le Houellebecq libre!

John King

The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner (Jonathan Cape) is a surreal wander through the Scottish Highlands. It sees The Nephew tracking his uncle, the eponymous Man Who Walks, who has been accused of stealing a pub's World Cup cash kitty. Warner's unique prose style makes every step a pleasure; the final collision of people and place is the perfect end to his best novel so far. Porno by Irvine Welsh (Cape) is very funny, but more important is its lack of compromise, as Welsh rips into gentrification and the rise of the media class. Nicholas Murray's biography of Aldous Huxley (Little, Brown) stood out. Along with George Orwell and Alan Sillitoe, Huxley represents the best that 20th-century English fiction has to offer. Brave New World, in particular, was the perfect preview of today's Ecstasy-dulled, EU-conned society.

William Leith

One of the best non-fiction books of the year, I thought, was Seek (Methuen) by Denis Johnson, a collection of journalism including a piece in which the author goes to interview Prince Johnson, the Liberian warlord. When he arrives at Johnson's compound, he finds him "gripping an acoustic guitar and singing 'Rivers of Babylon'". Then he shows the author a video of his rival President Doe having his ears cut off. It's terrifying, with moments of strangled hilarity. I liked Complications (Profile Books) by Atul Gawande, a book by a surgeon about how surgeons can make terrible mistakes. I was genuinely gripped by James Lasdun's novel The Horned Man (Cape), about a guy who thinks a killer might be trying to frame him for a series of horrible murders. And I thought July, July (Flamingo), Tim O'Brien's novel about a class reunion of disillusioned fiftysomethings, was one of his best.

David Marquand

Eric Hobsbawm's magisterial Interesting Times heads my list for 2002. As one would expect from Britain's greatest living historian, it combines verve and passion with wry detachment. Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in the year of the Russian revolution, and grew up in Vienna and Berlin. He conveys more successfully than any other writer I can think of what it felt like to be a Jewish teenager in the heart of Germany when Hitler came to power, and then a young communist intellectual in 1930s Cambridge and Popular Front Paris. This is a must for anyone who wants to understand the century that has just ended. I was almost as gripped by John Gray's harsh and self-lacerating Straw Dogs, an excoriating attack on humanist progressivism and all its derivatives. Last, but by no means least, I cheered inwardly at almost every page of Joseph Stiglitz's Globalisation and Its Discontents, a rumbustious, slash-and-burn critique of the narrow-minded, doctrinaire free-market fundamentalism of the IMF and the "Washington consensus".

Mark Mazower

I was gripped by a brilliant novel, The Cold Six Thousand - the latest bare-knuckle ride through the paranoiac world of James Ellroy - as well as its prequel, American Tabloid (both Arrow). For sheer furious, disgusted intensity, I can't think of anyone to match him; like Philip Roth, he gets better and better. Read him to be cured of any lingering nostalgia for the cold war. Alexander Baron's 1963 novel, The Lowlife (recently reissued by Harvill, with an introduction by Iain Sinclair), weaves its tale of the seedy postwar East End life of its hero Harryboy Boas in prose of astonishing assurance; I felt ashamed of having taken so long to acquaint myself with the author. Finally, one of those academic tomes that occasionally comes along to help us understand our own age better: A W Brian Simpson's Human Rights and the End of Empire (Oxford University Press) marks the point at which historians and lawyers start to look seriously at the power politics behind the emergence of a discourse on human rights after 1945. A huge but fascinating book.

Frank McLynn

The Victorians by A N Wilson (Hutchinson) combined sound judgement and historical nuance with the author's love of paradox. White Mughals: love and betrayal in 18th-century India by William Dalrymple (HarperCollins) was a masterpiece of careful sleuthing that exposed the underbelly of the East India Company. Samuel Pepys by Claire Tomalin was lucid, compassionate and persuasive. Roy Hattersley's life of John Wesley, A Brand from the Burning (Little, Brown), was first-rate and surely establishes him as our leading biographer of religious leaders. If it is ex-politician writers you are after, choose Hattersley rather than Roy Jenkins.

Pankaj Mishra

I read with admiration Louis Menand's intellectual history of modern America, The Metaphysical Club. His new collection of essays, American Studies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), should establish Menand as America's leading cultural critic - a position once occupied by Dwight McDonald and then usurped by Tom Wolfe. Ved Mehta's memoir All for Love (Granta) offered a genuine attempt at self-examination by an emotionally reticent writer. Few post- 11 September books are likely to be more rigorously argued than Slavoj Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso) and Lewis Lapham's Theatre of War (The New Press). I also enjoyed Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes's cultural history of Russia (Allen Lane).

Jan Morris

I greatly admired (and to be honest, envied) William Fiennes's The Snow Geese (Picador) - quirky, often funny, wonderfully descriptive and genuinely moving in its contemplation of nature. A lovely literary debut.

Toby Mundy

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East (OUP) by Michael Oren is a dramatic reconstruction of the war in which much of today's dreadful stasis finds it origins; certainly one of the finest books about the Middle East I've ever read. I also thought Paul Auster's Book of Illusions (Faber) was terrific and makes a persuasive case that he is fast becoming Kafka's closest contemporary heir.

Adam Newey

The judges of this year's Forward prizes were, apparently, unanimous in their decision to give the best collection award to Peter Porter for his 16th volume, Max is Missing (Picador). Porter never ceases to astonish with his invention, urbanity and engaged contemporaneity. The Forward goes nicely with the Queen's Gold Medal, which he won earlier this year, sealing an annus mirabilis for the veteran Australian. The Irish poet Matthew Sweeney published a long-overdue Selected Poems (Cape) this year, rounding up the best of more than 20 years' work. He is by turns hilarious and subversive, a master of the cheekily surreal, whose conspiratorial mateyness often conceals the grinning of a skull. And Pleased to See Me (Bloodaxe), Neil Astley's second anthology of the year (after the much-hyped Staying Alive), is tremendous fun: where else will you find e e cummings on machinery as sex, or a poem about Ken and Barbie playing out their transvestite fantasies?

Ben Pimlott

The book I have enjoyed most is Lloyd George: war leader (Allen Lane), the fourth volume of the late John Grigg's triumphant and shrewdly balanced celebration of a Great Briton largely forgotten by the modern public, yet one with a strong claim to be Britain's outstanding prime minister of the 20th century. Not only was LG (unlike Churchill) a brilliantly effective peacetime leader, as well as a wartime one, when he came to office at the end of 1916, Britain's circumstances were quite as dire - if less glamorously so - as those facing Churchill in May 1940. Britain did not "stand alone", but, as Grigg wryly points out, with an ally like the French, things might have been better if it had.

Stephen Pollard

The War Against the Terror Masters by Michael Ledeen (St Martin's Press) is a terrifying indictment of why America was so unprepared for 9/11 and, more constructively, a detailed analysis of the terror network we are up against, its state sponsors, the role of radical Islam and the collaboration of our supposed "allies" in the Middle East. It is impossible to read Ledeen's clear-headed and sober laying out of the facts and fail to see that we are in a fight for our very survival - and that those who oppose the war on terror are fools, or dupes, or traitors. The third volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, Master of the Senate (Cape), is even better, to those of us who counted down the days in the 12 years since the second volume appeared. It is, quite simply, the finest biography I can ever imagine reading.

Anthony Sampson

Sheila Hale's The Man Who Lost His Language (Allen Lane) is a remarkable account of how her husband, the art historian Sir John Hale, recovered from a stroke which left him without speech until he died three years ago. It is a moving and intimate love story, but also full of important medical explanations and interpretations of aphasia by leading authorities. John Grigg's Lloyd George is a masterly account of the brilliant prime minister at the peak of his power: the third volume of the definitive biography, sadly cut short by the author's death a year ago. Neal Ascherson's Stone Voices: the search for Scotland (Granta) provides a scholarly and poetic explanation of the emotional roots of Scottish nationalism, invaluable for any Englishman who is baffled by its anger and contradictions.

Roger Scruton

This year has been devoted to catching up on things that I should have read years ago, with time off now and then for reviewing. Rereading the Iliad and Le rouge et le noir has caused me to throw recently published novels into the bin. There were two exceptions: Milan Kundera's Ignorance (but then I had to review it) and Nick Hornby's characteristically human and intelligent How to be Good (Penguin). I gained a lot from James Wood's penetrating literary criticism in The Broken Estate (Pimlico) and also from Antonia Fraser's impressive work of synthesis in Marie Antoinette (Phoenix) - the grim story of a crime that is still insufficiently pondered. It amazes me that, Francois Furet, Rene Sedillot and Simon Schama notwithstanding, there are still people who take the kind of attitude to the French revolutionaries that Eric Hobsbawm takes to the Bolsheviks and David Irving to the Nazis.

Will Self

My book of the year was Straw Dogs by John Gray. I read it once, I read it twice and took notes. I arranged to meet its author so I could publicise the book - I thought it that good. Gray is a synthetic thinker who draws together insights from philosophy, ecology, politics, economics and anthropology to produce a devastating critique of liberal humanism, and all of it is set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) apercus. No wonder Gray's book received a rough ride from more orthodox philosophers and thinkers: his writing renders much of what they spend their professional lives doing as otiose as it is irrelevant.

Maurice Walsh

Mixing history and reportage, Andy Beckett's Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's hidden history (Faber) explains why the lure of London ended up being a trap for the old dictator. Beckett explores the relationship between Britain and Chile, from the entrepreneurs and mercenaries of the 19th century to the political activists of the Pinochet era, and shows how the Chilean upper classes made England their ideal of civilised living. The real joy of this book is how he revives the traces of history still colouring the present. A similar feat is evident in The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and five lives of a lost war (Papermac), in which Paul Hendrickson explores the guilt and responsibility of the American defence secretary during the worst days of the Vietnam war, and recounts the stories of five people whose lives were profoundly changed by that conflict.

Ann Widdecombe

Top of my non-fiction list is Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler (Weidenfeld), a contemporary account of the reaction of ordinary Germans to the rise of Hitler. There have been plenty of attempts to explain how an entire nation in Europe could succumb to something as evil as Nazism in the middle of the 20th century, but what makes this unique is that it is not written with the wisdom of hindsight, but with mounting incredulity as events unfold. A close second in the non-fiction category is The Glass Bathyscaphe by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin (Profile). This history of glass will make you look at everyday objects with new eyes. Erudite but not indigestible, lucid and informative, it's a good and sometimes controversial read. No stocking would be complete without Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette, a bulky but wonderful appraisal of the last queen of France.

Robert Winder

Antony Beevor's Berlin (Viking) is a revelatory account of the Second World War's horrifying endgame. His description of two equally monstrous armies, grappling for survival and matching one another atrocity for atrocity, is studded with dire close-ups, lethal facts and stark expressions of despair. As a vehement anti-snooker merchant, I was astonished to be blown over by The Hurricane by Bill Borrows (Atlantic). It begins with a gale of expletives, and that's the polite part. As the "turbulent life" of Alex Higgins unfolds (or surges off the rails), it is like watching a train wreck. The man, and the book, pulsate with nervous energy, nearly all of it - except for moments of manic tranquillity over a snooker cue - ill-directed. Philip Gourevitch's A Cold Case (Picador) was an exemplary narration of a real-life murder story that managed to be both brief and eloquent. And nothing was more scintillating than Anthony Lane's collection of New Yorker criticism, Nobody's Perfect (Picador). He's a friend, so I'm not allowed to recommend his book, but perhaps, if I hereby declare him a mortal enemy, I can mention it in passing.

Peregrine Worsthorne

While reading about the Soviet Union under Stalin has always struck me as a most unpleasant duty, I fall on books about Germany under Hitler with unassuageable avidity. For anyone with a similar taste, Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner will prove compulsive. Haffner was the pen name of a young, non-Jewish, anti-Nazi intellectual who fled his country on the eve of the Second World War. On arriving here, he wrote down for the record what it had been like to live as a child and youth in Nazi Germany, while his memory of this terrible experience was still searingly clear and vivid. Having completed it, he put it in a drawer and continued with the rest of what turned out to be an active writing life, first on David Astor's Observer - where I got to know him as a regular contributor on international affairs - and then, in Bonn and Berlin, as one of Germany's most original and influential opinion-formers. Coming upon this memoir after Haffner's death, his son has now translated and published it, and in its pages are to be found insights, judgements, analysis and diagnosis of the Hitler phenomenon that even today's greatest experts on the subject, with all the archives now open and with the benefit of a half-century of hindsight, cannot really improve on. Every page of Miranda Carter's biography of Anthony Blunt (Pan) rings true; but in this instance the truth for once is not stranger than fiction. In fact, this admirable author, by taking the drama and the mystery and the heat out of the Blunt story, has managed not to diminish, but to enhance its interest. In Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton University Press) Sheldon S Wolin demonstrates how Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America is also a study of aristocracy in America - a subsidiary but fascinating theme that here receives, for the first time, the loving attention it deserves.

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