Our critics choose their books of the year

Beryl Bainbridge

Edith Templeton's Gordon (Viking) could be subtitled "the joy of hurt". First published in 1966 by the New English Library, and almost immediately banned in both England and Germany on the grounds of indecency, it is the story of a sadomasochistic love affair between an intelligent young girl and a psychiatrist. In real life, the latter committed suicide. Templeton, aged 87, is still with us. That her book has not lost its power to shock is attributable to the brilliance of its prose. Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self (Penguin pbk) is a wonderful biography of a great man. One would think his diary was a sufficient legacy, but Tomalin has leapt ahead and provided an unravelling of an age whose concepts, both political and moral, Pepys took for granted. In many ways, his sexual life, with its deceptions, seductions and miseries, was no different from that endured by the characters in Edith Templeton's novel.

Joan Bakewell

Sowing the Wind: the seeds of conflict in the Middle East by John Keay (John Murray) begins in 1900 and explains in detail the background to how we come to be where we are today. Here is the fall of the Ottoman empire, the western powers' scrabble for territory, the Anglo/French squabbles about who shall have access to the oil around Mosul. Here are all the trade-offs and negotiations, the arm-twisting and exerting of influence. This book makes all too clear that we have learnt nothing from history, and Blair and Bush are simply prolonging its mistakes. Injury Time by D J Enright (Pimlico) will do much to sustain your belief in humanity. It is his final memoir, an extended commonplace book, full of gentle humour. Enright's learning and wit shine through.

J G Ballard

Godard: a portrait of the artist at 70 by Colin MacCabe (Bloomsbury) is a brilliant biography of the almost forgotten genius of world cinema. MacCabe brings to life Godard's strange and prickly personality, and sets Breathless, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou against the political background of the day. A superb picture of a maverick talent that is also an obituary for a vanished era of serious film. Helmut Newton's Autobiography (Duckworth) is the great photographer's long-awaited self-portrait, and a fascinating glimpse into a dream-world of palace hotels and sleepwalking women. For me, Newton is the greatest figurative artist at work today, the heir to Paul Delvaux and those special fantasies that awake at midnight.

Hugo Barnacle

Toby Litt's Finding Myself (Hamish Hamilton) revived the idea of the country-house party as a laboratory of the emotions and gave it a number of modern twists, to excellent effect. Matt Thorne's Child Star (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) was an impressively anti-nostalgic story of 1980s adolescents acting in a TV serial. Both were notable for their range and the detail of characterisation. Russell Hoban continued on cracking form and gave us Her Name Was Lola (Bloomsbury), another of his offbeat romances, full of quirky lore about Hindu gods, masculine fecklessness, literary inspiration and E-type Jags.

Nicholas Blincoe

Geoff Dyer seems to have abandoned fiction and non-fiction alike in favour of a highly personal hybrid. His book on travel and leisure, Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (Abacus), is difficult to describe but impossible to forget: I would call it a roving snapshot, if I was not scared of sounding too illogical. Another unusual work of non-fiction, Joe Sacco's Palestine (Jonathan Cape), is a first-hand account of a trip through Palestine during the first intifada - told in comic-book form. It was a revelation to discover that a comic book could deal so effectively with issues of truth and objectivity. It is prefaced with a powerful essay by Edward Said, whose death this year was a great loss.

A S Byatt

It is a long time since I have been knocked sideways by a book of poems, but the life, energy, verbal precision and inventiveness of Don Paterson's Landing Light (Faber & Faber) kept me awake at night. It changes my view of the whole landscape of British poetry for the better. Tibor Fischer's reader-maddening Voyage to the End of the Room (Chatto & Windus) isn't really British jokiness - it's European black humour with a tragic undertow. Richard J Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press) gave the clearest account I've read of the political and cultural currents in pre-Second World War Germany. It is lucidly written and full of intelligence and lively detail.

Justin Cartwright

I had absolutely no interest in D B C Pierre's Vernon God Little (Faber) until I was in bed for a day and read it. It's funny, original and highly satirical. J M Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (Secker & Warburg) is no novel, but a concentrated, moving exercise in moral philosophy. The heroine has beliefs, but she doesn't believe in them - a strangely apposite position for our times. Patrick Leigh Fermor's Words of Mercury (John Murray) has the perfume of a richer, more cultured era when travel and classical culture were indistinguishable.

Jason Cowley

Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Canongate) is set in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. Mixing fact and fiction, and including actual people whom Courtemanche met and came to know well while he was making a film about Aids in Rwanda, it is at once a love story, a fierce indictment, and an elegy for lost friends. Not since Baudelaire has a writer so viscerally made the link between sex and death. It is unforgettable. Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor (Atlantic Books), written with economy and grace and deservedly shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is an intriguing parable of the feelings of redundancy felt by many liberal whites in the new South Africa, a country destined, it seems, to be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Amanda Craig

I was astounded that Rose Tremain's The Colour (Chatto & Windus) did not even get on the Booker longlist. By far the best novel I've read this year, it describes, in vigorous, vivid prose, an unhappy Victorian marriage exposed to devastating greed during the New Zealand gold rush. Its insight into characters ranging from murderers to Maoris is rich and rewarding. Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal (Viking) is not only a wonderfully mordant exploration of a teacher's affair with a 15-year-old pupil but a satire on the clash between the educational elite and the urban underclass. Louise Doughty's Fires in the Dark (Simon & Schuster) is a harrowing and wholly absorbing account of the gypsy Holocaust, and how one man survives it. A S Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories (Chatto & Windus) contains five modern fairy tales, gorgeous gems about life, mystery and death that make the perfect present.

Edwina Currie

It has been a great year for books about naughty ladies. I loved Dennis Friedman's Ladies of the Bedchamber: the role of the royal mistress (Peter Owen); it suggests the recent depiction on television of romps by the "virtually insatiable" Charles II was only scratching the surface. Andrea Stuart's The Rose of Martinique: a life of Napoleon's Josephine (Macmillan) is a terrific memoir of a remarkable woman, while the inhabitants of Courtesans (HarperCollins) by Katie Hickman make today's scantily dressed celebs look a very limp bunch. Or do I mean the men?

Margaret Drabble

Hilary Mantel, talking to Monica Ali recently at the Royal Society of Literature, praised Brick Lane (Doubleday) partly because it "brings us news, which is one of the things the novel can do". On these grounds and many others I much enjoyed this humane and human book. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury) is the only Afghan novel I have ever read and it brings news from a pre-conflict Afghanistan. Written by an emigre doctor now settled in the US, it has perhaps too much plot, but the childhood scenes are memorable. Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (Fourth Estate), also brings us news from the past and it is horrifying. This is a deeply unsettling, gripping work.

Bill Emmott

Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) distils 150 years of Japanese history into 150 pages, tells you all you need to know about what went wrong, right and then wrong again in that enigmatic but fascinating country, and offers some enjoyable tales. Pigs at the Trough (Crown) by Arianna Huffington, is a well-researched populist tract and a welcome critical look at what went wrong in American capitalism and democracy during the Clinton years - far better, and more readable, than the poorly thought-through anti-capitalist diatribes that too often pass for criticism of globalisation in Europe.

Maggie Gee

Suzy Kester's autobiography Under My Own Colours (Troubador) is compulsively readable, harrowing and amusing by turns. She tells the story of an extraordinary dynasty of mixed English, Welsh, Sioux, African American, Nigerian and Jewish extraction. Somehow Kester manages to record hurt without hatred as she negotiates the ups and downs of life: "In Africa, even a beggar is given honour, because yesterday he may have been a warrior and tomorrow he might be a king."

John Gray

Only J G Ballard could have written Millennium People (Flamingo) - a light, mellow and often hilariously funny novel about urban terrorism. Iain Sinclair's London Orbital: a walk around the M25 (Penguin pbk) is another instalment in his unique genre - a delicious mix of occult topology, hermetic scholarship and sharp, poetic observation. Will Self's Dorian (Penguin pbk) still has all the ruthless veracity and wit I enjoyed when I first read it last year.

Roy Hattersley

Jonathan Bate's biography of John Clare (Picador) describes a poet about whom we all talk without knowing very much. It is written in the spirit of Clare's own rural Arcadian tragedy. Power and

Glory by Adam Nicolson (HarperCollins)

explains how the King James Bible - one of the triumphs of the English language - was written by a committee.

Anthony Howard

The best political book of the year was John Kampfner's Blair's Wars (Free Press). A dispassionate and fair-minded account of the Manichaean mindset that has led the Prime Minister to involve the UK in five conflicts in six years, it provides an entirely new perspective on the meaning of new Labour. William Keegan does much the same in The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown (John Wiley). Anyone who wants to understand both the inhibitions and aspirations that motivate the Chancellor should read this study. The outstanding conventional political biography of the year was D R Thorpe's Eden: the life and times of Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, 1897-1977 (Chatto & Windus). Although gently and deferentially written, this biography offers a salutary reminder of what happened to the last prime minister who launched this country into war on a false premise.

Kathryn Hughes

It was a great year for books on domestic history. One of my favourites was Common Bodies: women, touch and power in 17th-century England by Laura Gowing (Yale University Press) which lifts the lid on the nightmarish world of female community in the century of the Stuarts. Everywhere, it seems, women were poking, prodding and spying on each other, ready to report the slightest sexual slip to the (male) authorities. One of the most interesting biographies to appear was Ann Wroe's Perkin: a story of deception (Cape). Wroe's speciality is writing about people who are barely there in the historical record (her last book was on Pontius Pilate). Here she recreates the life of the young Flemish boy Perkin Warbeck who, in the 1490s, tried to pass himself off as one of the Princes in the Tower. Wroe is not only a formidable scholar but a writer of rare flair. Finally, memoir continued to flourish. Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost was probably the best. Mantel doesn't just write out her own extraordinary life (married twice to the same man; the agony of endometriosis) but reflects with knowing wit on the whole difficult business of self-writing.

John King

Free Radical (Continuum), a collection of Tony Benn's columns for the Morning Star, is a reminder of how age so often translates as wisdom. Benn writes honestly about a broad range of subjects, from the state of the Labour Party to the nightmare of European union, and should be compulsory reading for all exchange-rate-obsessed zombies dully nodding their heads as our freedom and culture are erased by bureaucrats. Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia (Dewi Lewis) by Paul Willetts is a biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross, the hard-drinking writer who for many epitomises creative Soho in the 1940s and 1950s. Although he died aged only 52, Maclaren-Ross crammed enough alcohol and prose into his bizarre life to make this an inspiring read. With any luck, the book will lead to a revived interest in his work.

William Leith

My favourite novel this year was J Robert Lennon's Mailman (Granta), a superb story about a man who has fallen through the cracks of society. He's a postman who is so lonely that he reads the letters he delivers just to get some human contact and yet, in some obscure way, he still remains hopeful. In style, the book is the midpoint between Richard Ford and Rick Moody. Another excellent book, and a shocking one, is Alice Sebold's Lucky (Picador), the author's account of her own rape. It is an appalling story but one that is told with extraordinary clarity and great skill. Finally, if you haven't read Dr Atkins's New Diet Revolution (Vermilion), do: it tells you far, far more about the world than you might expect from a diet book.

Hilary Mantel

In 1970, Polly Toynbee travelled around Britain taking on low-paid jobs, mixing with people who got by in life but had few luxuries and little provision for emergencies or misfortune. A Working Life was her account of what she experienced. Last year she undertook a similar experiment and tried to live on the minimum wage. Hard Work (Bloomsbury) asks hard questions. How can it be that, with Labour in power and with a prosperous middle class, an invisible army of people is working for so little? How can it be that inequality has increased - and the poor are, relatively, poorer? Her book is highly readable, full of telling anecdote, sad and angry. In Courage, mon amie (London Review of Books), Terry Castle goes on a "grim and spinsterish" (but highly enjoyable) search for the grave of her great-uncle, who died in the Great War on the Western Front. She reflects on "the insane, uncomplaining, relentless bravery of men" and asks where the female variety of courage fits in. It is a quirky, personal, thought-provoking book, and quite unlike anything else you will have read about war.

David Marquand

The book I have enjoyed most in 2003 is Bryan Magee's Clouds of Glory (Cape), a marvellous memoir of a working-class London childhood in Hoxton in the 1930s. It is hauntingly evocative of a culture and a townscape which have gone for ever. Magee can look back on a lifetime of achievement in many fields, but this is his greatest. My second nomination is very different: Philip Bobbitt's extraordinary historical synthesis The Shield of Achilles (Penguin pbk). I am not convinced of the basic thesis - that the nation state is giving way to the market state - but I am impressed by Bobbitt's mixture of deep learning and imaginative power. Last, but by no means least, I have been totally absorbed by Robin Cook's mordant mixture of diary and analysis, Point of Departure (Simon & Schuster). Once the Labour Party has absorbed Cook's deadly account of the run-up to the Iraq war, Blair's days in No 10 Downing Street may yet be numbered.

Mark Mazower

Three very different pieces of investigative journalism most impressed me this year. All guns blazing, Charlie Wilson's War: the extraordinary story of the largest covert operation in history (Atlantic Monthly Press) by George Crile tells how an earlier Texan right-wing politician stoked up the "muj" in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, more or less unaided except for his friends in the CIA, a bevy of beauty queens and some fast-talking lawyers. Dana Priest's slower-moving but insightful The Mission: waging war and keeping peace with America's military (W W Norton) is about the regional CinCs - the commanders-in-chief - of the US army and the men under them, and the dilemmas of imperial peacekeeping that they faced even before Iraq. Most moving and perhaps most urgently necessary are the extraordinary articles of Amira Hass, the prizewinning Palestinian affairs correspondent for Ha'aretz, whose recent reportage is gathered in Reporting from Ramallah: an Israeli journalist in an occupied land (MIT Press). Stark, simple analysis underpinned by exemplary interviews and a fine historical and moral sense. It is available in the US, let's hope it finds a British publisher soon.

Frank McLynn

The biography I enjoyed most was Piers Paul Read's Alec Guinness (Simon & Schuster), which vaulted clear of the normal showbiz biography and actually illuminated the perennial problems of existence. By contrast, John Fowles's Journals: volume one (Cape), also partly dealing with the film world, revealed the celebrated author as something of a monster. My favourite book overall was Neil Hanson's The Confident Hope of a Miracle: the true history of the Spanish Armada (Doubleday), a true classic of popular history that at times rivalled the best of Parkman and Prescott.

Claire Messud

Glyn Maxwell's most recent collection, The Nerve (Picador), once again reveals the remarkable talent and versatility of this fine poet. In these new poems, his British sensibility is brought to bear upon an American landscape - fittingly, New England - and the resulting lyrics are indelible, even haunting. I also took great delight this year in the reprinting, by the New York Review of Books, of Celeste Albaret's riveting memoir Monsieur Proust. First published some 50 years after his death, this account by the master's devoted housekeeper is at once a touching and intimate portrait and a fascinating example of the unreliable narrator in action.

Rosie Millard

Derek Malcolm's Family Secrets (Hutchinson) was remarkable, but not really for its main story (Guardian film critic discovers Papa shot dead Mama's lover). What made it such a moving read was Malcolm's beady yet unjudgemental tone in describing his parents, his hideous boarding school and the damp misery of postwar Britain. The horrible depths of trailer-trash Americana have been better depicted, but Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre is a great read. And for the sheer class of depicting oral sex as olfactory epiphany, Pierre sure earned his Booker Prize. A Triple Treat of Horrid Henry (Orion Children's) by Francesca Simon tells delicious tales of the scampish hero and his ghastly brother Perfect Peter. Subtly modern touches have Mum wearing glasses, reading the paper and going to work, while apron-clad Dad hangs out in the kitchen. A favourite "chapter book" with the junior Millards.

Pankaj Mishra

John Gray's Al-Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern (Faber) was a provocative take on what is often too quickly described as religious fundamentalism. Jan Morris's travel writings are a vivid evocation of the late 20th century, and the new selection, A Writer's World (Faber), is a real treat. I also enjoyed Paul Krugman's The Great Unravelling (Allen Lane), Joseph Stiglitz's The Roaring Nineties (Allen Lane) and Andrew O'Hagan's novel Personality (Faber).

Adam Newey

Don Paterson's fourth collection, Landing Light (Faber), is included on the shortlist for the Whitbread poetry prize - welcome evidence that not all literary judging panels are driven by dreary, low-grade populism. Not that Paterson's book isn't accessible: it fizzes with jokes and exuberant wordplay. But it has an ambition and seriousness of intent - its themes of identity, memory and selfhood are unapologetically large ones - that are all too rare. Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Faber) is a miracle of the editor's art. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have brought clarity, order and understanding to the vast output of one of the most significant voices in 20th-century poetry. But for me, the outstanding collection of the year is Bernard O'Donoghue's Outliving (Chatto & Windus): tender, wise, sad, bleakly funny and painfully honest.

Ben Pimlott

In the wake of the late Roy Jenkins's triumphant biography, it has been a good year for Churchill-related books. Adrian Fort's Prof: the life and times of Frederick Lindemann (Cape) is a well-researched, thoughtful and witty account of an intolerably pompous and obsessive scientist who was right about pre-war Nazi weapons of mass destruction, and wrong about practically everything else. The Prof's most important function was to do sums for Churchill on his slide rule, and add a technical gloss to the great man's speeches. The Macmillan Diaries: the cabinet years (1950-1957), edited by Peter Catterall (Macmillan), is revealing about how intolerable Churchill himself had become by the time of his re-election in 1951. It is also a reminder of Britain's ignoble history of getting things hopelessly wrong in the Middle East. So is D R Thorpe's Eden which explores, inter alia, the tensions within the Eden-Churchill relationship.

Robert Potts

One book that has had a lasting effect on me is Paul Morley's Words and Music (Bloomsbury): a work of genuine and intelligent enthusiasm that, despite its apparent hubris and lunacy, has provoked me into listening to some very different music, and to listen in a different way. My favourite book of poetry this year was Tony Lopez's False Memory (Salt), a collection of cento-like sonnet sequences which samples and blends the white noise of 1990s Britain - economics, politics, genetics, fashion, real estate, entertainment, literature - in a surreal and satirical collage, sinister, elegantly amusing, and ultimately asking demanding political questions.

Malcolm Rifkind

John Campbell's second volume of Margaret Thatcher (Cape) is first class because it gives praise where praise is due and puts the boot in when the Lady was less than perfect. The author is to be commended for discovering an interview on the BBC where Thatcher, as PM, rounded on the United States for invading countries whose governments it disapproved of. Plus ca change.

Anthony Sampson

Kate Colquhoun's A Thing in Disguise (Fourth Estate) is a refreshing account of the life of Joseph Paxton, the gardener at Chatsworth who later designed the Crystal Palace and transformed architectural ideas. Colquhoun describes all the excitement of horticulture in the early 19th century as exotic plants were brought to England from across the world and reveals all the daring enterprise of Victorian Britain, writing in the unvarnished style of a gardening enthusiast. Elinor Sisulu's biography of her parents-in-law, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: in our lifetime (Abacus), is the definitive account of Mandela's mentor - who may have been more influential than Mandela himself - and his courageous wife who kept the family and his ideals intact through his 26 years in prison.

Ziauddin Sardar

William Dalrymple's White Mughals (Flamingo pbk) shows that the British did much more than simply colonise India: they also loved its splendour and its splendid women. History, romance, espionage, racism - it has all the elements of an orientalist's dream. In Bombay-London-New York (Routledge), Amitava Kumar evokes an India of rural simplicity, ancient traditions and bewitching rituals. Through a string of stories, he shows how the Indian diaspora internalised this view and brought Bollywood, bhangra and biryani to Britain and the US to create an imaginary home away from home. Post-colonial ideas also figure large in Parallels and Paradoxes (Bloomsbury), in which the late Edward Said holds a long and involved conversation with the maestro Daniel Barenboim. Talk of Beethoven and Wagner soon gives way to issues of identity and authenticity. Said emerges not just as an intellectual giant, but also a deeply passionate man.

Frances Stonor Saunders

All seven of A Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, compiled between 1952 and 1966, are being reissued by Frances Lincoln, which saved them from extinction when Michael Joseph, in a fit of parsimony, abandoned the series. Wainwright, the son of a poor Lancashire stonemason, first visited the Lake District in 1923. The guides that followed read like love letters, and no walker can cross a stream or sit atop Dollywagon Pike without evoking Wainwright's presence. After ravishing landscapes, ravishing boys: Germaine Greer's The Boy (Thames & Hudson) is a funny, provocative cultural map of men before they are men. The "whole woman" gazes lovingly at iconic ideals of the beautiful boy and strips bare all our assumptions about the primary object of desire.

Roger Scruton

I have been gripped by three books about the dead. First Will Self's How the Dead Live (Penguin pbk) - a tour de force of the imagination, which succeeds in building a post-life out of anti-matter. Anne Applebaum's Gulag (Allen Lane) is a clear and finely written tribute to the many millions of victims of a crime that is yet to be properly acknowledged. Finally a cheerful, thoughtful and touching book about cemeteries - Ken Worpole's Last Landscapes (Reaktion Books), which shows how people have sought to perpetuate their status, and to recover their innocence, through idealising their final place of rest.

Clare Short

I would recommend the Koran to anyone because there is so much prejudice and we all need to work to overcome it. William Keegan's The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown is a very intelligent account of what has been successful in new Labour's economic policy and what needs correcting in the third term (if there is one). John Kampfner's Blair's Wars tells the story of how hubris overtook the PM on foreign policy. Peter Stothard's 30 Days: a month at the heart of Blair's war (HarperCollins) is a good read; it also contains the six secret points that explain why Blair went to war. And Amy Chua's World on Fire (William Heinemann) warns that globalisation and unregulated free markets will lead to growing bitterness and ethnic division.

Colm ToibIn

R F Foster's Yeats: a life - the arch-poet (Oxford University Press) is a magisterial account of the second half of the life; it is subtle, intelligent and full of nuanced insight into the poetry, the politics and the personal life. Robert Lowell's Collected Poems restores a great, restless talent to his rightful place and contains fascinating early and discarded versions of poems. The Great Fire (Virago), Shirley Hazzard's first novel in more than 20 years, is intriguing and beautiful. Robert Hughes's Goya (Harvill) manages, with his usual style and skill, to enter into the spirit of the most enigmatic of painters.

Ann Widdecombe

Douglas Hurd's Memoirs (Little, Brown) are generous, factual and reflective; this is possibly the only political memoir of recent years not to have been written in a spirit of self-justification or to settle old scores. The Magic Mooncat by Lois Fenn (Crow's Nest) is not great literature but a great read. The novel convincingly evokes the innocence and the ignorance of a girl growing up in the 1940s.

Zoe Williams

It is a testament to how disarmingly good D B C Pierre's Vernon God Little is that I am prepared to recommend it, even though it won the Booker Prize and is therefore officially not cool any more. Bachelor Girl by Betsy Israel (Aurum) is a fascinating, pertly written history of the singletonette before she was allowed to drink Chardonnay. It was mostly grim, and not just during witch-hunts. Actually, I'm just being mischievous. I can't think of one solitary family member you could buy this for as a Christmas present without causing lasting offence. Edith Templeton's Gordon, reissued this year after the obscenity laws pushed it underground some decades ago, is a haunting, weirdly demure, totally desolate novel about S&M. Terribly good - but again, it might ruffle some feathers in a stocking.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Pierre Birnbaum's The Idea of France (Hill & Wang) is a fascinating account of how old and new France, torn apart by the revolution, have been brought together again in the past 50 years. Many lessons here for contemporary Britain, which seems to imagine, as the French revolutionaries did, that a country can cut itself off from its roots with impunity. In this respect I can also recommend Jonathan Clark's Our Shadowed Present (Atlantic), an excoriating and enormously satisfying assault on historical postmodernism. Another learned and original book - the former Eton schoolmaster and Reading University don David Hurst's On Westernism (G Hartley & Co) - has not been reviewed at all, because it is so remorselessly politically incorrect. Max Hastings, for example, wrote to Hurst to say, in effect, that he would not touch it with a bargepole. It is a work that most certainly deserves critical attention not so much in spite of its unfashionable nature as because of it. Most bookshops are unlikely ever to have heard of it, so I would suggest that would-be readers apply to David Hurst, 24 Kidmor Road, Caversham, Berkshire RG4 7LU.

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