Harriet Waugh

Fay Weldon's The Shrapnel Academy (Hodder & Stoughton), a dark comedy of warfare between revolutionary servants below stairs and their psychopathic betters above, is a breakaway......

Patrick Skene Catling

Very rarely, a novel sometimes proves to be so enjoyable that tears of sentimental pleasure ooze from the eyes of even the most jaded of readers. One such excep- tional book is......

• Kingsley Amis

If there were a category of underrated books of the year, Elizabeth Jennings's Collected Poems (Carcanet) would be my number-one choice. From the first (the earliest pieces here......

Lindsay Anderson

The novel I have most enjoyed is not available in bookshops. This is The Great Advertisment for Marriage, a comi-tragic dispatch from the battle of the sexes by David Sherwin.......

John Osborne

Two books in the year by two of the country's most gifted men. If only my own profession could produce anything as wise and funny as Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils (Hutchinson)......

Antony Lambton

The most enjoyable book I read this year was James Lees-Milne's The Enigmatic Edwardian, the life of Lord Esher. He turned a man who has long been a shadow into a comprehensible......