Guardian top 10 book lists, part 2 (2004 onwards)

Matthew Pearl: top 10 books for Dante lovers
Guardian, 2004-01-12.

Matthew Pearl is the author of The Dante Club, a literary thriller about a group of 19th-century Harvard scholars secretly working on a translation of The divine comedy who are forced out of hiding by a series of gruesome murders modelled on Dante's Inferno.

1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The first circle
Solzhenitsyn transfers the powerful notions behind Dante's 'limbo', or the first circle of hell where souls persist in desire but without hope, to life in a Stalinist prison camp. This story makes you contemplate relative peace within horrible conditions. Like Dante, Solzhenitsyn wrote in exile for many years, but the latter's renown eventually eased his return to his native country.

2. Thomas Harris, Hannibal
This is the strangest and most surprising of Harris's chilling Hannibal Lecter novels. It's almost as though Hannibal the character has taken over and is running the show (as suggested by the title - though I like what I understand was the original choice, 'The morbidity of the soul'). Harris's references to Dante are intriguingly filtered through Hannibal's warped intelligence.

3. T. S. Eliot, The wasteland and other poems
Eliot at his allusive best reworks lines from Dante with pizzazz. How would Dante react to his description of hell's souls applied to the mob of workers crossing London Bridge in morning rush hour? Luckily, Eliot provides his own footnotes (if only Dante had done that).

4. Primo Levi, If this is a man
For a long time, this book was known in English as 'Survival in Auschwitz'. Restoring the original Italian title stresses the Holocaust memoir's Dantesque exploration of whether we can survive dehumanisation. The chapter in which Levi tries to recite Dante's description of Ulysses to a fellow concentration camp victim is shattering.

5. Umberto Eco, The name of the rose
Although Dante is alluded to at several points in this novel, the ultimate historical literary thriller, the most Dantesque ingredient is the fabulous relationship between the narrator and his mentor. Compare with Dante's complicated bond with his guide Virgil in The divine comedy.

6. Teodolinda Barolini, The undivine comedy
A study in how modern scholarship can be inventive and entertaining. Barolini, a former president of the Dante Society of America, considers Dante's journey as a sustained dream rather than a divinely ordained trip. Dante's son, who was embarrassed that his father claimed to have travelled through the afterlife, would have been grateful to get his hands on this.

7. Peter Hawkins, Dante's testaments
This is one of the most unique volumes of current scholarship on Dante. Hawkins is a divinity school professor and, in addition to his expertise, he shares the personal impact Dante's literature has had on his life and thinking. You always feel Hawkins is a reader and enjoys reading - most refreshing in a scholar.

8. Peter Hawkins & Rachel Jacoff (ed.), The poets' Dante
What a gift to Dante lovers! The book is divided into two sections, with essays by past and living poets on personal and artistic views of Dante and Dante's influence. Those of us who read and study Dante are often asked, 'Why Dante?' Now you can recommend this book and let WH Auden and Seamus Heaney answer. Have a pen handy: this should inspire lots of follow-up reading.

9. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Everyone's favourite abomination had some Dantesque inspiration. There are more colourful similarities to Dante besides the consequences of transcending our natural limits. For instance, the artist/creator's dysfunctional relationship with friends, teachers and women.

10. Henry Francis Cary, The vision of Dante Alighieri
Finally, to Dante himself. There are so many new translations of Dante into English, it's fun to pick up one of the early ones. Cary's version, self-published in 1814, didn't go anywhere until Samuel Taylor Coleridge sang its praises. Cary helped bring Dante to the attention of a string of important British poets and writers. Don't let the title confuse you - this is a translation of The Divine Comedy, but Cary wanted to downplay the theological aspects with a more secular label. Hunt around rare book stores for a copy, or you might be able to find a cheap paperback reprint.

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A strong start for a new thread.

Once again, a list that demonstrates the shallowness of my character. I've read The name of the rose. I enjoyed it more than the film adaptation, The name of the rose {1986 film}. In my mind's eye, in the book, I saw the library like something created by Escher, something like Relativity. Not surprisingly, the film's library seemed weak in comparison.

And I think I've listened to If this is a man on the BBC. I certainly read The periodic table donkeys' years ago, and caught parts of it on the radio just a few years ago. And that's it. We've already stablished there's no way I'm going to read Frankenstein, and I think it's safe to say the same's true for Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Hannibal Lecter. Each in their own way too grim for me.

D. J. Taylor's books for Orwell-lovers
Guardian, 2004-01-20.

Critic, biographer and novelist D. J. Taylor is the author of Orwell: the life which has won the Whitbread biography prize and is eligible for the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year award.

1. Peter Davison, Orwell: the complete works, volume XI: a kind of compulsion, 1903-1936
Professor Davison spent 15 years on his 20-volume collected works. This volume is recommended as a sample of his painstaking scholarship and meticulous footnotes (these have to be read to be believed!) all set down with the lightest and most enthusiastic of touches.
Touchstone: Peter Hobley Davison.

2. Peter Davison, Orwell: a literary life
See above for my opinion of Peter Davison. This is a 'literary' study rather than the full chronological Monty. Later biographers, myself included, have thanked God that Professor Davison didn't choose to go the whole hog.

3. Vernon Richards, Orwell at home
The best-known (and best-executed) file of Orwell photographs were taken by his anarchist chum the late Vernon Richards at Orwell's Islington flat in the winter of 1946. This collects all Richards' snaps - some of them rarely seen - together with Richards' obituary of Orwell and essays on Orwell's anarchist leanings by Colin Ward and the late Nicholas Walter.

4. George Gissing, New Grub Street
Gissing was England's best novelist, according to Orwell, and a decisive influence on his work. New Grub Street, first published in 1891, is a tremendously gloomy account of the late-Victorian literary marketplace (ominously enough, its hero - like Orwell - dies of lung trouble) and an obvious forerunner to Orwell's own Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

5. Anthony Powell, Infants of the spring
The first volume of Anthony Powell's four-part memoir, To keep the ball rolling. Powell was one of Orwell's greatest friends, and kept a close eye on him for the last 10 years of his life. This contains one of the best sketches of him ever written, including a deeply weird account of our man, invited to inspect Powell's infant son John, absent-mindedly leaving a nine-inch Bowie knife in the cradle.

6. Tosco Fyvel, George Orwell: a memoir
'Tosco' (TR) Fyvel worked with Orwell on Tribune in the 1940s and succeeded him as the paper's literary editor. This memoir is full of beguiling biographical asides, and is particularly interesting on Orwell's occasionally ambiguous attitudes to Jews and Jewishness. In particular, Fyvel's criticisms of a Tribune piece seem to have convinced Orwell of his anti-semitic tendencies and encouraged him to make amends.

7. Hilary Spurling, The girl in the Fiction Department
Spurling's memoir of her great friend Sonia Brownell, who married Orwell as his second wife across his death-bed in late 1949. The title refers to Julia in Nineteen eighty-four, for whom Miss B may have been a model. Spurling is horribly partial (many observers rated Sonia as a gold-digging drunk) but her grasp of milieu and motivation is first-rate.

8. Bernard Crick, Orwell: a life
Authorised by Sonia who died, shortly after it appeared, wishing she had never countenanced it. Quite why remains a mystery, as this is groundbreaking stuff, to which all subsequent biographers have endlessly to refer.

9. Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, The unknown Orwell
Not countenanced by Sonia, but apparently the goad that provoked her into sponsoring Crick. Thoroughly researched and, even now, turning up many a hare that later scholars have yet to chase.

10.Jacintha Buddicom, Eric and us
Long out of print but an entertaining childhood memoir written by a neighbour of Orwell's (whom she knew as 'Eric Blair') from his teenage years in Henley-on-Thames. Orwell's youthful poetry is much quoted and there are some salutary slaps at the myth of his unhappy childhood ('a happy smiling boy' Ms Buddicom retrospectively pronounced).

Deirdre Bair's top 10 Jungian books
Guardian, 2004-01-22.

Deirdre Bair is the author of biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin and Samuel Beckett, for which she was awarded the National Book award. Her latest book is a biography of Carl Jung.

1. C. G. Jung, Memories, dreams, reflections
Jung described this as his "so-called autobiography". Not published until 1964, almost three years after his death, it has been in print ever since. Jung's depiction of the important "inner" experiences of his life have touched everyone from die-hard Freudian partisans to psychoanalytic scoffers. The best place to begin.

2. C. G. Jung, Modern man in search of a soul
The title says it all: a collection of Jung's essays dealing with everything from the aims of psychotherapy to the differences between his theory and Freud's, to the stages of life and the spiritual quest.

3. C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his symbols
A collection of essays, one by Jung, others by the leading practitioners of analytic psychology, including Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, and Aniela Jaffé. This collection provides insights into how others interpret and practise Jungian analysis.

4. Andrew Samuels, Jung and the post-Jungians
Samuels, an analyst and professor, is one of the leading critics and scholars of Jungian theory and thought. Eloquent and accessible, the book is an excellent overview of analytical psychology today.

5. Thomas B. Kirsch, The Jungians
"The" history of the how, where, and why of analytical psychology, written by a second-generation Jungian analyst (his parents were the distinguished James and Hilde Kirsch). Thomas Kirsch has followed analytical psychology from its founding moments in Zurich to the worldwide consideration it receives today. Indispensable.

6. Anthony Stevens, On Jung
A splendid overview of Jung's personal and professional development. An excellent introduction to Jung's life and the origin of his ideas.

7. Anthony Storr, Jung
Should be read along with Anthony Stevens, for it is an explication of Jung's theory. In highly accessible prose Storr explains Jung's concepts with clarity and concision.

8. Thomas Singer (ed.), The vision thing
A provocative collection of essays by practising politicians, political consultants, scholars of mythology and contemporary culture, and practising Jungian analysts. Important for an understanding of how Jung's ideas pervade and influence contemporary attitudes toward events in the larger world.

9. William McGuire & R. F. C. Hull (eds), C. G. Jung speaking: interviews and encounters
Now that you have read Jung himself and have read all about him, you might want to find out more about what he said and what others said about him. This is an important collection of his talks and interviews, articles about him, and excerpts from the diaries and journals of others. Every page makes for fascinating reading.

10. Henri Ellenberger, The discovery of the unconscious
Having discovered Jung, you might want to learn something about the history of psychoanalysis from its beginnings to the present. This book is monumental for its scope and depth, but it is written in such an accessible style that the reader is soon caught up in the analysis of how the study of the mind came into being, and how, as it developed, it became such a battleground for warring factions with differing views.

David Almond: top 10 children's books
Guardian, 2004-01-26.

David Almond won the 2003 Whitbread Children's Book award for The fire eaters (Hodder), the tale of a young boy starting at grammar school in 1950s Tyneside.

1. Kevin Henkes, Lilly's purple plastic purse
Lovely, quick writing, sharp and affecting illustrations. Lilly might look like a mouse, but she perfectly embodies the passions, joys, shames, delights and despairs of childhood.

2. Shirley Hughes, Dogger
This is a deceptively gentle tale of a lost-and-found toy by one of our greatest writers.

3. E. B. White, Charlotte's web
A beautiful, funny and moving book, filled with sounds and smells of the farmyard, the rhythms of life and death.

4. Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table
Gory, magical, noble and still in print after umpteen years. A marvellous retelling of the wonderful tales.

5. Lobsang Rampa, The third eye
Lobsang was exposed as a fraud. Oh, dear, a writer who tells lies! But his account of a supposed childhood in Tibet is strange, fascinating and truly memorable.

6. Sonya Sones, Stop pretending
Lots of stories try to portray teenage angst and pain but this one, composed in a series of slight but powerful poems, is truthful and restrained and gaining many devoted readers.

7. Gary Paulsen, Dogsong
Paulsen's compelling account of a boy's journey on a sled across a frozen world has mythic force.

8. Sonya Hartnett, Thursday's child
A wonderful Australian story set during the Depression. Hartnett's prose is intense, poised, totally convincing.

9. Italo Calvino, Italian folktales
A treasure house of great stories and images, and also a way of drawing children towards the work of one of the great European writers.

10. Philippe Petit, To reach the clouds
This true account of an illegal high wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre is great stuff for teenagers, showing that ambition need not be confined to safe targets, but can be an outrageous, audacious, transcendent thing.

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This is a cross-over article between the Guardian's top tens tag and the children's books tag (https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site), which contains 8,700 reviews, top tens, other lists, "How to's" and author's readings, 2004-2016. I notice that some, but not all, of the children's books top tens are also tagged children's top tens (https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/series/childrens-books-top-10s), of which there are 370, dated 2000-2021. Teaching point: newspapers tag today's stories for today, not posterity or consistency; the old saw about today's news being tomorrow's fish and chip paper. I'll try and keep an eye across the children's sites and slot their lists in.

See also the top 10 children's books lists by Jacqueline Wilson (2000) and Eoin Colfer (2002) above. Also Michael Rosen's top 10 books (2003) and Cornelia Funke's top 10 bedtime stories (2003).

5.
Is Lobsang Rampa the inspiration for Lobsang, the AI who claimed to be a re-incarnated Tibetan motorcycle repairman in Terry Pratchett's The long earth?

Francis Wheen's top 10 modern delusions
Guardian, 2004-02-03.

Francis Wheen is a journalist and author of several books, including a highly acclaimed biography of Karl Marx. His collected journalism, Hoo-hahs and passing frenzies, won the George Orwell prize in 2003. Francis Wheen's new book, How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world: a short history of modern delusions, is published by Fourth Estate.

1. "God is on our side"
George W. Bush thinks so, as do Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden and an alarmingly high percentage of other important figures in today's world. After September 11 2001 Blair claimed that religion was the solution not the problem, since "Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham" - unaware that the example of Abraham was also cited by Mohammed Atta, hijacker of the one of the planes that shattered the New York skyline. R. H. Tawney wrote in Religion and the rise of capitalism that "modern social theory, like modern political theory, developed only when society was given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation". In which case modern social and political theory would now seem to be dead.

2. The market is rational
Financial sophisticates in the 21st century smile at the madness of the South Sea Bubble or the absurdity of the Dutch tulip craze. Yet only a few years ago they scrambled and jostled to buy shares in dotcom companies which had no earnings at all nor any prospect of ever turning a profit. To justify this apparent insanity, they maintained that such a revolutionary business as the internet required a new business model in which balance sheets were irrelevant. In short, they thought they had repealed the laws of financial gravity - until they came crashing down to earth.

3. There is no such thing as reality
Hence the inverted commas which postmodernists invariably place round the word. They see everything from history to quantum physics as a text, subject to the "infinite play of signification". But if all notions of truth and falsity cease to have any validity, how can one combat bogus ideas - or indeed outright lies? There is, for instance, a mass of carefully empirical research on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. As Professor Richard Evans points out, "To regard it as fictional, unreal or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the 'revisionists' who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse."

4. We mustn't be "judgmental"
In 2002 the Guardian revealed that Christian fundamentalists had taken control of a state-funded school in Gateshead and were striving to "show the superiority" of creationist beliefs in their classes. When Jenny Tonge MP asked Tony Blair if he was happy that the Book of Genesis was now being promoted as the most reliable biology textbook, he replied: "Yes. . . In the end a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children." This is the enfeebling consequence of unthinking cultural and intellectual relativism. If some schools start teaching that the moon is made of Swiss cheese or that the stars are God's daisy chain, no doubt that too will be officially welcomed as a healthy sign of educational diversity.

5. Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity
The International Monetary Fund may say so, as it imposes Thatcher-style solutions all over the world, but its own figures tell a different story. Its report on The world economy in the 20th century, published in 2000, includes a graph - printed very small, perhaps in the hope that no one would notice - which shows that the pre-Thatcherite period between 1950 and 1973 was by far the most successful of the century. This was an era characterised by capital controls, fixed exchange rates, strong trade unions, a large public sector and a general acceptance of government's role in demand management. The average annual growth in "per capita real GDP" throughout the world was 2.9% - precisely twice as high as the average rate in the two decades since then.

6. Astrology and similar delusions are "harmless fun"
Those who say this never explain what is either funny or harmless in promoting a con-trick which preys on ignorance and anxiety. Yet even the Observer, Britain's most venerable and enlightened Sunday newspaper, now has a horoscope page.

7. Thin air is solid
Charles Leadbeater's book Living on thin air (1999), a starry-eyed guide to the "weightless economy", was described by Peter Mandelson as "a blueprint for what a radical modernising project will entail in years to come". The dustjacket also carried a tribute from Tony Blair, hailing Leadbeater as "an extraordinarily interesting thinker" whose book "raises criticial questions for Britain's future". Three years later, after the pricking of the dotcom bubble, industry secretary Patricia Hewitt admitted that "industrial policy in (Labour's) first term of office was mistaken, placing too much emphasis on the dotcom economy at the expense of Britain's manufacturing base...The idea of Living on thin air was so much hot air." Tactfully, she forgot to mention that the chief hot-air salesman had been her own leader.

8. Sentimental hysteria is a sign of emotional maturity
The psychotherapist Susie Orbach interpreted the 'floral revolution' outside Kensington Palace after Princess Diana's death as proof that we were "growing up as a nation". Will Hutton, radical social democrat and republican, said that the collective genuflection before a dead aristocrat showed that the British were "freeing ourselves from the reins of the past". The assumption is that emotional populism represents a new kind of collective politics. In fact, it is nothing more than narcissism in disguise.

9. America's economic success is entirely due to private enterprise
In the 19th century, the American government promoted the formation of a national economy, the building of railroads and the development of the telegraph. More recently, the internet was created by the Pentagon. American agriculture is heavily subsidised and protected, as are the steel industry and many other sectors of the world's biggest "free-market economy". At times of economic slowdown, even under presidents who denigrate the role of government, the US will increase its deficit to finance expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. But its leaders get very cross indeed if any developing country tries to follow this example.

10. "It could be you. . ."
This was the advertising slogan for the National Lottery, that monument to imbecility, which was introduced (fittingly enough) by John Major. And millions of British adults apparently believed it, even though the odds on winning the jackpot are 13m to one. It could be you. . . but it bloody well won't be.

Robert Irwin's top 10 books on Islam and Islamic culture
Guardian, 2004-02-18.

Writer and broadcaster Robert Irwin is the author of The Alhambra, recently published by Profile. He is also the author of The Arabian nights: a companion and The desert: an anthology of classical Arabic literature as well as six novels. He has just finished writing a history of Orientalism.

1. Arthur J. Arberry (transl.), The Koran interpreted
Strictly, Muslims hold that a translation from Arabic of the Koran is not possible. However, this is the best attempt at a translation into English. Not only is this one the most accurate, it also captures the rhythm and poetry of the original. Arberry was a devout Christian who nevertheless identified strongly with the mystical strain in Islam.

2. Michael Cook, The Koran: a very short introduction
However good the translation you read (or even if you can read it in Arabic), the text of the Koran still needs a lot of glossing and some context. Cook is erudite, witty and incisive and he packs a huge amount into his 150 pages. Even specialists in Koranic studies are likely to learn something from this amazingly efficient account of how the Koran was put together, what it contains and how it is studied and recited today. Apart from anything else, this book should serve as a model of how to write a very short account of anything whatsoever.

3. Roy Mottahedeh, The mantle of the Prophet: religion and politics in Iran
There is no other book quite like this. Mottahedeh, a brilliant Princeton professor, based his account of spiritual life in Iran on a series of lengthy interviews with an Iranian mullah, tracing the holy man's career from childhood in the holy city of Qom to a senior position in the ranks of the Iranian clergy. This searching exploration of the spiritual and intellectual life of Shi'i Islam is effectively an insider's account of an educational curriculum that has not significantly changed since the middle ages. Modern political and social tensions in the region are also explored.

4. Martin Lings, A Sufi saint of the twentieth century. Shaikh Ahmad al-'Alawi
This book changed my life. It is an inspiring account of the career and teachings of a great Algerian Sufi mystic master. Al-'Alawi, a holy man and profound thinker, founded one of the most important North African Sufi orders. Lings is a convert to Islam and his account of al-'Alawi's teachings manages to convey something of authentic Sufism, (as opposed to the ersatz new age stuff that is otherwise so widely available in the west). This is a book that may give you some sense of why and how Muslims believe in Allah.

5. Carl Ernst, The Shambhala guide to Sufism
This is an outsider's account of Sufism written by an academic specialist in Islamic studies. Ernst lucidly sets out the mystical elements in the Koran and provides a potted history of the great Sufi orders from medieval times onwards. He is very good on the great Sufi poets, Hafiz and Rumi, but the most interesting chapter is the last, on contemporary Sufism.

6. Marshal G. S. Hodgson, The venture of Islam: conscience and history in a world civilization (3 vols)
Hodgson died before he could quite finish this massive cultural history of Islam but, even so, it remains a great monument of learning and cross-cultural empathy. Hodgson attempted to rethink the way Islamic history was traditionally written about and he wanted to ditch Orientalist cliches. Since he was largely successful in these enterprises, his book has been hugely influential. It is particularly good on the achievements of Persian, Turkish and Indian Muslims.

7. Francis Robinson, Atlas of the Islamic world
This beautifully produced atlas is one of the books influenced by Hodgson's rethink of Islamic culture. The pictures (of Persian miniatures, Mughal architecture, African mosques, modern political posters and much else) are lovely. The accompanying text is intelligent and entirely reliable. Robinson reminds us, if the reminder is necessary, that Islam is not the monopoly of the Arabs and that high Islamic culture did not come to a screeching halt some time around the 11th century.

8. Albert Hourani, A history of the Arab peoples
Although Islam is not the monopoly of the Arabs, they have played rather a large part in its propagation. Hourani was a fastidious stylist and this book, a glowing and sympathetic account of Arab achievements, was his last masterpiece. The narrative has a fine sweep and is not clogged with detail about people with unpronounceable names marching off to fight in unspellable places. Anyone thinking of going to the Middle East should read this first. So should Kilroy Silk.

9. Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic art and architecture
Hillenbrand is the top man on Islamic art in Britain today and in the past he has ranged extremely widely in his more specialist studies on Islamic art and architecture. His general book on this topic is compact and attractively illustrated. The quality of his prose and its effectiveness in evoking the appearance and aesthetic effect of the objects he is describing is marvellous. His description of the Alhambra, for example, is simply breathtaking.

10. Andrew Rippin, Muslims: their religious beliefs and practices
This is probably the best general account of what Muslims believe. Rippin instructs his readers in the elements of Islamic history and the evolution of theology and law, as well as meaning of such things as the hajj, salaat, Ramadan and jihad. He explains the differences between Shi'is and Sunnis. He is particularly strong on the challenges and opportunities facing modern Muslims, so that contemporary Islam's encounter with modernity, feminism and democracy are all thoughtfully explored.

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8.
The name-check for Kilroy-Silk relates to his BBC TV talk show, Kilroy (1986-2004), newly cancelled in reaction to an article by him published in the Sunday Express entitled "We owe Arabs nothing" (4 Jan. 2004). For more details, see his Wikipedia article.

Sarah Dunant's top 10 books on the Renaissance
Guardian, 2004-02-23

Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant is the author of eight novels. Her latest, The birth of Venus, is a tale of art, passion and politics set in Renaissance Florence.
Guardian review of The birth of Venus

1. Luca Landucci, A Florentine diary from 1450 to 1516
Landucci owned an apothecary's opposite the Strozzi palace in Florence at the end of the 15th century and he lived through it all: from the opening of Ghirlandaio's great frescoes in Santa Maria Novella (apprentice: Michelangelo) through the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent to the rule of the fundamentalist monk Savonarola. What for us is history, for him was life.

2. Michael Rocke, Forbidden friendships
The job of the night police in 15th century Florence was to poke their noses into dark alleys to root out sin. This study of their records allows Rocke to construct a fascinating portrait of Renaissance homosexual culture and its treatment by the state.

3. Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The craftsman's handbook
Written in the early 15th century, this is the ultimate "how to" book on Renaissance art. Pigments, brushes, the art of fresco, techniques and tricks, it's all here. Where else would you learn that while the yolk of country eggs is good for reproducing old skin tones, town eggs are better for young flesh?

4. Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice
Comprehensive, erudite and most of all highly readable study of convent life in the Venice of the late Renaissance and beyond. From the sacred through the profane to the simply fashionable. Riveting.

5. Dante Alighieri, The inferno
Predating the Renaissance but its influence on the iconography of art and thinking is huge. Dante's imagination when it comes to thinking up punishments apposite to the sins is truly fabulous.

6. Guido Ruggiero, The boundaries of Eros
The history of the bedroom (or the dark alley) is much harder to document than the lives of politicians or governments. But Ruggiero's analysis of court records in 14th- and 15th-century Venice uncovers a fascinating portrait of sex, sexuality and transgression.

7. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the artists
The first and still the foremost authority on the great names of the Renaissance. Though written in the mid-16th century, it's still unbeatable for its mix of fact, biography, art criticism and gossip.

8. Christopher Hibbert, The rise and fall of the House of Medici
A clear, solid but never less than readable account of one of the great families of the Renaissance and their journey from statesmanship, scholarship and patronage to avarice and decadence. Never a dull moment.

9. Iris Origo, The merchant of Prato
Based on a tranche of family letters found in 1870, this is a rare glimpse into mercantile, domestic and marital life on the cusp of the Renaissance. Unique for the way in which you can really hear the voice of a woman - the merchant's wife - amidst the male cacophony.

10. Eve Borsook, The companion guide to Florence
Because you can't just read about it; you also have to see it. This is still the best guide to Florence ever written. Take it everywhere and read on and off the hoof.

Georgia Byng's top 10 books to feed the imagination
Guardian, 2004-03-03.

Georgia Byng was an actor and children's entertainer before scoring publishing success with Molly Moon stops the world. Her latest, Molly Moon's hypnotic holiday, is one of six children's books produced to mark World Book Day 2004 and available for only £1.

1. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the chocolate factory
I love books where nasty characters get their just deserts. Dahl has his readers foaming with anticipation before the horrid children in this story start to fall. Set in the ultimate location and run by one of the craziest geniuses in literature, Dahl creates the perfect venue for funny accidents. Brilliantly imagined and really fun to read.

2. Philip Pullman, Northern lights
Pullman is a fantastic storyteller and this book sucks you in like a strong current. The world he creates and the magical creatures and logic in it are absolutely irresistible. I had wonderful dreams whilst reading this book - it was as if by reading it, some part of my dream world was unlocked.

3. Louis Sachar, Holes
A small gem of a book set in a detention centre where the aim is to turn bad boys into good ones by making them dig holes everyday in the hot sun. It is a simple story, plainly told, and set in a very sparse venue, yet the characters and their fates are completely compelling.

4. Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Martel describes the months that go by on the open sea with such detail that it is difficult to believe that he didn't go through the ordeal himself. Another book where the setting is simple but the reader is gripped. I love good survival stories but this one is especially interesting because, with the other passenger on the lifeboat being a tiger, the psychology is riveting.

5. Frances Hodgson Burnett, A little princess
A riches to rags to riches story set in a very realistic Victorian London. The heroine is sent to boarding school as a pupil but, when her father dies, is forced to work there as a maid. It is a lovely story about friendship and right winning out in the end, but what I like best about it is the way the characters show their true colours when Sara Crewe is down on her luck. I love extreme characters in books and here, the bad characters are really hateful and the good characters just loveable.

6. Michael Morpurgo, Kensuke's kingdom
This is a brilliantly imagined story and the reader cannot fail but be transported. A boy is shipwrecked and ends up on an island where he meets an old Japanese man who's been there for years. It's the sort of desert island story that makes you want to go there immediately and get down to fishing and cooking on open fires.

7. Raymond Briggs, Father Christmas
I loved this book so much when I was seven that I wrote to Mr Briggs. He wrote back and sent along a delightful hand drawn picture of Father Christmas. I still enjoy the detail and humour in his characters and illustrations.

8. Sharon Creech, Walk two moons
A wonderful children's book with a really elegant twist at the end. The end is so poignant that it made me cry. It's always slightly peculiar to be moved to tears by a piece of fiction but Creech draws her heroine so well that one cannot help empathising with her and being really touched by her story.

9. Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's world
Gaarder weaves a clever web here: Sophie's story keeps you turning the pages and the riddle of what is going on keeps you hooked. While you're at it Gaarder feeds you the history of philosophy, weaving life's big questions into Sophie's story so that all her experiences are relevant to the ideas being discussed. The result is a very thought provoking, stimulating read, and you finish it feeling more intelligent than when you started!

10. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone
I still marvel at how Rowling took an old idea that so many had tried to breathe life into and worked wonders with it. I really enjoyed discovering her world of magic and I liked her original, clever take on how things really work in the world of witches and wizards. A pleasure from start to finish.

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7.
Interestingly, the LT system's auto-choice for Father Christmas was J. R. R. Tolkein's Letters from Father Christmas. Sometimes the system serendipitously comes up with real goodies.

Elleke Boehmer's top 10 tips on scouting, survival and good citizenship
Guardian, 2004-03-08.

From the original 1908 edition of Baden-Powell's Scouting for boys. Tips gleaned by Elleke Boehmer, editor of the first and only critical edition of the scouting blueprint.

1. Keep your eyes about you at all times in order not to miss a thing. When tracking in the bush a tiny detail - a broken twig, a crushed can - may provide a crucial "sign" (of water, of food, of rescue, danger, wildlife).
This, for me as editor, was one of the most fascinating aspects of Scouting for boys - that the non-bookish Baden-Powell advocated that the scout learn to "read" the countryside almost as if it were a book. The scout is invited to put "signs" together, in the same way as words come together to form meaningful sentences.

2. Breathe through your nose and keep your blood in good order. A mouth left hanging open aids and abets snoring - a dead giveaway in the bush.
Scouting for boys is full of cranky Edwardian beliefs, some of them charming, others mind-boggling. The advice to keep the mouth shut at all times, unless speaking or whistling, was one of the more quirky bits of advice regarding a boy's health.

3. Always carry a rough towel. Its uses are endless, even when you find yourself in the bush without water.
This recommendation I must confess I found teasingly ambiguous. It tallies in some way with B-P's suggestion that when out tracking in dry terrain the scout keep his clothes clean by beating them with sticks. But why a rough towel?

4. Limit your intake of meat. Meat weighs you down.
This advice sprang to my attention for its relative contemporaneity. I've included it as an example of how parts of the book retain a freshness and direct appeal to our time, especially in the areas of exercise, diet and the environment.

5. Study other peoples' footwear. Shoes are a good indicator of character.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was for B-P the picture of the ideal scout (as was Kipling's Kim), and this advice is derived virtually unadulterated from observations taken by the great detective in many of Conan Doyle's 1890s stories.

6. Sleep where possible in the open air and without heavy blankets. An overheated body produces distracting dreams.
It would be difficult to avoid mentioning B-P's famous predilection for sleeping out as he did - alone, virtually all his married life - as well as his aversion to anything, including "rich food", that might produce sexual stimulation. However he believed in speaking frankly to boys about the "dangers of self-abuse", more frankly than his first publishers believed acceptable at the time.

7. Whenever you can, "get a good laugh on". And make other people laugh, too; it does them good.
This is virtually a direct quote from the text, to suggest its unflagging chirpiness, its devotion to fun and games at all costs.

8. Be a friend to all.
This bit of advice - the fourth scout law - has often been touted in support of the alleged inclusiveness of the scout movement and its absence of class and race prejudice. B-P certainly did urge boys not to be snobs - but was he addressing middle class boys in the main, or all boys? The fourth law no doubt helped to promote the worldwide spread of scouting.

9. Play the game of life with good spirit, whatever your game may be.
Play up, play up, and play the game - be it the game of cricket or empire or life. For B-P it's far better to be in the game than standing on the sidelines as a spectator.

10. Be prepared to do your duty. Country first, self second.
Possibly the most important tip in scouting: a useful reminder in a century when human rights are regarded as having a prior claim to social duties.

The original 1908 edition of Scouting for boys by Robert Baden-Powell is published on March 11 2004 in a critical edition from Oxford University Press, edited by Elleke Boehmer.

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3.
"Always carry a rough towel. Its uses are endless ..."
Is this where The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gets its towel from?

H2G2 : "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth ... More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. ... Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in 'Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.'" (Wikipedia, 'Towel Day').

Philip Davis's top 10 Victorian literature
Guardian, 2004-03-18.

Philip Davis is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. His publications include The experience of reading, Sudden Shakespeare and, most recently, The Victorians in the new Oxford English Literary History Series. He is currently writing a biography of the American novelist Bernard Malamud for Oxford University Press.

1. Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth
Powerful personal emotions are at the heart of Victorian literature. Here is the story of a young woman who is both ruined and fulfilled when she becomes an unmarried mother. Each time you pick up this realist novel - even for a few pages at a time - you are immediately absorbed in the distinctive evocation of a particular struggling life.

2. Ruby Redinger, George Eliot: the emergent self
Almost everything written in the Victorian age leads towards that greatest of all English novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch. If there isn't a God, George Eliot will do. And this modern biography (1975) tells the story of how awkward, inadequate, bungling Marian Evans became that god-like author.

3. Mrs Oliphant, The autobiography
Margaret Oliphant was left a widow, pregnant and in debt, with two young children. This real-life story of her effort to sustain the family out of her earnings as a writer is an account of the difficult balance between motherhood and authorship. The terrible thing is that Margaret Oliphant felt she had failed in both: "No one will remember me in the same breath as George Eliot."
Touchstone: The autobiography of Margaret Oliphant.

4. Mrs Oliphant, Hester
But Mrs Oliphant should be remembered as a novelist too, in this golden age of women writers. Recently reclaimed by Oxford World's Classics, Hester is a psychologically powerful account of a remarkable, ageing, matriarchal figure - a sort of provincial Queen Victoria - trapped by her own power.

5. John Ruskin, 'The nature of Gothic'
This chapter, from Ruskin's The stones of Venice, is one of the greatest documents in defence of human creativity - wherever we can find it, with whatever faults or inadequacies it is accompanied. There are many selections of Ruskin's work as art critic and social prophet, but Dinah Birch's Oxford World's Classics selection, due out in May, is recommended.

6. John Henry Newman, University sermons
These 15 sermons are really lectures of passionate reason which were delivered to theology students at Oxford. They don't preach in the conventional sense. What they do instead is offer insights into the inevitably risky nature of human thinking, encouraging people to trust their beliefs and intuitions of whatever kind.

7. George MacDonald, Lilith
This great neglected work of fantastic imagination rivals anything written by Tolkien or Philip Pullman. It is a journey into another world of temptation and death, a Victorian version of Dante's Divine Comedy by a children's writer who, with Lewis Carroll, was one of the first to be also more than that.

8. William Morris, The earthly paradise
Recently republished by Routledge (edited by F. S. Boos), this long poem is a magnificent compendium of ancient tales delivered in a direct verse narrative. It describes the varieties of the failed human search for paradise on earth and is the work of a determinedly simple man committed to single-minded action in what he nonetheless finds to be a painfully complex world.

9. Christina Rossetti, Complete poems
Which is worse: being a reluctant unbeliever such as Thomas Hardy in a world without God, or a believer, like Christina Rossetti, from whom God seems withdrawn? Read the sequence 'Later Life' for a serious version of a stranded mid-life crisis, or 'An Old-World Thicket' about the search for 'something' more.

10. Bernard Malamud, The assistant
If you want to see what a 20th-century version of serious Victorian realism might look like, then try this moving fictional account from 1957 of a ruined lower-class young man's attempt to a make a new life out of the mistakes of the old one. It is a Jewish-American rewriting of Dostoevsky, of Dickens and of Hardy.

Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni's top 10 books on Hollywood
Guardian, 2004-03-30.

Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is European editor at Harper's Bazaar and the author of Sam Spiegel: the biography of a Hollywood legend.

1. David Thomson, The new biographical dictionary of film
Hailed by J. G. Ballard as "the greatest of today's film writers", Thomson deserves such praise. His breadth of knowledge, his unapologetically personal approach, his sense of irony and rebellious attitude toward Hollywood make this work unputdownable. Reading one of his entries leads to reading at least 10. At times, Thomson can be harsh - Ben Affleck, Walt Disney, Glenda Jackson: ouch! - but he's always entertaining, and bravo that he dares.

2. Elia Kazan, A life
And what a life! Kazan - nicknamed Gadg - was the boy genius of Broadway who discovered Marlon Brando, changed the face of cinema with A streetcar named Desire and then named names during the Un-American Activities Committee hearings. (His other films include On the waterfront, East of Eden and Splendor in the grass.) Throughout, Kazan is refreshingly candid about his relationships with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe and many, many more.

3. David McClintick, Indecent exposure: a true story of Hollywood and Wall Street
When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, was caught forging actor Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 cheque, it seemed to be a simple case of embezzlement. But because it was Begelman - a former über agent and colourful con man - it wasn't. It quickly transpired that many other Hollywood power brokers were involved. An exhilarating tale, revealing the greed and lack of moral fibre in Hollywood. No wonder Brecht called the town "the marketplace of lies".

4. Peter Viertel, White hunter, black heart
Viertel's thinly disguised roman à clef gives the full scoop about the making of The African Queen. He goes into fascinating detail about the demons that drove John Huston: the director's lust to kill an elephant, his treatment of cast and crew and all the other problems that occurred when trying to make a film in darkest Africa in the early 1950s. Avoid Clint Eastwood's turkey and read this book.

5. A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn
Berg had complete access to Goldwyn's archives as well as interviewing the movie mogul's friends and family. The result is an extraordinary look at Hollywood's golden era, when studio heads were despots and the talent did what it was told. It's also the study of a fabulously flawed megalomaniac who discovered the likes of David Niven and Danny Kaye but was capable of losing $150,000 in one night of gambling (in the 1940s!) and was notorious for such phrases as: "Include me out" and "When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you."

6. Christopher Silvester (ed.), The Grove book of Hollywood
Many people, from Luis Buñuel to William Goldman to producer Julia Phillips, have written about their frustrations when toiling in Tinseltown. You can read the most apt and humorous accounts in this highly entertaining anthology spanning 1910 through 1990.

7. Tino Balio, United Artists: the company that changed the film industry
When entertainment lawyers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took over United Artists in 1950, they revolutionised the movie industry's studio system, paving the way for today's system of independent production and distribution. Balio vividly describes the history of the company which collapsed after Cimino's Heaven's gate in 1980, but was behind masterpieces such as The night of the hunter, The apartment and One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

8. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: a biography
The definitive biography of Lean, the brilliant director of such classics as Great expectations, Brief encounter and Lawrence of Arabia. Film-maker and historian Kevin Brownlow spent many hours with Lean, who was renowned for his meticulous attention to detail, his fraught rewriting of scripts and inevitable fury with the producer who was financing his film. The stories behind each film are priceless.

9. Pauline Kael, For keeps: 30 years at the movies
Until Kael retired in 1991, she was one of the most outspoken film critics of her generation. The tiny terror at The New Yorker believed in being entertained, and was not afraid of dipping her pen in acid if she wasn't. For keeps offers some of the best of her reviews and essays on movies, from her previously published "I lost It at the Movies" (1965) through to "Movie Love" (1991).

10. Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift
Clift - the star of Red River, A place in the sun and I confess - appeared to have it all: talent, beauty, artistic integrity. Then he suffered a car crash which exacerbated his downward spiral into drugs and alcohol. Bosworth reveals all without losing his respect: Clift's complex relationship with his domineering mother, his kindness to Frank Sinatra during the making of From here to eternity and the protective behaviour that he inspired from friends such as Elizabeth Taylor and Gore Vidal.

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That's got to be the most touchstone-heavy list so far.

Harper's Bazaar could use a little TLC by anyone interested in that sort of magazine. There isn't even the beginnings of a series.

Alan Riding's top 10 curious facts about Shakespeare
Guardian, 2004-04-22.

Alan Riding, the European arts correspondent of the New York Times, is co-author with Leslie Dunton-Downer of the Essential Shakespeare handbook, published by Dorling Kindersley.

1. St George's day
There is no certainty that Shakespeare was born on April 23 in 1564, only that he was baptised three days later in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. But after he died on April 23, 1616, it became popular to believe that England's greatest poet appeared and disappeared on St George's Day.

2. Sheikh Pear
In the Middle East, where the myth survives that Shakespeare was in fact an Arab, he is still sometimes fondly referred to as Sheikh al-Subair, meaning Sheikh 'Prickly Pear' in Arabic.

3. Verse v prose
Most Shakespeare plays employ verse and prose. But while no play is composed entirely of prose, five plays are written exclusively in verse. All five are history plays, written relatively early in his career: Henry VI, Part I; Henry VI, Part III; King John; Edward III; and Richard II. The play with most prose - 87% - is The merry wives of Windsor.

4. Big and small
At nearly 1,500 lines, Hamlet is the largest Shakespearean speaking part. The role is almost as long as The comedy of errors, which at 1,786 lines is the shortest of the Bard's surviving plays. Interestingly, in Othello, Iago with 1,098 lines has a larger role than Othello, who has 887 lines. Cleopatra, the largest female role, runs to 686 lines.

5. A late-bloomer in London
Troilus and Cressida was performed in Bavaria, Austria, and France in the late 19th century. But the Shakespearean text of the play did not receive a modern production in English until 1912, when it was finally given in London. And it is still rarely performed.

6. What the dickens!
Many expressions now taken for granted in English first appeared in Shakespeare's works, including 'elbow room', 'love letter', 'marriage bed', 'puppy dog', 'skim milk', 'wild goose chase' and 'what the dickens'.

7. Hungry for Shakespeare?
The Bard achieved cult status in Hungary nearly 200 years ago. By 1878, when Russian texts were still being translated from French and German, every play then thought to be by Shakespeare had already been translated directly from English into Hungarian.

8. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
For centuries, English literary critics tried to disguise the fact that Shakespeare's sonnets were addressed to a male beloved, but the jury is still out as to whether readers in his own day would have been shocked. In any event, no trace of an offended reader survives from Shakespeare's lifetime.

9. Fathers and sons
Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins Judith and Hamnet, born in 1585. Some believe that Hamlet, written in 1599, registers Shakespeare's grief following the death of Hamnet, his boy twin, in 1596, at the age of 11. In King John, written around 1596, Constance is also deeply poignant as she anticipates her young son's death.

10. Kiss me Laurence?
Same-sex productions continue to revive the gender-bending practices of actors in Shakespeare's day, when women did not interpret roles on stage and females were played by trained boy actors. In recent seasons, Shakespeare's Globe in London has matched an all-male Twelfth night with all-female productions of Richard III and The taming of the shrew. In 1922, 14-year-old Laurence Olivier played Kate "the shrew" in a production at his all-boys All Saints Choir school.

Toby Green's top 10 utopias and dystopias
Guardian, 2004-04-29.

Toby Green is the author of Thomas More's magician: a novel account of Utopia. The book tells the story of Vasco de Quiroga who, using Thomas More's Utopia as his blueprint, forged a commune on Mexico City's outskirts.

1. Plato, Republic
Not always seen as being within the utopian genre, but Plato's Republic was the first work of world literature to envisage an ideal state, and to lay down concrete parameters as to the activities of each and every class within society.

2. Thomas More, Utopia
Of course! Eponymous founder of the genre; brilliant mixture of satire, political idealism, and obfuscation of the author's own views. More's book has been seen by some as an attempt to justify colonisation of the Americas, by others as a dreary state of Catholic dogma and by his champions as a proto-communistic vision. The book's very indeterminacy is testament to its constant inventiveness.

3. Thomas Campanella, The city of the sun
In the same idealistic strain as More's book, sharing the vision of religious harmony and of genuine communitarianism. Like More, Campanella placed his ideal state in a distant land - near Ceylon - and like Plato, he envisaged a society run by a beneficent elite. A book that is resonant of the high watermark of the humanist utopian ideal.

4. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
Although published only 25 years after The city of the sun, Bacon's book belongs to the early enlightenment period. Bacon pictures a world in which scientific experiment could be the core of the progress of an enlightened state. As such, the book is testament to the changing conceptual framework of the early 17th-century, though, like Campanella and More, Bacon set his ideal state in a remote location, this time the South Pacific.

5. Samuel Butler, Erewhon
One of the most brilliant utopian novels, using a mixture of devastating satire and compelling narrative to both decry the developments of mechanised labour and to show how society might be better run. Terrified by the prospect of machines ruling the future, Butler was essentially suspicious of any model of perfection, mocking people who "really do know what they say they know".

6. William Morris, News from nowhere
The most visionary of the many socialist utopias conceived at the end of the 19th-century. Beautifully written, it imagines someone from this period waking up in the future and finding an earthly, pastoral, socialist paradise.

7. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
A precursor to much more famous works by Huxley and Orwell, this antidote to totalitarianism, written by someone who genuinely knew what that sort of existence was like, is the anti-Stalinist dystopia to beat them all - even Brave New World, 1984, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

8. Aldous Huxley, Island
Huxley's last novel within the utopian genre, and one of the three or four most successful of that genre. It puts forward genuine proposals for better ways of living - including more agricultural work, mutual adoption clubs for children, societies which are largely vegetarian - while retaining realism as to the likelihood of their acceptance.

9. Ursula Le Guin, The dispossessed
Brilliant utopian satire and exploration in which a capitalist planet - Urras - and its ecotopian satellite - Anarres - are described by Le Guin with pathos and realism. Urras is corrupted by its "propertarianism", but things are not perfect on Anarres by any means - individual creativity is stifled, and nothing changes.

10. Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia
Imagines an ecostate, which seceded from the USA in 1980, and lives in sentimental co-existence with nature - the working week is reduced to 20 hours, bus travel is free and trees are planted on old boulevards. A blueprint for a green future.

Nik Cohn's top ten rock 'n' roll books
Guardian, 2004-05-11.

Nik Cohn is the author of numerous books on rock and pop and wrote the story that gave rise to Saturday night fever. His classic history of pop music Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom has been reissued by Pimlico with a new foreword by the author.

1. Nick Tosches, Hellfire
A perfect match of writer and subject. Tosches's overwrought prose and boundless fascination with sin (the wages of) finds its ultimate exemplar in Jerry Lee Lewis. This isn't so much "warts and all," as "all warts, all the time." A top-class wallow.

2. June Juanico, Elvis in the twilight of memory
June and Elvis were teenage sweethearts and spent an idyllic summer together in Biloxi, Mississippi - the last summer that Presley would enjoy as a (relatively) normal citizen. Juanico's remembrance isn't writerly, thank God, but thoughtful, evocative, and possessed of a genuine innocence.

3. Cheo Hodari Coker, Unbelievable: the life, death and afterlife of the notorious B.I.G.
A fan's choice, pure and simple. I love Biggie Smalls, and this is chapter and verse on him, in all his oversized glory.

4. Boy George, Take it like a man
The title isn't the only great thing here. George O'Dowd's memoirs are witty, as one might expect, but also touching and, for the most part, unblinkingly honest (the one exception is the section in which he tries to fudge the implications of testifying against his drug dealer).

5. Charles White, The life and times of Little Richard
I speed-read this once while drunk and later thought I must have imagined it. But no - it really is the most jaw-droppingly outrageous of all rock memoirs.

6. Jim Fricke, Charlie Ahearn & Nelson George, Yes yes y'all: an oral history of hip-hop's first decade
A motherlode (or muthalode) of Old Skool nostalgia. Here come DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Fab 5 Freddy, and the other great originators. The text is fine, and the visuals are superb.

7. John Lydon, Rotten: no irish, no blacks, no dogs
From Mick Jagger to Marilyn Manson, the one thing that all rock antichrists have had in common is that they're panto dames at heart. Rotten is Exhibit A - bright, hilarious, bloody-minded, and wildly camp. Picture a punk Dame Edna.

8. Ray Davies, X-ray
As a writer, Davies possesses the same off-centre charm that he brought to his classic songs with the Kinks. Many rock memoirs are more sensational, none more endearing.

9. Frank Owen, Clubland
A wonderfully trashy whirl through the underbelly of New York club life in the 1990s, fuelled by all the bad stuff one could hope for, and more. Humans don't half stink at times, mum.

10. 'The autobiography of P. J. Proby' (unpublished)
A monumental, messianic sprawl of a book, over 800 pages of typescript, many of them fantastic. Publisher wanted; must be dauntless.

Isabel Losada's top 10 books about the Dalai Lama and Tibet
Guardian, 2004-06-01.

Isabel Losada is the author of the The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment and For Tibet, with love: a beginner's guide to changing the world. For Tibet, with love is an exploration of the old question 'What can one person do to make a difference?' as applied to the Chinese government's policy on Tibet. Here Isabel Losada chooses her top 10 books on the subject of non-violence, the Dalai Lama and the Tibet.

1. Mahatma Gandhi, The story of my experiments with truth: an autobiography
We have to start here as even the Dalai Lama admits that Bapu has been an inspiration to him. As a young man, when Tibetans came to him demanding to be allowed to take up arms to protect Tibet the young Dalai Lama would imagine what Gandhi would have said to them. If you are weary of the war on terror, reading the life of Gandhi will restore your faith in mankind.

2. Nelson Mandela, The long walk to freedom
I wanted this on the list because of the common misconception that Mandela was violent. His fight against apartheid was non-violent for many years. They did eventually resort to bombing empty buildings - but never people. If you haven't read this astoundingly inspiring autobiography - where have you been?

3. Dalai Lama, Freedom in exile
The first autobiography of the Dalai Lama, written when he was a young man who had recently been driven into exile. Full of passion and, rather ironically as it turned out, hope. What I love about this book is the way it weaves the recent history of Tibet (since about 1945) with the Dalai Lama's personal story so I learned about Tibetan history but was gripped by the personal details. Like Mandela - an inspiring life. It's amazing how many people read 'little books of Buddhist sayings' that have the Dalai Lama's name on the cover and yet have no idea of the story of his life.

4. Dalai Lama with Howard Cutler, The art of happiness
This has been compiled by a western psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler in a series of long conversations with the Dalai Lama. I found Mr Cutler rather rambling but we all need to be reminded by His Holiness that peace has to be inside us before we can help anyone or anything. Happiness, personal responsibility, peace, empathy, compassion - wouldn't it be good if these were on the curriculum in our schools as they are in the Tibetan monasteries?

5. Tsering Shakya, The dragon in the Land of Snows: the history of modern Tibet since 1947
If you've ever wondered why the world stood by and let the Chinese communist party walk into Tibet and destroy this ancient and unique culture - read and be horrified. The British come off as particularly culpable as we had diplomatic representation in independent Tibet. We decided to ignore that fact as it was inconvenient for us. We are still ignoring it.

6. Kate Saunders, Eighteen layers of hell: stories from the Chinese gulag
It is hard to believe that institutionalised torture goes on today in China. But reading this book, which includes firsthand accounts of life in the Laogai (Chinese labour camps) and details of medieval forms of torture, will leave you in no doubt. A hard read but certainly one of the most important books that I've ever read. You will never again want to buy a single item that says 'Made in China.'

7. Alec le Sueur, The hotel on the roof of the world
Very different from the book above, this is the light-hearted true story of the author's five years running a hotel in Lhasa. It makes Fawlty Towers seem an oasis of calm. He unfolds his tale with genuine wit and compassion for all points of view.

8. Dr Isabel Hilton, The search for the Panchen Lama
You may be amused to know that the atheist Chinese government apparently knows more about the recognition of reincarnations than the Dalai Lama. This is the tale of how a young boy believed by Tibetans to be an incarnation of wisdom was arrested at the age of six and hasn't been seen since. He was detained because he was supposed to be the person responsible for identifying the next Dalai Lama. Instead there will now just be a mess, as the book explains.

9. Mick Brown, The dance of 17 lives
This is the story of the boy who got away. The other leading figure of Tibetan Buddhism, brought up under Chinese eyes to be loyal to the Chinese government, escaped over the mountains as a teenager and now lives in India. If you are sceptical about reincarnation, read journalist Mick Brown's extraordinary book.

10. Michael Buckley, The Bradt travel guide to Tibet
If, like me, you decide that you want to travel to Tibet then you need the help of a really travel guide. Tibet is a very dangerous place to travel - if the altitude sickness doesn't kill you then the roads probably will. This guide has all the usual things that you'd expect of a travel guide. It includes places to stay, cultural and historic information, maps and the best routes to take but the author of this guide has travelled in Tibet for over 10 years and knows his subject really well. Buying this guide may just save your life.
Touchstone: Bradt guide Tibet

Sally Emerson's top 10 books of quotations
Guardian, 2004-07-05.

Sally Emerson, author of several novels including Second sight and Broken bodies, has recently published In loving memory, a collection for memorial services, funerals and just getting by, an anthology of poetry and extracts intended for reading at funerals. Here, she picks her favourite quotation books.

1. Elizabeth Knowles (ed.), The Oxford dictionary of quotations
A desert island book? Probably. After all, it might remind you of the some of the key passages of great literature. Plus, if you learned enough, you could become a triumph of learning and wisdom - if a little trying. This fifth edition, with over 20,000 quotations and 3,000 authors, has 2,000 new quotations including proverbs and nursery rhymes and snippets from the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita. Some of the more modern ones are irritating (Boy George saying that Madonna is a "gay man trapped in a woman's body", for example). Fine in a dictionary of modern quotations, but too ephemeral in a volume designed to collate the best quotations of all time. Nevertheless, this is still a magnificent volume.

2. J. M. & M. J. Cohen (eds), The Penguin dictionary of quotations
What power these editors of quotations have; they choose which are the most apposite of the millions of words written. My 1967 edition of this popular volume has 12,000 quotations and has stood up to being consulted on innumerable occasions. It has the battered look of a well-used book. The two Cohens here are father and the son; the son, M. J. Cohen, "worked on the dictionary during most of his Cambridge vacations, contributing particularly quotations from drama and some 17th-century and modern writers". The quotations are closely packed, but this adds to the air of seriousness and intensity. By comparison, some of the more modern dictionaries look a little too well designed, more superficial.

3. John Bartlett (ed.), Familiar quotations: a collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature
First published in 1875, this classic American collection is not so well known in the UK. My edition is a leather-bound one, dated 1902. The edition and the layout can be just as important to the charm of these volumes as the particular quotations. On the title page are the words "I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own." Here, there are all kinds of wonderful treasures, including quotations from authors long since forgotten, with of course an American bias (plenty of Emerson). Excellent for browsing. These old editions stop the reader from being forced to accept the quotations that are fashionable today.

4. Robert Andrews (ed.), The New Penguin dictionary of modern quotations
Begins with a great quote from Labour politician Diane Abbott, from the Independent on Sunday in 1998: "The honest truth is that if this government were to propose a massacre of the first-born, it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons". The task of choosing 8,000 quotations from the myriad of words pouring out from today's newspapers and books is not easy, and represents a much harder task than choosing the great pithy or provocative or glorious quotes from the past. After all, what is funny and new one month nowadays can already seem stale by the next, and some of these already feel unexciting. Time is of course one of the greatest editors of quotations, and the modern collections do not have his help. But there is much here that is remarkable, and there are many excellent quotations from last century's newspapers which would otherwise have disappeared. Usefully, this collection also provides brief details of the speaker or writer before each quotation.

5. Peter Kemp (ed.), The Oxford dictionary of literary quotations
Over 4,000 quotations around the theme of writing and the life of writers. Peter Kemp writes: "Fascinating quotations have turned up from remote eras. Fearsome penalties invoked against remiss users of a clay-tablet library in ancient Assyria make our present system of fines look absurdly lenient: the gods are called upon to punish anyone 'who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognise it' with 'a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog's mouth!'" The dictionary is organised in themes, alphabetically from Accolade and Admiration to Writer's Block, Writing, and W. B. Yeats. Entertaining, and excellent for browsing.

6. Justin Wintle & Richard Kenin (eds), The Penguin concise dictionary of biographical quotation
Good collection of gossip, information, praise and malice about everyone from the Earl of Aberdeen to John Wycliffe. Useful for students wanting to compare who said what about whom. For instance, Cyril Connolly on Virginia Woolf: "Virginia Woolf seemed to have the worst defect of the Mandarin style, the ability to spin cocoons of language out of nothing ... " Or David Garnett: "Virginia had this reputation of being a rather malicious person - deservedly so, I think."

7. Ned Sherrin (ed.), The Oxford dictionary of humorous quotations
Used by many a speechmaker, it is divided into themes including Christmas, the country, education, happiness. The quotations are witty rather than merely funny; for instance, Alan Bennett on old age: "In England, you see, age wipes the slate clean ... If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize." Or from Harold Laski: "That state of resentful coma that ... dons dignify by the name of research."

8. Anthony Lejeune (ed.), The concise dictionary of foreign quotations
Good collection for those who wish to show off. Once, when everyone knew Latin, the quote book was just for checking. Now it's for pretending. But watch out: Virgil's "she acquires strength as she goes" refers to the power of ancient gossip and is no use for Olympic commentators on Paula Radcliffe.

9. Antony Jay (ed.), The Oxford dictionary of political quotations
Here are many quotations better left unsaid, such as Henry II's "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" or Tony Blair's memo that "we need two or three eyecatching initiatives ... and I should be associated with as much of this as possible". Not to mention Hillary Clinton's nice understatement that her husband was a "hard dog to keep on the porch".

10. Frank S. Pepper (comp.), Handbook of 20th century quotations
The editor maintained a catalogued collection of quotations over a period of 50 years; he collected over 20,000 quotations and 6,000 are in this book, many of which are not in other books of quotations. Nowadays few people keep commonplace books, even fewer personally collect quotations (Oxford has a whole dictionary department working on books like these) so these collections are all worth having. One test of excellence when judging a collection of quotations is finding something intriguing every time you open a page. For instance: "Everything goes wrong for a government which is going wrong" - Richard Crossman, Diaries, Dec 1 1986. There is hardly a dull or irritating quote here.

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Trivia corner. A list of ten books without a single author, but eleven editors and one compiler.

6.
"Earl of Aberdeen" is probably George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th earl of Aberdeen, UK prime minister, 1852-1855 (Wikipedia). Interestingly, "He is said in the last few months of his life, after the Crimean War, to have declined to contribute to building a church on his Scotland estates because of a sense of guilt in having "shed much blood", citing biblically King David's being forbidden to build the Temple in Jerusalem." Would that some of our modern politicians had a fraction of that self-knowledge.

Mark Billingham's top 10 fictional detectives
Guardian, 2004-07-19.

Mark Billingham is a stand-up comedian and the bestselling author of Sleepyhead, Scaredy cat and Lazybones. His new novel, The burning girl, is published by Little Brown on July 19.

1. Sherlock Holmes
Has to be on the list of course. I first encountered him through an eccentric maths teacher who would read The speckled band and other Conan Doyle adventures to us instead of teaching fractions. He also used to balance chairs on his chin, but that's another story. I'm still fond of Holmes to this day, especially now that I can see him as the crazed, controlling junkie that he clearly was.

2. Sam Spade
I've always slightly preferred Spade to Marlowe, probably just because I thought Hammett was cooler than Chandler. He was leftwing, his name shortened to Dash rather than Ray, and he didn't smoke a pipe or like cats. I adore Hammett's stuff, especially the short stories, and it was a close call between Spade and the unnamed private eye in The continental op.

3. Harry Bosch
The hero of Michael Connelly's LA-set series of mystery novels, Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch has starred in nine wonderful novels, one of which - Lost light - was one of only two crime novels in recent years to make me cry. The other one was by Agatha Christie and I was crying with laughter because the opening line was, "'How queer!' Poirot ejaculated..."

4. Frank Cannon
In the 1970s, there was a trend for all detectives on TV to have some quirk or gimmick and this was often physical. At one time there was a spate of disabled detectives. We had Longstreet (the blind detective) and Ironside (the wheelchair-bound detective). I liked Frank Cannon for no other reason than his "disability" was centred around the fact that he'd eaten all the pies.
LT character: Frank Cannon.

5. Matt Scudder
A big drinker like many great detectives, Lawrence Block's Scudder is an ex-cop turned PI who is haunted by the accidental death of a child. Fuelled by a cocktail of guilt and rage, Scudder gets deeply involved in his cases and then always leaves 10% of his earnings in a church collection box. Though he settles down in the later novels, he is at his very best while slowly drinking himself to death in classics such as When the sacred ginmill closes.
Touchstone: Matthew Scudder.

6. John Rebus
Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh. He is also the only fictional cop I can think of who likes Hawkwind.

7. Dave Robicheaux
Like Harry Bosch, the hero of James Lee Burke's New Orleans-based series is a Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic, but "Streak" Robicheaux is a one-off. Like the books themselves he is tough but lyrical, violent when he needs to be but always aware that to resort to violence is to fail. Robicheaux is a man of honour and courage; a bruised bayou knight.

8. Burke
Burke, the creation of Andrew Vachss, is the ultimate human survivalist. A man with a history of pain and abuse who moves through the underbelly of New York like Batman with a handgun. Together with his adopted "family" of outcasts, he hunts down those monsters who would exploit children in a series of brutal, controversial, but never less than compelling novels.

9. Charlie Parker
Parker, who made his debut in the stunning Every dead thing, is the creation of Irish writer John Connolly. An ex-cop, Parker is haunted by the brutal murders of his wife and child and is called - often by the dead themselves - to avenge those who have been taken before their time. Connolly brilliantly mixes the PI and horror genres and Parker has developed into a genuinely unique character in modern mystery fiction.

10. Tom Thorne
Hey, I've got to pick my own guy, haven't I? I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground and my love of country music both alt and cheesy. However, as my life has become happier and more settled, Thorne's has become increasingly twisted, and events personal and professional have seen him begin to drift further towards the shadows.

Ian Marchant's top 10 railway books
Guardian, 2004-07-21.

Ian Marchant is a comedian, bookseller and novelist and the author of Parallel lines or journeys on the railway of dreams in which he examines the history of the British railway and meets those who still hold it close to their hearts. "Sadly, given the importance of the railway to the history of Britain, lots of books about trains are frankly dull. They have titles like Branch lines To East Grinstead, which, with the best will in the world, do not make riveting reading on the beach. Here are 10 which do."

1. Christian Wolmar, Broken rails
Everyone knows that rail privatisation was a botched-up nonsense, but no one explains why better than Wolmar. This will scare you.

2. Andrew Martin, The necropolis railway
Martin's dark and funny novel brilliantly encapsulates the atmosphere of the Edwardian railway, and the pride and skill of the men who worked it, all wrapped up in a compelling plot.

3. Nicholas Whittaker, Platform souls
This is one of the few books that attempts to explain the motivation of that much maligned breed, the trainspotter. Funny and tender by turns, it ends up being a great book about men and what makes them tick.

4. W. A. D. Strickland, Chronicles of a garden railway
Virtually unobtainable but, if you keep your eyes open in charity shops, you might get lucky. Buried amongst a great deal of sensible technical advice on the problems of running an OO gauge model layout in a suburban garden is an admittedly unintentionally hilarious account of family life in the 50s and 60s.

5. Jack Simmons,The Victorian railway
Not just the best book on Victorian railways, but one of the best books about Victorian Britain. The critics piled up the superlatives, and it deserves them all.

6. Paul Theroux, The great railway bazaar
This is the best of Theroux's several railway travel books. From London to Saigon, and back via the Trans-Siberian, he manages to capture both the excitement and the tedium of train travel.

7. Anon, The railway traveller's handy book
First published in 1862, and republished in 1971, this was the first ever guide to how to travel by train. A classic of High Victorian comedy, sadly out of print, but fairly easy to pick up. You will never feel the same about going through tunnels again.

8. L. T. C. Rolt, Railway adventure
Rolt was a fascinating figure, who ended up being the reluctant father of both the canal restoration and steam preservation movements. This is the story of how he helped save one of The Great Little Railways of Wales, the Tal-Y-Llyn. His biographies of the Stephenson's and Brunel are highly recommended too.

9. E. Nesbit, The railway children
You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll learn the value of wearing red flannelette knickers.

10. Stephen Halliday, Underground to everywhere
The Tube is the only railway which is cool; all the others are romantic, which is a very different thing. This is the best single volume introduction to the subject, and good looking too, as you'd expect from a railway that has always valued good design.

Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson's top 10 books about Elizabeth I
Guardian, 2004-07-28.

Michael Dobson and Nicola J Watson are the authors of England's Elizabeth: an afterlife in fame and fantasy (Oxford, 2002). It is a guide to the nation's 400-year obsession with the Virgin Queen. "This is a deliberately miscellaneous selection, since one of the most extraordinary things about Elizabeth is the sheer range of material she has inspired, and continues to inspire, from Spenser's Faerie Queene to Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth and beyond."

1. Mary Beth Rose, Janel Mueller & Leah S Marcus (eds), Elizabeth I: collected works (2001)
The best way to get to know the historical Elizabeth is through her own writings. Her Collected works brings together her speeches, poems, prayers and letters and make wonderful reading. The political speeches are sometimes masterpieces of cryptic evasiveness, but the letter she sent to Mary, Queen of Scots on learning about the blowing-up of Mary's husband Lord Darnley has to be one of the most forthright documents in the English language.

2. Roy Strong, Gloriana: the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (1987)
The second-best way to get to know the historical Elizabeth is through the dazzling array of portraits dating from her lifetime. Roy Strong's Gloriana is a very handsome volume that is erudite, lucid and fascinatingly detailed about how these images were made and what they mean.

3. David Starkey & Susan Doran (eds), Elizabeth: the exhibition catalogue (2003)
The National Maritime Museum celebrated the 400th anniversary of Elizabeth's death in 2003 with splendidly dramatic exhibition. Anyone who missed it can still admire the lavishly-illustrated catalogue, full of helpful essays and stunning images.

4. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: a tragic history (1928)
We confess to a definite taste for the belles-lettres school of historical biography that flourished during the earlier 20th century. Lytton Strachey's biography is a gloriously overwrought performance, a pioneering Bloomsbury exercise in psychological intuition which reveals as much about Strachey as it does about Elizabeth but is none the worse for that.

5. Edith Sitwell, The Queens and the hive
Edith Sitwell's poetic rhapsody does for Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots what Strachey did for Elizabeth and Essex; this is haunted and haunting stuff.

6. Benjamin Britten, Gloriana (1953)
It's cheating to include an opera, but Gloriana, with its Strachey-based libretto by William Plomer, demands inclusion, not least for its heartbreaking ending in which the old queen can no longer sing romantic love arias but merely recites fragments of her historical speeches. Judith Barstow's performance, which helped rehabilitate this opera after the resignation of Mrs Thatcher suddenly made it appear contemporary, remains definitive.

7. Margaret Irwin, The young Bess trilogy
Among the classic historical novels about Elizabeth, Margaret Irwin's Young Bess trilogy of the 1940s and early 1950s has probably stood up best; very accomplished, very well-researched, it's a lot more demanding and adult than many of its imitators (and vastly more so than the saccharine film version, which cast Jean Simmons as Elizabeth opposite Stewart Granger as a romantically laundered Admiral Seymour).
Touchstone: Good Queen Bess series.

8. Patricia Finney, Firedrake's eye
Patricia Finney's more recent trilogy - Firedrake's eye, Unicorn's blood and Gloriana's torch - is also lavishly researched, if a good deal more fantastical than Irwin's brand of psychological realism permitted. Finney has one foot in the court and one in the Catholic underworld, and she has all sorts of literary tricks up her sleeve besides some very adept postmodern political plotting.

9. Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth
The first major historical novel about Elizabeth, with its wilful anachronisms and simultaneously dense and witty texture, is still one of the best. Sir Walter Scott's classic pretty much invented 19th century mock-Tudor, and it's still a sumptuous read long after the vogue for heavy solid black oak dining tables and leaded windows has passed.

10. Alexandra Sheedy, She was nice to mice: the other side of Elizabeth I's character never before revealed by previous historians
Let us not forget the children. The 12-year-old Alexandra Sheedy produced She was nice to mice in 1975, before growing up to abbreviate her first name to Ally and become a Hollywood actress. It's a charming book, and the scene of the Queen's death, with her beloved mice mourning in her hair, remains strangely haunting.

Paul Murray's top 10 gothic novels
Guardian, 2004-08-11.

Paul Murray is an Irish diplomat and writer. His biography of Lafcadio Hearn won the Koizumi Yakumo literary prize in Japan in 1995. His latest work, From the shadow of Dracula: a life of Bram Stoker has just been published by Jonathan Cape. Here he chooses his top 10 novels in the older gothic tradition.
Touchstone: A fantastic journey: the life and literature of Lafcadio Hearn.

1. Horace Walpole, The castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole published what is generally recognised as the first gothic novel almost two and a half centuries ago. The castle of Otranto (1765) created a confluence of medievalism and terror that has mutated and endured ever since. Stoker may have paid an oblique tribute by featuring Walpole's kinsman, the 17th century prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in Miss Betty (1898), his next novel after Dracula.

2. William Beckford, History of the Caliph Vathek
William Beckford's History of the Caliph Vathek (1786) merged the 18th century fashion for oriental tales with the newly-established gothic tradition. Byron and Mallarme, among others, admired this work, which H. P. Lovecraft considered caught well the "shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit". A fascination with, and fear of, the east was a feature of the gothic novel.

3. Ann Radcliffe, The mysteries of Udolpho
Radcliffe's 1794 work anticipates Stoker's ability to describe landscapes unseen by the author. The final chase of Count Dracula across Europe by his righteous band of pursuers also recalls Radcliffe at her considerable best. She has a masterful ability to suggest the supernatural without ultimately invoking it. Hugely, and deservedly, popular in her time.

4. Matthew Lewis, The monk
One of the most vicious, rip-roaring and entertaining novels of the entire gothic genre. Written by an MP, its reactionary political message - an attempt to revive the horror of the intertwined threat of the Spanish and the Papacy at a time when they had been displaced as the main threat to the British state by the new ideology of the French Revolution - is clearer in retrospect. It shocked even Byron when it appeared in 1796.

5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Together with John Polidori's The vampire (the first fictional vampire tale), Frankenstein (1818) emerged from the high jinks, featuring the Shelleys, Matthew Lewis, Polidori and Byron, at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. It created a monster rivaled only by Count Dracula in the global consciousness. It also contains a reference to the monster as a vampire and anticipates Dracula's multiple narrator technique. It marks a confluence of the gothic and romanticism.

6. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Representing the beginning of the Irish gothic tradition in 1820, it is considered by some the greatest of all gothic works. Representing a significant stride in the evolution of the genre, Melmoth profoundly influenced some of the most important writers of the 19th century, including Scott, Thackeray and Baudelaire. Balzac grouped Melmoth with Moliere's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred as one of the supreme allegorical figures of modern literature. Maturin's relative, Oscar Wilde, symbolically took the name Sebastian Melmoth when he went into exile following his release from prison.

7. George Croly, Salathiel the Immortal
Now almost forgotten, the Reverend George Croly was a friend of the Stoker family. In Salathiel the Immortal (1829), there are similarities of predicament between Salathiel and Dracula (as well as with that of Melmoth the Wanderer). Salathiel led the mob which promoted the death of Jesus, in return for which he was condemned to the misery of the undead state. A reshaping of the Wandering Jew legend which underlies so much of the gothic genre, including Melmoth the Wanderer. Like Maturin, Croly was a Church of Ireland clergyman.
Touchstone: Tarry thou till I come.

8. James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Pecket Prest, Varney the Vampire or The feast of blood
Published in 1847, the year of Stoker's birth, this penny-dreadful contained over 800 pages of often confusing text. It did, however, create some of what would become the stock characters of the vampire tale, especially its central European vampiric aristocrat with ambitions to be master of a great English house and a taste for the blood of young virgins. He is possessed of glittering eyes that fascinate his victims and fang-like teeth. The staking of one of his victims established one of the most potent images of the genre while the elderly and wise Admiral Bell anticipated Van Helsing. Varney represented the first full-length vampire novel in fiction and probably also the first significant fantastic adventure story.

9. Robert Louis Stevenson, The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Like Oscar Wilde's slightly later Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, i>The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887) achieved a dramatic effect by bringing the terror of the primitive, or the peripheral, 'other' home to the heart of empire. A play based on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was put on at the Lyceum by the actor Richard Mansfield in 1888 with limited success. Like Dracula and Frankenstein, it became a major magnet for movie makers and is now embedded in the mass consciousness.

10. Bram Stoker, Dracula
Don't believe those who tell you that i>Dracula (1897) does not need to be read: no movie to date has done justice to a long and complex work. Arguably the greatest, certainly the most popular gothic novel of them all. It has been reinterpreted afresh by each succeeding generation, a sure sign of a masterpiece, and still generates oceans of critical comment, some of it profound, some unintentionally hilarious, much of it just plain silly. Stoker would have been amazed (he replied to one earnest American correspondent that he clearly knew more about Dracula than he did himself!).

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9.
Richard Mansfield, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mansfield

>18 Cynfelyn: lots of books about trains are frankly dull
— By coincidence, I've got a copy of the "unobtainable" Chronicles of a garden railway on order. Now to see if it turns up!
— The comment about the dullness of many railway books is sadly true, but I can't share Marchant's enthusiasm for Andrew Martin's rather feeble detective stories. Maybe they still had novelty value in 2004. At least it's pre-Portillo, so he didn't have to list the Bradshaw reprints. A few months later, he could have included Helena Wojtczak's surprise hit Railwaywomen (self-published in 2005), which is a really fascinating bit of historical writing by anyone's standards.

>21 thorold: "unobtainable"

For better or worse the world has changed since 2004. There are six copies of Chronicles of a garden railway currently listed on AbeBooks, and another copy on eBay, although with a spread of prices from £9 to £120, the invisible hand of the market is keeping some copies unobtainable.

And fair play for a 14-year old review of Wojtczak's Railwaywomen. Although the author's website: www.railwaywomen.co.uk, has succumbed to link rot. Is http://www.hastingspress.co.uk/railwaywomen/index2.html the same content?

Dominic Calder-Smith's top 10 boxing books
Guardian, 2004-08-24.

Dominic Calder-Smith writes about boxing for newspapers and magazines and is the author of Tarnished armour: hopes and fears in heavyweight boxing. His latest book, The long round, tells the story of the generation of fighters who tried to beat Mike Tyson. "I have to concede first that there are a number of boxing books I have not as yet read, which I'm reliably informed are superb. These include Dancing Shoes is dead by Gavin Evans (described to me by a highly respected US fight writer as simply the best boxing book he had ever read); The fight by Norman Mailer and The black lights by Thomas Hauser."

1. Donald McRae, Dark trade
The first half of the 1990s will probably not go down as boxing's most exhilarating era, yet this book had a huge impact on me, inspiring me to stop dreaming about writing about the sport and actually get out there and do it. McRae's writing is both incisive and utterly compassionate, and his meetings with and subsequent portraits of men like Chris Eubank, Michael Watson, Roy Jones and most of all James 'Lights Out' Toney are unforgettable.
Disambiguation and touchstone: Michael Watson (3), James Toney.

2. David Remnick, King of the world
Beautifully written account of Muhammad Ali's first ascent to the heavyweight throne, concentrating largely on Ali's bouts with Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, but also Liston and Patterson's own brief encounters (all three principals met each other twice). This is a detailed study, unearthing many new anecdotes about rivalries that have already been well-documented, and whilst it is a book about Ali, Patterson and Liston are also given a deserved and generous share of the stage.

3. Mark Kram, Ghosts of Manila
This book polarised many sections of the boxing community with its tigerish stand in Joe Frazier's corner and scoffing at Muhammad Ali's purported wisdom and wit, and it's fair to say some of the salvos launched at Ali are somewhat off the mark. But the lyrical prose is stunning and, besides, Ali had more than his fair share of propaganda volumes, so why begrudge Frazier at least one? Kram died shortly after this was published.

4. Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali: his life and times
Much of this huge volume consists of direct quotes from Hauser's interviewees, so that it reads almost like a play, with Hauser providing the scene-setting. But the scene-setting is wonderful and Hauser's research clearly exhaustive; former wives, opponents, sparring partners, managers, promoters, trainers, businessmen, the Nation of Islam, and of course Ali himself, contributed their views and memories to help form what is surely the definitive Ali book.

5. Donald McRae, In black and white
This one's not just about boxing, for it focuses its attentions not only on former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, but also the legendary athlete Jesse Owens. It's also not just about boxing because it's really about the previously underreported friendship and bond between Louis and Owens and their dignified struggles against racial bigotry. All in all, an epic tale. And enough absorbing and often tragic material on Louis's fighting days to keep the hardcore boxing nut fascinated throughout.

6. Nick Tosches, Night train
Tosches writes with plenty of attitude, doesn't waste his time with any bullshit and couldn't give a fuck what you think of his language, so he was perfectly equipped to tell Liston's dark story. There's no mind-bending discovery to shed light on the mystery surrounding Liston's untimely death as a lot of people were expecting before this came out, but Tosches peeled - no, hammered - his way through many tired layers of Liston's past to come out with a fast-moving, painstakingly researched classic.

7. Jack Newfield, Don King: only in America
Even for those of us who are quick to damn King for a catalogue of deceit and betrayal towards his former fighters, the most successful promoter of modern times possesses a magnetic presence. And I have a hunch that when King eventually retires from the blood business, boxing will be a little poorer for it. Newfield did not incorporate the cooperation of King for this fine book, but he provides the reader with a concise account of King's life and times, including homicides (King has been found guilty of murder on two separate occasions), larceny and a monopolisation of the heavyweight division.

8. Richard Durham, The greatest
This title was slammed by Kram in Ghosts of Manila as shallow propaganda, and it's true that Durham was approved and commissioned by the Nation of Islam, of which he was a member. Released shortly after Ali's third rumble with Joe Frazier in 1975, it does, however, give a fascinating insight into the mentality and psyche of a champion. And it's not guilty of deification either, as Ali candidly speaks not only about his well-disguised fear of and respect for arch-rivals like Joe Frazier and George Foreman, but also his shame with regard to his litany of extramarital dalliances.

9. Kevin Mitchell, War, baby
Nine years ago Nigel Benn met vicious-hitting American Gerald McClellan in defence of his WBC super-middleweight title. Together the pair produced one of the most savage encounters ever seen in a British ring. Benn was never the same again and McClellan was left in a coma, battling for his life. This is about much more than the fight. It is about damaged souls, bodies and minds, and while I don't believe Mitchell was advocating a ban on boxing, he does a tremendous job of asking those of us who follow the sport to consider a more grown-up, realistic case for its defence in the 21st century.

10. Jonathan Rendall, This Bloody Mary is the last thing I own
A former adviser to Colin McMillan - a brief owner of the WBO featherweight title in the early 1990s - Rendall's book is a wonderfully-written account of his time in boxing. Most memorable are his moments spent with McMillan and a pair of much older featherweights, former rivals Jack Berg and Kid Chocolate. Powerfully descriptive, moving and, at times, very funny.

>17 Cynfelyn: I need to catch up with some of these. But a very solid list indeed (there are way too many to fit in a 10 list and these 10 are solid).

>24 AnnieMod: Yes. All but Frank Cannon are LT series. If he ought to be a series as well - and I'll leave that to those who know the books to decide - he'd be joint smallest with Sam Spode, with four core books each. Harry Bosch's core books are numbered 1-35 (admittedly with gaps), the others being 2x23, 19, 2x18, 17 and a 9. What's that, 170 books?

I think we can agree that Mark Billingham managed to expand on his brief. Good job.

>25 Cynfelyn: Well, anyone reading Sam Spade and not listening to the radio plays with him is missing a lot. Cannon is the same with TV. Fictional does not just mean books after all. :) I’ve been on a Old Time Radio kick in the last few years and even if some of the episodes and detectives are campy and even if some of the shows are dated, they do add to the Golden age.

And detective series tend to run long :)

>19 Cynfelyn: Well, I did not expect a few of the ones here. I have an Elizabeth I collection so I expected to have most of these. Sitwell, the opera and the last book caught me by surprise. :)

>20 Cynfelyn: I cannot argue with any of these but this is the most conservative list I had seen in these so far. While everyone does go for best, there is usually a surprise somewhere - a book that needs an explanation for being included or just something that I really do not expect in a top 10.

Are all of those classic Gothic tales in the meaning we use the term today? No, not at all. But once you get the organization principle, they might have been lifted from a textbook.

So was the list that predictable or is it just me being into the genre that causes that familiarity?

>28 AnnieMod: "I cannot argue with any of these but this is the most conservative list I had seen in these so far. ... So was the list that predictable or is it just me being into the genre that causes that familiarity?"

It's not my genre. Dracula is the only one on the list I've read, with Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the only other ones where I could sketch the story, plus name recognition for The castle of Otranto. The themes of the others may have been recycled by Terry Pratchett's Discworld and/or The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror, for all I know.

Brian Chikwava's top ten works by writers who had a score to settle with society
Guardian, 2004-09-02.

Writer and musician Brian Chikwava won this year's Caine Prize for African Writing for his story Seventh Street alchemy. He is currently working on a novella, Bubble Wrapping Artificial Shit, and a blues album, Jacaranda Skits. "This is a mélange of geniuses whose minds sought to tackle or reorder the worlds they lived in. These writers had issues to settle with society, and in these works of fiction they let rip their imaginations to drip smoldering ideas on the minds of their generations and many beyond."

1. Mikhail Lermontov, A hero of our time
A landmark in Russian literature, this novel published in 1840 influenced writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Five episodes, each of which could easily stand alone as a short story, are weaved together to produce a psychologically fascinating story of 19th century aristocratic boredom and disillusionment.

2. Dambudzo Marechera, The house of hunger
A wildly angry and chaotic novella (and other stories) by the tortured late Zimbabwean author. Marechera has also been described as African literature's enfant terrible largely for his rejection of African literature as ridiculously narrow.

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From underground
Dostoevsky is one of the greatest literary talents the world has seen in the past two centuries, and the reputation of his works is monumental. Notes From underground is arguably his most idiosyncratic masterpiece.

4. Isaac Babel, Collected stories
A collection of stories by the hard-hitting Jewish Russian author. "...since I was a boy, I have felt that certain literary works were a form of witchcraft. After I had read The King, I knew that a new sorcerer had entered Russian literature," Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky once referred to Babel.

5. Jean Rhys, Tigers are better-looking
A very engaging collection of passionately delivered short stories, incorporating Rhys's first collection of Paris stories, The left bank. Rhys's work was way beyond her time in terms of the issues she tackled.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Sartre's thought-provoking novel in which he explores his theories of existential angst through a protagonist whose encounters with existence lead him to a relentless questioning of reality.

7. Albert Camus, The outsider
One of the 20th century's existential jewels. It is a short unassuming novel through which the Algerian-French writer/philosopher delivers an awesome indictment of society.

8. Franz Kafka, The complete short stories
For anyone interested in the development of Kafka's ideas into longer fiction, this is the definitive book. In this collection one sees Kafka's imagination toying around with the worlds that it creates.

9. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against nature
A very dense and compact story in which Huysmans extended the scope of the French novel by using art, science and history to frame and capture the excessive indulgence of an aristocratic heir.

10. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the rye
A literary masterpiece by a master of satire, this is a devastating examination of the human condition and has kept its controversial reputation since its publication in 1951.

Frank Delaney's top 10 Irish novels
Guardian, 2004-09-07.

Frank Delaney is the author of eight novels, as well as several non-fiction books (including James Joyce's odyssey) and a number of screenplays. He has been a judge for both the Booker and Whitbread prizes and chairman of the Book Trust. In his latest work, Ireland: a novel, Delaney tells the history of his native land through a young boy's search for an itinerant storyteller.

1. James Joyce, Ulysses
Obviously Ulysses has to be first. On another day in another room in another town my top 10 Irish novels might be different - but there are 'given' novels, the bibles of the country, without which no reader worthy of the nationality 'Irish' can proceed. Joyce hammered a job on the novel so complete that he became a category unto himself. Every literary style was mist to his grill, as he might have said, and his plotting, if such it can be called - two men who take all day to meet each other - paved the way for, among others, Samuel Beckett. Above all he taught every writer the importance of naturalistic dialogue; with his fine tenor voice Joyce knew better than most that we read not with the eye but with the ear.

2. Elizabeth Bowen, The last September
Chosen as much to represent Bowen rather than merely for the novel's own powers. Which are none the less significant. The year is 1920; Sir Richard Naylor and his family await in their great house the final onslaught of the 'Risen People' - meaning that the twilight of the Anglo-Irish has begun to fall as the native Irish begin to take back their land. In that anxious gloaming, relationships advance and retreat like sad and fearful dancers; some have possibilities, some never had, some will cause death. And always the clear, cool and nervous voice of Bowen herself comes through the fog of years as it does in all her novels.

3. J. G. Farrell, Troubles
It seems right that a number of any top 10 Irish novels should address the emotional and physical violence that formed modern Ireland. Farrell wrote superbly; all his books had a quality that hallmarks great literary talent - he could 'do' texture. This album - which is what Troubles feels like - records the same Anglo-Irish as Elizabeth Bowen knew and belonged to. As with Bowen, this feels like the real thing (which is all a novel has to do). Always judge a writer by his grasp of what he doesn't know: Farrell died young yet his old people are almost his best creations.

4. Michael Farrell, Thy tears might cease
This Farrell wrote only one book, spent all his life doing so, told everybody about it incessantly, didn't live long enough to finish it and startled everybody with its excellence when it appeared. The book centres on the 1916 period and addresses the confusion in the minds of young men who have not yet discriminated between the relative importance of patriotism and personal survival. One of the most irritating questions that all novelists have to field is, "How autobiographical is your book?" In Michael Farrell's case the answer feels as though it must be, "totally" but as he's not here to speak for himself let us accept it for the stirring fiction he intended to create.

5. William Trevor, Fools of fortune
Fools of fortune makes it into this list because of its rightful place among great books that deal with the Irish question. I would also have chosen Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel and cited it as exciting because it appeared early in Trevor's writing life and heralded the wonderful powers of observation and characterisation that appear like flashes of lighting in his short stories. Fools of fortune, however, displays a further and to me even more arresting Trevor hallmark: nobody has written better about each nationality in the other's country - the Irish in England or the English in Ireland - and certainly never in a single volume. In this novel he again makes tragedy, if not bearable, at least comprehensible.

6. Thomas Flanagan, The year of the French
I recall the excitement when this book was published in the late 1970's - and then discovered (not always the case) that the book merited it. Flanagan, an American history professor of Irish descent, pulled off a substantial coup in that he brought a historian's training to bear upon a romantic moment, the period when the French landed in the west of Ireland in 1798 and all Ireland thought liberation was at hand. His research never lies around the novel in pools, it stains the entire fabric, so that when his character's point of view is emerging from a dispossessed farmer's clay hovel or a small town merchant's table in the local hotel, we smell them - their clothes, their breath and (this is Ireland after all) their politics.

7. John McGahern, Amongst women
Other than Ulysses I wish that lists such as this did not also suggest hierarchy of choice. McGahern has written the finest novel of what might be called the 'rural bourgeoisie,' the small to middling farmer with emotions and opinions. I have heard that when the manuscript first reached his publishers it was more than twice as long as the book that eventually appeared and that McGahern himself insisted on cutting it back. Given the spare power of what appeared here - the farmer and his family and their subcutaneous, needless, heedless anguish - I know that I am perhaps making a literary misjudgment but I merely wanted more and more of this wonderful writing.

8. Edna O'Brien, The country girls
Just as pure and compelling today as when it first appeared 45 years ago. Simple in the extreme, it tells the story of Kate and Baba who have made it to Dublin from the deep and damp parish countryside and find that, in all the excitement, hypocrisy remains a constant. The book's place in my heart was copper-fastened by the banning of it; so how, then, did the natives of Miss O'Brien's home village in County Clare get enough copies for the bonfire they held to burn it? It was her first novel, not her finest but her most innocent - and see how she grew her talent.

9. Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
Which is more exciting - to see a writer arrive in one bound or to see a promising writer flesh out his talents? In a sense O'Connor did both; his earlier books always had flash and sparkle, especially when examining young humans, and we should not be surprised that he suddenly pulled out this astounding work. But we'd have been surprised at anyone suddenly leaping to this height. In 1847 many ships crossed the Atlantic, ferrying the fleeing Irish from hunger to the new promised land and many have written about it, fiction and fact. But never like this; here, you catch your breath on every page. Judging by the payload O'Connor delivers, I can only marvel at the emotional demands the writing must have made upon him.

10. James Joyce, Finnegans wake
Chosen because James Joyce did writing and reading (and literary Ireland) the ultimate service; he took nothing for granted. The Wake calls down myriad responses - derision, fawning respect, confusion, ennui; but why not enjoyment? Read it aloud and read it slowly; read it while thinking of a man who loved language and who loved mankind and who loved - above all, perhaps - mankind's use of language. More poetry lurks in here than in 10 verse anthologies. I don't claim you should read it every day like some sort of Celtic missal; best to approach it once in a while, and approach it as though quarrying - this is Joyce's diamond mine.

Linda Wagner-Martin's top 10 jazz age books
Guardian, 2004-09-22.

Linda Wagner-Martin is the author of biographies of Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein. Her latest book, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: an American woman's life is the 'cultural biography' of one of the most famous figures of the jazz age, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald and an author in her own right.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The beautiful and damned (1922)
The work that helped to create the term 'jazz age', Fitzgerald's second novel charts the life of characters Anthony and Gloria Patch (whose similarities to himself and his wife Zelda are remarkable), creating an admonitory ending to the narrative begun in his first book, This side of paradise (1920).

2. Michael Arlen, The green hat (1924)
Born in Bulgaria and reared in England, Arlen set the stage for the 'new woman' characters of Daisy Buchanan and Brett Ashley (in The great Gatsby and The sun also rises).

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby (1925)
Set in the wealthy culture of New York, complete with gangster-driven finances, prohibition, jazz and sexual triangles, this novel showed the futility of monetary success which is not backed up by moral conviction. Ironically, the title character remains one of the most admired of American literature's romantic men.

4. Ernest Hemingway, The sun also rises (1926)
Following a group of vacationing American and British characters to the Pamplona festival, complete with its ritualised bullfights, Hemingway's first novel captures the mood of the hard-drinking and hard-loving jazz age.

5. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Save me the waltz (1932)
A woman's story of life during the jazz age, revealing just how exotic the expatriate years in Paris and Italy were. The second half of the book, which describes life as a would-be ballerina, is the best treatment of the agony, and the satisfaction, of art.

6. William Faulkner, Sanctuary (1932)
Set among the illegal liquor producers of prohibition, Sanctuary focuses on the sexual mores of the 1920s in college circles of the south. Unlike Fitzgerald's Princeton-based novels and stories, Faulkner's Mississippi youth represented the harsh realism of a grotesque underclass. The novel also provides the best early treatment of Stockholm Syndrome (the lead woman character is a rape survivor).

7. Gertrude Stein, The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
A spoof of the memoir genre, this book - although written by Stein - narrates the lesbian couple's life through the voice of Alice Toklas and is an account of their Paris years, largely in the 1920s, among the expatriate artists of the world. It is this book, rather than her fiction, that made Stein known to her fellow Americans; excerpts from it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and she and Toklas then undertook a nine-month tour of the US.

8. Ernest Hemingway, A moveable feast (1964)
Published posthumously, this part autobiographical, part fictional account of the author's Paris years sheds much light on the temperament of the jazz age characters. Rightly famous for its biting portraits of Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, among others, the book is one of the more famous memoirs of the 20th century.

9. Michael Reynolds, Ernest Hemingway: the Paris years (1989)
The second volume of Reynolds's five-book biography is the standard work, with full attention to expatriate issues.

10. Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored strangers: Gertrude Stein and her family (1995)
The most recent biography of Stein (and Toklas) in the context of the art-collecting older brothers, Leo and Michael.

>20 Cynfelyn: At last! a list I have read more than half of!! Let's not look too closely at what that says about me and my reading... >;-)

Sam Jordison's top ten books on place
Guardian, 2004-09-27.

Sam Jordison is the creator and co-editor of Crap towns and Crap towns II, books which together, he likes to claim, provide the genuinely rough guide to Britain. "This is my pick of books where location is everything - and everything is miserable. In no particular order."

1. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And loathing In Las Vegas
Las Vegas is the Crap Town mother ship; the highest form of all that is venal, gaudy and corrupt in the modern world - and Hunter S Thompson is its poet laureate. "This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs," he tells us. "Reality itself is too twisted."

2. Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Sinclair's trawl through the violence and filth of London's past and present is as thrilling as it is nasty. You'll never look at booksellers in the same way again after meeting his thoroughly disgusting purveyors of old volumes.

3. Alasdair Gray, Lanark: a life in four books
A work of visionary genius inspired by Blake, the Book of Revelation and the sheer bloody misery of growing up in Glasgow. One of the most warped books to have emerged from the late 20th century.

4. William S. Burroughs, Naked lunch
THE most warped book to have emerged from the late 20th century. Naked lunch is a masterpiece. Its location, the Interzone, the home of the Mugwump, is an utterly sickening creation. No, I do not want to go to Hassan's Rumpus Room.

5. Dante Alighieri, Inferno (book one of The divine comedy)
Grievous fires. Beasts with pointed tales. Rivers of boiling tar. Furies. Devils. Nakedness. It doesn't get much worse than the "red city" of Dis. And the perverse delight Dante takes in relating the agonies of its inhabitants is still deeply fascinating.

6. Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit
Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical account of an adolescence spent in a fundamentalist family among the chimneys and terraced streets of Accrington is innovative, touching and, above all, extremely funny.

7. John Burnside, Living nowhere
The poet and frequently dazzling novelist takes on his hometown of Corby, which he describes as "a suburb of hell." It features one of the most convincing accounts of an acid trip ever written. Not surprisingly, it goes bad.

8. Saul Bellow, Humboldt's gift
Cold winds and corruption in Bellow's cruel, cruel vision of Chicago. There's an eminently quotable line on every page. One picked (just about) at random: "I had gone out one evening to amuse myself in vulgar company and I had fallen into the moronic inferno." Unsurprisingly, this is the novel that secured the grand old man of American letters a Nobel prize for literature.

9. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
In Brighton, Greene found a town almost as depraved and seedy as his own imagination. The resultant collision was this enduringly powerful and thoroughly unpleasant slice of social realism. Razor sharp.

10. Eloise Millar, Wednesday's child
Of course, I'm biased, because I live with the author, but the descriptions of Oxford's Blackbird Leys estate in this promising debut are bang on the money (or lack of it). Run out and buy 10 copies - then she'll be able to get me that Italian espresso maker I've been craving.

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3.
Copy my earlier rant, https://www.librarything.com/topic/331420#7590573 . There are masses of touchstones to 'Book of Revelation' credited to various editors and commentators, but none to 'Bible author', 'Anon'/'Anonymous', or in this case, 'John'. So I've left it on the algorithm's choice of touchstone; another chance to consider some members' ideas of appropriate CK people, places and events.

10.
With Thursday (no. 4 above), that's two out of seven from "Monday's Child" (see Wikipedia). I wonder whether there is anything named after the other children of the week worth a top ten slot.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson's favourite books about fishing
Guardian, 2004-09-29.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson writes about fishing for The Field and other magazines and newspapers. His first book, Somewhere else, a collection of 14 essays about travelling and fishing around the world, is published by Yellow Jersey Press. "I enjoy the way fishing puts me in touch with a landscape. The weather, the moon phases and even the rocks take on a significance lost to many travellers. I love, too, the way a journey puts me on edge and takes me out of context, making me feel more alive. The best fishing writing reflects this, and through it we can travel at the writer's shoulder. The books I've chosen all do this brilliantly, whether on journeys down the road or across the world."

1. Negley Farson, Going fishing
Farson introduces his 1942 masterpiece: "This is just the story of some rods and the places they take you to." A foreign correspondent between the wars, Farson worked all over the world, accompanied by a typewriter and his fishing rods. Where there was water, he fished, and in spare and vivid prose, he brought to life his adventures in revolutionary Russia, on horseback in the Caucasus, or living hand to mouth in British Columbia. As a fishing and travel book it is the original and the best.

2. Chris Yates , The secret carp
All of Yates's books are good, but this one - written as a diary over one day and night fishing for carp by a secret lake in the depths of Wessex - conveys perfectly the captivation of fishing. Yates's writing takes you with him, and this book also has the quality of a sketchbook; the word pictures are immediate and tactile. There's no better way to go fishing on a rush-hour train.

3. Thomas McGuane , The longest silence
McGuane is a renowned American novelist, but he's at his best writing about fishing. Here the off-beam satiricism, the wit, the calloused mid-western outlook, the reflectiveness, and the brilliant prose combine perfectly. His story, Fly fishing: the evil empire, about salmon fishing in Russia, is as good a piece of travel writing as you'll find.

4. Clive Gammon , I know a good place
Gammon grew up in south Wales, but has lived and worked for many years in America writing for Sports illustrated. His writing combines the lyrical and fabulous ancestry of his home country with a dry American style that cuts quickly to the point. He tells a bloody good story, and is endlessly entertaining.

5. John Gierach , Trout bum
Gierach lives the life of the peripatetic trout bum; a latter-day Huck Finn. You'll read this book and wonder why the hell you work anyway. In deceptively easy, conversational prose Gierach takes you to the riverside or to the tackle store, to shoot the breeze, sip camp coffee and spend your days in the earnest pursuit of fish. As original in its way as Going fishing, Trout bum is the book that launched a thousand job resignations.

6. H. T. Sheringham , An angler's hours
Sheringham was the angling editor of The Field. He published An angler's hours in 1905, but it seems hardly to have dated at all. Perhaps this is because Sheringham was happy to fish for anything with fins, and to fish in some quirky places, while the idea of the all-round angler seems a more modern notion. Sheringham is earthy, right down to his unpretentious wish to do nothing more than entertain with his writing, as he himself has been entertained by the fishing.

7. Arthur Ransome , Rod and line
A collection of Ransome's fishing columns from the Manchester Guardian published in 1929 and written before Swallows and Amazons made him famous. This was my favourite book when I first started going mad for fishing aged 12. The trouble with bulls, fishing in Lilliput, getting ready for the new season - I read it over and over.

8. James R. Babb , Crosscurrents
Babb lives in a house he built himself, eating food he grew, caught or shot himself, and he writes in a shed overlooking a pond he dug himself. But you won't find any wistful bucolic longing in Babb's writing. You'll get his own unique take on anything from the business of taking a shit in the woods to the perfect fishing sandwich. His first book, Crosscurrents, combines an acerbic wit with his own brand of verbal pyrotechnics to deliver a jolting, intensely entertaining read.

9. Ted Leeson , The habit of rivers
An extensive reflection on rivers and fly fishing by a wiry university lecturer from the hippy generation. To get so metaphysical about such a muddy pursuit is difficult and dangerous, and others who try can quickly become boring or pretentious. But Leeson is an original; he is a keen observer and unusually eloquent. He keeps it anchored, and what emerges is a timeless book about the inner and outer landscape of fishing.

10. Norman Maclean , A river runs through it
"In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing." Thus begins Maclean's brilliant novella in which fly fishing and a river become a backdrop to the frontier lives of the writer and his family. On one level it is an engaging and moving story well told. But the book has the feeling of poetry in places, both in the pared-down language and the complex metaphor of landscape in which the river becomes the story. Maclean didn't write a thing until he was 70 years old. It was worth the wait.

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Para. 1.
Surprisingly, there isn't an obvious touchstone for 'The Field' magazine. Perhaps there isn't a lot of overlap between LT members and members of the hunting and shooting county set that is the caricature of The Field's readership.

7.
This book changed my life. It lead me to the 'Swallows and Amazons' series, and on to rediscovering children's literature, and threads of sailing and fishing books. But not actually fishing. It also led me to buying a sailing boat - two boats and two kayaks by now - besides rejuvenating camping within the family, and joining The Arthur Ransome Society (TARS; https://arthur-ransome.org).

Going off at a tangent, I would thoroughly recommend anyone join a literary society of a favourite author. Although admittedly, unlike TARS, most societies probably don't include camping, sailing, hill walking and code breaking among their activities. Another shout-out for the Alliance of Literary Societies (ALS; https://allianceofliterarysocieties.wordpress.com), an umbrella group with links to over 100 mainly UK literary societies. Some of your favourite authors are probably represented. Well worth a browse.

Saul David's favourite books on South African history
Guardian, 2004-10-11.

Saul David is a historian and broadcaster. He specializes in wars of empire and is the author of The Indian mutiny (shortlisted for the Westminster medal for military literature). His latest book, Zulu: the heroism and tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879, is published by Viking (£20).

1. Thomas Packenham, The Boer War
Eight years in the making - and it shows. Packenham's exhaustive research in numerous archives in Britain and South Africa, not to mention interviews with more than 50 survivors, resulted in a completely new take on many aspects of the war: the crucial role of two Rand millionaires in precipitating it; the feud between the British generals Buller and Roberts; and the plight of the 100,000 black Africans who served both sides. A fast-paced narrative - with wonderful descriptions of the fighting - is merely the icing on the cake.

2. Donald Robert Morris, The washing of the spears
Donald Morris's peerless narrative is both a history of the rise and fall of the Zulu nation and a no-holds-barred account of British colonial and military policy in South Africa. The chapters on the Zulu War of 1879, particularly the battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, are spellbinding. But if Morris's scholarship is impressive, it is the quality of his sparkling prose that makes this book one of the greats.

3. Rian Malan, My traitor's heart
Not a history book as such, but a fascinating insight into apartheid South Africa by a young Afrikaner who tried to shed his inbuilt racism but found it central to his identity. As a teenager he scribbled "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" on walls to proclaim his anti-apartheid credentials. He even slept with a young black girl. But he secretly felt guilty and left South Africa in 1977, shocked at the violence of the Soweto uprising, which he covered for the 'Johannesburg Star'. A beautifully written, searingly honest account of a white South African's struggle with his conscience.

4. Neil Bennun, The broken string: the last words of an extinct people
The earliest inhabitants of South Africa were bushmen, stone age hunter-gatherers who did not survive the arrival of white settlers. Their extraordinary world of sorcerers, hunters and artists would have been lost for ever had it not been for the efforts of Wilhelm Bleek, a Prussian linguist, and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, who spent 18 years in the late 19th century recording the stories, pictures and personal histories of six of the last bushmen. Neil Bennun's account of Bleek and Lloyd's labour of love, and the remarkable culture they saved for posterity, is superbly told.

5. John Fisher, The Afrikaners
A majestic history of the white settlers of Dutch, German and French descent who dominated South African politics for more than 300 years. John Fisher, a historian and diplomatic correspondent, provides a clear, considered and remarkably objective assessment of who the Afrikaners are and how they came to be there. Published 30 years ago during the apartheid years, it is still the best survey available.

6. John Laband, The rise and fall of the Zulu nation
The history of the 'Black Spartans', from their rise under Shaka to their deliberate destruction by the British in 1879, is neverless than compelling. What this book lacks in storytelling, it more than makes up for with the quality of its analysis and the depth of its research. John Laband, associate professor at the University of Natal, is the senior authority in this field, and his command of Zulu sources is unsurpassed. This enables him to avoid the Eurocentric bias of so many other South African histories, even Donald Morris's. A work of stunning quality.

7. Nelson Mandela, Long walk to freedom
Riveting memoir by one of the great moral and political role models of the 20th century, and required reading for anyone interested in a black perspective of the apartheid struggle. In simple, unadorned prose it charts Mandela's extraordinary journey: from his childhood in a small village in the Transkei (where he was the foster son of a Tembu chief), through his 27 years in captivity on Robben Island, and finally to his inauguration in 1994 as South Africa's first black president.

8. Denys Reitz, Commando: a Boer journal of the Boer War
Rivals the recently reissued world war one classic The storm of steel (Ernest Junger) as a war memoir of brutal frankness. The son of a former president of the Orange Free State, Reitz was just 17 when he took part in battle of Spion Kop, a British defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Reitz played his part, helping to drive the numerically-superior British force from the crest-line and eventually off the hill altogether. Commenting on one particularly bloody skirmish, he wrote "A fight is a fight".

9. Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: the making of the new South Africa
A compelling and honest account of South Africa's transition from apartheid to black majority rule told through the eyes of four young photographers. No punches are pulled as the authors witness at first hand the consequences of the white regime's ruthless attempt to cling on to power by spreading dissension among its black political opponents. Marinovich's account of his Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of a suspected Inkatha member being burned to death by ANC supporters is heartbreaking.

10. Elizabeth Pakenham, Jameson's Raid
The future Lady Longford's groundbreaking study of the famous raid that foreshadowed the Boer War. The raid, into the Transvaal Republic in 1896, was part of a hare-brained scheme by Cecil Rhodes and a group of British-born Johannesburg business leaders to overthrow President Paul Kruger's anti-British regime. Longford provides evidence that the British government, in the form of the colonial secretary Joe Chamberlain, knew about and supported the raid. It failed nevertheless, though its leader Dr Jameson recovered to become prime minister of Cape Province. Despite being Longford's debut book, it's still one of her best.
Touchstones: Joseph Chamberlain (1), Leander Starr Jameson.

Simon Singh's favourite books on the history of science
Guardian, 2004-10-15.

Simon Singh is a physicist-turned-author whose books combine the twin disciplines of science and history. His first book, Fermat's last theorem, looked at the history of the world's most notorious mathematical problem; his next, The code book, looked at the history of cryptography. His latest book, Big bang (Fourth Estate), is a history of cosmology.

1. Jacob Bronowski, The ascent of man
Not just a classic TV series, but also a great book. In fact, it taught me a huge amount about mixing history and science.

2. David Bodanis, E=mc2
The biography of Einstein's famous equation. Bodanis explains clearly each and every aspect of the equation and reveals why it is one of the pinnacles of human achievement.

3. James Gleick, Isaac Newton
There are quite a few books about Isaac Newton, but this concise book tells you everything you need to know.

4. Tom Standage, The Victorian internet
We might be astonished by the impact of the internet on our daily lives, but Standage looks at an even more shocking communications revolution - namely, the advent of the telegraph.

5. Tom Standage, The Neptune file
As you can probably tell, I'm a big Tom Standage fan. This time he tells a gripping tale of rivalry among 19th-century astronomers.

6. Dava Sobel, Longitude
John Harris's story was well known among horologists, but Dava Sobel told it to the rest of world and created a classic.

7. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the enigma
Turing is now a well-known figure, but that is largely thanks to Hodges' excellent biography, which inspired a film, a play and numerous TV documentaries.

8. Doron Swade, The cogwheel brain
This is the story of the brilliant Charles Babbage and his attempt to pioneer a thinking machine - a mechanical brain. Babbage only ever got to the blueprint stage, but Swade eventually built one of his designs, so was in a unique position to write about him.

9. Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's dream
The periodic table is pinned up on the wall of every school laboratory. This is the story of the chemist who drew it up and who thereby brought new understanding to the atomic world.

10. Richard Rhodes, The making of the atomic bomb
I read this as an undergraduate, and 20 years later it still remains one of my all-time favourites. A beautiful synthesis of scientific explanation and gripping narrative.

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1.
I agree this is a top ten book, but it rather suggests a seperate list of top ten television history / science tie-ins, along with David Attenborough, Life on Earth, Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Michael Wood, In search of the Dark Ages, and I don't know what else. Suggestions?

Sam and Sam Clark's favourite cookery books
Guardian, 2004-11-04.

Sam and Sam Clark are the husband-and-wife team behind Moro, the award-winning southern Mediterranean restaurant which they founded together in 1997. In 2003 they published Moro: the cookbook (Ebury Press, £25; £15 in paperback), a collection of the restaurant's most popular and successful dishes. Their new book, Casa Moro (Ebury Press, £25) came out on November 4; in addition to hundreds of new recipes, it explores the history and tradition on which their cooking is based.
Touchstones: Samuel Clark (1), Samantha Clark.

"At Moro we change the menu every two weeks, to keep the food seasonal and fresh for both the customers and chefs. To maintain this constant flow of ideas, travelling and books play a vital role in our menus. Sometimes we read about a dish in a book, then go to that particular country to find someone to show us how to make it, or we taste something new and refer to books to make sure we've left nothing out. Below is a list of our favourite of the books we use at Moro. The longest story book Samuel has ever read (due to dyslexia) is The adventures of Winnie the Pooh - but cookery books have never been a problem."

1. Claudia Roden, A new book of Middle Eastern food
Perhaps the most well-thumbed book in our collection. As you'll see, we love all of Claudia Roden's and Paula Wolfert's books, and both authors were hugely influential when we were beginning at Moro. Our copy has been signed by Claudia, which makes it even more special.

2. Paula Wolfert, The cooking of the eastern Mediterranean
Ruth Rogers gave us this thoughtful leaving present when we left the River Café to start Moro. We still remember our excitement as we read the recipes for the first time. Just the sort of food we adore.

3. Paula Wolfert, Moroccan cuisine
Reading Paula's recipe for warka, the north African paper-thin pastry, intrigued us so much that when we took a campervan trip through Spain and Morocco while the restaurant was being built, it became one of our missions to learn how to make it. Our quest was successful, we put crab brik on the menu and it has been a favourite ever since. Recently, we've spent a lot of time in Morocco and have learned about tangia lamb, slow-cooked with preserved lemon in an earthenware pot buried in the ashes of the hammam (steam bath). That recipe now appears in Casa Moro.

4. Nicholas Butcher, The Spanish kitchen
One of the most thorough and thoroughly enjoyable books available on Spanish cookery. Written with knowledge and affection - which is true, of course, of all the books we have mentioned.

5. Penelope Casas, Delicioso! Regional cooking of Spain
A wonderful mishmash of dishes from all the different regions of Spain, with personal twists from the chefs who have contributed.

6. Ghillie Basan & Jonathan Basan, Classic Turkish cooking
A great book which draws you in and allows one to see the breadth and quality of Turkish food.

7. Aida Karagoglan, Food for the vegetarian - traditional Lebanese recipes
Vegetable cooking of the Islamic regions of Mediterranean is some of the most enlightened in the world - and this book helped open our eyes.

8. Anissa Helou, Lebanese cuisine
This book taught us about freekeh - roasted green wheat - as well as other delicious recipes.

9. Time Life Foods of the World series - The cooking of the Middle East
Beautiful and touching, and visually influential for our books.
Touchstone: Middle Eastern cooking

10. Alan Davidson, Mediterranean seafood
A classic - useful in the kitchen at home and on holiday, when going around the amazing fish markets in Spain.

>37 Cynfelyn: Kenneth Clark’s Civilsation from about the same period is another obvious one. Although I don’t remember ever having the book, Wikipedia says it’s never been out of print. And Robert Hughes The shock of the new.
Maybe also Alistair Cooke’s America? I think I enjoyed the book more than the TV series there.

Michelle Paver's favourite books on archaeology and anthropology
Guardian, 2004-11-10.

Michelle Paver is the author of four historical novels for adults. Her latest book, Wolf Brother, is the first in the Chronicles of ancient darkness series, set 6,000 years ago in the world of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Her research for the book involved trips to Scandinavia and extensive reading on archaeology and anthropology. Here she chooses the 10 books on the subjects that had the greatest impact on her.

1. David Lewis-Williams, The mind in the cave
A persuasive account of the origins and purpose of the great cave-paintings of western Europe. Drawing evidence from neurology, anthropology and archaeology, Lewis-Williams proposes that the ancient shamans entered caves in order to interact with the spirit world. The walls of the caves were perceived as a kind of membrane between that world and their own, and the cave paintings were a means of 'fixing' images of the spirits. This is a compelling, beautifully written book, which reads like a thriller.

2. Steven Mithen, The prehistory of the mind: a search for origins of art, religion and science
The best book about the evolution of the human mind I've ever read. Its central theory is that human beings' great leap forward came when the mental barriers between different kinds of intelligence - for example concerning the natural world, social interaction and the making of artefacts - broke down, allowing the brain to form hitherto unheard-of associations. This led to the development of religion, art, and, among other things, humour. Elegantly argued, it has stayed with me ever since I first read it.

3. Pascal Boyer, Religion explained
A fascinating, plausible theory for the origins of religion. The central argument is that the creation of religious concepts involved the use of mental systems which had already developed as a result of evolution. In other words, we're not moral because we're religious, but rather, we're religious because we're moral - morality having evolved for good Darwinian reasons. A stimulating read with many well-documented examples from a host of different cultures, particularly African ones.

4. Nicholas Gubser, Nunamiut Eskimos
A readable, highly detailed account of the beliefs and way of life of a traditional people. Particularly good on the classic means by which traditional hunters square the circle of having to kill their 'brothers' (in this case, caribou) by honouring the spirit of the prey and promising the guiding spirit to treat the carcass with respect. While at the same time eating it.

5. James George Frazer, The golden bough
It may have been written over 80 years ago, but it's still a riveting theory of the origins of myth, magic and religion. Cogently argued in lucid, dispassionate prose, it's supported by a host of examples from all over the world. From the Ainu cult of the bear to Egyptian corn spirits; from the sacrificial god-kings of Ethiopia to the European worship of trees, it's all here, in over 700 pages of dense but fascinating prose. And that's just the abridged version.

6. Colin Renfrew, Before civilization
A marvellous reappraisal of European prehistory in light of changes in radiocarbon dating, this is clear, thought-provoking, and also casts a fascinating light on how scientific theories develop, are defended, and overthrown.

7. Betty Kobayashi Issenman, Sinews of survival
A hugely detailed examination of Inuit traditional skin clothing from prehistory to the present. No other book I know conveys so well the in-depth knowledge which traditional hunter-gatherers have about their environment, and the extent to which they learn from the animals they hunt.

8. Steven Mithen, After the ice
A global human history from 20,000-5,000 BC, this is evocative, erudite storytelling at its best, drawing on genetics, archaeology, anthropology and the writer's imagination to take the reader back in time. It's rare for an archaeologist to write like a novelist, but when he can, as Mithen can, it gives the lay reader a marvellous opportunity to go back in time, far surpassing the 'dramatic reconstructions' which mar so many television documentaries.

9. H. R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and myths of northern Europe
My favourite account of Norse mythology. This pulls together history, folklore, literature and anthropology in its discussion of each deity of the Norse pantheon: where they came from, how they developed, and where they ended up once Christianity had taken hold. The section on Odin as a shaman is particularly fascinating.

10. Jean Clottes, Return to Chauvet cave
A big, beautifully illustrated book which does ample justice to the Chauvet cave, and includes a detailed account of the artistic techniques used in the making of these 35,000 year-old paintings and engravings, their themes, and possible significance. The photography is outstanding.

>39 thorold: I didn't realise there was a book of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Thank you for that.

Being a science-ey family with traditional views on art ("I like art that looks like what it's meant to represent"), Robert Hughes's The shock of the new was never on our horizon. But one of my daughters having turned to the dark side of the Force (art, particularly illustration), I having to re-evaluate my biases.

Alistair Cooke's Radio 4 Letter from America was one of the poles around which our week revolved for decades, but I don't remember the 1972 television series. But then I don't remember anything specific about Stephen Fry in America (2008), and I know I watched that! What happened to Alistair Cooke's body after his death was gruesome.

M. John Harrison's top 10
Guardian, 2004-11-17.

M. John Harrison's books include Viriconium, Signs of life and the short story collection, Travel arrangements. His new novel, Light, is published by Gollancz. "Ten books which link the inside to the outside, the scientific to the personal, the individual to the universal. In no particular order..."

1. Tim Etchells, Dream dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer)
These contemporary dream-interpretations map a social landscape of love-rats, failed consumerism, football, video games. Etchells examines each joke with a lizardlike deadpan as he delivers it. He's not going to let us get away with laughing.

2. Alan Wall, The School of Night
Alan Wall has been described as "Secker & Warburg's best kept secret". This tale is a good place to start on his addictive oeuvre of metaphysics, literature and conspiracy.

3. Janna Levin, How the universe got its spots
A love affair with mathematical physics counterpoints cosmologist Janna Levin's relationship with a country & western musician, to produce this delightful merge of science and autobiography.

4. Iain Banks, The wasp factory
Banks dives with us into the murk of his inner landscape. Then we look around and he's abandoned us there. How will we get out now?

5. John Braine, The Vodi
Constructed round the fantasies of a recovering tuberculosis patient, this novel was the defining moment of an as-yet-unreported genre, kitchen sink gothic. One of my favourite books of all time, it doesn't seem to be in print with the rest of Braine's backlist.

6. Michael Marshall Smith, Only forward
Mike Smith's raw and compelling debut novel starts with a headless corpse knocking to get in. It ends with an admission. In between, you simply grow more and more guilty and uncomfortable. Everything bad you've ever done was a feint, wasn't it? It was to pull the wool over your own eyes...

7. Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion
A novel which constantly transgresses the line between Dennis Wheatley and Plato. Charles Williams was a member of the quasi-Rosicrucian "Order of the Golden Dawn", founder members of which included Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats. Once you've read Williams you won't need to read C. S. Lewis, which is a relief.

8. Patrick Harpur, Mercurius
This weird, compellingly batty novel describes an act of alchemy in a series of villagey, pungent human exchanges. A kind of Gothic Joanna Trollope, it has a nicely chemical, nicely noisome feel to it; also a mad vicar.

9. Scott Bradfield, The secret life of houses
Briefly associated with the 90s New Gothic of Patrick McGrath and others, Bradfield had already shown them the way home with this immaculate 1987 collection of short stories.

10. Thorne Smith, The night life of the gods
Thorne Smith's comic genius mixed weird science with mythology, bootlegged alcohol with a chilly eye for the hypocrisy of the very Americans he was entertaining. At worst, sentimental; at best, like a New Yorker cartoon wrapped round a knife.

Julie Burchill's top 10 books for teens
Guardian, 2004-12-01.

Author, journalist and erstwhile Guardian columnist Julie Burchill decided this year to try her hand at teen fiction, and came up trumps with her novel Sugar rush, the Brighton-based story of a romance between two adolescent girls. Published by Young Picador, it is currently being adapted for television and will appear as a serial drama on Channel 4 in 2005.

1. Philip Pullman, His dark materials
Awe-inspiring trilogy, making mincemeat of all allegedly adult modern literary fiction from Amis to Zadie.

2. Alan Garner, The owl service
Eternal triangles, class loathing, race hatred and cutting out paper owls by tracing the pattern on some manky old teacups - all teen life is here.

3. Noel Streatfeild, Ballet shoes
What little girls wanted from life in the days before they wanted to perfect the perfect blowjob by the age of 15. Don't mind me, I'm just jealous.

4. Leon Garfield, Jack Holborn
Pirate pyrotechnics from the Pavarotti of the pea-souper.

5. Jacqueline Wilson, Anything
We're not worthy!

6. John Wyndham, Chocky
My imaginary friend's bigger than your imaginary friend ...

7. Mark Haddon, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Annoyingly, as brilliant as everyone says.

8. Lorna Hill, The Sadler's Wells books
If only I hadn't grown to be 5'10 and a size 16, I would have now become the world's greatest prima ballerina. These books were my pubescent crack cocaine.
Touchstone: Sadlers Wells

9. Enid Blyton, The Malory Towers books by
Pashes, petulance, pillow fights - and the heroine is called "Darrell"! Hel-LO? Sub-textual dyke action ahoy!

10. Graham Marks, How it works
Very cool, very creepy.

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Sorry, but this list feels like it was phoned in. And Jacqueline Wilson, Enid Blyton and Sadlers Wells for teenagers? Perhaps that's what happens when you get an ex-colleague to knock out a column as part of the publicity push for their first novel.

Guy Browning's top 10 Christmas books
Guardian, 2004-12-17.

Formerly an advertising copywriter and stand-up comedian, Guy Browning is famous among Guardian readers for his 'How to ... ' column, in which he offers guidance on issues such as the best way of clearing a runny nose, and how to establish a queue when you're the first person in it. His columns have now been published together in a book, Never hit a jellyfish with a spade: how to survive life's smaller challenges (Guardian Books). Here, he chooses his top 10 Christmas books for all the family - including difficult Aunt Jess.

1. Dr Seuss, How the Grinch stole Christmas
A moving and heart-warming tale of one Grinch's effort to ruin Christmas for everybody and how, in the process, he discovers its true meaning.

2. Delia Smith, Delia Smith's Christmas
This book gives you cast-iron timings for cooking food around which you can base the rest of your Christmas. Delia is possibly the most important woman in the country at Christmas, after the Queen.

3. Charles Dickens, A Christmas carol
The classic tale of how to unscrooge yourself at Christmas with the help of strong spirits (that is, Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come).

4. Louisa May Alcott, Little women
Opens with the best line about Christmas presents in English literature. Grown women often weep openly reading this book, which is why, if you are one, it's best not to read it on a train.

5. John Cleese & Robin Skinner, Families and how to survive them
Christmas is a time when those of your relatives that cast doubt on the theory of evolution emerge. This book gives you helpful tips on how to deal with them.

6. Jan Pienkowski, The first Noel
More of a Christmas game than a book. It contains five cut-out scenes from the nativity, each accompanied by a verse. The book opens out completely to make an attractive ornament.

7. David Sedaris, The Santaland diaries
A one-man comic play recounting the author's experiences as a Christmas elf at Macy's department store. Not for children. Or elves.

8. U. A. Fanthorpe, Christmas poems
Beautifully observed, superbly written and unflinchingly human. Poetry that uses some very modern imagery to illustrate some very ancient truths.

9. Clement C. Moore (illus. Christian Birmingham), The night before Christmas
The best Christmas poem of all time, especially for children and those tasked with reading to the little treasures. Fantastic illustration by Christian Birmingham, who sounds like a local pressure group.

10. Raymond Briggs, The snowman
All-time classic, and responsible for causing grown men to attempt to sing "We're walking in the air" at a pitch three times above that of which voice boxes are physically capable.

Sally Beauman's top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place
Guardian, 2005-01-11.

Sally Beauman is a journalist and author of a number of books, including Rebecca's tale, Rebecca de Winter's version of events at Manderley. Her latest book is The landscape of love, a novel set in a decaying house in the heart of Suffolk in the summer of 1967.

1. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Yorkshire moors - and one of the most powerful evocations of landscape in the English novel. The narrative divides between the bleakness of the moors surrounding the Heights and the sheltered park of Thrushcross Grange in the valley. This is a binary novel - two narrators, two houses, two families, two generations: the landscape mirrors this duality. Can anyone forget the scene where the young Heathcliff and Catherine escape from Wuthering Heights and run across the moors to spy through the Grange windows? Or Lockwood's last view of the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff? The landscape embodies choice and becomes a force in the novel. Once read, imprinted.

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby
1922: Long Island glamour disguises moral squalor. Beautiful Daisy Buchanan and her odious husband live at West Egg, as befits old money. Across the water at East Egg, home to the nouveau riche, is the vast vulgar mansion of the shady millionaire, Jay Gatsby. Nick Carraway, narrator of the novel, cousin to Daisy and neighbour to Gatsby, has to negotiate the troubled waters between these territories; he must cross a moral as well as a class divide. A schematised landscape, and a location that encapsulates an era.

3. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
England, 1850, and the most famous fog in literature. We're in the Holborn district of London, and the city, like the book, seethes with energy. Every plotline conceals another; the huge, extraordinary cast of characters spans the social spectrum and there are hidden links between all of them, from lowest to highest. The befogged city becomes a web of coincidence and connectedness. The court of Chancery, lawyers' chambers, clerks' rooms, taverns, rag and bone shops, burial grounds, illiterate Krook spontaneously combusting, tiny Miss Flite with her caged birds - was there ever a richer, stranger London than this?

4. John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: the four novels
Brewer, Pennsylvania - a town like a million others in America. In the first novel, Rabbit Angstrom is an athletic young man, it's the late 1950s and he's a Magipeel salesman. In the fourth novel, at the end of the Reagan era, he's 55, tired, retired and bloated. Angstrom is one of the least likeable characters in modern fiction: a wife-cheater, a lecher, a useless father, a lazy businessman. Brewer, his hometown, mirrors his moral sclerosis: provincial, smug and jingoistic, it's grown flabby with greed, phoney morality, and religious hypocrisy. It's ugly and it's unforgettable. Want to know what the Land of the Free was like in the second half of the 20th century? Read Updike on Brewer.

5. Richmal Crompton, The William books
In children's fiction there are many worlds that, once encountered, are never forgotten - Alice's underworld, Pook's Hill, Pooh Corner, Toad Hall and the Wild Wood, a secret garden in Yorkshire, a Kensington nursery where a Newfoundland dog is the nanny... Equally indelible is the somewhat suburban village inhabited by the immortal William Brown and his family, especially in the sublime wartime stories. They are laugh-out-loud funny. Best friend Ginger, the appalling Violet Elizabeth Bott, collecting scrap-iron, capturing German parachutists, daily scrapes and escapades, all of them testament to the transformative power of William's lurid imagination: we're in a comedic England, observed with a sharply satiric eye, but the true location, of course, is Boyhood.
Touchstone: Peter Pan.

6. Raymond Chandler, Farewell my lovely
"It was a warm night and the soft breeze wafting over the Hollywood hills didn't only bring the acrid smell of wild sage further inland, but blackmail, broads and blood too." Los Angeles in 1940, as immortalised by Chandler. His plots are unfathomable and so is his city of the angels. Criminally alluring, its noir bars, boulevards and millionaires' mansions exude an eternal unspecified threat. The literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting - and just as unsettling.

7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Normandy: when Flaubert was writing the novel, he drew maps for himself of his fictional territory. That precision carries over into the narrative, and contributes to the near-photographic exactitude of its locations. By the time you finish it, you know every room of Bovary's house; you could pinpoint each shop, each neighbour in Yonville. That contributes to the novel's intensely powerful alchemy: you experience the same claustrophobia as Emma Bovary.

8. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ..." The famous opening sentence of a story told by a famously nameless female narrator. But what is Manderley? A manor house by the sea in Cornwall - or Bluebeard's castle? In this house, two women are destroyed: a first wife is murdered; a second is stripped of her identity. Freud would have relished this setting: eroticised, threatening, maze-like and haunted, Manderley is a male domain where the chatelaines' principal function is to produce a male heir. Neither does so. A troubling, heretical place, the heartland of women's dreams and nightmares.

9. Thomas Hardy, The return of the native
All Hardy's novels are remarkable for the power of his landscapes. He writes like the true poet he is, but with the practical understanding of a countryman too - someone who experienced at first hand the working realities of a rural environment. Egdon Heath, a brooding presence throughout The return of the native, first glimpsed lit by bonfires in the astonishing opening chapters, is his most implacable and terrifying landscape.

10. Jean Rhys, Good morning, Midnight
Paris - but not as we usually see it. An ageing woman, once desired, now adrift, wanders the streets and bars of a city that saw the end of her marriage and the death of her child. This Paris is a ghost town of melancholy streets, cheap restaurants, dubious boites, sexual ennui and intense loneliness. Wry, acerbic, and exquisitely written: in Rhys's hands, every cheap hotel room, every passing encounter in a cafe or brasserie, becomes haunting.

James Hawes' top 10 satires
Guardian, 2005-01-28.

Since his critically acclaimed debut, A white Merc with fins, James Hawes has gone on to write four more novels. His second, Rancid aluminium, was made into a film, the experience of which provided the inspiration for his fourth, White powder, green light, in 2002. Speak for England, his latest novel, is a satirical take on modern-day Britain, charting the adventures of a divorced language teacher who decides to take part in jungle-survival reality TV show and stumbles across the descendants of a 1958 plane crash.

1. Franz Kafka, The trial
Kafka has been ill-served by the widespread notion that he writes mysterious, heavy tales about blameless Individuals ensnared by strange Powers - and by translations that pitch him accordingly. In fact, he is far closer to 19th-century Russian satire than to 20th-century French existentialism, and in his day he was admired for his sharp, clean prose. His greatest work sets a thoroughly modern, deeply unlikeable Hapsburg Empire salaryman up against the chthonic reality of the "free country" he believes he lives in.

2. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Kafka's favourite book, a tour de force that mixes grand scale and minutely-observed, perfectly-heard reality. Incomparable set-pieces (that opening! spontaneous combustion!) and dialogue.

3. Evelyn Waugh, Vile bodies
Posh England in the jabbering 20s, filled with the unspoken trauma and secret dread of war, partying desperately to forget, viewed through a radio-telescope by an alien observer on a distant, icy planet. No-one escapes.

4. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
His warmest tones, broadest laughs and most unforgettable caricatures. Still uncannily relevant.

5. Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan
Badly translated as "Man of Straw", this book, so much earthier than his more famous brother's work, is the last major work of German literature before the first world war - and, remarkably, satirises the Nazi mind-set before it even existed.

6. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
Astonishingly original, terrifying, moving, free of the occasionally irritating feyness of his later work. Should be on every 21-year-old's bookshelf.

7. Don DeLillo, White noise
Another master of the big set piece, here concentrating his satiric fire to best-ever effect on an unusually limited target. Americans have no sense of irony? Puh-lease.

8. Aldous Huxley, Brave new world
A decade ago we smug inhabitants of the information technology age thought Huxley's socio-biological satire had called history wrong. Then along came stem-cells.

9. Malcolm Bradbury, The history man
Still the most memorable unmasking of Brit-academic hypocrisy, careerism and sexual exploitation. Everyone on a gap-year should read it and be warned.

10. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and fall
Sorry, the blessed Evelyn yet again. The only English writer I read and re-read for sheer pleasure.

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2.
That's Bleak House featuring in two successive lists. It dosn't happen often.

8.
"A decade ago ..." refers to Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (1992), the USA as the last superpower standing and all that. So whatever happened to stem cells? Went the same way as interferon. Remember that? Normalised. Society's forgotten that it was ever new. Everything new is either junked (e.g. Sinclair C5, Salter's duck), normalised (decimal currency, mobile telephones), or normalised then later junked (leaded petrol, Betamax, manned lunar landings). It was faintly amusing while FaceBook was off-line this week, reading reports of people having to send text messages: "who sends text messages? It's as mediaeval as writing an email or a post card". /rant.

John Burnside's top 10 Scottish poetry collections
Guardian, 2005-02-07.

John Burnside is one of Scotland's best-loved living poets. He has published eight previous books of poetry, including The asylum dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and most recently The light trap, which was shortlisted for the 2002 TS Eliot prize. He has also written four novels, one of which, The mercy boys, won the 1999 Encore Award, and a book of stories. His latest collection, The good neighbour, is published by Cape on February 10.

1. Robert Henryson (c.1425-c.1500), Poems
Scotland's answer to Chaucer may be putting it too strongly, but his Testament of Cresseid is wonderful.

2. Alexander Montgomerie (1550?-1598), Poems
Montgomerie was 'maistre poete' to James VI, until he was barred from the court for his part in a mysterious intrigue. A wonderful, somewhat overlooked love poet.

3. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), Poems in Scots
Burns' favourite poet, he put together an extraordinary body of fine work before dying at the tender age of 24.

4. Robert Burns ( 1759-1796), Complete poems
An obvious choice, but he deserves his reputation as Scotland's finest poet, bar none - not just for the best-known work, but for his extraordinary range.

5. James Hogg (1770-1835), Songs, by the Ettrick Shepherd
Overshadowed by Burns as a poet, and better known for his fiction, but the same brilliance shines through his songs and satires.

6. Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), Collected poems
Love him or hate him, MacDiarmid is an essential poet, author of two of the finest modernist poems of the last century - A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and On a Raised Beach - not to mention some of our finest Scots lyrics since Burns.

7. W. S. Graham (1918-1986), The nightfishing
Scotland's best-kept literary secret for many years; now receiving his due, thanks to Faber's marvellous New Collected Poems. The Nightfishing is an extraordinary collection, full of dark treasures and formal energy.

8. Burns Singer (1928-1964), Still and all
Born in New York but brought up in Glasgow, Singer has still not been given his due as a poet. Annoyed a good many people while he lived, and died far too young. Challenging, intense work.

9. Norman MacCaig (1910-1996), Voice over
This collection was, as its title implies, his last; a beautiful, touching and witty farewell from Scotland's best-loved poet of recent times.

10. Somhairle MacGill-Eain (1911-1996), O choille gu bearradh
The collected poems of Sorley MacLean, entitled From wood to ridge. Our finest Gaelic poet, connecting us all - Gaelic speaking or not - to our roots in song, and in the earth.

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This has happened before. Generic titles like Poems, Complete Poems and Collected Poems (above), and Complete Works, Selected Works and Short Stories (elsewhere) overwhelm the Touchstones/Others system, unless what you want is towards the top of the pile. Not to worry; touchstoning the author is a perfectly adequate solution.

Leonie Frieda's top 10 biographies of historical figures
Guardian, 2005-02-15.

Leonie Frieda was born in Sweden and grew up in Britain, France and Germany. Her long-term interest in Catherine de Medici took her to archives in Paris and Florence as well as the chateaux of the Loire, and finally led her to write a revisionist biography of Catherine published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2004. She is currently tackling her second book, a biography of first world war soldier and letter-writer Edward Horner. She chooses her top 10 biographies of historical figures.

1. Elizabeth Longford, Queen Victoria
It's fabulously readable and never gets stale. Longford's book is one of the first English biographies that I ever read.

2. Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I
A brilliant study - again the author is undaunted by the fact that her subject has been covered countless times - and rightly so. She brings wit, insight and vigour to the telling of 'Gloriana's' remarkable life and the weltpolitik that dictated so much of her policymaking.

3. Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots
The author's lyrical life of the Scots queen, the compelling narrative that drives the story headlong to its sorry conclusion, much in the manner of this tragic and stubborn monarch's life, is one of English biography's greats. The book was also my introduction to Catherine de Medici and piqued my interest in the Florentine Queen of France.

4. Modris Eksteins, Rites of spring: the great war and the birth of the modern age
An unconventional, often witty and piercing analysis of the first world war's effects on society, its mores, language and psyche. A fresh look at what W. B. Yeats described as the birth of a terrible beauty - the post-war world.

5. David Starkey, Elizabeth
All of Starkey's books on the Tudors are excellent; this just happens to be my favourite.

6. Professor Robert Knecht, Renaissance warrior and patron: the reign of Francios I
The definitive study of the fabulous French monarch. Francois was a contemporary and sometime friend, sometime foe of Henry VIII of England. He understood how to project majesty, how to glorify France, himself and the throne. Despite his flaws as a statesman, Francois I is arguably the most splendid monarch in French history; certainly of the early Renaissance.
Touchstone: Renaissance warrior and patron: the reign of Francis I

7. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: the court of the Red Tsar
A fantastically chilling study of power bought with cunning, brutal cruelty and retained by evil.

8. Ivan Cloulas, Catherine de Medici
The most comprehensive modern biography of the queen whose reputation for evil was on a par with that of Lucrezia Borgia and Messalina. This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to take their studies on Catherine further.
Touchstone: Catherine de Médicis.

9. Frederick Baumgartner, Henri II
A splendid life of this little-known king, husband to Catherine de Medici. He had many good qualities, but tragically for France his reign was cut short when he died in a tournament accident in 1559 - had he lived it is likely that he would have used the force of a united France to stamp out Protestantism and avoid the civil wars that plagued the country for nearly 40 years following his death.
Touchstone: Henry II: King of France 1547-1559.

10. Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire
Dr Foreman's life of Georgiana (nee Georgiana Spencer), a society beauty, married to the foremost Whig aristocrat of her day. Her life of chaotic adventures, tragedy and triumphs is splendidly retold.

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That rarest of lists: compiled by a woman, with almost parity between the sexes of the authors (4 female:6 male), and a majority of female subjects (6:3:1). The previous two lists having been 100% male. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Tim Dolin's top 10 books on George Eliot
Guardian, 2005-03-01.

Tim Dolin is a research fellow at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, the author of Mistress of the house: women of property in the Victorian novel, and the co-editor of Thomas Hardy and contemporary literary studies. His latest book, George Eliot, is part of the Oxford World Classics 'Authors in Context' series; in it he examines Eliot's life and work and the social and intellectual contexts in which they developed, and explores the ways in which she has been recontextualized for present-day readers. Here he picks the 10 books that offer the greatest insight into her life.

1. Margaret Harris & Judith Johnston (ed.), The journals of George Eliot (1998)
George Eliot is not generally thought a great letter writer. Most correspondents were treated to a version of the measured public voice of her novels - wonderfully empathetic and insightful, but rarely unguarded, impulsive, or funny. Her journals, on the other hand, are a revelation, recording, for example, her intense happiness as she travelled openly through liberal Europe with her married lover, George Henry Lewes, in 1854-55.

2. Phyllis Rose, Parallel lives (1983)
"Perhaps that is what love is", Phyllis Rose suggests in Parallel lives: "the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power". A marvellous 'brief life' of the Leweses in those terms, in company with the Carlyles, Ruskins, Mills, and Dickenses.

3. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The real life of Mary Ann Evans (1994)
Rosemarie Bodenheimer disagrees about the letters. Beneath their carefully wrought surface, she argues in The real life of Mary Ann Evans, Eliot is fighting to control her self-representation. Wonderfully incisive readings of the letters alongside Eliot's novels, stories, and poems.

4. Edith Simcox, Episodes in the lives of men, women and lovers (1882) and Diary of a shirtmaker (1998)
Edith Simcox was a remarkable person: a social theorist and socialist who ran a progressive shirt-making cooperative and was one of the first women trade union leaders. She was also in love with George Eliot, and wrote two painful and moving accounts of her 'idolatrous' feelings for the woman who would only ever accept her as a 'spiritual daughter': the fictional Episodes in the lives of men, women and lovers, and the private Diary of a shirtmaker (eventually published in 1998).
Touchstones: Men, women, and lovers, and A monument to the memory of George Eliot : Edith J. Simcox's autobiography of a shirtmaker.

5. Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser papers (1997)
In this novel, Cynthia Ozick's out-of-work feminist lawyer Ruth Puttermesser is a latter-day spiritual daughter longing to meet her own Lewes. At length she does: Rupert Rubeeno, a painter of 'Reenactments of the Masters', exact reproductions of works in the Metropolitan Museum, photographed and sold on postcards. Together they begin reading Eliot's work aloud, just as Eliot and Lewes had done ...

6. Nadia May (read by), George Eliot on Blackstone Audiobooks
Puttermesser is right. There's something compelling about hearing George Eliot read aloud, and Nadia May's complete and unabridged Blackstone audiobook collection of the novels is a gem. It's really surprising what this reading experience reveals about Eliot. We hear the force and unity of her magisterial narrative voice, yet recognize, as if for the first time, how each novel was a radical new departure: try finishing the Blackstone Adam Bede and starting The mill on the Floss on the same day.

7. Henry James, Partial portraits (1888) and Virginia Woolf, 'George Eliot' (1925)
Henry James and Virginia Woolf were both profoundly influenced by Eliot, and wrote what are still the best essays on her work. See James's Partial portraits (1888) and Woolf's 'George Eliot' in The common reader (1925).

8. Gillian Beer, Darwin's plots (1983)
Gillian Beer's pioneering study of the influence of evolutionary narrative patterns on 19th-century fiction includes important chapters on Eliot. George Eliot (1986) is a long, absorbing essay relating ideas of interdependence - the "threats and burdens of connection" as well as its joys - to the Victorian (and late 20th-century) woman question.
URL Gillian Beer, George Eliot (1986): https://www.librarything.com/work/234583

9. Neil Hertz, George Eliot's pulse (2003)
George Eliot's pulse offers, among much else, an exhilarating set of riffs on a range of ethical concepts in Eliot's writing etymologically rooted in the word 'pulse' (impulse, repulsion, compulsion etc). Hertz reminds us what we can do with Eliot's formidably intellectual texts.

10. Gordon Haight, A century of George Eliot criticism (1965)
There isn't an anthology called Hating George Eliot, but there's probably enough material for one. Eliot inspired adulation during her lifetime and revulsion for more than half a century after her death in 1880 (and much longer among school children coerced into studying Silas Marner). Read what Arnold Bennett thought of her, in Gordon Haight's A century of George Eliot criticism.

Maggy Hendry's top 10 entries from the Dictionary of women's biography
Mon 7 Mar 2005 00.00 GMT

Maggy Hendry has co-edited the third and fourth editions of the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of women's biography alongside the original compiler and editor, Jenny Uglow. In honour of International Women's Day, she has chosen her top 10 women from the latest edition of the Dictionary, which was published at the beginning of the year. "It has been a pleasure to work on the updates of such a wonderfully scholarly volume as this. Despite all my efforts to lower the tone in recent years, the book remains as solidly erudite as ever. But Jenny's generosity in allowing me to try is commendable. Here are my top 10 women, together with their Dictionary entries."

1. Madonna
For liberating the brassiere. She is largely responsible for modern blatant bra-wearing. Back in the day, perhaps because we were supposed to have burnt them, we would have died of embarrassment if anyone caught a glimpse of so much as a strap. Bras as outerwear and also their straps have been out of the closet ever since Madonna got together with Jean Paul Gaultier et al.
Dictionary entry: Madona Louise Veronica Ciccone (1958-).

2. Frida Kahlo
For dedication to her art in spite of living a life of pain, and for her brutally honest self portraits which show her with a moustache, a beard and ferociously dark eyebrows that cross in the middle. An excellent role model for the hirsute.
Dictionary entry: Frida Kahlo (1910-54).

3. Jezebel
For a reputation which has been evolving for around three millennia. A woman with a penchant for make-up who lived life on her own terms, Jezebel achieves 597,000 results on the world wide web. She had a second world war missile named after her and appeared in celluloid as a ruthless southern belle played by Bette Davis in 1935. She is still to be seen roaming high streets up and down the land on Saturday nights (according to her mother).
Dictionary entry: Jezebel (c9th century BC).

4. Professor Wangari Maathai
Kenyan environmentalist. For demonstrating the power of persistent non-violent protest, and for becoming the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.
Dictionary entry: Wangari Maathai (1940-)

5. Eileen Wani Wingfield and Eileen Kampakuta Brown
Septuagenarian Aboriginal campaigners and winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2003. For travelling Australia with other senior women, speaking out against nuclear testing and dumping on their ancestral lands, and working to keep their culture alive.
Dictionary entry: Eileen Wani Wingfield and Eileen Kampakuta Brown (1930s-)

6. Valerie Solanas
For writing the SCUM Manifesto (now freely available on the web) and for being ahead of her time. Her wit and brilliance were not appreciated in her lifetime.
Dictionary entry: Valerie Jean Solanas (1936-88)

7. Martha Gellhorn
For her fearless reporting of the Spanish Civil War and other conflicts including the second world war and wars in China, Vietnam and central America. Also for her stormy five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway.
Dictionary entry: Martha Gellhorn (1908-98)

8. Mary Anning
For finding and unearthing a complete ichthyosaurus at the age of 12, and for discovering the first pterodactyl.
Dictionary entry: Mary Anning (1799-1847)

9. Mary Kingsley
For coming out of the west African swamps with a necklace of leeches, for writing about it with humour and for her insistence on wearing Victorian clothing - layers of petticoats, heavy skirts, boots and highnecked blouses - in all situations.
Dictionary entry: Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)

10. Rosa Parks
'Mother of the civil rights movement', for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Her action sparked the eventual abolition of the segregation laws and the emergence of Martin Luther King as a national leader.
Dictionary entry: Rosa Louise Parks (1913-)

------

The Guardian scraped their own copies of the DWB entries for these women, so they are still available, and linked here. In the case of most of the entries Wikipedia as overtaken the DWB, which has probably been the fate of most dictionaries of biography.

3.
Jezebel. If ever there was a case of history being written by the victors.

4.
Wangari Maathai. Since died, 2011.

8.
Mary Anning. LT character: https://www.librarything.com/character/Mary+Anning

10.
Rosa Parks. Since died, the October after this article was published.
I discovered and binge-watched YouTube clips from 'The Newsroom' (among others) during the first lockdown. Will McAvoy's take on historical hypotheticals relating to Rosa Parks, F. D. Roosevelt and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=herczHmAyno . Whether Claudette Colvin gets an entry in the DWB, I don't know.

David Monagan's top 10 Irish journeys
Guardian, 2005-03-16.

David Monagan is an American writer, currently a resident in Cork. Jaywalking with the Irish (Lonely Planet) is his tale of the pleasures and pitfalls, challenges and frustrations of relocating with his family in 2001 from Connecticut to Cork, and their struggle to come to terms with their new life and 'fit in'.

1. Flann O'Brien, The third policeman
The perfect companion for a trip to Ireland, The third policeman is a journey into a looking glass of doomed eccentricity, absurd introspection, cracked metaphysics, and circumlocution without end. Hilarious and mind-bending, it is set in a two-dimensional police station that turns out to be Irish hell. Framed for murder by quare constables - who are obsessed with the atomic properties of bicycles and struggle to maintain the barometric balance of Ireland - the protagonist occasionally wanders down the road to heaven, but can never bring any of the riches out. Fortunately, he is helped toward enlightenment by his soul Joe. Flann O'Brien, a brilliant columnist for the Irish Times, was the greatest oracle of Ireland's eternal oddness. Alas, he stashed this great work until he died of the drink in 1956. Read it with his earlier masterpiece At Swim Two Birds.

2. Maurice O'Sullivan, Twenty years a-growing
This memoir of one of the last residents of Great Blasket Island off the Dingle Peninsula is an elegy to a world altogether insulated from modern civilization, a coming of age story so resonant with timelessness and magical thinking that one might guess that it was written 500 years back, rather than in 1933. Flip to any page and out jumps an effortless music: "Well, in the far end of the night, everyone was pretty merry, the soft word and the hard word coming together." The author's sea-wracked innocence is finally shattered by his inevitable move, at age 20, to the until then unknown mainland world of the 20th century. Twenty years a-growing is one of the sweetest, saddest, and most lyrical books you will come across, sad because it is also a story about the vanishing of an entire culture. The book is so beautifully translated that the reader is transported into a separate linguistic universe. To finish it is to reluctantly wake from a dream.

3. Terry Eagleton, The truth about the Irish
This one is a light, myth-busting snapshot-take on all ludicrous things Irish, written by a contemporary son of Ireland. Shrewd observations and plenty of laughs inside.

4. Heinrich Böll, Irish journey
A masterpiece of travel writing, this is a delightful and penetrating meditation on the German Nobel laureate's encounters with the singularities he found everywhere while traversing the west of Ireland in the 1950s with his wife and children. Böll settled for years into an Achill Island cottage and described the beauty, heartbreak, and endearing quirkiness around him with exquisite precision and style. Out there, he said he was "playing truant on Europe."
Touchsone: Irish journal.

5. David Thomson, Woodbrook
Woodbrook is an enchanting, poignant tale of the English writer's 10 youthful summers spent tutoring in a crumbling great house in the Sligo hinterlands in the 1930s, where he fell into hopeless unrequited love. Thompson's (1914-1918) work casts a beautifully observed light over the gradual collapse of one ostensibly nurturing Anglo-Irish fiefdom, with the aura of yearning relieved by deft use of history and superb writing. As Seamus Heaney said of Thomson's The people of the sea, the man's gifts included "perfect grace and perfect pitch."

6. Spike Milligan, Puckoon
One of the maddest of all Irish tales, Puckoon involves quite a bit of journeying - across the fictive border between the Irish north and south. The wickedly satirical Milligan border happened to complicate drinking, however, since it was drawn between the stools and bar at the Holy Drunkard pub. It also messed with eternity, having further split the village churchyard, thus inspiring the parish's priest to smuggle Catholic cadavers out of the suddenly Protestant and damned end. A menacing official announces, "Any hostility to the Boundary Commission will be penalized with fines from a shilling up to death." As Milligan's tombstone reads, "I told you I was ill."

7. Pete McCarthy, McCarthy's Bar
Whoever hasn't read this work by the sadly recently deceased McCarthy should know: this is the ultimate Irish pub tour with the only hangover one of laughter. The exceedingly good-natured traveller's tale is droll and cleverly observed, though it perhaps forces some bits and walls out the disturbing fact of the Celtic Tiger. But it's vivid and fun.

8. J. P. Donleavy, The gingerman
A bestseller for years, The gingerman is what is known as a "rollicking tale" of a rambunctious young American on the dole landing in the vagabond Dublin of the 1950s and drinking, rutting, blathering, and fighting along with the natives, then getting up and doing it all over again. Donleavy, with debts to Henry Miller's Sexus and Dylan Thomas's absurd Adventures in the skin trade, got the spirit of the place (then) down, and the book remains amusing and idiosyncratically stylish.

9. Eric Newby, Round Ireland in low gear
One of the most polished of all travel writers, Newby and his game wife Wanda took a protracted bicycle spin past Irish villages, canals, ruins, and "moving statues" in the dead of the rain-lashed winter of 1985. The audacity of the by-no-means young couple tackling mountain roads in gales is captivating in itself. This wittily described tour is no shallow gimmick - a la hitchhiking with a refrigerator - but a coming to intimate terms with the land and its history at every turn.

10. This sceptered isle
A robust and engaging tale of a British writer and adventurer chucking his fast-paced UK existence to cultivate a remarkable reinvention of his life in later years in County Carlow.

------

10.
The original article misses out this book's author, and neither LT's touchstone system nor Google have any likely candidates.

Julith Jedamus's top 10 Japanese novels
Guardian, 2005-03-18.

Born in Boulder, Colorado, Julith Jedamus now lives in London with her husband and son. In her first novel, The book of loss (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), she explores the lives of a group of women living in the court of the emperor in 10th-century Japan through the voice of a narrator who confesses her sins to her diary. Here, she chooses her favourite Japanese novels.

1. Murasaki Shikibu, The tale of Genji (11th century)
The great Proustian novel from the late Heian Period. Though the world it describes is antique, the writing is wonderfully fresh and immediate. The emotions of the characters, both male and female, are subtly analysed. Read it in the new translation by Royall Tyler.

2. Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (1914)
Simply told in the first person, the novel is a study of loneliness and betrayal. Published soon after Conrad's Heart of darkness (which Soseki read while studying in London) it explores the nature of evil, and the possibility of a 'selfless self'.

3. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon (1915) and In a grove (1922)
All right, they're short stories - but Akutagawa, who killed himself when he was 35, never wrote a novel, and as a prose stylist he's just too marvellous to leave out. There is enough mystery in these two tales (transposed to film by Akira Kurosawa in 1950) to fill a book as long as The wind-up bird chronicle. A critic of the confessional mode of writing, Akutagawa implies in these stories that narrators are always unreliable.

4. Junichiro Tanizaki, Some prefer nettles (1928)
The story of a man who, having lost his passion for his wife, encourages her to have an affair. Despite the tension between them, the couple find themselves reluctant to separate, in part to protect their young son. Wonderful digressions on dolls, puppets, garlic breath, clove-scented baths, and the love suicides of Chikamatsu.

5. Yasunari Kawabata, Snow country (1947)
Snow is such a presence in this story that it almost becomes a character. Everything that matters is elided or implied in this ambiguous tale of a Toyko dilettante who allows a young geisha from the western mountains to fall in love with him.

6. Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956)
Can a crime of passion be committed against an object? In 1950, a young acolyte set fire to a Zen temple in Kyoto. Mishima attended the trial, and discovered in the monk's confession a strange story of beauty and desire, in which a boy's wish to protect what he loves most is transformed into an act of destruction.

7. Kobo Abe, Woman in the dunes (1962)
"One day in August a man disappeared." So begins this bizarre tale of an entomologist trapped by the strangest of predators: a voracious pit of sand. Within the pit lives an equally voracious woman, who, the trapped man learns, rewards those who willingly renounce their freedom to fight the relentless encroachment of the dunes.

8. Shusaku Endo, Silence (1966)
A generous and beautiful novel in which Endo, a Catholic, imagines the sufferings and self-delusions of two Portuguese missionaries forced by their Japanese captors to renounce their faith. The descriptions of the tortures endured by the Jesuit apostates and their 17th-century converts are harrowing.

9. Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse up o young men of the new age! (1983)
In 1963, Oe's eldest son was born with a malformed skull and massive brain damage. In this tender and hopeful book, Oe describes how a man very like himself comes to terms with his son's disability through a chance encounter with a mad autodidact and the prophetic books of William Blake.

10. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian wood (1987)
The novel, Murakami's fifth, whose phenomenal success led to his exile to Europe and the United States. It's all here: the callow narrator, the deja vus and symbols, the peripheral danger - plus slug-eating, damp bras, The great Gatsby, fires, Miles Davis, and a dead man's pyjamas.

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's top 10 books for six- to eight-year-olds
Guardian, 2005-03-23.

Paul Stewart is the author of a number of books for children including The midnight hand and The wakening. Chris Riddell is a graphic artist who has illustrated many books for children and has won the Unesco Award for Something else, and the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2002 for Pirate diary. He is also the acclaimed political cartoonist for the Guardian and the Observer. Together they have co-written the successful 'Edge Chronicles' series and also Fergus Crane, which won the Nestlé Smarties Gold Medal Award 2004 in the six- to eight-years category. Their latest book, for the same age group, is Corby Flood.

Paul's picks

1. Norton Juster, The phantom tollbooth
A rollicking rollercoaster of a ride full of jokes, puns and a totally skewiff take on life, it is the book that inspired me to be a writer.

2. Philip Pullman, Clockwork
This masterful tale of dark forces and darker magic could have been forged in the endless forests of Grimm's fairy tales.

3. Enid Blyton, The magic faraway tree
A fast-paced story that has more wacky characters and weird incidents per page than just about any other book for this age group. If anyone tells you not to read Enid Blyton, just ignore them!

4. S. F. Said, Varjak Paw
A mystical martial arts tale of greed, deception and finding one's place in the world. A fascinating modern take on ancient traditions - with cats ...

5. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the chocolate factory
With its wicked humour, sweeping imagination and wealth of revolting characters, this is still one of the most enchanting books written for children.

Chris's choices

6. Chris Priestley, 'The Tom Marlowe mysteries'
Fantastic historical fiction by a good friend of mine.

7. Florence Parry Heide, The shrinking of Treehorn
Sublime tale of a boy who shrinks unnoticed, illustrated by the master of Gothic cross hatching, Edward Gorey.

8. Norman Stone, Professor Branestaum
Fabulously absurd stories of a mad inventor illustrated by my hero, William Heath Robinson.

9. Jeff Brown, Flat Stanley
When I was five, I wanted to be Flat Stanley and post myself in a letter to a far off place.

10. Lewis Carroll, Alice's adventures in Wonderland
A classic - John Tenniel's illustrations have never been surpassed. He was a famous political cartoonist as well!

------

"Chris Riddell is also the acclaimed political cartoonist for the Guardian and the Observer."
Sixteen years later, Riddell is still a (the?) poliical cartoonist on the Observer. His cartoons.

8.
Recte Norman Hunter, Professor Branestawm. Horrah the Grauniad!

>51 Cynfelyn: I’m glad he included Böll’s Irisches Tagebuch — that’s a long-standing favourite of mine. All that lovely stuff about everyone cycling to the pub in the next village on Sundays so that they count as bona fide travellers and are allowed to drink. But how did he manage not to list anything by Dervla Murphy?

Paul Addison's top 10 books on Churchill
Guardian, 2005-04-11.

Paul Addison is director of the centre for second world war studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is a former visiting fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and the author of Churchill: the unexpected hero recently published by Oxford University Press.

1. Winston Churchill, My early life
My top 10 have not been arranged in order of merit - but if they had been, this would still be number one. The best source on the making of Winston Churchill is still Churchill himself. Written in late middle age, his autobiography recalled his unhappy childhood and his youthful quest for glory as a soldier and war correspondent. A classic adventure story, it was also a lament for a vanished age of aristocracy and empire.

2. Various, , Churchill: four faces and the man
First published in 1969, this sparkling collection of essays anatomised Churchill's qualities as a statesman (A. J. P. Taylor), politician (Robert Rhodes James), historian (J. H. Plumb), military strategist (Basil Liddell Hart) and depressive human being (Anthony Storr). Research has moved on since then, but as an analysis of the essential Churchill the book has never been surpassed. It founded the British school of Churchillians who admire him 'warts and all'.

3. Martin Gilbert, In search of Churchill
Political biography was a gentlemanly affair of delving into one or two archives until Martin Gilbert came on the scene. As Churchill's official biographer he set rigorous new standards of research, working through scores of manuscript collections and travelling far and wide in search of new material. The six volumes of his life are a towering achievement but not many people have the leisure, this side of retirement, to savour all 7,285 pages. In the meantime there could be no better introduction than Gilbert's highly entertaining account of his methods of writing, and his search for buried treasure: eye witnesses whose recollections had never been recorded, and caches of documents that had lain hidden for decades.

4. Mary Soames, Winston Churchill: his life as a painter
Denis Healey used to say that every politician needs a hinterland - an absorbing outside interest beyond the world of Westminster. Churchill found it in painting. He seldom travelled without his brushes and oils and the moment he set up his easel he was lost to the world. Churchill never claimed to be a great artist but he delighted in the landscapes he saw on his travels, domestic scenes from his home at Chartwell, and portraits of his family and friends. The story of his life as a painter, delightfully told by his daughter Mary Soames, is a revelation of the private self who kept the statesman human.

5. David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service
Churchill's lifelong fascination with secret intelligence is the theme of this riveting book which covers everything from his first encounter with the 'Great Game' on the north-west frontier to his involvement in the Anglo-American inspired coup that led to the overthrow of Mussadiq in Iran in 1953. Though Stafford is at pains to disprove some of the conspiracy theories which implicate Churchill in episodes like the sinking of the Lusitania or the attack on Pearl Harbor, he shows that Churchill played a crucial part in the development of the intelligence services and was no mean hand with a cloak and dagger.

6. John Ramsden, Man of the century: Winston Churchill and his legend since 1945
Ramsden has added a new dimension to Churchill studies with a richly detailed analysis of the growth of his legend since 1945. His book sets out "to understand how that fame was created, perceived, marketed, spun and in some cases even fabricated." In the course of a fascinating conducted tour of perceptions of Churchill around the English-speaking world, Ramsden identifies the publicists and politicians who constructed the legend and the monuments and memorabilia which celebrated him. Such is his eye for detail that he even remarks on Churchill's unassailable lead in commemorative Toby jugs: 22 different designs compared with two each for Baldwin, Chamberlain and Lloyd George.

7. David Reynolds, In command of history: Churchill fighting and writing the Second World War
In writing his war memoirs Churchill had two main aims. The first was to make a fortune for himself and his family while protecting it from the taxman. The second was to create a useable past that would vindicate his judgment as a war leader and assist his activities as a postwar statesman. In a masterly feat of sustained scholarly analysis Reynolds explains how Churchill achieved a triumphant success on both counts. In anyone else Churchill's profiteering, manipulation of the documents, and unacknowledged use of ghost writers would look disreputable, but all is forgiven the saviour of his country.

8. John Charmley, Churchill: the end of glory
The furore over the so-called 'Charmley thesis' - the case for a compromise peace with Hitler in 1940 - has distracted attention from an otherwise perceptive political life grounded in a coherent critique of Churchill's flaws, and a far from ungenerous appreciation of his abilities. Charmley adopts the sceptical view of Churchill held by most of his contemporaries before 1939, and extends it to apply to his conduct of the war - a debatable but stimulating exercise.

9. Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the origins of the cold war
It is no secret that Churchill is revered by many Americans as a philosopher king and role model for leadership. Whereas in Britain we see him as a man of the past, he is admired in the US as a guide to the present and future. Churchill's unique stature on the other side of the Atlantic owes something to his wartime alliance with Roosevelt, but as Fraser Harbutt shows in a powerfully argued book, the decisive factor was the part Churchill played, while he was out of office, in facilitating the entry of the US into the cold war. The tipping point was his 'iron curtain' speech at Fulton in March 1946.

10. Roy Jenkins, Churchill ; Geoffrey Best, Churchill: a study in greatness
The competition for the title of best one volume life of Churchill is intense and the result, it seems to me, is a tie between Roy Jenkins and Geoffrey Best. Both authors are comprehensive, accurate, and stylish, but in different ways. Jenkins brings to the subject a veteran politician's feel for office and power, a worldly appreciation of Churchill's love of the good life, and an encyclopaedic appetite for detail. His account is richly descriptive but tends to stick to the surface of events. Best is a more reflective and speculative writer with a historian's flair for the insights that lie just beyond the tangible evidence. By different routes both authors come to the same conclusion, or as Best puts it: 'His achievements, taken all in all, justify his title to be known as the greatest Englishman of his age...in this later time we are diminished if, admitting Churchill's failings and failures, we can no longer appreciate his virtues and victories.'

Bella Bathurst's top 10 books on the sea
Guardian, 2005-05-04.

Author of The lighthouse Stevensons, the story of the Stevenson family who designed and constructed 97 Scottish lighthouses, Bella Bathurst's latest book, The wreckers, deals with the murky, mythic practice of wrecking around the British coast. Here, she chooses her top 10 books on the sea.

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The rime of the ancient mariner
OK, it's a poem, but so what? It's long and narrative, and for most readers the Ancient Mariner has superseded both Homer and the Bible as the first and deepest source of all our sea-imagery.

2. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The original, and still the best. Melville spent time both on whaling ships and a man-of-war, and it shows. His masterpiece is as much an education in 19th-century shipboard life as it is the story of man against leviathan.

3. R. Wyville Thompson, The depths of the sea
Before the Challenger expeditions, the deep sea was seen as the dead zone; black, depthless, purgatorial. After the Challenger expeditions, the deeps were revealed to be as rich in life as a riverbed or a tropical jungle. The Challenger's crew not only brought back evidence of life in the abyss, they changed forever the way we perceive and use the sea.

4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Records of a family of engineers
Though this is only a fragment, Robert Louis Stevenson's brief family biography contains a treasury of fact and anecdote about the northern seas. His family were engineers who built all the Scottish lights, and Stevenson himself trained as an engineer. Part of the beauty of Records is its ambivalence; Stevenson loved and pined for the sea, but he also understood how corroding that love could be.

5. James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven-tenths
Describing this as a book of essays on the sea is accurate, but reductive. Hamilton-Paterson takes saltwater as a starting point for a book full of strange and beautiful musings on the facts and myths of ocean life, from sonar pings to the deep-sea dead.

6. Jonathan Raban, Coasting
In 1984, Jonathan Raban took a trip around the coast of Britain in a one-man boat. Coasting, his account of that voyage, not only contains some sublime writing on the sea and its meanings, but also offers an acute new angle on our island life.

7. Clare Francis, Woman alone: sailing solo across the Atlantic
Francis was the first woman to cross the Atlantic singlehanded. Endearingly - and like Ellen MacArthur 30 years after her - Francis's account of her journey is just as much a record of homesickness, discomfort and fear as it is of courage and lonely skill.

8. Patrick O'Brian, The Aubrey/Maturin Series
You can read this fabulous series of novels for advice on the correct use of spankers and futtocks, you can read them for their exuberance and humanity, or you can just read them because they're compulsive and you fancy Stephen Maturin.

9. Tony Parker, Lighthouse
In the 1970s, Tony Parker - the godfather of British interviewers - went out to the edges of England to find and record the last generation of lighthouse keepers. The result was not only an exceptional insight into a singular breed of men, but an unrivalled depiction of life on England's extremities.

10. John Fowles, Shipwreck: photographs by the Gibsons of Scilly
The novelist John Fowles wrote the accompanying text for this compendium of shipwreck photographs by the Gibson family of photographers. Their images of sailing vessels embayed on the shores of the Scillies or Cornwall are classics, as notable for their melancholy elegance as for their tell-tale details.

Rupert Wright's top 10 books about France
Guardian, 2005-05-10.

Rupert Wright lives in France and is the author of Notes from the Languedoc, an introduction to the region's winemakers, oyster farmers, canal people and celebrated inhabitants, living and dead. "As a nation, the British are in thrall to the French, even if we sneer at their contemptible habits - stuffing food down geese, mistreating their dogs, being able to run and catch a rugby ball at the same time ... In just about every way they seem superior to us: they have intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, while we have to put up with Melvyn Bragg; they had Brigitte Bardot while all we had to feast our eyes on was Barbara Windsor; their main striker is Thierry Henry, we have Wayne Rooney. By way of correcting this imbalance, many of our best writers have decided that the only way to deal with the beautiful place across the Channel is to write about it. Here, then, are my 10 favourite books written in English about France."
LT character: Thierry Henry.

1. A. J. Liebling, Between meals
A heroic account of gluttonous eating in Paris in the 1920s when you could get 26 francs to the dollars. Liebling did not meet the avant garde, such as Picasso, Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein. Instead, he met lunch.

2. Elizabeth David, French provincial cooking
Want to know how to cook those favourites, such as tripes à la mode de Caen or galantine de porc à la Bourguignonne? David, in her precise but patrician way, is the perfect guide.

3. Rosemary George, The wines of the south of France
You'll need some wine to go with lunch, and although wine from the south was not fashionable in either Liebling's or David's day, this is the best guide to the new world-style wines of the region. George's book is scrupulously fair, knowledgeable and often entertaining, although how she managed to read her notes after a day's tasting is beyond me.

4. Patrick Rance, The French cheese book
A slice of cheese to go with the Banyuls? Rance is the best guide to the country's more than 800 cheeses. Shame it's out of print.

5. George Orwell, Down and out in Paris and London
After all this eating and drinking, somebody's going to have to deal with the washing up. Read how one Old Etonian coped with all the crockery in the seamy Paris of the 1930s.

6. Robert Gildea, Marianne in chains: in search of the German occupation 1940-1945
Instead of a nap after lunch, how about a little history? This is the classic study of the German occupation of France. Gildea destroys both the myth of heroic resistance but also the notion that France was a nation of craven collaborators.

7. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: adventures of a romantic biographer
Holmes's brilliant biographical sleuthing follows in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson's donkey and Gerard de Nerval's lobster.

8. Herbert Ypma, Hip hotels: France
I've stayed in a number of his recommendations, but none better than the bizarrely-named Nord Pinus in Arles, where if you're lucky they will give you room 10, usually reserved for the matadors, its louche decor complete with nude photo of Charlotte Rampling.

9. Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovery
A rare British bande dessinée that equals its Flaubert inspiration for sharp social observation, taking as her subject the English in France, complete with Volvos, second homes and love affairs.

10. Helena Frith Powell, More France please we're British
If all this French focus makes you want to live there, this book tells you everything from where to go, why not to get involved in the gite business, and the importance of pelvic re-education after childbirth. Also, the author's my wife and said that she would give me pelvic re-education if I didn't include her.

Terry Breverton's top 10 great Welshmen
Guardian, 2005-06-02.

Terry Breverton is a senior business lecturer at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, and the author behind an ongoing series of books on Welsh history and culture. Here he picks his top 10 entries from the latest edition of 100 great Welshmen, a celebration of the remarkable achievements of his countrymen.

1. Arthur ap Meurig ap Tewdrig (died 570)
Europe's greatest legend has been kidnapped from south-east Wales, but by placing him in the lives of over 100 saints in the Welsh 'Age of the Saints' (the sixth-century Dark Ages in the rest of Europe), Arthur's existence and family background in Glamorgan, Gwent and Brittany was conclusively proved. In fact, all the legends associated with Arthur have their precedence in Wales, predating the medieval romances.
LT character: King Arthur.

2. John Charles (1931-1994)
Like football's first superstar, Manchester United's Billy Meredith, the gentle giant ("Il Gigante Buono") was never properly acknowledged as one of the greatest footballers in the world. Charles is still revered in Italy for his time with Juventus, when he was instrumental in their rise to greatness and broke scoring records. When asked who was the best centre-forward he ever played against, the English captain Billy Wright nominated John Charles. He gave the same answer for the best centre-half.
Note: John Charles (3).

3. Owain Glyndwr (1354-1415)
Wales' greatest hero has been neglected until recently with the 500th anniversary of his 13-year war against English rule. He threw back five invading English armies, and is still revered by patriots as a cultured man who fought overwhelming odds. Fidel Castro referred to him as the 'world's first guerrilla leader' and G. M. Trevelyan called him "a wonderful man, an attractive and unique figure". In 1999, in a poll to find the most significant figure of the last 1000 years, 100 world leaders voted Glyndwr in seventh place, above Churchill, Darwin, Gates, Mandela and Einstein. No one knows how or where he died, which adds to the aura of this undefeated Welshman.
LT character: Owain Glyn Dŵr.

4. D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)
A pioneer of cinema, David Lewelyn Wark Griffith was proud of his Welsh heritage, and boasted of his ancestry from Gruffudd ap Llewelyn, King of Wales. Apart from making 'Birth of a nation' and 'Intolerance', he formed the United Artists studio with Fairbanks, Chaplin and Pickford. He revolutionised cinema techniques, innovating fade-in, fade-out (dissolve), close-up and flashback. He elevated moving picture 'shorts' to epics, which were then copied across the world.

5. Llywellyn Morris Humphreys - Murray The Hump (1899-1965)
Also known as Murray the Camel, he was Al Capone's right-hand man, and made the mafia what it is today. His parents were from Carno in mid-Wales, and he rose from being a hired gun in Chicago to ruling the mob when Capone was incarcerated. After the prohibition years, 'The Hump' is credited with moving the outfit into more respectable activities such as the control of unions and financial institutions and then into entertainment, gambling and Las Vegas. For one of his daughter's teenage birthday parties, Frank Sinatra was the singer.

6. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, along with another four of the first six American presidents, had Welsh origins. J. F. Kennedy, at a dinner honouring Nobel prize winners said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, or human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

7. Pelagius (also know as Morgan) (c.385-c.460s)
This Celtic monk believed that paying for salvation or following a leader was not the way to heaven; following the example of Christ was the only way. This would have starved the Pope and Roman Catholicism of funding, and thereby power; many Italian bishops who supported Pelagius were banished.

8. William Price (1800-1893)
This Chartist free thinker and Republican doctor escaped to France after the Chartist riots, but upon his return preached the benefits of vegetarianism, nudity and free love, the unhealthiness of socks, and the potential dangers to the environment of rapid industrialisation, revolution, republicanism and radical politics. He refused to treat patients who would not give up smoking, and prescribed a vegetarian diet instead of pills. The original hippy, Dr Price wore long pigtails and dressed in the Welsh national colours of red, white and green. One of his children was named Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ) and Price was instrumental in the acceptance of cremation in Britain, selling tickets for his own bonfire.

9. 'Black Bart' Roberts (1682-1722)
Time-Life called Pembrokeshire's John Roberts "the last and most lethal pirate", and with his death the golden years of piracy died. The most successful pirate of all time, Roberts took over 400 recorded ships in just three years, from the coast of the Americas through the Caribbean to the Slave Coast of Africa. Utterly fearless, his habit of dressing in red silks (jolies rouges) for battle gave rise to the term Jolly Roger. Probably the only teetotaller on the seas, when he died over 250 of his crew were tried and sentenced, in the greatest pirate trial of all time.
LT character: Bartholomew Roberts.

10. H. M. Stanley (1841-1904)
Born John Rowlands in a workhouse, he fought for both sides in the American civil war. When working as a reporter in Abyssinia, he was sent to find the explorer David Livingstone, famously greeting him with the words "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" when he discovered him at Ujiji in 1871. Later Stanley was the first white man to cross central Africa from east to west. He led several expeditions, tracing the 2000-mile course of the river Zaire (Congo) to the sea, and carving out a huge colony in central Africa for his friend and employer, Leopold of Belgium.

· The launch of 100 great Welshmen is at the Hay Festival on Saturday May 28

------

Two warlords, a racist film-maker, a mobster, a slave-owning rebel, a pirate and a racist (if not genocidal) colonialist batting for the dark side of the Force, and a footballer, a heretic and the original hippy representing the forces of goodness and light. It makes you proud to be Welsh.

4.
I wouldn't want to rain on anyone's parade, but doesn't 'Birth of a nation' require (euphamism coming up) context these days? Certainly LT's "Book Description" (copied from Amazon?) is eye-watering:

"A civil war spectacular that portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War. The story depicts the war itself, the conflict between the defeated Southerners and emancipated renegade blacks, the despoiling of the South during the carpetbagger period, and the revival of the Southern white man's honor through the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan."

"... the revival of the Southern white man's honor through the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan." WTF??

5.
Not surprisingly, Murray the Hump is not an LT author, character or tag. Frankly, I doubt whether Al Capone's touchstone is legit. Llywellyn Morris Humphreys does, however, have a Wikipedia page: Murray Humphreys.

8.
Again, not on LT, so here's his Wikipedia page: Dr William Price.

------

ETA: Oh yes, the list is of the "top 10 great Welshmen".

Whether the book is also a male-only preserve, I don't know, but the title, 100 great Welshmen, doesn't inspire confidence.

Joyce Crick's top 10 fairytales
Guardian, 2005-06-06.

Joyce Crick was senior lecturer in German at University College, London until her retirement, and in 2000 was awarded the Schlegel Tieck Prize for her translation of Freud's The interpretation of dreams. Most recently, she has edited, translated and written an introduction for a new edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's stories, Selected tales, (OUP). Here she chooses her 10 favourite fairytales.

"'The first collection of its kind' is how Wilhelm Grimm, younger of the famous brothers, described their Tales for children and the household, first published in 1812. Tales of enchantment and terror had long been anthologized - and invented - for the entertainment of both children and adults, but what was new about this compilation was the brothers' insistence upon the assumed oral nature and supposedly folk origins of their stories, rescued from the neglect of the modern world. Their aims, particularly Jacob's, were as much historical and anthropological as poetic, and patriotic as well; these were meant to be German tales, first gathered under the shadow of Napoleonic occupation. Consequently their collection - 211 by their final edition of 1857, by then heavily rewritten for the nursery by Wilhelm - is far more varied than the handful of familiar tales by which it is best known, and includes animal fables, tall tales, moralities and peasant comedy, all without a fairy in sight. These tales come filtered, not only through the brothers' first tellers (more well-brought-up young ladies among them than peasant crones) but through their own romantic and scholarly purposes; through Wilhelm's later revisions for a child audience, and subsequently through their many, many translators. Above all, tales once told to listeners have been transformed by their unobtrusive arts into stories to be read, or read aloud."

1. Rumpelstiltskin
One of the best for reading aloud to the very young. It offers a wide range of possibilities for small ones' identification, from the miller's daughter's dismay at a task beyond her powers to the little man's tantrum at the end. It has all the ingredients of the fairytale plot: the test (to spin straw into gold), the grotesque helper, the conditions he sets ("guess my name or I take your child"), the triumph of fulfilling them and the fun of the guessing game, when reader and listeners can break free of the book to improvise outrageously. Much of the effect is down to Wilhelm's arts of piecing together at least three fragmentary tales (one of them from Dortchen Wild, the woman who was to become his wife) to make a satisfying whole, and of colouring the tale with the busy whirr-whirr of bobbin and wheel, and the glitter of piles of gold.
Wikipedia.

2. Cat and Mouse as partners
A worldly-wise animal fable, which has comparable tales in many cultures. Mouse is duped by Cat, who has been secretly eating the pot of lard they had set aside to share for the winter, under the pretext of going to the christenings of his pretended nephews, Skinoff, Halfgone and Allgone. Wilhelm's skill in lively characterization and dialogue makes this a tale of disenchantment. Of course it ends with Cat eating Mouse, and with the dry authorial comment - a late addition - of "There, you see: that's the way of the world."
Wikipedia.

3. The goose girl
The utopian happy ending we expect of the true fairytale is found here. This is one of the finest stories the brothers heard from Frau Dorothea Viehmann, not strictly a peasant voice, but a tailor's widow who most closely answered their ideal of a folk storyteller. She sold them her garden produce and they invited her in for coffee and stories. It tells of a princess's departure from her home to marry far away, and of her growth to maturity. It contains powerful feelings of hostility from the serving girl who usurps the true bride's place, and of fear in the intimidated princess who is reduced to looking after the geese; and unforgettable images in the three drops of blood on the napkin, the head of Falada, the faithful horse, on the town gate, and the goose-boy's hat whirling in the wind. All is made well at the end when she tells the tale of her woes and is overheard by the old king. Justice is restored when she is reinstated as the rightful bride and the impostor punished - in a barrel of nails. Such painful punishments of the wicked are characteristic, and trouble tender modern sensibilities: are they sadistic or reassuring?
Wikipedia.

4. Hans in luck
The underdog is a typical fairytale figure; he crops up as the third son, the thumbling, the simpleton who makes good. Hans in Luck represents a happy reversal of the genre. He does not set out into the world and find his destiny in marriage, wealth and a kingdom, but is the comic loser in a cumulative series of sharp deals as he makes his way back to mother and home - which was his goal all along. He heads for home carrying a nugget of gold, his wages for long and faithful service to his master. It is heavy. The sun is hot. He meets a rider and trades his nugget for the horse to ride - and that sets the pattern for all his encounters on the way: each time he is gulled into trading his last bargain for something less valuable, the horse for a cow, the cow for a pig, the pig for a goose, the goose for a grindstone which weighs him down more heavily than the nugget. But each time he is delighted at his good luck, even when his stone falls into the well - for now he can get home faster and reach his mother's house at last. Regression becomes a triumph - and Wilhelm's shaping of his final sentence makes it a consummation.
Wikipedia.

5. The fisherman and his wife
This story, written down in Pomeranian dialect by the painter Philipp Otto Runge, reached the brothers through their friend the poet Achim von Arnim. It is a beautifully crafted - and highly misogynist - comic morality tale of discontent and ambition. The fisherman catches an enchanted flounder who agrees to grant him wishes. His wife wants to leave the piss-pot they live in and wishes for a cottage instead - which the flounder grants. Thereafter, her desires grow bigger and bigger: first for a palace, then to be king, then to be pope; and each time the henpecked fisherman goes down to the sea and calls:

Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Come up again and speak to me,
For my wife, my Ilsebill,
Will not as I'd have her will.

And with each wish granted the descriptions of her glory swell and grow, and with each wish the sea swells with growing storms. The crescendo reaches its height when her last wish goes too far: to be like God. "Go back," says the flounder to the fisherman. "She's sitting in the piss-pot." In one version, the tale ascribes the overweening wishes to the man. This was taken up by Günter Grass in The flounder (1979), a vast comic novel which combines the themes of mankind's (ie male-kind's) self-destructive ambition with gender relations through world history.
Wikipedia.

6. The juniper tree
There are Scottish and English versions of this story, but the Grimms', a second contribution from Runge, is far richer, and surely the masterpiece of the collection. The cruel stepmother kills her stepson, and cooks him for her husband's dinner. Her daughter Marleenken, who loves her brother, gathers his bones and buries them under the juniper tree. They rise as a beautiful bird who flies off to sing his accusing song to the goldsmith, who gives him a gold chain to hear it again, to the shoemaker, who gives him a pair of red slippers, and to the miller's lads, who give him a millstone. He flies back and drops the chain down to his father, the slippers to Marleenken - and the millstone on the terrified stepmother. After such redress he is able to resume his true shape and the three sit down together and eat their dinner. Plot summary cannot do justice to the richness of event, the crescendo patterning, the inventiveness of detail, the bright bird's haunting song, the mythological resonances. Read it, read it!
Wikipedia.

7. Red Riding Hood
Feminist writers and critics have criticised the Grimms for the fixed gender roles and patriarchal values implicit and often explicit in their tales: in the charming housekeeping of Snow White and Rose Red, for example, or the other Snow White in her coffin as doll in a glass case. So it is salutary to note that they actually gave us two, quite incompatible, versions of the Red Riding Hood story: the familiar one in which she is tempted by the wolf and swallowed up by him, which has been read as a parable of rape; and another, less well-known, in which Redcap and her grandmother take the initiative and cheerfully drown the wolf in the sausage water. It is high time to circulate this one.
Wikipedia.

8. The pack of no-good lowlife ruffians
For light relief, try this nonsense story in which the animals behave like naughty children. It was passed on to the Grimms by their friend and fellow collector August von Haxthausen. Cock and Hen go off to the nut mountain, eat their fill, squabble, harness a duck to their carriage of nutshells, give a lift to a pin and a needle on their way to an inn, play all manner of tricks on the innkeeper and leave without paying. The title is his cry of rage.

9. Eckbert the Fair
Fairytales are not only anonymous folk tales: their dark enchantments chimed with the interests in the supernatural of the Romantic writers among the Grimm brothers' friends and contemporaries. They wrote their own, authored variations upon folk motifs and plot patterns, playing with them and sometimes reversing them. This disturbing story from Ludwig Tieck opens in the security of fireside storytelling, but is one of transgression and isolation with no final redress or certainty of moral rightness, ending instead in murder and paranoia - and deep unease in the reader. It can be read, together with three tales by other authors, in Romantic fairy tales, translated and edited by Carol Tully (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000).
Wikipedia.

10. Angela Carter, The bloody chamber
Of more recent writers, Carter has read the traditional tales as a utopian feminist. She has given them a lively shake, upset the plots, reversed the roles and gleefully rewritten them: Perrault's Bluebeard and Puss in Boots and the Grimms' Redcap and Snow White reappear newly imagined with wit and grace.

Tiffany Murray's top 10 black comedies
Guardian, 2005-06-13.

Tiffany Murray's debut novel, Happy accidents - a coming-of-age story with a cast of characters dysfunctional enough to make Emily Bronte proud - was shortlisted for this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for Comic Fiction. Here she selects her top 10 books that deal in the murky and contrary depths of dark humour.

1. Edward Gorey, Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too
No such list could begin without Gorey. If you want the lot in paperback there is nothing wrong with these two collections, although the individual Bloomsbury volumes are hard to resist. Fall in love with 'The Uninvited Guest', and for all visiting children leave out 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies': "M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Neville who died of ennui ... ". See also Struwwelpeter by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (my mother's favourite), Tim Burton's The melancholy death of Oyster Boy, and anything by David Shrigley.

2. Evelyn Waugh, The loved one
Hollywood and Whispering Glades; dead pets and mortician habits, biting Waugh at his best. "Turf does not prosper in southern California and the Hollywood ground did not permit the larger refinements of cricket." See also, Decline and fall.

3. Barbara Gowdy, Mr Sandman
Joan Canary, bumped on the head and unable to speak, lives in the upstairs closet and compiles the family bibliography in clicks and hums and confessional sound bites. An amazing story of a child born screaming "Oh no, not again!"

4. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Woodsheds will never be the same again.

5. John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire
A family tale of bears, Vienna, writing, school rape and almost-inexhaustible incest. A favourite of mine as an only-child teenager.

6. Denton Welch, In youth is pleasure
The main character Orvil Pym's wonderfully murky, adolescent voice and dark actions (such as roping up the scout master: "soon he had him completely trussed ... this gave Orvil great pleasure") create a modern classic. That Welch was in constant physical pain and bed-ridden while writing this autobiographical fiction simply adds to the bravery of the skewed humour. William Burroughs said "when asked which writer has most directly influenced my own work I can answer without hesitation: Denton Welch." A match made in heaven.

7. Patrick Gale, Dangerous pleasures
Chunky pre-pubescent girls are locked in wardrobes and vampiric embraces. A short story concerning an elderly mother lured off a cliff by something sinister and briny is titled 'Wheee!'. Gothic but gentle, perfectly tempered and never loud.

8. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Astride a grave with music hall gags, chosen because sometimes it works better on paper, without too much actorly clowning about.

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5
Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical classic was 24 years in the making: "So it goes". The unspeakablility of war where all that follows Dresden's destruction is the 'Poo-tee-weet' of a bird. Like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut was a prisoner of war inside a meat-locker beneath a slaughterhouse as Dresden was fireballed and bombed. It is unknown whether he, like Billy, was also abducted by aliens.

10. Paul Magrs, Modern love
A bellowing grandfather, Dan Fletcher, celebrates the royal wedding with murderous grand-twins, Jess and Jude. "I don't even WANT any of your Royal Wedding SHITE!" he says. Fantastic voices in this fantastically observed family saga.

Wesley Stace's top 10 books about children aimed at adults
Guardian, 2005-06-20.

Wesley Stace's first novel, Misfortune (Little, Brown), set in the early 19th century, tells the story of Rose Old, raised as a young lady in Love Hall, an endless gothic maze of halls and lawns and blissfully unaware that she is, in fact, a boy - until the day her world comes crashing down around her. He chooses his top 10 books featuring children but aimed at adults. "Since adults now happily read books primarily intended for children and teenagers, I started to think of books about children and teenagers meant primarily for adults. Much of the US reaction to Misfortune has focused on the gender-bending aspects of the story. To me, it's more a (particularly stressful) coming of age novel."

1. Richard Hughes, A high wind in Jamaica
Children on their way back to England from Jamaica are kidnapped by pirates; this book is eerie, macabre, and unsettling in its depiction of the children's relationship with their kidnappers. Published in 1929, High wind is Lord of the flies before its time, or Moonfleet (see below) plus Freud. (It was also made into a film by Alexander MacKendrick, featuring the young Martin Amis in his only film appearance - he dies young.)

2. L. P. Hartley, The shrimp and the anemone
The first volume of the 'Eustace and Hilda' trilogy, a masterpiece from the very first image, where Eustace tries to save a shrimp being eaten by an anemone and ends up killing them both. The trilogy depicts the power-shifts in the siblings' relationship and includes some of the most perfect sentences in English.

3. John Meade Falkner, Moonfleet
Written in 1898, a thrilling smuggling adventure set on the south coast, with all the right ingredients: hidden vaults, missing diamonds, a village full of characters, and Elzevir Block who, through thick and thin, guides the young hero, John Trenchard, back to his rightful place. (Not to be confused with the Fritz Lang movie of the same name which, though ostensibly based on the novel, has nothing to do with it, to the extent that it even has very few characters in common.)

4. Dodie Smith, I capture the castle
The story of Cassandra Mortmain's coming of age, stuck in the decrepit castle her family bought in better days. In her efforts to become a writer, this heir to Austen's heroines keeps a journal, wherein she depicts her writer's-blocked father, bohemian stepmother, romantically inclined sister, and their suitors.

5. Oliver Onions, The story of Ragged Robyn
The best novel ever to come from an author's dream? A menacing gang of thieves threaten Robyn Skyrme as he walks home along the sea wall - if he talks, they will return to kill him in seven years. He talks ... and spends the next seven years living in the shadow of their threat. Written in 1945, the book has the spellbinding feel of an old ballad, and a shocking ending.

6. Nigel Hinton, Time bomb
After the second world war, four 11- year-olds find an unexploded bomb in the building site that is their playground. The suspicious Cap enlists them in his own private army, giving them a sense of community away from their unsympathetic families. Though meant primarily for teenagers, the book moves forward with the kind of psychological precision that appeals to everyone.

7. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Unknown novel by little read author. (This could also have been Great expectations or Oliver Twist, but Copperfield is the one where, for me, the disparate elements that make up the wonder of Dickens come together.)

8. Iain Banks, The wasp factory
Frank Cauldhame's bizarre world of ritual and violence. Rivalled only recently by Patrick McCabe's The butcher boy, this book has almost everything: gruesome humour, a truly sympathetic villain, and a great twist.

9. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
A chance hearing of The Beatles' song takes the narrator back to his early relationships, particularly with the troubled Naoko. A long, very moving, Proustian rush, in two volumes, quite different in tone from many of his other novels. Such a huge hit in Japan when it was published there in 1987 that Murakami had to move to America.

10. Lord Berners, First childhood
First volume of autobiography by the eccentric English composer ('The English Satie' - real name, Gerald Hugh Trywhitt-Wilson). The non-fictional equivalent of Wodehouse, these memoirs of Berners' exceedingly peculiar upbringing are, simply, hilarious.

>58 Cynfelyn: That's just blatant stirring of curiosity to get people to buy his book, along the lines of "ten people you didn't know were Welsh and/or famous". Any serious list of Welsh heroes would have poets, musicians and socialist politicians on it.

Wikipedia has a list someone else compiled from a poll about the same time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Welsh_Heroes — Owain Glyn Dŵr is the only one in Breverton's list who makes the top ten there.

>62 thorold: True enough. I think it's safe to say that a fair number of these lists are by authors with new books to push.

For what it's worth, 100 Welsh heroes's Wikipedia page adds:

"Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, himself named in the poll, had, during the voting, drawn attention to a Welsh nationalist "plot" to have Owain Glyndŵr at number one, rather than the eventual winner, Aneurin Bevan. In August 2004 a former employee of Culturenet Cymru alleged that the poll had been rigged to avoid accusations of "dumbing-down", and to ensure that Owain Glyndŵr did not receive more votes than Aneurin Bevan, although these claims were later dismissed by the Welsh Government"

To some extent, both 100 Welsh heroes and 100 great Welshmen are a bit of fluff, much like the original '100 Greatest Britons' (Wikipedia) and international spin-offs (Wikipedia). For a more objective Welsh list, see Y bywgraffiadur Cymreig / the Dictionary of Welsh Biography (the Welsh and English versions had different publishing histories and slightly different content), these days only kept up-to-date online, at https://biography.wales, although this also has it's own - acknowledged - inherited biases, including a super-abundance of Victorian clerics, and an under-representation of women.

Matt Seaton's top 10 books about cycling
Guardian, 2005-06-30.

Matt Seaton's haunting memoir, The escape artist, charts the physical and emotional consequences of his obsession with cycling, and his struggle with his wife's death from cancer. He has recently gone back to a bit of racing, now as a veteran. At the last count he had six bikes, including a beautiful blue titanium Colnago.

1. Tim Krabbé, The rider
Krabbé is probably best known in this country as the author of the novel adapted as the film The vanishing, but in his native Netherlands The rider is his bestselling book. As a young man, Krabbé's forte was chess - in his late teens, he was inside the top 20 players in Holland - and he only discovered a talent for cycle-racing relatively late in life, in his 30s. That new-found passion eventually found its way into this autobiographical novella about a bike race in south-west France, but the chess knowledge still figures as Krabbé narrates the intricate battle of tactics and psychology as the race plays itself out against the bleak landscape of les causses. Like much of Krabbé's oeuvre, The rider has a strange, dark, philosophical flavour: it is both a paean to pain and a hymn to the fellowship of the road. Nothing better is ever likely to be written on the subjective experience of cycle-racing.

2. David B. Perry, Bike cult: the ultimate guide to human powered vehicles
This compendious scrapbook of bike lore is a resource I return to again and again. David Perry is the perfect bicycle enthusiast - a former professional racer but with a metropolitan 'alternative' sensibility. Whether you are hunting for references to movies which feature cycling or are merely browsing, Bike cult is, for all its idiosyncracies and slightly makeshift feel, about the best encyclopaedia there is. Where else would you learn not only about French surrealist Alfred Jarry's absinthe-inspired cycling fantasies but also about the astonishing mathematical complexity of the physics of balancing on a bicycle? An indispensable companion.

3. James McGurn, On your bicycle: an illustrated history of cycling
Jim McGurn is an institution in his own right. Few others have done so much to foster the culture of cycling, through entrepreneurialism, publishing and writing. His history of cycling is, for my money, the best in a crowded field. Originally published by John Murray and handsomely and imaginatively illustrated, On Your Bicycle is an elegant and perceptive social history of cycling. Read this and you will realise that merely to swing your leg over the crossbar is to participate in a noble tradition, and that, as Iris Murdoch once observed, the bicycle is the most civilised form of transport known to man.

4. Paul Kimmage, Rough ride
Now a renowned sports writer, Kimmage first paid his dues as a professional cyclist. His career overlapped with two other, more famous sons of Irish cycling, Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly. Kimmage worked as a domestique - which can be literally translated as servant - one of the workhorses of the team. That alone gives his account of a pitiless sport that chews riders up and spits them out some of its gritty touch, but what made Kimmage's portrait of the professional peloton famous was his frankness about doping. Compelling stuff.

5. William Fotheringham, Put me back on my bike: in search of Tom Simpson
The Guardian's own cycling correspondent, William Fotheringham, is one of several prolific cycling writers, and I could nominate any one of a number of his books. This biography of Simpson, arguably the most talented cyclist Britain has ever produced, stands out as exemplary, not least because of the difficulty and sensitivity of the subject. Simpson's death from heat exhaustion, exacerbated by amphetamine misuse, on Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France was a deeply traumatic event for a generation of fans - a tragedy that has subsequently become shrouded in denial and sentiment. Fotheringham navigates his way through this miasma with tact, rigour and intelligence.

6. Tim Hilton, One more kilometre and we're in the showers
As cycling memoirs go, it is hard to imagine Hilton's being improved on. Rich in reminiscences of his own 50s and 60s heyday, but mingling personal history with a deep knowledge of the sport and its history, Tim Hilton makes a congenial and acute companion. An arts correspondent by trade (latterly of the Independent, but formerly of the Guardian), he brings a subtle, nuance-alert mind to such subjects as why both artists and posties have always been over-represented among the ranks of club cyclists.

7. Samuel Abt, Off to the races: 25 years of cycling journalism
Does what it says on the cover. The point being that Abt, long-time correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and New York Times, is one of the best. However else you follow the Tour, Abt's columns in the IHT are mandatory reading. For one thing, he gets more space than many British sports editors allow, and his reporting is always spot-on. No spin, no angle, no ego - he just really knows his subject and tells it like it is. No other cycling journalist so consistently enriches what I thought I'd seen on the previous evening's TV highlights.

8. Graeme Obree, Flying Scotsman: the Graeme Obree story
Obree, you may remember, was the eccentric but brilliant Scottish cyclist who set a new world hour record on a bike he'd built himself out of, among other things, old washing machine parts. He lost his record to Chris Boardman, and the two entered an extraordinary duel which, symbolically, pitted amateur versus professional and homespun wisdom against cutting-edge sports science. Obree the arch-individualist always made a great story, but something deeper emerged after his career collapsed into depression and mental anguish and he was forced to confront the demons that had been driving him since his miserable childhood. A brave and honest autobiography.

9. Matt Rendell, A significant other: riding the centenary Tour de France with Lance Armstrong
One of the most fascinating aspects of professional cycling competition is the way teams work - essentially, all for one. Rendell's book takes as its subject the role of the domestique, the journeyman pro whose job is to shepherd and protect the team leader, to fetch and carry food and drink, to chase down attacks, and, when necessary, to give up a wheel or even his entire bicycle to his master. Rendell captures exactly the poignancy of this role, but the beauty of the book is its access to Colombian rider Victor Hugo Peña, whose daily job was to bury himself for Lance Armstrong. Peña proves a remarkably articulate subject, and Rendell's transcription of his account of one Tour is a white-knuckle ride.

10. Lance Armstrong, It's not about the bike: my journey back to life
It slightly goes against the grain to nominate Lance's bestseller - after all, doesn't he win enough? But this is just too big a book to ignore. We all now know the story in outline: world-class athlete discovers he has advanced cancer and may be weeks away from death; against the odds and with incredible grit, he makes a full recovery and, astonishingly, rides his way back to winning ways. Whatever you think of Lance, it is an inspirational tale. The title was a stroke of genius: aided by an excellent ghostwriter, Lance achieved that rare thing - a bike book that non-bikies wanted to read.

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If it was my list, I'd bump one of the above to make way for Richard Ballantine, Richard's bicycle book. It was my bible, one copy on the bookshelf, the other in the back pocket of one of my bike panniers. Where on earth have they got to?

10.
The ultimate unreliable narrator. I'm surprised this is on the list, as surely by June 2005, Armstrong as up to his neck in doping allegations. Perhaps Seaton was more interested, perhaps understandably, in the story of Armstrong's cancer than in his cheating.

Jeremy Sheldon's top 10 supernatural books
Guardian, 2005-07-14.

Jeremy Sheldon's debut novel, The smiling affair, is a literary thriller about a melancholic ghost-hunter named Jay Richards. Set variously in San Francisco, North Carolina and Ibiza, this atmospheric tale explores the relationship between love, obsession and memory. The smiling affair is published by Jonathan Cape on July 14 2005.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Although this isn't a supernatural novel in the received sense, Pynchon's hilarious and typically wide-ranging narrative sees its cast of stoners, ninjettes, hippy-chicks and karmic adjusters come up against a multitude other-worldly forces and entities, including a mysterious community of undead called the Thanatoids.

2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The story of this novel's conception never seems to dull. One night during the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley was sitting on the shore of Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, two titans of Romantic literature, when Byron dared each of the guests to write a ghost story. That Mary Shelley went on to complete a work as experimental and as insightful as Frankenstein (the only ghost story conceived that famous night to be published) before her 20th birthday is a miraculous achievement.

3. M. R. James, The collected ghost stories of M. R. James
As English as redcoats or crumpets, these stories are fascinating to me as exercises in understatement and more engaging for the poise of their sentences than their sense of suspense.

4. Julio Cortazar, Bestiary
Within the pages of these short stories, Cortazar has possibly provided me with the most pleasurable experiences I've had as a reader. These come in flashes, those moments where rational explanations for what's happening jostle for dominance with the superstitious potential of the imagination. Highlights include 'The secret weapons', a tale of ghostly possession, and 'Circe', a story that investigates whether a beautiful and young widow possesses supernatural powers over the young men of her town.

5. Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac, D'entre les morts ('Among the dead')
It's hard to read this novel as a piece of independent fiction given the towering reputation of Hitchcock's Vertigo for which it was the source material. But it's interesting nonetheless to exchange the film's brooding San Francisco setting for the novel's French mise-en-scene and to feel the plot's effortless sense of inevitability as it progresses towards an ending that will surprise even those familiar with Hitch's sublime masterpiece.

6. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale fire
Just as the idea that Humbert hallucinates his sexual experiences with Delores Haze is a fanciful but nonetheless intriguing reading of Lolita, so is the idea that the ghosts of the Shades influence the narrative of Pale fire.

7. Toni Morrison, Beloved
One of the many things to admire in this novel is Morrison's communication of the supernatural. This is elusive and bewitching, searching to articulate something beyond the facile issue of whether a ghost in the story does or doesn't exist.

8. Pu Songling, Strange tales from make-do studio
Written in the late 17th century, Pu Songling's enigmatic ghost-stories or Liaozhai Zhiyi explore and merge the boundaries between illusion and reality as well as life and death. Most feature one or both of the two central archetypes of Chinese supernatural literature: "fox spirits" and wandering female ghosts desperately searching for love amongst men from the world of the living.

9. Martin Amis, Other people
Given the explicitly ambitious nature of some of his books over the last 15 years or so, Yellow dog and The information amongst them, it's reassuring to remember that Amis Jnr used to turn out short, experimental novels that were both stylistically inventive and savagely cynical. How else can one explain the heroine of this novel's perpetually unresolved narrative except by considering the idea that she is a ghost?

10. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Yes, it's a play. But this negative image of Macbeth is still fascinating for presenting us with a hero who plays against type, genre and convention to resist the will of the supernatural in favour of investigating its provenance.

Segun Afolabi's top 10 'on the move' books
Guardian, 2005-07-21.

Segun Afolabi is the winner of this year's Caine prize for African writing. He has a short story collection, A life elsewhere, and a novel, Goodbye Lucille, coming out in April 2006 and April 2007 respectively. He is published by Jonathan Cape.

1. Caryl Phillips, A state of independence
Bertram, a British West Indian, returns to St Kitts after an absence of 20 years. Expecting to feel at home in a way he does not feel in England, he gradually comes to realise that he is now an outsider on his island of birth, a man caught between two very different cultures.

2. Graham Greene, The comedians
A hotelier meets two men aboard a boat bound for Haiti - the innocent American, Mr Smith, and the mysterious Mr Jones. Enter the world of Papa Doc and the menacing secret police, the Tontons Macoute. A world of great fear and danger, yet Greene teases out humour in a climate of chaos and malevolence.

3. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
1959. American missionary Nathan Price brings his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo, a country emerging from the blight of colonial occupation. Blind to the needs of his family and the Africans he has come to "save", he seems unable to halt his inevitable downfall. Told from the point of view of his wife and daughters, Price's voice remains absent, yet the power of the narrative is undiminished.

4. James Baldwin, Another country
The story of Harlem jazz musician Rufus Scott adrift in New York, his suicide, and the friends and family who try to piece together his life. Set in Harlem, Greenwich Village and France. An intense melange of art, race, sexuality and politics set in 1970s America.

5. Tove Jansson, The summer book
A six-year-old girl and her grandmother spend a summer of discovery on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Eccentric, humorous and quietly powerful.

6. J. M. Coetzee, Life and times of Michael K
Gardener Michael K sets out from Cape Town with his sick mother to return to her rural home. This is in a South Africa riven by civil war. The mother dies during the journey and Michael K is forced to confront an anarchic world alone. A strange, symbolic and moving novel of love, dignity and survival in a chaotic world.

7. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
New York City from the point of view of a 19-year-old West Indian girl who has fled her mother and her homeland to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple and their four young daughters. A novel of growth, burgeoning sexuality and trying to understand one's past.

8. Maeve Brennan, The visitor
Following the death of her mother a young woman returns to Dublin after six years in Paris. Faced with a grandmother who is unable to show her love, she is forced to learn hard lessons about family and home. A novella of love longed for and denied. In Mrs King, Brennan appears to have re-fashioned the grandmother/wolf of Little Red Riding Hood - without the teeth.

9. Colm Toibin, The south
A first novel set in Spain and Ireland about a painter fleeing a disintegrating marriage. A relationship with a Spanish painter ends tragically, forcing her to return once again to her homeland, and to the son she left behind. A spare novel of division - people and countries - and of self-discovery and reconciliation.

10. John Steinbeck, The grapes of wrath
The story of the Joad family from Oklahoma, driven off their farm due to soil erosion. They, along with thousands of other migrants, are forced to journey west in search of the promised land - California. A tale of the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, of hopes dashed and broken dreams, and of the search for a place to call home.

>64 Cynfelyn: I’m surprised I’ve only read one of those (Tim Krabbé). Richard’s Bicycle Book, as you say, and The third policeman, should definitely be on there. And Roland Barthes’ essay on the Tour de France considered as a Homeric epic.

Librarything’s list of best cycling books: https://www.librarything.com/list/308/all/Best-cycling-books-novels-and-narrativ...

>67 thorold: The third policeman, as you say, ha, ha.

Your list of cycling books reminds me that I have a copy of Jerome K. Jerome, Three men on the bummel somewhere, unread. Perhaps I ought to promote it to Mt TBR.

Ian Holding's top 10 books that teach us something about southern Africa
Guardian, 2005-08-16.

Ian Holding is a 27-year-old schoolteacher who lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. His first novel, Unfeeling, is set in contemporary Zimbabwe and is one of the first literary attempts to come to terms with the recent violent history of the country.

1. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
No other novelist renders the inner truths of man more palpably than Coetzee, and here the story of a fallen university professor turns into deft allegory, the everyman for an entire nation struggling to comprehend changes to its national identity.

2. Alexander McCall Smith, The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency
"Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa ..." so begins Alexander McCall's tribute to the spirit of character which defines this engagingly ebullient and much loved African heroine, and in doing so gives us all a much needed tonic: hope.

3. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous conditions
As Franz Fanon says, "The condition of a native is a nervous condition," and Dangarembga's use of illness as a metaphor for the consequences of imperialism sets up a coming of age story which subtly parallels the domination of one culture by another.

4. Nadine Gordimer, The conservationist
A novel evoking breathtaking landscape, atmospheric in its detail of the lush veld and tangy bush air, yet sitting utterly at odds with a malign, indifferent political regime. Gordimer's novel was a landmark statement from an isolated South Africa.

5. Shimmer Chinodya, Harvest of thorns
A brutal, honest account of the freedom fighter's struggle for independence in Zimbabwe, yet, in a tone of veiled cynicism, Chinodya suggests that little real change takes place, leaving his protagonists unsettled and wanting.

6. Damon Galgut, The good doctor
Galgut's strange and detached prose paradoxically brings into bright focus the unsettling realities of post-apartheid relations and expectations. It's a gripping and confounding read.

7. Andre Brink, Looking on darkness
With its classical structure and stated ideological beliefs, Brink's novel of a coloured actor awaiting execution for the murder of his white lover, reads like an African Greek tragedy.

8. Dambudzo Marechera, The house of hunger
Provoking polarised critical reactions, Marechera's 1978 novella is difficult and disturbing, yet has at its core certain themes which to this day remain haunting and true; the title a metaphor which has sadly transcended colonialism into independence.

9. Doris Lessing, The grass is singing
Just like Eliot's The Wasteland, from which its title derives, to read Lessing's novel is to stand in a time and place which surrounds you utterly, making you shiver with the unspoken truths of what it must have been like to be a white Rhodesian struggling with your conscience.

10. Achmat Dangor, Bitter fruit
Memory, confession and retribution: Dangor's novel is dark and powerful, yet in exploring pain and the past, the reader is massaged into a catharsis which lingers long after the novel is put aside.

Diana Souhami: books about Paris and London lesbians in the early 20th century
Guardian, 2005-08-17.

Diana Souhami was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for her biography of Radclyffe Hall, and won the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award for Selkirk's island, the story of Scotsman Alexander Selkirk, the 'real-life Robinson Crusoe'. Her latest book, Wild girls, out in paperback and published by Phoenix, is a dual-biography of the extraordinary lives of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, whose love for each other lasted for more than 50 years.

1. Djuna Barnes, Ladies almanack,
A prescriptive spoof for those who wonder what lesbians do (they muff-dive, sit on each other's faces and ruin each other's lives). In Paris between the wars literary lesbians met for culture and the rest in Natalie Barney's Temple of Friendship in her garden in Rue Jacob. Barnes portrays Natalie as a rapacious female pope.

2. Colette, The pure and the impure,
Colette went to Natalie's salons. Her autobiographical dialectic explores the torments of perverse desire and the irrationality of love. She gives complex psychological insight into the self-destructive poet Renée Vivien, with whom Natalie had a long affair.

3. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and company
"At Miss Barney's one met lesbians; ladies with high collars and monocles, though Miss Barney herself was so feminine." The inspirational bookseller Sylvia Beach puts these gatherings into context in a memoir that celebrates innovative talent, modernism and diversity.

4. Natalie Barney (ed.), In memory of Dorothy Ierne Wilde: Oscaria
Dolly Wilde, Oscar's niece, was another creative, vulnerable young woman drawn to Natalie's daring, charisma and money. She aspired to write and live her life like a work of art, but drugs took her into personal chaos and early death. In 1951 Natalie published this anthology of tributes from friends. On the frontispiece was a photo of Dolly dressed as Oscar with slicked hair and a cravat. "Well, she certainly hadn't a fair run for her money," Gertrude Stein wrote in her tribute.

5. Ernest Hemingway, A moveable feast
A classic memoir, intriguing and light, in which Hemingway gives a haunting anecdote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were intrinsic to Paris and modernism and supposedly the happiest of married couples. Hemingway writes of calling at their home in Rue de Fleurus and overhearing Alice speak to Gertrude as he'd never heard one person speak to another, "never anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein's voice came pleading and begging saying, 'Don't pussy. Don't. Don't, please don't. I'll do anything pussy but please don't do it.'" We'll never know what was going on.

6. Radclyffe Hall, The well of loneliness
Compared with Paris, the city of light, London between the wars was gloomy and repressive. This sad book should be read for the contempt it aroused in the British establishment in 1928. The sexiest line in it is "and that night they were not divided". Because the undivided were two women, the book was publicly prosecuted, destroyed and banned as obscene. "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel," wrote the editor of the Sunday Express at the time. "Poison kills the body but moral poison kills the soul." Whacko.

7. Joanne Glasgow (ed.), Your John: The love letters of Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall, or John as she called herself, confined her expressions of passionate love to letters to her Russian nurse, Evguenia Souline. They show the gulf that existed between private desire and permissible expression.

8. Mitchell A. Leaska & John Phillips (ed's), Violet to Vita: the letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West
Violet Trefusis was another casualty of London society's repression and hypocrisy. Her mother, Mrs Keppel, mistress to Edward VII, was determined to dash the scandal of Violet's love for Vita Sackville-West. She announced her engagement at a society ball and offered an income and the prospect of travel to Denys Trefusis who was shell shocked from the hell of the first world war. The mayhem and anguish of this marriage is preserved in these letters.

9. Diana Souhami, Gluck: her biography
How's that for chutzpah, I thought, when a decade ago Jeanette Winterson chose her own novel as Book of the Year. But if I don't recommend this biography of the society painter Gluck, how else will you know that among those with whom she had flings in London in the early 1930s were Constance Spry, flower arranger to the Queen, and Annette Mills, creator of Muffin the Mule? Those of us sufficiently over the hill to remember Mills on Children's Hour should revise our interpretation of the signature tune, 'We Want Muffin!'

10. Janet Flanner, Paris was yesterday
The second world war ended a civilization: "With the material destruction collapsed invisible things that lived within it." From 1925, writing as 'Genet', Janet Flanner wrote a Letter from Paris for The New Yorker. This collection of essays and vignettes was her valediction to the Paris she loved and to invisible things such as optimism, sexual daring and artistic innovation.

Robert Collins's top 10 dystopian novels
Guardian, 2005-08-24.

Robert Collins is half-Brazilian and half-English and lives and writes in London. His first novel, Soul corporation, is a fast-paced thriller set in a vividly realised not-so-distant future. "Fictional dystopias are almost always cautionary tales - warnings of where our political, cultural and social surroundings are taking us. The novels here all share common motifs: designer drugs, mass entertainment, brutality, technology, the suppression of the individual by an all-powerful state - classic preoccupations of dystopian fiction. These novels picture the worst because, as Swift demonstrated in his original cautionary tale, Gulliver's travels, re-inventing the present is sometimes the only way to see how bad things already are."
Touchstone: Robert Collins(5).

1. George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four
The dystopia to end them all. It's no coincidence that Orwell's nightmare has become such an ingrained part of our consciousness. More than any book in this list, it feels as though it's not really an allegory at all, but instead a murky, half-experienced reality. From Newspeak to Big Brother to Winston's sojourn in Room 101, Orwell's last novel is a towering, sadistic, and tender portrait of humanity floundering in the ideological clutches of totalitarianism.

2. Aldous Huxley, Brave new world
Do you want your future grimy and bleak, or shiny and clean? Huxley serves up the latter. For my taste, I've always felt this was a poor cousin to Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell is haunting because he paints the future through such a personal, terrifying ordeal, whereas Huxley is more a swaggering ideas man, warning us off "the horror of Utopia" by making it look so deliberately stark, sterile, and efficient.

3. J. G. Ballard, Crash
Ballard could create a dystopia from just about anything. Here, he depicts a modern world refracted through the lens of automotive desire: the car as a sexual fetish. Beneath the sleek, pornographic surface of modern machinery, Ballard uncovered his hallucinatory central idea - the fusion of human identity and technology.

4. Anthony Burgess, A clockwork orange
Burgess's cult classic lacks the all-encompassing political vision of Huxley or Orwell - it's more a wild experiment in the extremes of adolescent dispossession and mindless violence, matched in horror by society's retribution on the novel's Beethoven-loving hero, who narrates his story in a dazzlingly invented vernacular. A malenky bit of the ultra-violent...

5. William Golding, Lord of the flies
More teenage kicks in Golding's ingenious castaway classic. Like the best books in this list, its potency and timelessness come from its carefully layered feasibility. After Golding's childhood dystopia, being "civilized" would never feel quite the same.

6. Paul Auster, In the country of last things
I love short novels like this, which seem to do all the work of a heftier tome. Auster evokes a strange, apocalyptic world, set in an indeterminate country ravaged by an indeterminate catastrophe. The result is dreamlike and beautiful. A short, lyrical, melancholic meditation on what happens when the trappings of civilization are suddenly stripped away.

7. Rupert Thomson, Divided kingdom
I've always thought of Thomson as Auster's British counterpart - their worlds are characterful, eerie, and utterly idiosyncratic. Here, Thomson imagines a totalitarian regime separating the citizens of the United Kingdom into four geographical quarters, depending on their humours: melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, or choleric. He has described this political fable as being set "five minutes into the future" - a perfect description of how fictional dystopias warp and re-interpret the present.

8. Pierre Boulle, Planet of the apes
"Monkey Planet" (as it was first translated from the French) uses an exquisite device which the movies it spawned couldn't replicate - the human narrator struggling to make himself understood to his simian captors, to prove that he's not just a burbling primitive brute. Off-the-scale in terms of fantastical, topsy-turvy allegory. It shouldn't work - but it does.

9. Philip K. Dick, Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Dick definitely belonged to the grimy school of apocalyptic dystopias. His noirish detective thriller shares many themes with the other less typically sci-fi books here: the fusion of the human with the technological and, as suggested by the title, the nature of consciousness in an artificial world.

10. William Gibson, Idoru
I've often found Gibson hard to get on with: his narrative description can be as dense as computer code. But he updates Dick's preoccupations to the cyberpunk era, and evokes the delirious intermingling of human consciousness with virtual experience, through the sprawling psychosis of the internet.

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8.
The book behind the films was originally written in French? La Planète des singes. Who knew? And just the CK first and last sentences give a slight idea of how removed the films are from the book.

James Meek's top 10 books of Russia
Guardian, 2005-09-05.

James Meek worked in Moscow as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian from 1991 to 1999, and won several awards (including Foreign correspondent of the Year) for his reporting from Iraq and Guantanamo Bay last year. He has published two short story collections and three novels, the latest of which, the Booker-longlisted The people's act of love, is set in Siberia in 1919 and tells the story of an obscure Christian sect and a stranded regiment of Czech soldiers. "People tend to exaggerate, to others and to themselves, the number of books they have read - and no wonder. If we were to sit down at the age of 12 and work out how many books we could reasonably expect to read in our lifetime, the result would be terrifyingly small. Recommendations, therefore, are not to be made lightly. Having looked at these books again to write this, I feel I have to reread them all, they're so good. Whether you are interested in Russia by itself, or in the richness and strangeness of human life in general, time spent in these volumes will not, I promise, be wasted."

1. Nikolai Gogol, Dead souls (1842)
A novel of comedy and shame.

"Chichikov saw that the old woman was far from grasping the issue, and that he needed to make it clear. In a few words he explained that the transfer, or purchase, would take place only on paper and that the souls would be registered as if they were living.
'And what good are they to you?' asked the old woman, her eyes bulging.
'That's my business.'
'But, really, all the same, they're dead.'
'Who said they were alive? You're losing money because they're dead: you're still paying for them, and I'm offering to rid you of all these bills and bother. Do you understand? Not just rid you, but give you 15 roubles into the bargain. Is that clear?'
'Really, I'm not sure," said the proprietress hesitantly. "I've never sold dead people before, you know.'"

2. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and sons (1862)
A novel of ease versus rebellion.

"We were discussing happiness, I believe. I was telling you about myself. Incidentally, I just used the word 'happiness'. Tell me, why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a beautiful evening, or a conversation in agreeable company, it all seems no more than a hint of some infinite felicity existing apart somewhere, rather than actual happiness - such, I mean, as we ourselves can really possess?'"

3. Fyodr Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879)
A pious brother, a wild-living brother, a political brother and their wretched father.

"'So you married a lame woman?' cried Kalganov.
'Yes. They both deceived me a little bit at the time, and concealed it. I thought she was hopping; she kept hopping ... I thought it was for fun.'"

4. Andrei Bely, Petersburg (1916-1922)
A symbolist novel of terrorism.

"Entering the dressing room, Apollon Apollonovich (like other little old men of exalted rank) took his small red-laquered boxes out of a small wardrobe. Under their lids, on soft velvet cushions, lay all his rare decorations. He had been brought a small resplendent uniform (smaller than those worn by others), with a glittering gilded chest, white worsted trousers, and a pair of gloves, an odd-shaped hat box, and a scabbard (from its hilt dangled a silver fringe). Under the pressure of his yellow fingernail, all 10 lids sprang open; and there were extracted: the White Eagle, and corresponding star; and a blue ribbon. All this went onto his chest."

5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The master and margarita (1940)
A novel of magic, hubris and retribution.

"Having lost one of the gang, Ivan concentrated his attention on the tom cat and saw how this strange animal walked over to the boarding stop of an "A" tram waiting at the stop, brazenly elbowed aside a woman who squealed as she saw him, grasped the hand rails and even attempted to give the conductor a coin through the window, which was open because of the heat.
The cat's behaviour struck Ivan with such amazement that he stopped transfixed near the grocer's on the corner. And now he was struck again, even more forcibly, by the behaviour of the woman conductor. As soon as she saw the tom trying to climb into the streetcar, she screamed, trembling with rage: 'No cats allowed here! Nobody with cats allowed! Scram! Get off, or I'll call the militia!'"

6. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940)
How Lenin's mind got to where it was in 1917.

"In one of Karl Marx's ballads, a mariner is roused from his bed by the storm: he will go forth, he will leave behind him the warm and quiet towns; will put to sea, and let his ship's sail swell, keep his course by the changeless stars, contend with the waves and the wind, feel the joy of all his forces at full strain, blood pounding in his breast at the danger - he will defy and he will conquer the sea, which is picking at the bones of his brother."

7. Isaiah Berlin, Russian thinkers (1948)
A wise, beautiful guide to 19th-century minds.

"... As a child Turgenev had witnessed abominable cruelties and humiliations which his mother inflicted upon her serfs and dependents; an episode in his story The brigadier is founded on his maternal grandmother's murder of one of her boy serfs: she struck him in a fit of rage; he fell wounded on the ground; irritated by the spectacle she smothered him with a pillow."

8. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma tales (1929-1982)
Stories of Stalin's slave empire.

"On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship Kim entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo - 3,000 convicts. During the trip the convicts had mutinied, and the ship authorities had decided to hose down all the holds. This was done when the temperature was 40 degrees below zero. Kubantsev had come to Kolyma to speed up his pension, and on the first day of his Kolyma service he learned what third- and fourth-degree frostbite were."

9. Orlando Figes, A people's tragedy (1997)
Revolution and civil war as seen from the ground.

"When the Bolsheviks took control of the Winter Palace, they discovered one of the largest wine cellars ever known. During the following days tens of thousands of antique bottles disappeared from the vaults. The Bolshevik workers and soldiers were helping themselves to the Chateau d'Yquem 1847, the last Tsar's favourite vintage, and selling off the vodka to the crowds outside. The drunken mobs went on the rampage. The Winter Palace was badly vandalized. Shops and liquor stores were looted. Sailors and soldiers went around the well-to-do districts robbing apartments and killing people for sport."

10. Viktor Pelevin, Chapayev and Pustota (1998) (published in English both as Buddha's little finger and The clay machine gun)
A novel of Yeltsin's Russia, with Buddhist-Bolshevik episodes.

"... when the train stopped at Pushkin station Serdyuk got out with the desire for a drink forming in his soul. Not so much to have a drink as to get hammered. But the desire was, at first, formless and subconscious. He apprehended it first as a vague sorrow about something unattainable and lost. It acquired its real form only when Serdyuk found himself in front of a long battery of armoured kiosks, from whose observation slits identical, expressionless Caucasian faces looked out on enemy territory. It was hard to settle on any particular drink. Like in an election, the choice was large, but somehow second rate."

Isabel Wolff's top 10 books set in the Midlands
Guardian, 2005-09-13.

Novelist Isabel Wolff was born and brought up in Warwickshire and is the author of six bestselling romantic comedies, the latest of which is A question of love. She chooses her top 10 books set in her old stamping ground, the Midlands.

1. Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club
Coe goes back to his Brummie roots in this novel about a group of grammar school boys who inherit the editorship of their school magazine. Set against the backdrop of the Birmingham pub bombings, strikes at Longbridge, and the collapse of Old Labour, it's a clever and touching comedy of personal and political upheaval. What a carve up! is also brilliant, but I found this a more satisfying, involving read.

2. B. S. Johnson, The unfortunates
This extraordinary, experimental 'book-in-a-box' was published in loose-leaf format so that the separately bound chapters can be read in any order, paralleling the random nature of human thought. It's about a journalist who goes to Nottingham to cover a football match, but who spends the day remembering happier times spent there with his best friend, Tony, who is dying of cancer. Heartbreaking.

3. Meera Syal, Anita and me
A poignant and amusing novel about a nine-year-old Punjabi girl's childhood in a rural mining village near Wolverhampton. Meena's family are the only Asians in the village, and Meena's witty, sly insights about some of their culturally crass neighbours are delicious. The novel is particularly touching on the emphemeral nature of childhood friendships, and, unusually, was turned into an equally wonderful film.

4. George Eliot, Middlemarch
Although this "Study of Provincial Life" is set somewhere in "the English Midlands", Middlemarch is probably a smaller version of Coventry, where Eliot lived with her father for 10 years. It's the story of the beautiful, rich, but hopelessly idealistic Dorothea Brooke. She could marry anyone, but chooses the old, ugly, but intellectual vicar, Edward Casaubon - with disastrous results. It might be 800 pages long, but it's still an engrossing, pain-free read.

5. Penelope Lively, The road to Lichfield
In this suspense-filled novel, Anne Linton is a middle aged history teacher married to a stodgy barrister. Her father is in a nursing home, so she begins the fortnightly drives to Lichfield to visit him. She also has to clear the old family house, and while doing so she discovers that secret payments have been made to a woman who was her father's mistress for many years. Anne's entire perception of her father's life - and her own - begins to change.

6. David Lodge, Changing places: a tale of two campuses
A hilarious satire on academic life in Britain and the US, in which Phillip Swallow, an academic from the redbrick University of 'Rummidge' (Birmingham) does an exchange with Professor Morris Zapp from the plate glass Euphoria State University (Berkeley). Set in 1969 amid student revolutions and moon shots, it established Lodge as a writer who could be simultaneously serious and entertaining.

7. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's schooldays
Hughes' famous coming-of-age tale exposes the cruelty of English public schools before Arnold's radical reforms. Tom Brown struggles for survival in a school where mob-rule prevails, and where the older boys - particularly the sadistic bully, Flashman - torment the younger ones without restraint. Though necessarily didactic, and sometimes cloyingly sentimental, it's also highly entertaining, not least because Flashman is so wonderfully despicable.

8. Clare Morrall, Astonishing splashes of colour
A story of heartache and loss set in Birmingham, the novel centres on unconventional Kitty, a children's book critic, and her eccentric family. Something terrible has happened to Kitty; she goes to the school gates with all the other parents, but it soon becomes clear that she has no child - her son, Henry, having died at birth. Despite the depressing premise, it's an engrossing, and even enjoyable, read.

9. D. H. Lawrence, The rainbow
The rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Nottinghamshire Brangwens, setting their passionate human relationships against a cold industrial culture. It begins with Tom Brangwen and his hasty marriage to the Polish widow, Lydia, and spans the next 60 years. The stories of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen were continued in Women in love.

10. Jenny Colgan, Working wonders
Chick-lit blends with fantasy in this tale of provincial office life. The protagonist, Arthur, works in Coventry as a town planner. He spends one very strange day defenestrating a photocopier, wrestling with his boss, Ross, and fending off a dog called Sandwiches. Eccentric and funny.

>73 Cynfelyn: Surprised to see that I've read eight of those — all except Morrall and Colgan, I'll have to look those up.

She seems to have forgotten about Alan Sillitoe, somehow. And Adrian Mole

I'd have picked Nice work over Changing places — there's a lot more in it about Birmingham as an industrial city. And I'd have left out Tom Brown's Schooldays, where it's completely irrelevant in which part of the country Rugby School happens to be. You could just as well bring in R S Surtees...

I suppose you could object to B S Johnson as a Londoner visiting Nottingham for the day, but at least he does write about it in a very recognisable way, so you know where you are even though the name of the city is never mentioned.

Julian Roach's top 10 books on Percy Bysshe Shelley
Guardian, 2005-10-17.

Julian Roach studied English at Oxford before becoming a television scriptwriter, in which position he worked on everything from soaps (he wrote 267 episodes of Coronation Street) to comedies. In Shelley's boat he returns to 1822 and Shelley's final summer, spent on the Golfo di Spezia, and describes the events up to and beyond the poet's death.

"You'd be hard pushed to come up with any list of books about Shelley that didn't have Richard Holmes's biography sitting on top of it. That apart, there is no significance in the titles' order. As anyone would, I have tried to pick 10 books that give, through their variety, a rounded understanding of Shelley's thought and works, the flavour of the world he lived in and the complicated nature of the man. If I have landed on the coast of lit-crit only as a raider, leaving the jungle of the interior well alone, it's because of an allergic response to books with a colon in the middle of the title. The Cain-mark of academe, it usually threatens the minute examination, at great length, of immaterial evidence about something or the other not very important, in language few can understand and noone could enjoy. Whatever a writer has to say, it's his or her job to make it easy for me to understand. Even that's not enough. They have to make me enjoy it. Otherwise it goes straight out of the hammock."

1. Richard Holmes, Shelley: the pursuit
Thirty years and more now since the last definitive, indispensable - and so forth - biography of Shelley appeared. In the ordinary succession of things, you'd expect a big new book from someone, somewhere, would by now have been brought to market with much trumpeting as the new definitive, indispensible and so forth bees-knees job. Don't go down to Waterstone's with the sleeping bag to wait for it: Richard Holmes is likely to be the only serious claimant to the title for at least as long again as he has been already. The acknowledged legislator. His colon may be entirely ignored.

2. Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley
You could hold a grudge against the publishing house of John Murray. Murray was Byron's publisher, and it was in the fireplace of his Albemarle Street office that Murray and Thomas Moore burned the manuscript of Byron's too-shocking memoirs, so denying them to scholarship, posterity and, more importantly, to lascivious readers such as you and me. Had they not struck the match, The memoirs of Lord Byron would probably be in this top 10. The publisher has since made up for it a bit, however, with Peter Quennell's vast edition of Byron's letters and diaries, and earned a little more remission with Miranda Seymour's big, thorough and readable biography of Mary, which also carries the 'indispensable' rosette. Mary was not just any old wife, after all: with her devotional editing of Shelley's works and refashioning of his public image in the decades after his death, she was his midwife too.

3. Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the last days of Shelley and Byron
Trelawny was not a man who went in for the due diligence of authorship. A broad brush and plenty of imagination were his tools, but he was acute and he was there: an actor with a brief but luminous role in the last act of each poet's extraordinary drama. Mary was smitten with him the minute he walked in and his direct one-to-one style (in addition to his good looks) gives you a clue as to why. Reading him is so like hearing the old spell-binder talking to you, you'd think he'd written his Recollections for radio. The magic is that he makes the rest of the circle audible, too, as well as readable. If happen to pick up his Records of Shelley, Byron and the author instead, no matter. Put it in the basket. He recycled his material many times so, as the book-clubs say, these two count as one.

4. Donald H. Reiman & Sharon Powers (ed's), Shelley's poetry and prose
Shelley-the-republican might have liked to know that the best single-volume collection of his work is not English but American (although someone might have to break it to him that the US has become a semi-theocratic plutocracy, opposed with all its might to everything he thought a republic stood for). The densely annotated 'critical edition' comes with no fewer than 23 essays - a terrifying fusillade of colons here - mostly by American academics. Reading them is not compulsory, but a skim gives you an idea of what the drums are beating out in the interior these days. If you really need to follow the life cycle of every colon through every manuscript and revision, you'll need the multi-volume Norton edition by the tireless Reiman and Neil Freistat. For something less body-building, try the Oxford World Classics paperback.

5. Paul Foot, Red Shelley
A bare 30-odd years after his death, Shelley was carved in marble - as a dead spit of the dead Christ, draped across the lap of one grieving Mary impersonating another, in the Baptistry of Christchurch in Dorset, one of the grandest parish churches in all England. Not bad going for the man who wrote 'The Necessity of Atheism', and got himself kicked out of Oxford for it. But he's long been back in his old college, too, re-matriculated for all eternity, white and dreamily dead in Carrara marble from the very hills that looked upon his funeral pyre.

Luckily, there's no longer a shortage of published work devoted to reminding us that Shelley was not a pillar of the church and the ruling elite, but a revolutionary enemy of both. Unluckily, too much of this is written by Marxist academics in the complicated form of Pidgin-English imposed by the collective. Paul Foot's is an admirable exception. He's sensibly untroubled by Shelley's inconsistencies in revolutionary theory and Marxist analysis. Perhaps he remembered that Shelley died 26 years before the Communist manifesto saw the light of day.

6. P. B. Shelley, A philosophical view of reform
By Shelley, not about him, but has to be on this list because until lately it couldn't have been on any list. Shelley began it in 1819 in a great fit of anger after the Peterloo massacre, and it is all the more remarkable for being, really, not much beyond a first draft. When Shelley's friend Leigh Hunt declined the privilege of the certain jail sentence he'd have earned by publishing it, a disheartened Shelley put it aside.

His dispirited idea that it would never find a publisher turned out to be too gloomy. A mere 170 years later it was published, along with his revolutionary songs, by Redwords. It is now out of print, but Redwords keep saying they'll reprint it. I put in on this list so that you can chivvy them. Paul Foot, not surprisingly, supplies the concise introduction on which you should stick a post-it note saying 'crib essay' if you're doing Shelley for A level (or even if you're not).

7. E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class
It was the worst of times. In Castlereagh's England, to be poor - and almost everybody was - was to understand one great dismal economic truth: you could work yourself to death and earn enough to be merely hungry, or be thrown out of work and starve directly instead. To protest was treason, earning the lash, the Yeoman's sabre, transportation or the gallows.

Shelley's response was not only an angry call for radical change but also a profound insight into the economic and political machinery of injustice. As Shelley wrote, "a genius does not invent, he perceives." Thompson's eye-line and Shelley's are the same, and this great dissection of England's diseased body politic during, almost exactly, the years of Shelley's life, is the soundest basis available for understanding what made Shelley think like Shelley.

8. Thomas Love Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley
A small book - even when amplified by a collection of letters from PBS to Peacock - and easy to read, these Memoirs, like Macaulay's essays, were first published as reviews of the works of others. There is now little point in wading through the turgid prose of Thomas Jefferson Hogg's Life of Shelley, which makes Shelley too ridiculous, and no point at all in picking up the Memorial, by Richard Garnett (the hired pen of Lady Shelley, née St John), which tries to make him too respectable.

Hogg's sometimes sneery tone may have been brought on by Peacock's own satire of his friend and former drop-in neighbour in Nightmare Abbey, a joke that Shelley enjoyed - but Peacock had wit, style, a light touch and, unlike Hogg, not an atom of envy. Peacock had a sense of justice, too, and it shows in his defence of Shelley's abandoned first wife. Though his forensic correction of Garnett's malicious account of her does not reflect well on Shelley, he will not see the Harriet he knew well sacrificed to Lady Shelley's squeamish snobbery. You have to like the man. You have to like his open, readable English. It's hard to believe that Hogg and Peacock were writing in the same century, let alone the same decade.

9. Harold Bloom, Shelley's mythmaking
Time to get serious. Bloom does lit-crit and no mistake, but the language he does it in is (usually) transparent. Here, in a number of essays, he subjects the half-dozen or so core works to a close reading, and nobody brings a better range of lenses to the microscope than Bloom. His awareness of Hebrew scolarship, for instance, is brought to bear usefully on the Ode to the west wind - and therefore Shelley's whole conception of himself and his work - by clarifying just what a prophet is and isn't. Elsewhere, however, he points out a deep parallel between the Ode and the Biblical Song of Deborah. Must be my glasses: I can't see it for the life of me. Still, this essay is especially enjoyable for its deadly swatting of F. R. Leavis, who allowed his prejudices to make a stupid man of him when reading Shelley.

10: Sylva Norman, The flight of the skylark
This is unusual, as biographies go, in starting at the death of its subject and going on, rather than back, from there. It's not a biography of Shelley, though; it's the biography of his reputation, and as immortal fame is a posthumous affair, it seems a reasonable way to go. Published half a century ago, it no longer quite tells the whole story, but it's a good account of how Percy was shifted in the public mind from anathema to angel and from revolutionary to rhapsodiser. Bloom shows how Shelley set about the creation of new myths; Sylva Norman (who was for a while married to another Shelley biographer, Edmund Blunden) traces the ways in which those whose lives Shelley touched were fated to spend their days creating another new myth, called Shelley.

Bonus 11: The new Glenans sailing manual
It may not have much to say on Shelley, but had it only been available, this is the book I would have recommended to Shelley - and especially to his drowning companion and self-appointed skipper, Edward Ellerker Williams. Every aspect of sailing lore, science and skill from the great French sailing school, in excellent translation by James McGibbon. Much more useful aboard than that volume of Sophocles or a borrowed copy of Hyperion.

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2.
Although Shelley's manuscript of his memoirs was destroyed, Robert Nye, editor of Byron's letters and diaries (also mentioned in no. 2 above), used the title The memoirs of Lord Byron for his fictionalised version.

Helena Frith Powell's top 10 sexy French books
Guardian, 2005-10-21.

Helena Frith Powell lives in France and is the author of Two lipsticks and a lover, an investigation into the lives, lusts and secrets of French women, from the cultural circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the exclusive Sonia Rykiel sex shop. "Why are French women so sexy? Ever since 1066, we've been enthralled by the innate superiority of the French female. Never mind Larkin and 1963; the French were at it well before that. French women are beautiful, stylish and chic - but they have something else that many English women lack. One of their tools, every bit as potent as their matching underwear, is their knowledge of literature. They see being well-read as important as being well-groomed. In order to outwit our French female foes across the Channel, here is a list of the top 10 sexy French books, guaranteed to land you a date with Thierry Henry."

1. Colette, Chéri
All 10 books on this list could be by Colette, the most sensual and evocative writer of all time, who lived like one of her sexy heroines, still dancing on tables at 65, and marrying her son-in-law. Every woman's fantasy, this tells the story of an ageing courtesan (49!) who remains irresistible to her much younger lover.

2. Louise de Vilmorin, Madame de
Classic faux-brow, this is the book that French girls love to take seriously, even though it's nothing more than a story of adultery, written by the lover of Duff Cooper, British ambassador to France during the 1940s. When Cooper was away, Louise hunkered down with Diana, his wife. The smouldering passion between the fictitious ambassador and his mistress is a splendid example of Parisian society at its best and most snooty. Cooper himself did the English translation.

3. Marguerite Duras, The ravishing of Lol Stein
Possibly the maddest book ever written, but the title alone makes the book worthy of inclusion on this list. Voyeurism, lesbian leanings, broken hearts and adultery: what more could you ask for?

4. Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
The sound of cicadas and the smell of suntan oil jumps off the pages. Is there a sexier location in the world than the south of France? Not only are the teenagers getting down and dirty, the grownups are too. As the young narrator says, "Fidelity is arbitrary and sterile." - a mantra her father lives by. This sexy, poignant, moving and brief book is a must. If you read only one book on this list, this should be it.

5. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
No list of French books of whatever genre is complete without Madame Bovary. The unfortunate heroine, whose only crime is an endless search for romantic love, gives us some of literature's sexiest moments: the mussed-up bed, the carriage ride, the sheer foolishness of falling in love with French men. Madame Bovary's choice of lovers are 19th-century versions of Bridget Jones's fuckwits.

6. Emmanuelle Arsan, Emmanuelle
My husband's favourite French book. He says he reads it for the philosophy. It is the story of a woman getting laid. A lot. In just about every position and place imaginable, but mainly Thailand. This book has entertained French boys since publication. I fully expect to find it under my son's pillow in a few years' time.

7. Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses
"It's beyond my control." Is there a more brutal line in literature? This is the book that justifies any amount of appalling behaviour. It turns seduction into a game and an art form. While the Anglo Saxons were reading Pride and prejudice by candle-light, this book was teaching French society how to frolic and seduce.

8. Anna Gavalda, I wish someone were waiting for me somewhere
Worth it just for the opening story, the 'Courting rituals of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés'. Two strangers meet in a street; dinner follows; candles flicker as the sexual tension burns.

9. Edmond de Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
A play based on the life of the 17th-century swordsman Cyrano, this is the olden day equivalent of a cyber romance. Proof of the enduring attraction of words. And that you can still be sexy, even if you've got a big nose and a floppy hat.

10. Anaïs Nin, The delta of Venus
In the first half of the 20th-century, if you wanted to publish anything vaguely sexy, it had to be in Paris. Nin is the quintessential female player, willing to risk everything for the sake of art and adventure. This is one of her best books, a collection of erotic short stories. Her catchphrase was: "I really believe that if I were not a writer I might have been a faithful wife." Unlikely, but extremely cunning to blame her creativity for her lasciviousness.

Sam Jordison's top 10 books on cults and religious extremists
Guardian, 2005-11-15.

Sam Jordison is the author of Crap towns, a guide to the UK's worst places to live. His latest book is The joy of sects - an A-Z of cults, cranks and religious eccentrics. "Literature would be considerably poorer without cults and religious extremists. They've inspired some fine novels and riveting eye-witness accounts as well as producing rainforests' worth of mad, bad and thoroughly dangerous books themselves. Reading all this stuff made researching my book a fascinating and enjoyable experience. Here are 10 of the best I encountered on the way."

1. Mark Twain, Roughing it
This is one of Mark Twain's more neglected works, but it's one of my favourites. It's an invaluable firsthand account of gold rush-era America written with all the wit and perception you'd expect from such a great writer. His descriptions of the early Mormon church and his time in Salt Lake City are superb. Anyone thinking of joining the Church Of The Latter Day Saints should start here. Then stop. His assessment of the Book Of Mormon is a classic: "chloroform in print".

2. Joseph Smith, The Book Of Mormon
The book that Mark Twain disparaged is nigh on unreadable. As Twain also pointed out, if Smith had left out his favourite phrase "And it came to pass" this 500-page bible "would only have been a pamphlet". That doesn't mean it's not worth reading, however. Its incredible tales of stone-tablets, non-existent languages, warring tribes in early America and, oddest of all, elephants, would seem completely beyond belief - if it weren't for the fact that so many millions take them as gospel.

3. J. K. Huysmans, La-Bas ('The Damned')
In the course of his research for this novel Huysmans became genuinely entangled with black magic groups. One of the few virtuous characters in La-Bas, a tireless master exorcist called Dr Johannes, was based on a priest, the Abbe Boullan. It only later emerged that this priest, who convinced the writer he was an all round good-egg, was also fond of performing rites involving orgies, incest and bestiality. The novel itself is remarkable: a trawl through the Satanic underworld of fin de siècle Paris complete with evil old cults, dark garrets, unspeakable rites and mad perversions. The prolonged and graphic descriptions of child murder make American psycho look like Peter Rabbit. A must read - but not after you've just eaten.

4. James Hogg, The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner
James Hogg's masterpiece. The macabre story of a Calvinist who fervently believes that he's pre-ordained for heaven whatever happens - and consequently convinced that he can commit any sin he likes while on earth. Hideous, wicked and thoroughly entertaining.

5. William Shaw, Spying in Guruland
In the early 90s William Shaw took it upon himself to join half a dozen of the stranger British new religious movements, including the delightfully named Chrisemma, the cult of two people called Chris and Emma. I'm pretty jealous of the guts William Shaw demonstrated in getting so deeply involved with so many crazy cult groups and his descriptions of the rigours of life within the Hare Krishna organisation are unforgettable. I don't envy him all those insanely early mornings, however.

6. Aleister Crowley, Diary of a drug fiend
Aleister Crowley was a one-man cult-making machine (the societies he influenced include the Ordo Templi Orientalis, the A?A?, the Golden Dawn and The Church of Thelema). He was also a prolific and talented writer - when he wasn't rambling away in strange self-invented languages. Diary of a drug fiend is one of his most coherent works and it rivals Naked lunch in its vivid depiction of narcotic abuse. Of course, Crowley's ultimate contention that you can overcome addiction with the timely application of a spot of magick is belied by the crippling drug dependency that blighted his later life... but who could resist a book with such a splendid title?

7. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci code
I hate this book almost as much as I love it. It's literary crack cocaine - reading it does you no good at all, but you just can't stop. The Catholic church say that it's full of "shameful and unfounded errors" and that Brown's depiction of Opus Dei is riddled with inaccuracies. Of course, as a writer of fiction it's Brown's prerogative not to let the truth get in the way of a good story. Although his many critics are at least right when they say that the prose is terrible, the self-mortifying mad albino monk is a great villain.

8. Tim Guest, My life in orange
Tim Guest grew up in a cult and lived to tell the tale - and an incredible tale it is too. His description of life within the communes run by the orange-wearing followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a riot of no-holds-bound craziness, boundary-pushing extremism and terrible, terrible dancing. It's a credit to the author that he can recount it all with such wry humour.

9. Anton S. LaVey, The Satanic Bible
So impressive was Anton LaVey's shaven-headed appearance as the leader of the Church Of Satan that Roman Polanski employed him to play the devil himself in the film Rosemary's Baby. He was a smart writer too. Skip all the strange stuff in the bizarre Enochian language and concentrate on LaVey's startling and lucid essays. They're surprisingly funny and diabolically clever.

10. The Bible
Eyes of fire, seas of blood, rivers of tears, scarlet beasts, plagues of locusts, pealing trumpets, bottomless pits, mass murder and mayhem. Now this is a crazy book.

Max Décharné's top 10 London fashion books
Guardian, 2005-11-22.

Max Décharné lives in London and is the author of King's Road: the rise and fall of the hippest street in the world, a history of the short stretch of Chelsea pavement which was the launchpad for bands from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols, theatrical blockbusters from Look back in anger to the Rocky Horror Show, and fashion designers such as Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood and Ossie Clark.

"Having spent the recent past digging into the history of the King's Road, it's not hard to see how greatly the street styles of the capital have influenced fashions around the world. Prior to Mary Quant, people looked to Paris or New York for the latest thing. By the mid-60s, London was the world capital of cool, and in terms of rock'n'roll fashion, it maintained that position right up until the late 80s, when the entire globe seemingly drowned in a sea of sports clothing, trainers and corporate brand-names. In the end, though, individuality was always the most important part of the deal - particularly in the punk days, when the influence of the Clash and their spray-it-yourself Oxfam-chic did far more than the expensive store-bought styles to define the look on the streets - and London youth culture has long had that attitude in abundance. As the Desperate Bicycles so memorably said back in 77: "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it."

1. Mary Quant, Quant by Quant
Fine 1966 autobiography from the woman who started it all, published the same weekend as Time magazine's cover article 'London - the swinging city', after which, as Mary told me, "American news magazines and TV were often filming both sides of the King's Road at the same time". An engagingly-told tale of how she started out working from her Chelsea bedsit back in 1955 and wound up heading a multi-million pound business. Long recognised as a key 60s artefact, rare in any format, it's high time someone reprinted it.

2. Jane Mulvagh, Vivienne Westwood - an unfashionable life
A useful biography of the woman who brought you bondage trousers, ripped mohair sweaters and Cambridge Rapist T-shirts. This is very strong on the fashion side but occasionally loose when it comes to music chronology - Brian Epstein dying in 69, rather than 67, the New York Dolls' original drummer dying in 74 rather than 72. Overall, a fascinating and valuable introduction to the last great King's Road fashion iconoclast.

3. Paul Burgess & Alan Parker, Satellite - Sex Pistols memorabilia, locations, photography, fashion
Having read all about Vivienne, the best thing you could then do would be to immerse yourself in this beautifully-illustrated large-format book which, alongside shots of record sleeves and gig posters, has full-colour photographs of the revolutionary mid-70s street clothing which Westwood and McLaren unleashed on the world, much of which retains its shock value to this day. Never a cheap option even when brand new, most of these items now sell for thousands of pounds.

4. Paul Gorman, The look - adventures in rock and pop fashion
Excellent, immaculately researched and generously illustrated history of rock'n'roll fashion, from the 50s to the present. Gorman has spoken to many of the surviving tailors, shop owners and celebrity customers of hallowed outlets such as Granny Takes a Trip, Vince Man's Shop and John Michael, who outfitted some of the biggest rock names who ever stumbled onto Top of the Pops or showed up on a stage near you, clad in sharkskin, glitter or dogtooth check. Written after several decades of immersing himself in his subject, the author is currently updating and expanding it for a new edition.

5. Judith Watt, Ossie Clark 1965 / 74
Ossie Clark's designs, sold at the legendary Quorum boutique on Radnor Walk, off King's Road, helped define the era where 60s hippie styles melted into early 70s glam, and you could wear anything you liked, as long as it was see-through. Originally published in conjunction with an exhibition at the V&A in 2003, this is the first full length monograph devoted to Clark. It's a fine tribute to a singular talent.

6. Chris Steele-Perkins & Richard Smith, The Teds
The Teddy Boy look was the first indigenous London youth street style, pre-dating rock'n'roll by several years. Revived on many occasions - most notably by McLaren & Westwood when they started their first King's Road shop Let it Rock in 1971 - it has a purity which makes it absolutely timeless. These days, the members of the Edwardian Drape Society are the keepers of the flame, but in the late 70s, at the height of the punk/Ted wars on the King's Road, photographer Chris Steele-Perkins documented the London rocking scene in meticulous detail, in a book which has become a classic of its kind.

7. Johnny Stuart, Rockers!
The best book ever written about the British bikers of the late 50s and early 60s - the Ton-Up boys who hung out at the Ace Cafe on the North Circular and stopped off at the pie stall by Chelsea Bridge. Packed with vintage photographs and original adverts from key London clothing outlet Lewis Leathers, it's a welcome antidote to the portrayal of rockers in Franc Roddam's film Quadrophenia, which, while understandably mythologising mod culture, missed the point about the original biker fraternity by miles.

8. Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman & Caroline Evans, The London look - fashion from street to catwalk
A valuable general survey of several hundred years of London street styles, written to accompany a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of London in 2004. Scholarly and fully illustrated, it covers the ground well from the era of Brummell to the present.

9. Catherine Horwood, Worst fashions - what we shouldn't have worn... but did
His'n'hers matching tank tops, dayglo paisley kipper ties, four inch stack-heel boots with a Maltese Cross - this book runs the gamut of every fashion violation imaginable, with a rich variety of photographs, vintage adverts and celebrity fashion faux-pas shots to bring back memories of those times when your parents would rightly have been crying "Surely, you're not going out dressed in that?" From disposable paper dresses to 'space-age' PVC costumes seemingly knocked together in five minutes by the presenters of Blue Peter, these images can only leave you muttering, along with Conrad's Colonel Kurtz, "The horror, the horror..."

10. Sue Jenykn Jones, Fashion design
Finally, as an antidote to any of the above outfits that might leave you feeling "Hey, a child of three could do better than that...", here's a remarkably useful book for anyone thinking of actually becoming a fashion designer, written by a woman who teaches at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Accompanied by numerous illustrations, the text sets out to provide a step-by-step guide to pattern-making, measuring, cutting, draping and sewing, all the way up to presenting a collection and moving out into the commercial marketplace.

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6.
The Edwardian Drape Society, http://www.edwardianteddyboy.com/
Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/The-Edwardian-Teddy-Boy-146268508728754/

Jeremy Mercer's top 10 bookshops
Guardian, 2005-12-06.

After his life as a crime reporter in a Canadian city took a turn for the worse, Jeremy Mercer decided to head for Paris, where he happened upon the city's most famous bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare and Co. In Books, baguettes and bedbugs, Mercer describes the time he spent living in the bookshop, the people he met and his relationship with the shop's octogenarian owner. Here he chooses his 10 favourite bookshops from around the world. "Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers. These are some of the best."

1. Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini Island, Greece
This is a dream of a bookstore. Perched on the cliffs of this volcanic island in a postcard-worthy Greek villa, it's run by an international collective of artists, writers and activists. As well as organizing theatre and open-air cinema, they set up programs such as the 'book donkey', which brings books to the local schools. I'll be living beside Atlantis for the first four months of 2006 to work on my next book.
Atlantisbooks.org

2. Shakespeare and Co, 37 rue de la Bucherie, Paris, France
George Whitman has been running what he calls "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore" for 50 years. His store has long been a literary hub, attracting the likes of Henry Miller, Richard Wright, and William Burroughs. More importantly, George has been inviting people to live in his shop from its very first days. There are now 13 beds among the books, and he says that more than 40,000 people have slept there at one time or another. All he asks is that you make your bed in the morning, help out in the shop, and read a book a day. After living here for five months, I was inspired to write my own book about the place.
Shakespeareco.org

3. bookartbookshop, 17 Pitfield St, London, UK
All serious book addicts get off on the physical objects as well as the words: the smell of the paper, the feel of the binding, the font of the print ... The artists' book movement has heightened my physical relationship with books, in the same way that stimulating coca leaves are processed into outrageously stimulating cocaine. In this movement, the book itself becomes a piece of art and the bookartbookshop specializes in books of unparalleled creativity and imagination. A visit to this store opens your mind to all a book can be.
Bookartbookshop.com

4. Clovis Press, 229 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, US
In the heart of Williamsburg, Clovis Press has a stunning collection of New York City small press and subversive literature. The owner, artist Amanda Park Taylor, has been supporting independent presses and emerging writers for a decade, doing everything from organizing readings to giving writers jobs in her store and letting them sleep on her couch.
Clovispress.com

5. Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London, UK
John Calder has been a hero of mine for a long time. The original rogue publisher, constantly risking his business and health to put out books he believed in, he not only published great literature - Beckett, Tolstoy, Chekov - but he also fought censorship and political corruption with books such as Hubert Selby's Last exit to Brooklyn and Edward Milne's No shining armour. His store is the embodiment of his publishing company. In what remains one of my proudest moments, John hosted a launch party for Kilometer Zero, the independent magazine I edited, back in 2001.
Calderpublications.com

6. La Bouquinèrie, 88 La Canebiere, Marseille, France
Marseille is now my home, and this is my favourite place to get lost. There are three floors of books, used and new, and it's the kind of collection where you can close your eyes, reach out your hand and be sure to land upon a book that fascinates you. The store itself is a work of beauty, especially its façade, which has been sculpted to look like a three-storey bookshelf.

7. City Lights, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, US
This shop has been San Francisco's literary epicentre since 1953. A publishing house, a bastion of alternative culture, a brilliant collection of books - all this, plus a fantastic bar just across the street. One of the founders is the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Whitman's oldest friend. He was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' in 1956 and the landmark trial established the constitutional right to publish controversial work in the US.
Citylights.com

8. This Ain't The Rosedale Library, 483 Church Street, Toronto, Canada
This is Canada's best independent bookstore, full of small press publications and a centre for Toronto counterculture. Canada, like most countries now, is losing a lot of its independents due to competition from the big chains and online booksellers. This Ain't The Rosedale Library is a model of how an independent can survive: by building a community around the store and providing insight and inspiration for its customers.

9. Abbey Books, 29 rue de la Parcheminerie, Paris, France
This store is run by an obsessive Canadian bibliophile by the name of Brian. His national pride is immediately clear from the enormous Canadian flag out front, and he'll offer you a cup of coffee sweetened with maple syrup the moment you step inside. Abbey is absolutely crammed with good books and has the best selection of titles by Canadian authors outside of Canada.

10. Compendium Books (now closed), 234 Camden High Street, London, UK
The closing of Compendium is one of the sadder moments in the history of my bookstore passions. My English friends had long raved about Compendium, but back in 2000, word spread that it was shutting down. I travelled up to London a few weeks before it closed to get a feel for store. Sadly, it lived up to expectations, which made its demise that much more tragic.

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I'm sure several of these bookshops have closed over the last sixteen years, over and above no. 10. A number of the bookshops have LT Local pages:

1.
Atlantis Books has two LT Local pages:
https://www.librarything.com/venue/109129/Atlantis-Books
https://www.librarything.com/venue/17286/Atlantis-Books

Anyone know if it's possible to combine LT Local pages?

2. LT Local : https://www.librarything.com/venue/82970/Shakespeare-and-Company-Paris

3. LT Local : https://www.librarything.com/venue/44761/Bookartbookshop

6. LT Local : https://www.librarything.com/venue/1369/La-Bouquinerie (Defunct)

9. LT Local : https://www.librarything.com/venue/22153/Abbey-Bookshop

Elizabeth Kostova's top 10 books for winter nights
Guardian, 2005-12-19.

Elizabeth Kostova debut novel, The historian, in which a woman embarks on a hunt for the truth about Vlad the Impaler after discovering a cache of old letters in her father's library, was an immediate success when it came out this year. Here she chooses her top 10 books for a dark winter night. "I have a penchant for the erudite literary mystery. Over the years, I've collected novels that fall into this category - old warhorses and honored contemporaries - to pilfer from for my own story structures - and also simply to enjoy again and again. If there's a bit of history thrown very accurately in, so much the better. And if you think about it, every novel contains a mystery of some sort - usually "Who are these people and why do they do what they do?" The following are some literary choices that put that mystery front and centre."

1. Wilkie Collins, The moonstone (1868)
Wilkie Collins, along with Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens (see another warhorse, below) is generally acknowledged to be the great-great-grandfather of the modern mystery, but it's hard to think of many modern mysteries as skillfully shaped and psychologically keen as this one. The story flirts with the conventions of Victorian melodrama, but the characters that people it are truly vivid. Young and beautiful Rachel Verinder inherits one of the greatest jewels on earth - a yellow diamond from India - and when it disappears the suspects range from the Hindu priests who want to return it to its ancient shrine to the butler who sees and hears everything in the Verinder household.

The story is told in no fewer than seven distinct narratives and takes the pleasing form of a collection of documents. I first heard The moonstone on audio book while stripping wallpaper, and as a result I now remember with intense pleasure every hiss of the steamer, every curl of sticky, nasty flowered trellises. In his original preface, Collins strongly defends his use of the psychological "experiment" that dominates the book's climax: "I have declined to avail myself of the novelist's privilege of supposing something which might have happened, and have so shaped the story as to make it grow out of what actually would have happened - which, I beg to inform my readers, is also what actually does happen, in these pages." He might well have argued the same for the whole psychology of The moonstone.

2. Wilkie Collins, The woman in white (1860)
I know, I know - two by the same author. But what's a star-struck reader to do? The woman in white is, if anything, an even more powerful story of human foibles than The moonstone, although the mystery at its heart is less classic in shape - this is a tale of identity and legacy rather than a strict mystery. When nasty Sir Percival Glyde decides to get his wife's inheritance a little sooner than later, it's up to the carefully named Walter Hartright to clear the reputation of the woman he loves. Saying much more than that would give everything away. The figure of the woman in white, glimmering through all these pages, is alternately druid, muse, ghost, and bride. Hartright, as the novel's main narrator and assembler of the documents that make up the story, is so excessively honorable that he gets a little tiresome at moments, but the various women of the book - in white and otherwise - are wonderfully real. Not to be confused with a current musical production.

3. Umberto Eco, The name of the rose (1980) (English translation, 1984)
Most of the western world has read this marvel already, although its progenitor is still alive and well and teaching semiotics at the University of Bologna. The English edition has the supreme advantage of having been translated by William Weaver, and to say that it's both erudite and suspenseful is a profound understatement. Again, we're in the realm of documents (the novel itself poses as a document discovered and translated by Eco in 1968). Set in a Franciscan monastery in 1327 among the real, historical, theological upheavals of the church, the story follows Brother William of Baskerville (of course) and his novice-disciple and recorder Adso. They have been charged with the investigation of possible heresies in the monastery (a concept the rational and enlightened Brother William instinctively resists) but become absorbed instead in trying to explain seven very unpleasant deaths among the monks.

The name of the rose is endlessly in print not only because of this excellent tale, but also because it breathes genuine passion for history, architecture, and above all for books themselves - and because it's written with angelic precision. I love best the moment when Adso sees for the first time the carved stone tympanum of the abbey church with its grand Seated One surrounded by complicated heavenly order and its writhing legions of the damned below. A perfect expression of the light and dark in this gorgeous Holmesian novel.

4. Dorothy L. Sayers, The nine tailors (1934)
This is as far as I'm going to stray into the world of plain old detective fiction, but I simply have to stick it in here. In this classic, Lord Peter Wimsey, dinner-party guest par excellence and hero of 11 of Sayers' novels, finds himself investigating the murder of an unidentified man in the fen country of East Anglia. As always, Sayers puts together an exceedingly clever puzzle, which only the exceedingly clever Wimsey can tease apart. In this particular work, however, she outdoes herself in the realm of landscape, describing the fens (and their villages and churches) with indelible melancholy, and she also educates the reader in an obscure and ancient art: the medieval change-ringing of church bells. The novel is divided into sections based on particular "changes" (in the same satisfying way that The name of the rose is divided into the divine offices of the monastic day). Sayers rings her own changes on the themes of place and history, which weight the book with a special gravity despite Lord Peter's whimsy.

5. A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
This book has been reviewed so widely, so recently, and with such ferocious praise that I blush to put anything down about it unsupervised, but my copy of it is certainly one of the most pleasantly worn and thumbed on my shelf. Many of Byatt's novels deal with academia, of course, but in this one she deliberately sets out to conquer the historical mystery as well. Two young academics at interesting odds with each other find themselves piecing together the possible love story of two great (fictional, but hugely convincing) Victorian poets. The mystery of this literary past is couched partly in the poets' verse (Byatt's creation), some of which is exquisite in its own right. The novel gives off an eerie sense of real voices drifting in from the past, and at the same time is leavened by a good deal of sly parody of scholarly obsession. As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot. I first read Possession when it came out and (like many other readers) was inspired by it to read the rest of Byatt's oeuvre to date.

6. Orhan Pamuk, My name is Red (1998)
Any mystery that begins with a chapter entitled "I Am a Corpse" is bound to be full of eerie voices, and this one is home to a cacophony of them. Pamuk has done more than any writer to date to put Turkey on the shamefully resistant Western literary map, and this exquisite book - "strange" in the best sense - is one of his masterpieces. In 16th-century Istanbul, one of the Sultan's most gifted book illuminators has been murdered. His death appears to be connected with the Sultan's commission to illuminate a great book in the style of European painters, but only a careful examination of the unfinished illuminations for the book can explain why he was killed. Along the way to the solution, each of the suspects speaks, a literary device that makes My name is Red a book to read twice consecutively - once for the mystery these myriad voices present and a second time for sheer enjoyment of Pamuk's meditations on the meanings of art. Brilliantly visual, the novel evokes its time and place so skillfully that you can feel the snow on a woollen sleeve and touch a painted doorframe, and yet there's no creaking of historical-novel scenery. I'm already thinking about what a third reading might yield.

7. Martha Cooley, The archivist (1998)
Cooley's ostensible topic in this beautiful novel is a sealed collection of letters by T. S. Eliot, and what they might reveal about a very private man's private life, but The archivist is also a riff on poetry, jazz, faith, and above all how we experience (or deny) history - our own and the world's. The private man who guards those letters, Matthias, is depicted in a first-person narrative worthy of Walker Percy. Matthias's neatly ordered world is disrupted by a young poet, Roberta, who requests access to the forbidden letters with such passion that her concerns force him into an archive of his own, one he has long avoided. I love the fact that this novel begins with one mystery but ends up solving a different, if related one. The archivist is also an aching solo on the burdens of history. I read it on a plane, trying not to read too quickly, forgetting what ocean I was crossing and in which decade I was reading, trying not to let the flight attendant see my emotion.

8. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852)
"In Bleak House, I purposely dwelt on the romantic side of familiar things," Dickens writes in his preface to the novel. This staggeringly long work has been called by some his masterpiece, by some the master-novel of the 19th century, and by some the greatest mystery ever written. Many of the "familiar things" he describes in it - coal-smutted London, maidens in long, full skirts, and horse-drawn cabs - have become for us the stuff of period movies and romantic in themselves. Some of Dickens's familiar things are still thoroughly current, however, including the endless waste of litigation, the deadening dreariness of work in a dreary office, the affection and mutual protection that arise among young people stranded by circumstance.

Bleak House is the story of innocent young Esther Summerson, a lawsuit turned murderous, and a host of suspects whose pasts come to light over the course of nearly a thousand pages. Dickens thickens the brew with a casual movement between past and present tense and between chapters in the third and first person. His descriptions of London inside and out, from slums to mansions, and of his characters' appearances and mannerisms - often grotesque - are still riveting 150 years after their composition. It seems trivial to call Dickens "erudite," when his subject was human nature, but his knowledge of that subject was so detailed, so elaborate, that Bleak House reads like an encyclopedia not only of its time and place but of us. I recently began rereading it side by side with Ian McEwan's Saturday, an oddly resonant combination.

9. Donna Tartt, The secret history (1992)
This elegant, justly acclaimed novel is one of my favorite examples of why a suspenseful plot and a truly literary style shouldn't be considered enemies in contemporary fiction; here they are diabolically, beautifully intimate with each other. As are the main characters of The secret history, a group of students at a small college in Vermont who are drawn together by the teachings of Julian, their charismatic professor of Greek language and literature. The student narrator of the story is a newcomer among them, and when he discovers the Dionysian act the rest of them are trying to hide, he must join in or lose their compelling society. The novel is absolutely brimming with fine prose and insight into human weakness, so that the reader feels downright implicated in the dreadful outcome. Tartt manages also to convey an enormous tension between passion and order, a conflict that boils and rumbles beneath even the most prosaic conversations among her students of Greek. Or perhaps there are no prosaic conversations among them? Or among any group of friends?

10. Jody Shields, The fig eater (2000)
I like this novel partly for the sheer inspiration of the concept behind it: in the beautiful, seething Vienna of 1910, a young woman called Dora, a figure inspired by Freud's best-known patient, is found horribly murdered. Reading this wonderfully visual, sinister novel is like falling at frightening speed into an art nouveau mural. The mystery is a trail of brutal clues, but it's also shot through with colorful ideas from that time and place - ornate notions about art, psychology, sex, history - and in the middle ground you see the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the approaching storm that will bring it down. The fig eater contains passages of such vivid, concrete beauty that I've stuck it next to My name is Red on my bookshelf - two stories of great cities at great moments in history, each told in prose as close-up as embroidery on a jacket.

William Cook's top 10 books about comedians
Guardian, 2006-01-30.

William Cook writes the weekly comedy page in the Guardian Guide. He has published six books about comedy: Ha bloody ha - comedians talking (Fourth Estate); The Comedy Store - the club that changed British comedy (Little, Brown); Tragically I was an only twin - the complete Peter Cook, and Goodbye again - the definitive Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (both published by Century); 25 years of Viz (Boxtree) and, most recently, Eric Morecambe unseen - the lost diaries, jokes & photographs (HarperCollins).

1. John Fisher, Funny way to be a hero (Paladin, 1976)
What John Fisher doesn't know about traditional British comedy probably isn't worth knowing. This heartfelt book is a collection of compact but vivid portraits of the comedians who ruled the music halls during the first half of the last century (Arthur Askey, George Formby, Max Miller, Tommy Trinder) plus postwar variety survivors like Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and Ken Dodd. This book isn't just about comedians - articulate and affectionate, it's also an elegy for a lost age.

2. Humphrey Carpenter, That was the satire that was (Victor Gollancz, 2000)
The biographer of Jesus Christ and Dennis Potter scrutinises the 1960s satire boom, in a book that almost doubles as a biography of Peter Cook. As Carpenter points out, the four cornerstones of 60s satire were the stage show Beyond The Fringe, the private members club The Establishment, the periodical Private Eye and the TV series That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Cook was the star of Beyond The Fringe, the founder of The Establishment and the owner of Private Eye, and the only reason he wasn't all over TW3 was because he was busy performing Beyond The Fringe on Broadway when it started.

3. Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus (Methuen, 1980)
From Beyond the Fringe to Monty Python's Flying Circus, Roger Wilmut surveys the depressingly prodigious output of those Oxbridge clever clogs who seemed to be collectively responsible for virtually everything that was even remotely funny during the 1960s and 1970s. There are potted biographies of all the big names, from Bird & Fortune to The Goodies, and fascinating excerpts from long forgotten shows like Do not adjust your set, I'm sorry I'll read that again and The complete and utter history of Britain.

4. Roger Wilmut & Peter Rosengard, Didn't you kill my mother in law? (Methuen, 1989)
Wilmut resumes his history of British comedy where From Fringe to Flying Circus left off, describing the haphazard evolution of so-called 'alternative' comedy, from the Comedy Store (the Soho comedy club cum strip club where this supposedly anti-sexist movement started) to Saturday Live, the TV show that introduced its right-on stars to a mainstream audience. There are some cracking extracts from the early stand-up routines of Alexei Sayle, the Store's first compere, and an entertaining introduction by Peter Rosengard, the life insurance salesman who co-founded the Comedy Store.

5. Stephen Dixon & Deirdre Falvey, Gift of the gag - the explosion in Irish comedy (The Blackstaff Press, 1999)
Sparked by the cult success of Dublin's first alternative comedy club, The Comedy Cellar (located in an attic), during the 1990s Britain was overrun by a horde of Irish comics. Sean Hughes, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan all won the Perrier Award, while Patrick Kielty, Graham Norton and Ardal O'Hanlon became household names on both sides of the water. Dixon and Falvey talk to all the main players on this lively, creative circuit, in a breezy compendium of enjoyable anecdotes that is mercifully free from navel-gazing introspection.

6. John Connor, Comics - ten years of comedy at the Assembly Rooms (Macmillan, 1990)
"In 1982, John Connor was a young sketch writer, stand-up and freelance journalist. Crap at all three, he decided while compering a show and watching a performer crack jokes with a paper bag over his head that comedy might be very silly but as nobody else was going to write about it he would." Here Connor recalls the first decade at the Assembly Rooms, the Edinburgh Festival's top comedy venue, and the launch pad for countless comedians: Rory Bremner, Julian Clary, Ben Elton, Harry Enfield and Stephen Fry, to name a few. However Connor's most amusing yarns concern less famous acts like Malcolm Hardee, fondly remembered for stealing Freddie Mercury's birthday cake.
Touchstone :Comics : a decade of comedy at the Assembly Rooms

7. John Lahr, Dame Edna Everage and the rise of Western Civilisation (Bloomsbury, 1991)
An absorbing backstage biography of the comedienne sometimes mistaken for Barry Humphries, by the theatre critic of the New Yorker - and the son of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Lahr taped 34 hours of interviews with Australia's finest (and funniest) cultural export, but it's his colourful descriptions of Dame Edna, Sandy Stone and Sir Les Patterson that make this book live and breathe. A life in showbiz, seen from the wings.

8. Humphrey Carpenter, Spike Milligan - the biography (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)
During his later years, Spike Milligan was practically canonised by the British comedy establishment - the Mahatma Gandhi of modern comedy, a holy fool who could do no wrong. Actually, Milligan was a far more complicated and interesting character than these eulogies suggest. Carpenter gets a bit closer to the complex (and often contradictory) truth - not quite close enough to crack the riddle of this enigmatic clown, but probably about as close as any biographer will ever get. He doesn't shy away from the lurid details - the affairs, the illegitimate children, the accusations of racism - but he never loses sight of the fact that what made Milligan so special was his extraordinary sense of fun.

9. Graham McCann, Morecambe and Wise (Fourth Estate, 1999)
This meticulous but amiable book charts the twin careers of Britain's greatest double act (more than 28 million people - over half the population - watched their 1977 Christmas show) who bridged the gap between live vaudeville and televised Light Entertainment. The duo's story doesn't have the peaks and troughs that make a riveting tale (theirs was a steady ascent, rather than a rapid rise and fall, with no offstage scandals to report) but McCann's warm and scrupulous study looks set to remain the definitive biography for many years to come.

10. Graham McCann, Frankie Howerd - stand-up comic (Fourth Estate, 2004)
After chronicling the careers of Eric and Ernie, two of the most well-adjusted men in show business, McCann turns his attention to one of the most peculiar individuals who ever stood behind a stand-up mike. During his 50 year career, this ultra camp comic flitted in and out of fashion (but remained resolutely in the closet) and McCann masterfully chronicles all his showbiz ups and downs. Frankie Howerd's material may have been pedestrian but his delivery was unique, and McCann makes a convincing case for Howerd as one of the founding fathers of modern comedy.

Eve Claxton's top 10 memoirs and autobiographies
Guardian, 2006-02-06.

Eve Claxton is the compiler of The book of life, a compendium of the best autobiographical and memoir writing throughout history. "I've always been intrigued by memoirs and autobiographies. I remember my mother telling me that Helen Keller's autobiography was 'all true.' I was eight years old and had no idea there was a distinction between books that were 'made up' and 'real'. Of course, there can be a fine line between the two, as the recent James Frey debacle has proven once and for all, however, you could argue that this is part of what makes the genre so interesting. For the most part, a well-written memoir can bring an intimacy to our relationship with an author that doesn't happen when you're reading a novel. With a memoir you know that the protagonist has truly lived to tell the tale. The unfolding of memories on a page - exactly how and why a writer decides to recreate the past - can be fascinating to witness."

1. Girolamo Cardano, The book of my life (1576)
Contrary to popular belief, memoirs weren't invented in the mid-1990s. The genre is, of course, ancient - the Romans and Greeks wrote about their own lives; St. Augustine penned The confessions, his full-length life story, at the turn of the 5th century. One of my personal favourites amongst the earlier works of autobiography is The book of my life, written in Renaissance Italy, by the polymath Girolamo Cardano. Each chapter describes a different aspect of Cardano's life - his career and relationships; his appearance and temperament, not to mention difficulties with his sexual health. A classic of self-examination.

2. Harriette Wilson, Harriette Wilson's memoirs (1825)
Wilson was the most famous courtesan in Regency England - a mistress of aristocrats, politicians, poets, and military men alike. When she came to publish her memoirs in 1825, however, she was past her prime and losing her looks. In desperate need of money, Wilson posted letters to each of her ex-lovers demanding £200 or an annual pension if they wished to be omitted from her kiss-and-tell. The Duke of Wellington reportedly told her, "Publish and be damned!" (as a result, the Duke appears in her Memoirs portrayed as a dreadful bore with the looks of a "rat-catcher"). Wilson's first line gives you a good idea of her seductively mischievous tone: "I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven..."

3. Charles Dickens, 'Autobiographical fragment' (1847)
I hadn't known about this prior to my work on the anthology and so it was exciting to discover that Dickens had the original Dickensian childhood. This "autobiographical fragment" was included in John Forster's 1872 biography of the great writer and although it's only a few pages long, it's a riveting and vivid depiction of 10-year-old Dickens after he was forced to leave school and work in a factory when his father landed in debtor's prison. The details are grim - cruel factory masters, scuttling rats, abject hunger, a small boy's loneliness. Dickens had planned to write a longer description but was so overcome by the anguish of remembering this period of his life that he couldn't continue. Soon afterwards he began work on David Copperfield, where the factory of his youth is transformed into Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse.

4. Margaret Oliphant, The autobiography of Margaret Oliphant (1899)
Oliphant was one of the most prolific and beloved novelists of the 19th century. Today, if she's remembered at all, it's usually as "Queen Victoria's favourite novelist" which doesn't seem like much of a recommendation. Her Autobiography, however, is unusually affecting. It was written as a private record over a period of 30 years, and was patched together by her descendents after her death in 1897. Even Virginia Woolf, who reviled Oliphant's novels, described The autobiography as a "most genuine and moving piece of work." Each of Oliphant's six children and her husband died before her - including two sons in infancy and two daughters in childhood. The book ends with the death of her last surviving child: "I have nobody to stand between me and roughest edge of grief," she writes.

5. Edmund Gosse, Father and son (1907)
A memoir about the relationship between the English writer Edmund Gosse and his father, the naturalist and evangelical Phillip Gosse. Although the events it recreates take place in the mid-19th century, the book feels timeless. This is partly because it's so poignant but also because the Gosses' complex and conflicted relationship is so well rendered. In the course of the book we witness the young Gosse emerging as his own person, despite enormous pressure from his father to fit into a staunchly evangelical mould. Eventually Gosse Jr and Gosse Sr go their separate ways - a schism that's ostensibly cause by their divergent views on Darwinism. Incredible to think such matters are still contentious in certain parts of the States.

6. Maxim Gorky, My childhood (1913)
The first part of the Russian writer's autobiographical trilogy, this is Gorky's description of growing up poor in late 19th-century Russia - no fun by all accounts. Gorky's picture of the punishing impoverishment of daily peasant life is brilliantly lucid. After his father dies, the four-year-old Gorky goes with his mother to live with his appallingly cruel grandfather. Later, our hero is orphaned entirely and like a real-life Russian Huckleberry Finn, he sets out to make his way in the world, aged only 11. A masterpiece amongst "miserable childhood" memoirs.

7. Primo Levi, If this is a man (1947)
This is Levi's legendary account of his year in Auschwitz when he was 25 years old. The book first appeared in 1947 and it remains the most profoundly civilised description of profoundly uncivilised events. What's so extraordinary is Levi's tone, which is never one of simple outrage, but instead springs from a kind of principled curiosity; the astonishment of the scientist confronted with wholly foreign phenomena. "How is this possible?" Levi seems to be always asking us. If this is a man can make for extremely disconcerting reading, not only because of the systematic cruelty of the Nazis it describes, but because Levi doesn't let you dismiss the Holocaust as the work of monsters. This was the work of men.

8. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited (1966)
- about Nabokov's "lost" childhood in pre-Revolution Russia, and the early years of his post-Revolution peregrinations in Europe - is literary memoir at its finest. Nabokov weaves the stuff of memory into a luminous work of art, definitively upping the ante for memoir writers to come. While working on the anthology, I sought out his notes for a sequel to Speak, memory (in the New York Public Library), which he began in the late 1960s but never finished or published. A single, immaculately fashioned paragraph from these notes is included in the anthology.

9. P. J. Kavanagh, The perfect stranger (1966)
The English poet P. J. Kavanagh called his 1966 memoir, "the story of a recognition and a rescue." It's a book that charts how one person can change another's life completely. Kavanagh begins with his childhood, growing up in wartime Bristol, and follows the course of his youth through boarding school and the army, until he winds up at Oxford, a rather lost and disgruntled 20-something. Here he meets a fellow student, Sally Phillips, the "perfect stranger" of the title, and they fall in love. What follows is a magical depiction of Sally, their short-lived happiness together, and the transformative effect she has on his existence.

10. Paula Fox, Borrowed finery (2001)
My favourite memoir of recent times. Sadly, I didn't manage to include an excerpt in the anthology (I couldn't find a single section that would work when divorced from the rest of Fox's book) so it's very pleasing to recommend it here. Fox - the American novelist and children's book author - wrote this story of her childhood in her late 70s and she's a very good advertisement for waiting until old age to write about the past. Borrowed finery is a model of exactitude and restraint, in which Fox manages to evoke her abandonment by her parents and a childhood spent in the care of a succession of strangers and relatives without a shred of self-pity. A second memoir, The coldest winter has just come out in the States and forms a kind of sequel. It's just as good as its predecessor.

Dai Smith's top 10 Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas
Guardian, 2006-02-21.

Dai Smith is research chair in the cultural history of Wales at Swansea University and series editor of the Library of Wales, a Welsh Assembly government initiative designed to bring back into print classic writing about Wales written in English. The series is published by Parthian Books and the first five titles, all with new forewords by prominent contemporary Welsh writers are:

So long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry (1970)
Border country by Raymond Williams (1960)
The dark philosophers by Gwyn Thomas (1946)
Cwmardy and We live by Lewis Jones (1937; 1939)
Country dance by Margiad Evans (1932)

"Of course, it's not Dylan's fault that his bible black and ugly lovely, hymned and heron-priested (omigod the word-spinning virus has already struck) suburban and sunny (that's better) Wales has become everyone else's. After all he did say "Land of my Fathers! My fathers can keep it". Only, admiring American ex-presidents like Jimmy and Slick Willy don't listen and troubadours from Minnesota called Bob take on his name as did bucktoothed magic rabbits and now, already branding a Welsh ale and a literary centre, it is to grace Britain's newest literary prize - oodles of dosh if you are under 30 and write from anywhere in the world in English with an SAE to Swansea - so it's time for us Welsh to put him in his place. Or rather to tell the world, as he well knew, that the Wales of the last century - industrial, modern, secular, immigrant, befuddled and rebellious, big shouldered and short-arsed - was something more than Cwmdonkin Drive and adolescent wet dreams. Writing from Wales in English has been as distinctive and complex as England's nearest and least understood neighbours, the Welsh themselves. So, new readers, start here and remember, if you enter the Milk Wood you will not Pass Go."
Touchstones: Library of Wales, Slick Willy, Dylan (rabbit), Dylan (beer), Dylan Thomas (arts centre).

1. Alun Richards, Dai country (1973) and The former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976)
These are two wickedly astringent collections of short stories by a master craftsman. Alun Richards (1929-2004) cast a baleful but knowing eye on the snobbery and pretensions of the Welsh middle classes - the self-styled crachach - as he sallied out from his hometown of Pontypridd to eviscerate professional peddlers of false culture and self-aggrandisement. The Welsh language media world, heirs to a bankrupt nonconformist tradition of teachers and preachers, get it in their richly deserving necks. Hilarious and invigorating.

2. Alun Lewis, In the green tree (1948)
A post-war compilation of the letters and stories of the lost leader of Welsh writing, Dylan's (1914-53) near contemporary, Alun Lewis (1915-44). Mostly known as a war poet when he died in Burma by his own hand, Lewis, like his younger admirer Alun Richards, came from the epicentre of modern Wales - the South Wales valleys - and his unfulfilled fate, glimpsed here in these stunning stories, would have been to become its greatest chronicler as a novelist. The new Library of Wales series is now reprinting this volume, with the original woodcuts of John Petts, and a new foreword by Owen Sheers.

3. Aneurin Bevan, In place of fear (1952)
The fragmentary but filigree political testament of Wales's most vital political figure of the last century, Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960). He had resigned, on principle, from the Labour government just the year before his credo's appearance and he never held office again but the flash and crackle of these insights and asides leave no doubt that he had indeed imagined a better Britain. And could have led it. You can taste the confidence of that Welsh working class world of which he was the finest representative.

4. Gwyn Thomas, A few selected exits (1968)
This resembles an autobiography in the way Tristram Shandy looks like a novel. Gwyn Thomas (1913-81), however, never wrote anything conventionally - he once said his work was like "Chekov with chips" - and his models were Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx more than any sentimental epic of proletarian life. All of which helps to explain how he managed to write the most savage comedy about some of the most socially ransacked coal gulches on earth. You'll only stop laughing to man the barricades of revolt.

5. John Ormond, The selected poems (1987)
John Ormond (1923-1990) moves effortlessly from ballad-tales about his artisan ancestors from Dunvant to lyrics of personal love and painterly desire. He knew Dylan - all too well, he once concluded, as he burned his own first efforts - and had to shake off the young ranter-at-the-moon to find his particular voice. When he did again, in the late 1960s, it was humane and warm with no false grace notes of sentimentality. A poet to explore, and to return to again and again.

6. Bernice Rubens, I sent a letter to my love (1975)
This is one of the letters of love, or at least of compassion, Bernice Rubens (1928-2005) addressed to Wales. Or, perhaps, it is more a return-to-sender epistle of the yearning which the Cardiff-born novelist felt about Wales. From Anglophone Cardiff and a Jewish family she was decidedly, still, not English. And so she was indeed Welsh. But. And in the ambivalence of the conjunctions lay her puzzled attachment. Also Wales's only Booker prize winner. The first, indeed, in 1970. Oh, and I liked her a lot.

7. Gareth Williams & David Smith, Fields of praise (1980)
This is here because I had the cheek to include it and because Frank Keating thinks it is the best book on a team sport ever written (ta, Frank) and because you cannot understand how modern Wales is the way it is without understanding the social, class and national significance of rugby to its cultural history. Besides, I (b. 1945) only wrote the adjectives and verbs; Gareth (b. 1945) did the nouns.

8. Ron Berry, Flame and slag (1968)
Not a poor Welsh remake of Burt Lancaster's superb socialist swashbuckler Flame and the arrow but a Faulknerian tale of settlement, growth and slow community decline in industrial Wales told in a memoir diary and by a fast-forward narrative. It has all the verbal pyrotechnics and structural leaps of Berry (1920-1997) at his very best and, as Library of Wales readers of Berry's boxing novel So long, Hector Bebb now know, that is a very good indeed 'very best'.

9. Menna Gallie, Strike for a kingdom (1959)
This is both a detective story and a social panorama of a village in west Wales during the 1926 general strike. Menna Gallie (1920-90) was a sensitive chronicler who is, thankfully, in print with the Welsh Women's Press, Honno (itself a wonderfully complementary adjunct to the Library of Wales). The recent Honno edition has an incisive introduction by one of Wales' best historians, Professor Angela John.
Touchstone: Honno Classics.

10. Des Barry, Chivalry of crime by (2000)
It starts with a migrant Welsh boy in Colorado who dreams, via dime novels, of the breathtaking subversiveness of the gun-toting Jesse James into whose life and times we are convincingly flashbacked. It won Best Western New Novel of the Year in America and its author, Merthyr-born Des Barry (b. 1955), has gone on to establish himself at the head of a marauding gang of young Welsh writers, men and women, who could easily extend my list of 10 on and on until we could afford to include the real Dylan as one of them and, of course, one of us.

Michael Symmons Roberts's top 10 verse novels
Guardian, 2006-03-20.

The author of four critically acclaimed collections of poetry, the latest of which, Corpus, won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Prize, Michael Symmons Roberts first novel, Patrick's alphabet - a literary thriller - is published this week. He explores the unstable ground between poetry and prose with his top 10 verse novels. "It sounds like a publisher's nightmare: too long and prosaic for poetry fans, but too concerned with its own form and music for readers to dip into on the train. The verse novel (like the rock opera or the sound sculpture) is the awkward child of successful parents, destined to disappoint both of them. The pitfalls are many. Verse novels can be full of bad poetry: essential but dull building blocks to get from A to B. Or they can be strong on music but light on narrative. Reading a bad verse novel is very hard work with little reward. You think it must be good for you; you just can't work out how.

"But that's not the whole story. The best verse novels can be remarkable. One or two might even creep into my top 10 novels, or my top 10 books of poems. The problem is the definition. It's a slippery one. I've drawn the line at poetic, lyrical fiction writing. There's plenty of that, but a true verse novel attempts something different. It is as intricate in form as any poem. It is often set out in stanzas. It may have a rhyme scheme. Most true verse novels are written by poets, and they often only do it once or twice in a career. So how does it differ from an epic poem? Something about the scale and complexity of the story which pushes it into novel territory? Something about intent? You could argue that a verse novel can only be written in conscious awareness of the novel as a form, which counts out Beowulf and Paradise lost, despite their scale and richness of story and character.

"Here, in no particular order, are my own top 10 verse novels."

1. Aleksander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
The classic verse novel? This tale of love and class showed that a major poet could take on a novel without compromising the music.

2. David Jones, In parenthesis
Jones's extraordinary account of his experience as a soldier in the first world war. Complex and lyrical, hugely ambitious in its interweaving of history and myth with the horrors of the trenches, In parenthesis is a neglected masterpiece of 20th-century literature.

3. Vikram Seth, The golden gate
Already an accomplished poet, Seth flexed his narrative muscles here before embarking on 'A suitable boy'. A witty and urbane San Francisco story.

4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
Barrett Browning spent at least a decade conceiving and crafting this story of a struggling poet and her agonies about her vocation. Her work gave the verse novel a radical edge, raising issues about poverty, women in society and the role and value of art.

5. Craig Raine, History: the home movie
In the mid 1990s, Raine created a semi-fictionalised account of journey of the Raines and the Pasternaks (his wife's famous Russian literary family) through the 20th century. Built in three-line stanzas, it observes the same formal rigour as Raine's poems.

6. Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Australian poet Murray also took on 20th-century history, but with longer, eight line stanzas. Central to this book is the extraordinary image of a character (Fredy) so shocked by his inability to prevent a massacre that he loses his sense of touch.

7. Ciaran Carson, Shamrock tea
Carson is one of Ireland's greatest writers, author of award-winning poetry books and novels. Though they are published in their distinct categories, many of his books could hold their own in either camp. His mastery of the long poetic line enables him to build stories and characters in the most wonderful lyric poetry.

8. Anne Carson, The beauty of the husband
Canadian poet Anne Carson's tracing of a single love affair through to the breakdown of a marriage has won her many admirers. This book is an amazing balancing act - classical and colloquial, surreal but rooted in telling everyday details.

9. Glyn Maxwell, The sugar mile
Maxwell is a virtuosic writer regularly drawn to the borders of poetry and fiction. The sugar mile interweaves two stories - one set in New York the weekend before 9/11, and one in London during the second world war - and does it in poems that stand up by themselves. His skills as a dramatist allow him to write convincingly in many voices.

10. Anthony Burgess, Byrne
Never a writer to rest on his laurels, Burgess launched into this hybrid form in his final years, finishing his first verse novel shortly before his death. It's a darkly comic novel in full rhymed verse, brimming with Burgess' heady brew of sex and religion.

>79 Cynfelyn: Anyone know if it's possible to combine LT Local pages?

On a venue page, click edit venue info. To the right on the edit page, there is a box that says "Combine venues. Click to combine this venue."

James Morrow's top 10 books on witch persecutions
Guardian, 2006-04-19.

James Morrow is the author of The last witchfinder, an historical novel about the birth of the scientific worldview, centred around one woman's audacious crusade to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act of 1604. "We tend to regard belief in witches as a rather low order of credulity, something belonging to the medieval period or perhaps even the dark ages. The startling and instructive fact is that demonology overlaps and to some degree participates in modernity. The Witchcraft Statute of James I remained on the books until 1736. Several prominent members of the Royal Society, including Henry More and Joseph Glanvill, believed wholeheartedly in witchcraft, and even Robert Boyle speculated that the famous démon de Mâcon affair might have proved the reality of evil spirits. Add to this the bedeviling circumstance that the various "proofs" of Satanic compact - swimming the witch, pricking her imp-teats - boasted a certain weird Aristotelian logic, and we can begin to understand why the legal extermination of alleged Satanists lasted nearly three centuries."

1. Edward Harrison, Masks of the universe (1985)
In a remarkable feat of encapsulation, physicist Edward Harrison frames the evolution of human thought as a succession of increasingly efficacious world-pictures, beginning with the magic universe of Paleolithic peoples and proceeding through the mythic universe of ancient Mesopotamia, the geometric universe of classical Greece, the Christian universe of medieval Europe, the demon-driven universe of the Renaissance, and the mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment. After reading Harrison, you will never again regard the 15th and 16th centuries as the apex of humanism: "The supposed Renaissance was a disordered interlude between sane universes ... a witch universe created by leaders with fear-crazed minds, an age in thralldom to a mad universe on the rampage, which would have destroyed European society but for the intervention of science."

2. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and other essays (1969)
This classic work is in fact an extended essay, bound into the same volume with some of the author's other historical pieces. Against all odds, Trevor-Roper manages to condense the narrative of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation campaigns against supposed witches into a mere 100 pages. As horrid fact follows upon horrid fact and one grotesque statistic yields to the next, the appalled reader finds himself awhirl in the maelstrom that was the "witch universe". The story Trevor-Roper tells is largely a cavalcade of villains, among them Nicholas Rémy, a beloved and respected French lawyer who consigned 2,500 innocent people to the flames, and Benedict Carpzov, the Lutheran scholar who, before ascending to his heavenly reward, read his Bible cover-to-cover 53 times, took Holy Communion at least once a week, and underwrote the deaths of 20,000 presumed heretics.

3. Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic (1971)
Keith Thomas's weighty but never ponderous chronicle places witchcraft beliefs in a larger context: the great banquet of credulity at which nearly all folk feasted during the period that historians now call early modern Europe. Beyond demonology, the zeitgeist nourished astrology, magical healing, love charms, fortune-telling, ghosts, fairies, omens, and ancient prophesies. Thomas notes that that the most momentous system to emerge amidst this bacchanal, experimental science, represented a sea-change that not even by its most devoted practitioners fully grasped at first: "The methods of the scientists were different from those of the magicians ... They gradually lost their attitude of reverence for the hermetic wisdom of the past and came to recognise that there was no precedent for their achievement."

4. Arthur Miller, The crucible (1953)
Is there anything quite so aesthetically dreadful as a bad production of The Crucible? I think not. Yes, all drama is melodrama, but in writing a tragedy about the Salem witch trials, Miller was running the risk of eschatological soap opera - which is indeed what happens when this play is ill-mounted or indifferently acted. Should you ever hear of a favourably reviewed Crucible, however, don't hesitate to attend: properly staged, Miller's critique of religiosity is a religious experience. If no such theatre-going opportunity lies at hand, your next best option is the printed text. True, the author occasionally departs from the historical facts, and his decision to frame the story as a dress-rehearsal for McCarthyism feels heavy-handed in retrospect. But this is a beautifully structured work, full of searing moments and resonant speeches.

5. Frances Hill, A delusion of Satan (1995)
At least once a decade we seem to get a new theory of the Salem witch trials. Interpretations have thus far embraced the sociological (it was all about antagonistic neighbours settling scores with each other), the psychological (the putatively possessed children were seeking attention), the political (Reverend Parris encouraged the proceedings to consolidate his power), the anthropological (the villagers were projecting their fears of Indians onto each other), and even the pharmacological (the hysterical girls had eaten bread contaminated with ergot). Francis Hill, a London-based journalist, returns us to the heart of the problem: the psychotic theologies and Manichean madness that contaminated Christianity for nearly 300 years. The author is refreshingly unimpressed by Judge Samuel Sewall's famous apology for his role in the Salem murders. As Hill sardonically paraphrases his mea culpa, "Innocent people may have died and guilty ones escaped; the whole thing was deeply regrettable; everyone meant well; no one was to blame."

6. Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons (1997)
Stuart Clark's monumental tome defies easy categorisation, but if forced to apply a label, I would call it a social constructivist account of the "witch universe". The author cheerily deprives the reader of any cosy post-Enlightenment notions that the ascent of science automatically spelled the doom of demonology. Cartesian mechanical philosophy not only allowed that evil spirits might exist, it practically required the world to harbor such entities. Clark clarifies that witchcraft was never regarded as "miraculous" phenomenon. An enchantress was simply somebody who had successfully petitioned Satan to manipulate the laws of nature on her behalf.

7. Peter Barnes, The bewitched (1981)
How could a practice as cruel and irrational as the campaign to exterminate witches have lasted for nearly three centuries? In this astonishing historical play, centered on the pitiable figure of King Carlos II, Peter Barnes vividly dramatises humankind's lamentable willingness to cede common sense and simple decency to the spurious expertise of political leaders, ambitious clerics, and opportunists of all stripes. The play's best speech, which Barnes puts in the mouth of his physically damaged but morally intact hero, is a ringing indictment of those who regard themselves as intrinsically fit to rule over the minds and bodies of allegedly lesser beings: "Now I see Authority's a poor provider. No blessings come from 't. No man born should ha' t', wield 't. Authority's the Basilisk, the crowned dragon, scaly, beaked, and loathsome."

8. Heinrich Krämer & James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII, whose name must now be counted the paragon of misnomers, deputised two Dominican friars to go on a fact-finding mission throughout northern Europe, ferreting out evidence of Satanic compaction among ordinary citizens. Thus it was that Heinrich Krämer and James Sprenger became the Lewis and Clark of demonology, intrepid explorers trekking across the dark continent of Renaissance witch beliefs. Saturated with misogyny, the resulting tome, the notorious Hammer of witches, reveals far more than any sane person would want to know about the detection, examination, and prosecution of suspected heretics. Edward Harrison said it better than I could: "The Malleus Maleficarum possesses a hypnotic power. The aghast and sickened reader, after returning from the nightmare universe of Krämer and Sprenger, will never again be quite the same person."

9. Alan C. Kors & Edward Peters (eds), Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: a documentary history (1972)
Anyone interested in studying primary sources pertaining to the witch persecution era would do well to start with this classic compendium by two renowned historians. With perspicacity and discernment Kors and Peters have assembled court records, papal letters, confessions, sermons, pamphlets, Malleus Maleficarum excerpts, and the arguments of such celebrated skeptics as Montaigne, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The most moving document in the book is the famous 1628 letter that Bamberg mayor Johannes Junius smuggled to his daughter prior to his execution for sorcery. "Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are all sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through fear of torture..."

10. Robin Briggs, Witches and neighbours: the social and cultural context of witchcraft (1996)
My novel The last witchfinder is largely a dramatisation of Edward Harrison's argument that, had not an emergent experimental science undermined Renaissance supernaturalism, the ever-expanding "witch universe" would have ultimately sucked the whole of European civilization into its maw. Oxford historian Robin Briggs offers a different perspective on the same era: "If we in the industrialised world mostly take witchcraft less seriously than our ancestors did, this arguably owes more to social changes than to any massive spread of Enlightenment values." Although I dissent from Brigg's thesis, I salute his rigorous and thoughtful scholarship, and so I append Witches and neighbours to my top 10 list without hesitation.

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Let's start on this project again, after a break of a month or more.

I was just looking at the tag page for "witches". The first two dozen books comprise nine Discworld titles, seven Harry Potter titles, first three titles of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches series, the first two titles of Deborah Harkness's All Souls series, and one each from Roald Dahl (The witches), Gregory Maguire (Wicked, "An adult retake on the world of the wizard of Oz") and Kim Harrison (Dead witch walking, the first title of his Hollows series).

All a country mile from the superstition and misogyny in the main list.

Matthew Pearl's top 10 books inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Guardian, 2006-05-23.

Matthew Pearl is the author of the bestselling novel The Dante Club. His latest novel, The Poe shadow, is a thriller centered around the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe. He has also edited and introduced a new standalone volume of Poe's three stories featuring the detective Auguste Dupin, The murders in Rue Morgue: The Dupin tales.

"Edgar Allan Poe is a writer who claimed to have taken little influence from writers who came before him, but whose own influence on literature and culture has been endless. He is traditionally credited with almost single-handedly inventing the genres of fantasy, science fiction and mystery. Yet Poe's work has seeped into our consciousness in more subtle ways. Indeed, some writers - TS Eliot and EL Doctorow included - would say that Poe has had an impact on our world out of proportion to his actual talent as a writer. Judge those claims by reading Poe's own work, but revel in Poe's never-ending influence and resonance by picking up a few of these. Poe seems to have at least one consistent effect on writers: he makes them react."

1. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe
A playful meditation on Poe by Hoffman, himself an important poet. Poe's poetry and his theories on poetry influenced all of his writing. Hoffman is extremely knowledge about Poe, but also not afraid of personal insights into Poe's work. This book doesn't try to explain to us why Poe is important to the world, or what Poe is "about" in some large sense; instead, it tells us what Poe is about for one reader's life, perhaps an angle more appropriate to Edgar.

2. Borges, Labyrinths: selected stories
Borges is a reader and student of Poe's mystery fiction. Poe's original tales of C. Auguste Dupin, the first literary detective, still excite interest and raise questions about exactly what the substance of detective fiction really is. Borges complicates those questions further and helps us see the genre more clearly inside his interlocking, fascinating puzzles. A great introduction to Borges and a gloss on Poe.

3. Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes
Conan Doyle freely admitted that Sherlock Holmes was inspired by C. Auguste Dupin. Look for the amusing comment on Dupin by Sherlock Holmes in his first appearance, A study in scarlet. You can pair this with the brand new Vintage edition of The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. The similarities are shocking, and the differences speak volumes about the quick birth and evolution of detective fiction.

4. Peter Straub, Ghost story
Originally, Straub planned that the characters in Ghost story would retell the tales of several early American horror writers, including Poe. Although he took this out of the plan for the book, Poe's traces can still be found in this smart, addictive novel about a group of friends haunted by personal and societal demons.

5. Jules Verne, An Antarctic mystery
Speaking of novels, Poe wrote only one, The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Never heard of it? Most people haven't, but this urgent, staccato transatlantic tale is oddly hypnotic. Verne was preoccupied with the intentionally incomplete and mysterious (and possibly supernatural) ending, and wrote a sort of sequel that completes the narrative. Read both Poe's and Verne's books for a rare treat of following the path of one master's influence on another.

6. Scott Peeples, The afterlife of Poe
Peeples, president of the Poe Studies Association in the United States, chooses a perfect framework for a study of Poe. Poe did not really become the Poe we know until after his death. Peeples expertly examines responses to Poe's writings as well as his life in the century and a half since his death. His chapter on Poe's death, and the way it has been perceived, stands among the very best texts on the subject.

7. Michael Deas, Portraits of Poe
As the title suggests, photographer Deas compiles a beautiful edition of photos and portraits of Poe. Some of the surprisingly interesting parts of this book concern the apocryphal portraits once thought to be Poe. Someone should put together a similarly beautiful book that selects some of the remarkable illustrations made from Poe's work, too.

8. Louis Bayard, The pale blue eye, and Andrew Taylor, The American boy
The pale blue eye is a new novel from a talented Washington DC author who takes on Poe as a cadet at West Point military academy. Most people find it surprising that Poe was a military man (or quasi military man, since he never quite finished his training or service), and indeed he is the only major American writer to have attended West Point. Bayard cleverly matches up cadet Poe with a heinous outbreak of murders. To continue your fictional path through Poe's youth, read Taylor's American boy, which treats Poe as a child living with his foster family in London, and there being mixed up in an appropriate amount of intrigue.

9. Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint
One of Poe's most lasting legacies is that of the narrator who is frantic, frenetic, a little deranged, who nevertheless somehow grows on us. We trust his world vision even when we don't believe a word he's saying. Roth's Portnoy is a great example of a latter-day evolution of that species of Poe's narrators. He is delusional but somehow in touch with a cultural and emotional reality that is evocative and unforgettable. There is also a sexual self-torture that cannot fail to remind us of Poe's characters and his persona. (Similarly, think of Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, who explicitly tips his hat to Poe.)

10. Richard Powers, The goldbug variations
One of Poe's most popular stories in his own day was The gold bug, about a perplexing quest for pirate treasure. Powers uses this as well as other cultural, scientific, musical and mathematical materials to create an ambitious, complex, challenging novel that will keep you thinking and questioning. Not always reader friendly, but it is worth remembering that neither was Poe.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY

I'll leave it at that.

ETA I've just noticed that one of the books the raven (Bart) pulls off the shelf is The purloined letter, one of Poe's Auguste Dupin stories. Although the most fantastical part of the story is that Homer has a library.

Matt Haig's top 10 novels influenced by Shakespeare
Guardian, 2006-05-30.

Matt Haig's latest novel, The Dead Fathers Club, features an 11-year-old boy living above a pub in Newark, Nottinghamshire, and gives more than a nod towards Hamlet. Matt also has a forthcoming children's book, Shadowforest*, to be published next year by Random House Children's Books.

"Vivien Leigh once said that acting in a Shakespeare play was like 'bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants'. Writers seem to find the same freedom when working under his influence. There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare, because to a considerable degree he shaped that language. As that's the case, a top 10 list of novels influenced by Shakespeare might look identical to a top 10 list of novels full stop. So, I've limited my selection to those writers whose works clearly advertise that influence."

1. John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius
There are a lot of nods to the Bard in Updike's work. The witches of Eastwick clearly drew on the 'weird sisters' in Macbeth, although added more sauce to the cauldron. Gertrude and Claudius is a prelude to Hamlet and draws on the ancient Scandinavian legends that first inspired Shakespeare to flesh out a life for Gertrude. She famously doesn't say much in the original play, but triumphantly emerges here as a warm and clear-headed woman who sees life 'as a miracle daily renewed'.

2. Jane Smiley, A thousand acres
Smiley's prize-winning novel transferred the story of King Lear to the American mid-west, with brutal results. If you take on Lear, you've got to be able to rise to the challenge and Smiley doesn't flinch from the dark heart of the story. Indeed, she heads deep into that darkness with the suggestion that Lear sexually abused two of his daughters.

3. David Foster Wallace, Infinite jest
"A fellow of infinite jest" is how Hamlet describes the dead court jester Yorick in the famous graveyard scene. 'Infinite Jest' in Wallace's satirical, zillion-page novel is the name of a film produced by Poor Yorick Productions. The film eventually kills its viewers by entertaining them to death. Wallace, like Shakespeare, is always aware of the skull behind a jester's smile.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave new world
The title of Huxley's classic dystopian novel comes from Miranda's words in The tempest, and the book is full of Shakespearean references. In the novel, John the Savage quotes endlessly from Shakespeare as he has read nothing else. The point seems to be that Shakespeare's vision of humanity, with all its complex and messy emotions, can't fit into any utopian society.

5. James Joyce, Ulysses
"Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. . ." The bit where Stephen Dedalus suggests that the ghost of Hamlet's father is in fact Shakespeare talking "his own words to his own son's name", and that Ann Hathaway is the "guilty queen", must surely be the most ingenious example of lit crit ever to make it into fiction.

6. Martin Amis, Money
The bloated, debauched and delusional figure of John Self may have epitomised the greed-fuelled 80s, but he owes more than a drunken nod to his Elizabethan counterpart Sir John Falstaff. Self is certainly a character of Shakespearean proportions, and could easily have asked Falstaff's question "What is honour?" In a novel gleefully drunk on literary allusions it's more than fitting that Self ends up on a park bench, slugging back a bottle of 'Desdemona Cream'.

7. Anthony Burgess, Nothing like the sun
Years before Shakespeare in love, Burgess offered this darker imagining of our Will's love life. The incredible achievement of this novel is how well Burgess managed to adopt Shakespeare's language into the narration. As with James Joyce, Burgess also has his doubts about Shakespeare's much maligned wife. He suggests the reason Shakespeare only left his 'second best bed' to Anne was because he found her there making the beast with his brother.

8. John Steinbeck, The winter of discontent
Steinbeck was a writer who understood that Shakespearean intrigue and tragedy should not be the sole preserve of Kings and Princes. The titular reference to Richard III is used here to add a certain grandeur to this moving tale of dispossessed grocery clerk, Ethan Hawley.

9. Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
The Bret Easton Ellis of this novel lives on Elsinore Road, visits a nightclub called Fortinbras and even receives a phone call from his father's spirit. Brat-pack novelist as tragic hero was too much for some critics to stomach, but I'm someone who believes most father-son stories end up being Hamlet stories, so you might as well be transparent about the fact.

10. Angela Carter, Wise children
Carter's novels were always Shakespearean in their playful mix of the high and the low, but Wise children owes a bigger debt than her others. The book begins on Shakespeare's birthday and follows the lives of two chorus girls, Dora and Nora Chance, who are the illegitimate daughters of a well-known Shakespearean actor. It's peppered with lots of Shakespearean references (the sisters grow up on Bard Road, for instance), and is even sliced up into five 'acts'. It's full of that truly anarchic spirit that people used to sitting in quiet theatres sometimes forget is at the heart of Shakespeare's plays.

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*Not published under this name. Probably Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest (2007).

Pamela Norris's top 10 passionate women writers
Guardian, 2006-06-06.

Pamela Norris read English at Bristol and has an MA in Renaissance Studies from London University. She taught English in Zagreb and Paris before working in publishing and television. She is now a freelance writer and critic specializing in women's history and writing. Previous books include critical editions of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and The story of Eve, an exploration of the genesis and evolution of the myth of Eve, and its impact on western ideas of women. Her new book is an exploration of women's writing entitled Words of love: passionate women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath. Here she chooses her 10 favourite women from the book.

"Words of love began as a history of writers and romantic love from the troubadours to D. H. Lawrence. Glancing through the avalanche of books written about male poets and novelists, I quickly realized that the story had never properly been told from the woman's point of view. While the troubadour poet was celebrating a lady on a pedestal, his mistress was busy pouring out her own tempestuous accounts of how it felt to be the muse and sometimes the discarded lover of a dashing minstrel-poet. My voyage of discovery took me from the women poets of medieval Provence to the court ladies of early Japan, with their mesmerizing accounts of clandestine love affairs and sexual intrigue. Male poets might celebrate a fantasy 'belle dame', but Lady Mary Wroth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote with astonishing frankness about the agonies and ecstasies of love. Women novelists explored the pitfalls for the romantic heroine, and real-life women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath wrote in moving detail about their yearning for love, sex and a working partnership with a brilliant mate. It's a fascinating story, and gives a whole new dimension to popular myths about women, men and romantic passion. My top 10 women from the book are listed in chronological order. They are all real-life women, although many of them invented heroines who are equally memorable. It would be hard to say who is my absolute favourite - I love them all - but I've always had a particularly soft spot for rebellious Charlotte Brontë ..."

1. Lady Gossamer (c. 935-995)
(Touchstone: Michitsuna no Haha)
One of several wives of a powerful statesman at the Japanese court, Lady Gossamer recorded her experience of courtship and marriage in a memoir known as The Gossamer Diary. Famous for her beauty, she was also a respected poet, but her marriage was far from happy. Her importance in the marital pecking order diminished when she only produced one child, and Lady Gossamer had the added misfortune of being temperamentally ill-suited to her boisterous husband. She was earnest, obsessive and romantic, prone to sulks and melancholy sighs. He was amorous, noisy and fun-loving, and bewildered by his wife's refusal to be happy. Lady Gossamer's portrait of this prosperous, bustling and self-important man is superb. Equally gripping is her description of her own tempestuous feelings as she battles to win his attention. Her diary offers an extraordinary insight into the private life and passions of an aristocratic woman in 10th-century Japan.

2. The abbess Heloise (c.1101-1162)
Heloise was a remarkable woman, whose frankness about sex still has power to surprise. A bluestocking famous for her learning, she was also celebrated throughout France as mistress of the philosopher Peter Abelard. Their love story was abruptly terminated when Abelard was castrated on her uncle's orders, but separation did nothing to diminish Heloise's feelings. Writing to Abelard many years later, she laid bare her sexual longing in a series of astonishing letters. Although by now a respected abbess responsible for a community of religious women, she declared that her passion for Abelard came before her duty to God. At night, she writhed with desire for her lover; by day, everything she thought and did was solely for his sake. Despite the centuries that have passed since Heloise wrote her letters, her voice has lost none of its urgency. Her pleas for her lover's attention continue to rend the heart.

3. Christine de Pizan (1364-1430)
Christine de Pizan was one of the first women to live by her pen in medieval Europe. Widowed early, she was left with a family of young children, a niece and a mother to support. She began by writing enchanting love poems, perhaps inspired by memories of her own happy courtship and marriage. Always passionate about women's abilities, Christine celebrated their talents and achievements in The book of the city of ladies, dreamed up in her study while her mother was preparing supper downstairs.

As her confidence grew, she even dared to challenge the courtly code which favoured clandestine affairs between married women and gallants anxious to win their spurs in the bedroom as well as on the battlefield. Her verse-novel, The book of the duke of true lovers, is a bold exposé of a young wife's unhappiness when she agrees to a secret affair with a pressing suitor. Christine's sympathy with her heroine reveals her sensitivity to the temptations and torments of woman's desire.

4. Jane Austen (1775-1817)
I first became a Jane-ite at the age of 10, when I huddled with a torch under the bedclothes greedily reading Pride and prejudice late at night. She remains a firm favourite, the writer I turn to when tired, dispirited, or simply in need of a reliably good read. A few pages into any of her novels and I'm immediately hooked, caught up all over again in the excitement and anxiety of Mr Darcy's pursuit of Elizabeth, Emma's matchmaking, or Anne Elliot's despair over Captain Wentworth.

Although she never married, Jane Austen's letters to her niece, Fanny, reveal her deep and sympathetic knowledge of the female heart. Aunt Jane's worldly wisdom is everywhere apparent in her novels. She has an enviable ability to make her heroines and their adventures seem as immediate and fascinating as the lives of celebrities which fill our newspapers today. Whether it's Marianne's extravagant passion for Willoughby or Elinor's secret tears over Edward Ferrars, Jane Austen understands the feelings of a woman in love.

5. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
"I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses." This was Charlotte Bronte's verdict on Jane Austen's novels. When one turns from Pride and prejudice to Jane Eyre, it is hardly surprising that the rebellious Charlotte might have found her predecessor a little tame. Jane Eyre is a study in individuality, the claim of a plain girl without family, friends or fortune to be the equal of a rich, powerful and sophisticated man. Jane dares to tell Mr Rochester, "I have as much soul as you - and full as much heart!" Her fire and energy strike matching sparks from her lover. Custom, law, the presence of his living wife in an upper chamber are swept aside as Rochester strides forward to grasp his bride in an iron embrace.

In creating this dark, ruthless, impassioned hero and the feisty Jane, Charlotte Bronte revealed her own secret longing for intensity of feeling and the thrill of recognition. As obscure and daring as her heroine, she claimed women's ability to feel passion and their right to voice desire. While Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester set new markers for women and love, it took the audacious imagination of Charlotte Bronte to invent their story and give it life.

6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Everyone knows the story of Miss Barrett's rescue from her invalid's couch and her jealous father by debonair Robert Browning, who carried her off to Italy, marriage and motherhood. It's a marvellous romance, eloquently told by the lovers in the many letters they exchanged during Robert's prolonged courtship, and also in the clutch of sonnets secretly written by Elizabeth before their marriage and eventually published as Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Reading her letters and sonnets in parallel is an astonishing experience. They offer an intimate portrait of a woman slowly turning away from sickness and premature death to the joy of passionate love with a beloved partner. Elizabeth's caution and self-distrust are credible and moving, and there are moments as the story unfolds when Robert's eagerness and impetuosity nearly wreck his suit. Finally, all obstacles are overcome and Elizabeth accepts her lover, the one person in the world who has seen her "soul's true face" and loves her unconditionally.

7. L. M. Montgomery (1874-1942)
Who would have thought that this respectable author of a steady stream of popular novels for girls had once loved a handsome young man to the point (almost) of sexual abandon, and recorded her feelings in a private journal which has only recently seen the light of day? From Anne of Green Gables to Emily of New Moon, Lucy Maud Montgomery's novels describe many varieties of love and desire, but her heroines always remain ladies. Indecorous things do happen, but usually off-stage, whispered about in the midst of a cake-baking session, or among girls running up frocks for a poetry recital. At first glance, her own life as busy writer and wife of a Presbyterian minister in Canada seems unexceptional. Her account of her love affair with Herman Leard contradicts this bland public face, and reveals the very real torment experienced by young women in the days when anything more than a kiss branded a girl as a whore, even in the eyes of her lover.

I've always enjoyed L. M. Montgomery's novels, with their tales of love's rewards and heartbreaks, but her real-life passion for Herman Leard is quite exceptional, the story of desire keenly felt, temptation agonizingly resisted, and finally the death of her beloved. Alone in her room many months later, carefully recording their painful history, she is struck anew by a grief so potent that she yearns to be in the grave with Herman, pressed to his heart in "one last eternal embrace".

8. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf may seem an odd choice as favourite in a book about romantic passion. She is often regarded as frigid, a cold wife who conducted an arm's-length relationship with the saintly Leonard, and a bluestocking who preferred books to bed. Yet she was always deeply interested in sexual relationships. Although her intimate life with Leonard can only be conjectured, her diaries describe a close and often amorous marriage, and she writes wittily and wonderfully about love in her novel Night and day, in which pairs of lovers engage in a Mozartian game of swapping partners until the couples are finally happily matched. In To the lighthouse, she casts a canny eye over Victorian family values and Mrs Ramsay's attempts at matchmaking. In Orlando, she celebrates her passionate friendship with Vita Sackville-West, a partnership which embraced romantic love, sexual experiment and a shared enthusiasm for writing.

As well as her curiosity about love and sex, Virginia was fascinated by the buried history of women writers, an interest she developed in A room of one's own and many of her shorter essays. In Words of love, I similarly wanted to highlight the testimony of women who are often marginalised in the conventional history of romantic love.

9. Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
By her mid-20s, Edna St Vincent Millay had acquired a reputation as a beauty, a talented, a risqué poet and a shocking flirt. The "It-girl of the hour", as one contemporary described her, began her lifelong fascination with romantic love as a teenager. Unrecognized and unfulfilled, the lonely girl conjured her dream lover with candle and incantation, like some medieval seductress rehearsing her midsummer rites of love. Later, lovers would come in droves, moths attracted to the flame of this alluring redhead. Later still, when already married to a devoted husband, she would fall in love with a much younger man, and celebrate their affair in a cycle of sonnets that unflinchingly describe their unequal passion.

Millay often upset her lovers by what they regarded as her 'masculine' attitude to sex: an ability to flit from lover to lover without commitment. Her poems reveal an honesty about the gulf between sexual desire and love that is as refreshing now as it was scandalous in the early 1920s. When she did fall in love, Millay committed herself with a vengeance, but her poet-self was always present, a canny watcher, pen in hand.

10. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Although she was only 30 when she died, Sylvia Plath left a remarkable collection of writing, including her blackly comic novel The bell jar, and the Ariel poems that made her reputation. Her name has long been associated with passion, anger and genius, but her nature has often been misunderstood. For the reader who really wants to get inside the skin of this unusual woman, her journals offer a magnificent entry point. In place of rumour and gossip, one finds the clear voice of a young woman wrestling with the sexual double standard, greedy for love and success and the powerful male who would be her equal. Plath's record of her youthful love affairs is vivid, wry and funny, her account of her meeting and marriage with Ted Hughes deeply moving.

Sylvia Plath's journals explore many of the questions raised in Words of love. She writes about a woman's most intimate feelings about sex and love, the tension between marriage and children and the energy needed for painting or writing or any other career, and the difficulty of finding the right balance in a love affair between the partners' conflicting needs. Written with vigour, conviction and honesty, her words record a 20th-century woman's struggle for passion, love and creative fulfilment.

>89 Cynfelyn: Great list!

Sam Mills's top 10 books about the darker side of adolescence
Guardian, 2006-06-12.

Sam Mills's first novel, A nicer way to die, is a dark thriller about a group of 30 pupils who travel to France on a school-trip. A horrific coach crash kills 28 of them, leaving two boys behind: Henry and James, two stepbrothers who share a troubled relationship.

"When I was growing up, there seemed to be two main types of teenage fiction around. The first was fluffy (Sweet Valley High et al) and portrayed growing up as a hunky-dory experience, where beautiful boys met beautiful girls, the greatest trauma in life was not being selected for the cheerleading squad, and all lived happily ever after. The second type, which I feasted on with glee, explored reality. They captured just what a difficult and jagged experience growing up can be. Some teen books can be terribly depressing; they focus too heavily on 'issues' (drugs, teen pregnancy etc) and become unrealistic in their bleakness. The most interesting books about teenagers are not afraid to explore the darker side of adolescence, but with humour, insight or humanity. As a result, they become classics because their readership is universal; their protagonists may be teenagers but anyone aged 13 to 80 can enjoy them. Hence, the list I have chosen is a blend of books that have been either published as teen or adult fiction..."

1. William Golding, Lord of the flies
Lord of the flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today. It centres on a group of boys who, following a plane crash, are stranded on a desert island. At first they work together, building shelters and gathering food. But soon group tensions split the group as Ralph tries to maintain reason, order and structured discipline, opposed by Jack and his band of painted savages. Primal instincts take over and civilisation crumbles into animal savagery and violence. Golding uses the playing field of adolescence to explore the roots of evil, tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral of the story is that the backbone of a society depends on the ethical nature of the individuals who founded it, and not any government, or politics.

2. S. E. Hinton, The outsiders
S. E. Hinton wrote The outsiders while she was still a high school student, inspired by her determination to change the negative stereotype of teenagers who were labelled 'greasers.' She tells the story of two groups of teenagers whose bitter rivalry stems from socioeconomic differences: the greasers, the lower-class hoods, who continually clash with the Socs, the rich kids in town. The novel is narrated by the 16-year-old Greaser Ponyboy and, like many of the finest teen novels, Hinton pins down her hero's colloquial voice perfectly. Though it is a violent and at times bleak read, Hinton offers a spark of hope as Ponyboy begins to realise that the hardships that greasers and Socs face may take different practical forms, but that both groups share the same fundamental difficulties of growing up. Published in 1967, The outsiders was a groundbreaking piece of fiction that set the precedent for the uncompromising, realistic fiction for young adults that soon followed it.

3. Anthony Burgess, A clockwork orange
Burgess's novel far excels Kubrick's film. This is a novel which explores the very darkest side of adolescence. 15-year-old Alex and his friends set out on an orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex relates his tale in an idiom called Nadsat, a glorious invention by Burgess: a kind of musical Russian-English slang. When Alex is arrested, the book takes on Orwellian overtones when he is used in a scientific experiment to regulate adolescent violence in a new and alarming way. The original American edition of the book (and hence the film) failed to include the final chapter of the book, where Alex grows up and gives up his violent ways. Burgess believed that all individuals, even those as violent as Alex, could reform, and that moral growth could come with age - but his US editor felt the last chapter was too 'bland' and forced him to omit it. Later Burgess got the chapter reinstated, arguing that he objected to his work being used to send a message that some humans are simply evil by nature.

4. Matt Whyman, Boy kills man
Many of the best teen books highlight real problems happening in the world today and Boy kills man is a perfect example. Inspired by the true story of child assassins in Colombia, it tells the tale of Sonny, aka Shorty, who is hired by the crime lord El Fantasma to become a assassin on the streets of Medellin. It is a powerful and moving book that swings between tenderness and brutality. Whyman takes care not to moralise or offer easy answers - Sonny is a complex character who does the wrong things for what he believes are the right reasons.

5. Ian McEwan, The cement garden
Many of the most interesting novels about adolescence explore the theme of children who are abandoned by their parents or find themselves in a situation where they are free from adult authority. Like Lord of the flies, the four children in The cement garden, are left to their own devices when their parents die. Fearing adoption, they keep their mother's death a secret by burying her in a cement locker in their basement. But, unlike Lord of the flies, the children do not descend into animal savagery. Rather, they are torn between the impulses to progress and regress. Julie, the eldest of the siblings, takes on the role of a surrogate mother as the children attempt to carry on as normal a life as possible. But, as they seek to emulate their parent's roles, an incestuous relationship develops between Julie and Jack...

6. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the rye
Catcher in the rye is narrated by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield. At the start of the story, Holden has just been expelled from school and stands poised on the cliff separating childhood and adulthood. Holden's voice is superb: colloquial, savagely comic, and utterly persuasive, sucking you in so swiftly that it is hard not to read the book in one sitting. It is also captures the complexity of adolescence. Holden feels deeply cynical about the adult world; like the 'catcher in the rye' he wishes to wipe out corruption from the world and protect children from becoming a 'phonie' - an adult. Yet, at times, he behaves like a 'phonie' himself and is frustrated by his desire to fit into the adult world and be taken seriously by adults. You can guarantee that any brilliant and honest book for teens will be frequently banned in schools and The catcher in the rye has certainly suffered from this fate many a time.

7. Graham Joyce, The tooth fairy
Though Joyce's novels are shelved in the fantasy sections in bookshops, his books are about as far away from Tolkien as you can get. The tooth fairy begins firmly in reality, exploring - with wonderfully deft observation - the adventures of a boy called Sam Southall growing up in England in the 1960s. At the age of seven, Sam loses a tooth and is visited by a Tooth Fairy. But this is no fluffy sprite: Joyce's Tooth Fairy smells rank, peppers his language with swearwords and makes sinister threats. Joyce blends together fantasy and reality as the Tooth Fairy becomes a superb metaphor for his hero's adolescence, metamorphosing as Sam shifts from boyhood to manhood.

8. Barry Hines, A kestrel for a knave
A teenage novel about a boy called Billy who is trying to survive his harsh existence in a small mining town in Yorkshire. His family are impoverished, his teachers mistreat him and he is entirely friendless - until he finds a form of love and redemption in a kestrel that he trains and rears from a chick. A profoundly touching novel, its greatest achievement is the depiction of Billy. He might have been an unsympathetic narrator - he is at times violent, ill-tempered and bad-mouthed - but Hines (like Whyman in Boy kills man) shows that his troubled adolescent behaviour is a result of the society he is brought up in rather than his true nature.

9. Sam Taylor, The Republic of Trees
A dark fable about four English children who run away to the French countryside to establish their own Utopian community. There, in the Republic of Trees, the children hunt, fall in love and educate themselves in the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The social contract. The novel is narrated by Michael and the first half of the book explores his sexual awakening as he falls in love with Isobel and loses his virginity to her. But then a new member, Joy, joins the group, bringing new disciplines and the mood of the camp begins to alter. Gradually their utopian paradise descends into a dystopian nightmare as the novels powers towards a shocking, violent and terrifying conclusion. A fantastic novel with shades of Lord of the flies and 1984.

10. D. B. C. Pierre, Vernon God Little
Surely the best Booker prize-winner in recent years, Vernon God Little has been described by some critics as a modern day equivalent to Catcher in the rye. It swings from savage satire to black comedy to sweet lyricism to poignant tragedy from one page to the next - all captured in the voice of 15-year-old Vernon, when he is wrongly accused of a high school massacre. Like many adolescent heroes, Vernon finds himself rebelling against a corrupt adult society.

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8. Barry Hines, A kestrel for a knave
I think 'Kes' - Ken Loach's 1969 version of this book - was the first 'proper' film I saw at the cinema, and I was blown away. My family's cinema diet tended to be new musicals and Second World War blockbusters as they were released. I particularly remember 'Mary Poppins' (1964), 'The sound of music' (1965), 'Where eagles dare' (1968), 'Battle of Britain' (1969), 'The aristocats' (1970), 'Bedknobs and broomsticks' (1971), 'Cabaret' (1972), 'Jesus Christ Superstar' (1973), 'The eagle Has landed' (1976). Also the Bond films between about 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'The man with the golden gun' (1974).

Not, however 'Godspell' (1973) or 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' (1975). My parents had standards; at least in front of the children.

As you can imagine, in comparison 'Kes' was a shock: gritty, realistic, unsentimental about childhood and, perhaps the biggest shock to my young self, set in the north! As the Doctor said in 2005, "Loads of planets have a north", just not in 60s and 70s cinema.

Elizabeth Buchan's top 10 books to comfort and console during a divorce
Guardian, 2006-06-19

For a long time, Elizabeth Buchan led a double life as a publisher and author, successfully pursuing both careers simultaneously until she became a full-time writer in 1994. Her latest novel, The second wife, is published by Michael Joseph this week, priced £12.99. Here she chooses her top 10 books guaranteed to give comfort during the ending of a relationship.

1. Richard Holmes, Footsteps
I first read this many years ago and it has stayed with me. Every so often, I return to it in order to immerse myself in its wonderful prose and insights. It combines travelogue with biography, detective work with a probing inner exploration, and is both an account of a physical journey and a remapping of the writer's imagination. The book opens with an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a donkey, in which Holmes describes his own trek over the Cevennes, during which he abandoned his ambition to become a poet, having been led "far away into the undiscovered land of other's men and women's lives ... towards biography". It is the turning point of his life and for the remainder of the book - as he hunts down subjects that include Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Gerard de Nerval and Gautier - he goes on to explore the nature of the relationship between biographer and quarry. The book so enraptured me that I myself walked in the company of friends over the Cevennes in his footsteps. It was one of the best journeys of my own life.

2. Alice M. Coats, Flowers and their histories
The perfect book to dip into without worrying about having to maintain perfect concentration. The flowers are arranged in alphabetical order - from acanthus (often the flower chosen to decorated borders in illuminated manuscripts) to santolina and tanacetum (also known as ostmary) - and the book is stuffed full of botanical detail and historical anecdote about the origins, medicinal uses and the literary airings of the older plants that feature in our gardens. If it thrills you - as it did me - to discover that the dahlia originally came from Mexico or that tradescantia is also known as "spiderwort, trinity-flower, widow's tears or Moses in the bulrushes", then this book will beguile and divert. The author's relish for her subject is infectious and quietly persuasive. At a time when friends are important, Flowers and their histories would be a friend of sorts.

3. Barbara Willard, The Mantlemass chronicles
Revisiting childhood favourites can be a disastrous mistake but, equally, can sometimes allow you to recapture a flavour of the innocence and delight of that time. As a child, I loved the eight novels that make up the Mantlemass Chronicles and revelled in their realism and robust writing - as well as their love stories - which seemed to me to build a bridge between my world and adulthood. Spanning the period between the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War, the individual novels trace the fortunes through the centuries of a small community in a Sussex forest and the families who come and go. Barbara Willard's research is superb, and her skill at reflecting the wider world of politics and war and the ways in which they impact on the continuing struggle to survive and thrive, is masterly. She never patronizes her younger readers, she loves her characters and her subject and her sense of place is terrific.

4. Juliet Barker, The Brontes
Juliet Barker's monumental biography falls into the category of tried-and-tested books that won't let you down. A fiercely revisionist, meticulously researched reassessment of the background, landscape and events that shaped and formed the lives of Patrick Bronte and his children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, it breathes fresh air and commonsense into the dark myths and fantasies that envelop the sisters in particular. I love it for the hard work that the author invested in it, her detail, her scrupulous integrity and her determination to get at the truth about the individuals and the family as a whole. She argues well and powerfully that "without this intense family relationship, some of the greatest novels in the English language might never have been written".

5. Daphne du Maurier, The house on the strand
As a teenager, I gorged on the novels of Daphne du Maurier, revelling in their gothic thrills and partially comprehended hints of darker compulsions. On rereading a few not so long ago, Rebecca was toppled from my personal number one spot by The house on the strand. A time-travel story written long before such things were voguish, it manages to strike a delicate balance between a traditional (albeit far-fetched) romantic love story and a more troubling consideration of perception and identity. This is not a peaceful novel: it is suffused with longings and restlessness, and there is a powerful vein of anger and disgust hovering below the surface. But it is both gripping and resonant and, for the purposes here, cathartic.

6. Rene Weis, The yellow cross : the story of the last Cathars
These days any book that takes the Cathars (or the Holy Grail) as its subject appears to have a magnet attached to it. So what is it about the former that triggers such interest? And what was it that they did that was so wrong? Concentrating on the twilight years before the Catholic church ruthlessly and bloodily extinguished the heresy, this accessible and deeply felt narrative by a professor of English traces the events of those last years in the Cathar strongholds up in the mountains of southern France. He is very good on telling detail - describing homes, meals and relations between husbands and wives as well as desperate flights over the hills. I like very much the freedom he gives himself to write about his personal experiences of - and responses to - the landscapes and sites of their communities. Such is his percussiveness that I could picture myself walking with him along the cols and tracks over which the Cathars fled. It is a reminder of how savage Christian history has been, and an insight into how a faith can grip so tight that its believers go willingly to their deaths.

7. Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan sun
Mayes struck gold with her account of buying and restoring a Tuscan villa when it was first published. It is a book that plugs into the contemporary fantasy of giving it all up to live out an idyll in a sun-kissed foreign spot. I confess I'm a sucker for it, and to read of her patient and loving restoration of Bramsole, the house she bought near Cortona, is to indulge in a ridiculous, but highly potent, daydream. She neglects nothing in the confection of the fairy tale that hangs around the beautiful, neglected house longing for the restorative touch. There are funny, and occasionally almost disastrous, battles to make the house habitable again, luscious descriptions of meals, a fascination with the local topography, history and landscape, and a selection of authentic recipes. All in all, it offers irresistible escapism - a necessary pleasure at a difficult time.

8. Natasha Cooper, Gagged and bound
This should be a moment for striking out into new reading territory. In this novel, Natasha Cooper steers a path between 'cosy crime' and the stronger meat of noir. I was full of admiration for her deft plotting, her thoughtfulness and the care she takes to construct a novel that works both on a narrative and emotional level. For those who want diversion, it offers unshowy, intelligent respite, a good puzzle and the fictional reminder that things are never simple.

9. Nancy Mitford, The pursuit of love
In an atmosphere of post-divorce reflectiveness The pursuit of love could be considered an exercise in masochism. But it is not. Granted, the laughter engendered is often rueful and Linda Radlett's hit-and-miss search for love is sometimes heartless, but that is to ignore the pure comedy and high-spirited wit that streams effortlessly from Mitford's pen. It is also to undervalue her clearsightness, her obvious acquaintance with grief and failure and the deep comprehension of human nature that runs through the light, polished story of the Radlett family and the beautiful Linda in particular. If one has to be down, Nancy Mitford's clever, satirical comedy about a world that has more or less vanished does an excellent job of bracing the spirits - something of which she would no doubt approve.

10. Jane Austen, Persuasion
Finally, of course, there is recourse to the enduring classic. Austen's Persuasion has to be the favourite. The opening chapters, which depict the lonely figure of Anne, the middle sister who has lost her bloom, struggling to live well at time when her future is precarious, have all the melancholy of lost hope and neglected chances. This is a novel in which the spectre of autumn hovers, but as the plot progresses, the spectre is chased away and Anne moves towards a late blossoming. As a young woman she was persuaded to turn down marriage to Captain Wentworth. Now, her good sense, her good qualities and her experience and intelligence persuade her otherwise. The Anne who emerges is hardly passive and she grasps her second chance with both hands. Woven into this portrait of a woman's renaissance is Jane Austen's deliciously acerbic observation, an uncharacteristic tenderness and a deal of sharp, brilliant social comedy. All in all, Persuasion is as irresistible, life affirming and nourishing as chicken soup - which, under the circumstances, is exactly what is needed.

Nick Brooks's top 10 literary murderers
Guardian, 2006-06-23.

Nick Brooks' first novel, The good death, is a murder mystery with a difference. Less whodunit than who-am-I, the murderer is pursued more keenly by his conscience than by the police. "Literary killers hold a deep fascination for us, taking grip of the imagination when other forms of writerly voyeurism have long since faded. During the writing of my own novel, The good death, a number of the works on this list occupied my thoughts, and I could easily have included many more novels and stories, settling instead for the ones that have been most influential on a personal level, the ones that stick with me still, many years after my first bruising encounters with them. It is no exaggeration to say that the characters who inhabit these works seem to exert an undue - possibly malign - power upon the psyche of the reader who stumbles, hapless, upon them. Since the best is often the enemy of the good, this list has been compiled with no particular order."

1. Patrick Bateman, American psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Bastard offspring of Thatcher and Reagan, Patrick Bateman kills with the same care and attention he might pay to his early morning shaving routine, gym workout or his collection of Huey Lewis and The News albums. Vilified on publication, American psycho set a new benchmark for horror and humour.

2. Francie Brady, The butcher boy, Patrick McCabe
Francie Brady is one of the true Emerald germs of Ireland. Discovered at the book's opening hiding under a bush on account of "what he done on Mrs Nugent." Neglected, humiliated and abused, Francie slips further and further from sanity until he becomes the "pig boy" others fear, and the nemesis of Mrs Nugent, who embodies everything Francie despises.

3. George Harvey Bone, Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton
Lumbering drunk George comes undone though his love for Netta in the Earl's Court of 1939, with the added help of a brain that is inclined to "click!" out of kilter. A study in psychosis, Hamilton's novel has surely one of the finest closing lines in all of literature.

4. Mersault, The outsider, Albert Camus
Mersault is the character who inspired a thousand budding existentialists, and who killed because the sun was shining in his eyes. The book's sense of its own moral purpose is what gives the story weight, but it is Camus' prose, cool as blown Gauloise smoke that carries us along.

5. Raskolnikov, Crime and punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Starving and feverish in his yellowing St Petersburg room, Raskolnikov murders a moneylender and her daughter to set himself apart from the venal masses and make himself a superman. Then he begins to have his doubts. Perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written, and certainly one of the most influential.

6. Robert Wringhim, The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner, James Hogg
Eerie, surreal and hilarious, Hogg's character has wrestled with God and, as one of the Elect, believes his name to be "Justified" in his maker's book, and so sets about "cutting off sinners with the sword." Accompanied everywhere by the mysterious Gil-Martin, Wringhim is a heinous coward, and the novel a supernatural tour-de-force.

7. Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The original and best?

8. Joe, Young Adam, Alexander Trocci
Joe, the narrator, works on a barge with Leslie, Ella, and their young son, when they discover a girl's body floating in the water. Only later do we find out Joe's connection to the dead girl. Much influenced by Camus' novel, The outsider, Young Adam is disturbing and mysterious, an odd admixture of ambivalence and opacity still capable of unsettling the reader.

9. The creature, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Perhaps the most abject of all literary characters, Frankenstein's monster is not a born killer but a made one. Driven to extremes of despair by the rejection of his "father", Frankenstein, the creature vows that if it cannot be loved as men are, then it shall take from its creator what he loves - by murder. So begins the creature's desolation of Frankenstein's world, and is the birth of one of literature's true icons.

10. Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Unlike other killers on the list, Humbert Humbert kills so that he can keep Lolita his. At once monstrous and urbane, erudite and depraved, Humbert's dazzling power over his written narrative is as persuasive as his imagination is perverted, and it is to our own shame that we find ourselves siding with a paedophile over his victim.

Mary Watson's top 10 books about maverick women
Guardian, 2006-07-18.

Mary Watson is the winner of the 2006 Caine prize for African writing for her short story Jungfrau, from her 2004 collection Moss.

1. Valerie Martin, Property
Beautifully written, this book stretches taut between two women: one a slave whose sullen sensuality creeps out from between the lines, the other the owner's repressed wife. The elegant, precise prose contrasts with an underlying unease which simmers then eventually erupts.

2. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
I was awed when I read this book which tells the story of a young thief and the woman she intends to defraud. It's my ideal balance of an intriguing story and beautiful prose. Sarah Waters writes pace and suspense without missing a beat.

3. André Brink, The other side of silence
This book, drawing on historical events, tells the story of Hanna X who arrives on a ship of women sent to Southwest Africa (Namibia) to satisfy soldiers' needs. She has a series of very grim adventures, including mutilation after resisting an officer. She joins up with a group of Namas and together they seek revenge.

4. Anne Landsman, The Devil's chimney
There is something pervasively sad about this book which is partly set on an ostrich farm. South African writers are usually very good at writing about the emotional landscapes of solitary, misconnected women on bleak farms. There really is something irresistible about this and Anne Landsmann tells her story very evocatively.

5. A. S. Byatt, Little black book of stories
I love this book because it combines two of my favourite things: A. S. Byatt's prose and the short story form. And best of all, many of the stories slip quietly into the surreal and return without too much fuss. Two stories especially stand out for me - the woman who turns into stone and the story where a man receives a midnight visit from a young woman while his sick wife sleeps.

6. Diane Awerbuck, Gardening at night
Diane Awerbuck, originally from Kimberly, South Africa writes this book about a character called Diane Awerbuck, from Kimberly. She captures the small town and its (real?) inhabitants with biting wit. The writing is very, very clever - this from a writer who "puts the fun back in funerals".

7. Louise Erdrich, Tracks
This book begins with my favourite opening line ever: "We started dying before the winter and, like the snow, we continued to fall." I stumbled upon this book in the early days of writing my collection of interlinking stories, and was happy to find a writer who did it so well. Louise Erdrich links stories of dispossessed people amongst the Chippewa and her maverick woman character, Fleur, has remained vivid in my memory these last 10 years.

8. Margaret Atwood, The blind assassin
Selecting my favourite of Margaret Atwood's books is a hard task, and The blind assassin beats The handmaid's tale by a hair's breadth. Which beats Alias Grace only just.

9. Lauren Beukes, Maverick women
The book that inspired this list. Lauren Beukes invites a host of unusual South African woman to a party: there's a stripper who danced with a snake, a woman who maintained a long term, long distance relationship with an alien (they visited occasionally), as well as familiar figures in a the South African cultural landscape like the music diva Brenda Fassie and Helen Martins of the owl house.

10. Agatha Christie, The big four
The Countess Vera Rossakoff - what a girl! No wonder she was the only one who captured the unattainable Hercule Poirot's (my hero!) heart.

Don Mullan's top 10 books on heroes
Guardian, 2006-07-28.

Don Mullan is the bestselling author of Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, the book that was credited as a primary catalyst in the establishment of the new Bloody Sunday Inquiry, and which inspired the 2002 award-winning film Bloody Sunday, on which Mullan worked as co-producer. He is currently working on a film script for his latest book, Gordon Banks: a hero who could fly. Here he chooses his top 10 books on his other heroes.

"Of the books I have written, compiled and edited, the one I enjoyed most is my latest book - part-memoir, part-eulogy - on the great England goalkeeper, Gordon Banks. The book is a heartfelt expression of gratitude from an Irishman for his English boyhood hero. As a dyslexic boy I thought I was stupid, but after seeing Banks play for England in the 1966 World Cup final he became my inspiration. In 1970, just a few weeks after he became a global icon after his save against Pelé in Mexico, my father magically arranged for me to meet him while he was on a pre-season tour of Ireland. In my book I write: "Throughout my adult life, I have had the opportunity to meet many notable personalities of the 20th century ... but nothing, absolutely nothing, other than an audience with God, will ever surpass the pure joy my father gave me as a boy, the day we met Gordon Banks." And it's true! These, though, are books by, or about, some of my other heroes."

1. Rosa Parks, Quiet strength
I interviewed Rosa Parks in June 1998. En route, at JFK airport, a friendly black TWA duty manager asked me if I was traveling to Detroit on business. When I told her I was going to interview Rosa Parks she took my boarding pass, asked me to wait, and returned a few minutes later with a first class ticket. "If you're going to see Ms. Parks," she said, "We've got to take care of you." Next day, Ms. Parks smiled when I related how her refusal to give up her Montgomery bus seat in 1955 had led, 43 years later, to a black woman offering a first class seat to a foreign white man traveling on a US commercial airline. Quiet strength is Rosa Parks' inspiring memoir of how her faith, hope and charity inspired her with the courage to confront American racism and set in motion a chain of events that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to the fore and changed a nation - indeed, the world. Rosa Parks, who passed away in October 2005, was a humble woman who altered history.

2. John Allen, Rabble-rouser for peace : the authorised biography of Desmond Tutu
In 1982 I helped to organise an international conference on world peace and poverty, to mark the 800th anniversary of the birth of St Francis of Assisi. Desmond Tutu, then secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, was one of the first to accept an invitation, subject to the return of his passport, recently confiscated by the apartheid government. I first met him in 1984, the year he won the Nobel peace prize, and we have been friends since. John Allen's biography, due out in October, will undoubtedly be a definitive work for decades to come. Interviewees include former South African presidents F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, and US president Bill Clinton. In 1984 I drove Tutu from Dublin to Belfast and was overwhelmed by his gentleness and generosity. Unquestionably, his compassionate handling of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission checked a potential bloodbath of revenge. A wonderful human being.

3. Nelson Mandela, Long walk to freedom : the autobiography
On May 10 1994, together with a friend from Ireland, I was swept along by a tidal wave of humanity into the grounds of Union Buildings, Pretoria, for Nelson Mandela's inauguration as President of the Democratic Republic of South Africa. His autobiography tells the story of the institutional racist brutality that failed to break the spirit of a nation. Amazingly, a man who during the Thatcher/Regan era was officially considered a terrorist presided over a miraculously peaceful transition of power. Mandela is, and will forever remain, the beacon of all Africa and a source of inspiration for the earth's most abused and exploited continent.

4. Mahatma Gandhi, The story of my experiments with truth : the autobiography
Following the effective killing of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement by the events of Bloody Sunday, I, along with many others, was confronted with the choice of violence or non-violence. Ultimately, I went in search of an alternative to violence and inevitably read the autobiography of Gandhi. I was particularly touched by his openness to read and discuss the gospels at the behest of Christians he met as a young barrister in South Africa, and by his hurt at their unwillingness to reciprocate by reading the ancient texts of Hinduism, in particular his beloved Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi's respectful dialogue with Christianity and other faiths has much to teach our world, where similar dialogues are urgently required.

5. St Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a soul : the autobiography
Apparently, Robbie Williams and I have one thing in common. Our favourite saint is a young French mystic, Thérèse Martin, who died in 1897 aged just 24 in an enclosed monastery in Lisieux, Normandy. I first read her autobiography in 1975 after which I hitchhiked to visit her shrine. What captivated me was her breathtaking honesty. As a child struggling with the unrecognised condition of dyslexia, I identified with her struggle to cope at school. She wrote: "I have often heard it said that the time spent at school is the best and happiest of one's life. It wasn't this way for me. The years I spent in school were the saddest of my life." Thérèse recognised that even as small and limited human beings, we all have the potential for greatness. There is a breadth and spiritual profundity to her writing; her guiding motto, powered by a generous and loving heart, was to do "ordinary things in an extraordinary way."

6. Martin Rees (ed.), Universe : the definitive visual guide
One of the most exciting books I ever read was a Ladybird book called The night sky. It exposed me to the wonders of the cosmos. Gifted thinkers such as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein are mesmerizing, but their contemplation of time and space has led them on a journey of modesty. The universe revealed to them that true education should teach us how little we know, not how much. Does God exist? I don't know. Who does? But there is an intelligence and order evident in the universe that, I believe, eludes the explanation of even the most gifted intellects. So, the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever you are, you, too, are one of my heroes. This book is a wondrous and fathomless feast.

7. Lori Van Pelt, Amelia Earhart : the sky's no limit
On my first visit to the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, I rushed past the 1903 'Wright Flyer' and Lindburgh's 'The Spirit of St. Louis' to a small, red, single-engine Lockheed Vega which my father, as a boy in 1932, had watched land in our hometown of Derry to make history. Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, piloted it. My father glimpsed her through the crowds who thronged to see her. It was emotional standing beside the actual aircraft he had seen as a boy. His stories ignited within me a love affair with America's Lady Lindy who disappeared without trace in the south Pacific on July 2 1937. Van Pelt's biography reignited my admiration for a fearless pioneer who not only broke barriers and pushed back frontiers but also helped spearhead commercial aviation and the advancement of woman.

8. Denise Chong, The girl in the picture : the Kim Phuc story
1972 was a momentous year in my life. On January 30 I witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday. On May 4, then aged 10, one of my closest friends, Richard Moore, was blinded by a rubber bullet on the edge of our school grounds. One month later, on the far side of the earth, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc, was photographed by Nick Ut of the Associated Press, running naked and terrified from her burning village. Years later I was to meet the girl in the picture and we became friends. In 2001 I brought Kim to Ireland to meet my friend Richard and a schoolgirl he was mentoring who lost her eyesight in the 1998 Omagh Bomb. Together we made a 10-minute documentary for Ireland's TV3. Chong's book movingly tells how Kim Phuc's image changed the course of the Vietnam war. She writes: "In the voiceless cry of the girl in the picture is the silence of guilt."

9. Helen Prejean, The death of innocents : an eyewitness account of wrongful deaths
George Bush believes in the death penalty. As governor of Texas he condemned scores of inmates to lethal injection. Statistics suggest, however, that some 7% of those on America's death row are innocent. Helen Prejean is America's most famous Catholic nun following Susan Sarandon's Oscar-winning portrayal of her in the film Dead man walking. Death of innocents tells the heartbreaking story of two men whom Prejean accompanied to the execution chamber and who she believes were not guilty of the crimes for which they were killed. She has been to Dublin twice now and on both occasions has stayed with my family; she's feisty, compassionately fair, and fun. She argues persuasively that even one innocent death is too many and that while those guilty of murder must be punished, the death penalty reduces a civilised society to legalised and institutional barbarism. "The readers of this book," says Prejean, "will be the first 'jury' with access to all the evidence the trail juries never saw."

10. Pelé : the autobiography
I saw Pelé from a distance recently in a Dublin bookshop, signing his autobiography. Crowds had gathered through the night to see him; I smiled when I read the promotional poster: 'GOD is a four letter word - Pelé!" and thought, "If Pelé is the god of footballers then Gordon Banks is the god of goalkeepers." Pelé was the hero of my best friend, Shaunie, who died in 1976, aged 21, in a car crash. We spent many happy days kicking and catching a ball as our alter egos. I'm currently involved in building a monument to Banks' save against Pelé outside Stoke City's Britannia Stadium and, I hope, Pelé himself will come to unveil it. In the days before commercialism contaminated the game, Stoke City's most successful manager, Tony Waddington, referred to soccer as "the working man's ballet'. I'll drink to that.

John Higgs's top 10 psychedelic non-fiction
Guardian, 2006-08-02.

John Higgs is a journalist, television writer and producer and author. His latest book, I have America surrounded : the life of Timothy Leary, published by the Friday Project, is the first full biography of the pioneer of psychedelic drugs.

1. Aldous Huxley, The doors of perception
Huxley's account of his experiments with mescaline in the 1950s make psychedelic use sound like a perfectly reasonable and admirable pursuit which would bring credit to any middle class gentleman. Huxley never wrote a dull sentence in his life and this is certainly one of his best works. If its influence of the likes of Timothy Leary or Jim Morrison is considered, then it could easily be his most culturally important book.

2. Hunter S. Thompson, The great shark hunt
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas is usually considered Thompson's best work, but I much prefer The great shark hunt. It's a huge book, a collection of the best of his journalism from the 60s and 70s, and it shows that Thompson had a far greater range than his later reputation suggests. His essay about Hemingway's death, in which he tried to understand why such a once-vibrant man ended up blowing his brains out in small town America, is particularly poignant following Thompson's suicide.

3. Tom Wolfe, The electric kool-aid acid test
This is Wolfe's account of life with Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the birth of the American west coast psychedelic movement. Wolfe knew that a detached, even-handed journalistic approach could never really explain what was happening, so he gave his book the same psychedelic viewpoint as his characters. The result is a wonderful piece of writing. For those of us who weren't born in the 60s, this is probably the closest we can get to experiencing it.

4. Timothy Leary, High priest
Leary was a prolific writer, producing over 30 books and hundreds of essays and papers. I've chosen his autobiographical High priest (1968) for this list as I think it is one of his most accomplished pieces of writing. It captures both the drug experience and the sense of discovery so well; the moment a scientist realises that the implications of their work are so huge that their life will never be the same again.

5. Cynthia Palmer & Michael Horowitz (eds), Sisters of the extreme : women writing on the drug experience
Psychedelic use is split fairly evenly between the men and women, but the desire to write about and try to explain the experience is a predominantly male trait. Certainly every other book in this top ten is from a male author, which is why this book so important. It sheds light on the otherwise hidden half of the psychedelic experience.

6. Paul Devereux, The long trip : a prehistory of psychedelia
Devereux's impressive and thorough trawl through prehistory will be an eye-opener for anyone who thought drug use was a modern phenomenon. Devereux demonstrates that this point in history is a strange quirk in the human story, a rare time where we don't have a structure for incorporating psychedelic use into our society. If nothing else, it will make you view your ancestors in a different light!

7. Rick Strassman, MD, DMT : the spirit molecule
The medical profession has written little about psychedelics since Timothy Leary, which makes this book all the more valuable. DMT, a natural chemical produced by the human brain, is a hallucinogen so powerful that it makes LSD look like lager shandy. DMT throws up some very big questions about the workings of the brain, consciousness and about the world at large, and Strassman does not shy from these. For those who think that one day science will have all the answers, this book shows just how clueless we still are.

8. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic trigger : final secret of the Illuminati volume 1
The usual medical warning about psychedelic use is that it is dangerous for anyone with latent or undiagnosed neurotic or schizophrenic disorders. Perhaps a more important warning would be that psychedelic use can trigger an onslaught of utterly weird synchronicities which leave the user in a world that has seemingly gone totally crazy, while they still feel perfectly sane. Robert Anton Wilson describes this situation better than anyone, and this sanity-bashing account of his personal journey through what he calls 'Chapel Perilous' is one of his best works. Anti-drug campaigners should distribute this book in schools, and ask children if they could handle that much madness.

9. Kevin Booth & Michael Bertin, Bill Hicks : agent of evolution
Psychedelics are often thought to have faded in influence after the mid 70s, but this is not the case. Instead, they became more subtly integrated into people's lives, to the degree that they didn't overshadow an individual's other interests or achievements. Bill Hicks is a good example. Although he frequently talked about his psychedelic use on stage he is not generally labelled as just a 'drugs comic', and I suspect that my inclusion of this book in this list will surprise a few people. This honest biography by his close friend Kevin Booth shows how integral psychedelics were to his life and, ultimately, his legacy.

10. John Markoff, What the dormouse said : how the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry
This is significant because it is one of the first books to look at the legacy that the psychedelic movement of the 60s left behind. Many people will be surprised by the debt the idea of a 'personal computer' owes to psychedelics, the significance of the geographical location of Silicon Valley on the San Franciscan peninsula, or why Steve Jobs would say that taking LSD was one of the "two or three most important things" he has ever done. An impressive account of recent history.

11. Brian Barritt, The road of excess
A psychedelic top 10, of course, goes up to 11, which allows me to include Barritt's autobiography. One of Timothy Leary's lovers recently told me that she thought this book had the greatest descriptions of acid trips ever written, and she may well be right. This is a piece of literature that has clearly never been within a hundred yards of a copy editor, and it is all the better for it. Words just spill forth with no interest in grammar, coherence or where the narrative is going, but it possesses such an innate wit and swagger that it is a complete joy from start to finish. Psychedelia in its purest form, studded with flashes of brilliance.

Kit Whitfield's top 10 genre-defying novels
Guardian, 2006-08-08.

Kit Whitfield is the author of Bareback (Jonathan Cape). It is a whodunnit, a science fiction fantasy and a love story.

"Genre is all very well, but it's a cage as much as a support. Who knows how many books a person who won't touch women's fiction or only reads sci fi is missing out on that they'd otherwise love? But for a writer, the effect is more insidious. A work of art needs to be complete on its own terms: it needs to ring with internal rightness, never mind whether it makes sense in terms of genre. A writer who forces a trope in or leaves an idea out because they're worried about genre categories has mutilated their book. The best novels are those that are so effective in themselves that they let genre go hang: use what works, leave out what doesn't, and come up with whatever's fresh and vivid that serves the story you're trying to tell."

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved
One of those books that's worth including on almost any list because it's one of the best books in the world, and a book so strong that genre becomes irrelevant. It's a literary classic, but also, technically, a political fable, an historical novel, a ghost story, an allegory and even an anatomy of a murder - but none of that really matters, because Beloved is just Beloved. There's no other book like it; it's unique, individual, perfect. It doesn't contain a ghost because it's a ghost story, for instance: everything is there because it couldn't be any other way. It's the ideal of literature: a highly cultured and informed book, that in the end is still only answerable to itself.

2. Margaret Atwood, The robber bride
Marvellously enjoyable as well as moving and highly intelligent, a book I've read to pieces. On the face of it it's a naturalistic novel and, in its portrait of female friendship and terrors, it provides the same kind of satisfaction as standard chick lit, only better. But also, as part of the story, there's a character who is psychic, and uncannily accurate in lots of her seemingly flaky conclusions. It's not made an issue of, it's just a character detail, harmoniously worked into the plot as a parallel to her two best friends' personalities. Atwood has written some more openly speculative works, but The robber bride is my favourite example of her boldness and imagination: rather than leaving out the psychic Charis because the book is supposed to be mainstream literature, she brings her in, and it works beautifully.

3. Antonia White, Frost in May
School drama, psychological horror story, autobiography? Adult novel, children's tale? It's any and all of them. I first read Frost in May when I was about 12 years old, and have reread it at intervals throughout my life; it never stales, it never palls, it never ceases to cast its cool, numinous spell. Young Nanda's clash with the nuns at her convent school is charged with a mesmerising, Stockholm-syndrome ambivalence that makes it an impossible book to categorise. It simply stands apart, even from the rest of Antonia White's other, admittedly excellent, novels. It's a vivid moment of brilliance that can't be classified without diminishing it.

4. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Too good and too delightful to leave out. A fantasy novel, a historical novel, a literary jeu d'esprit? Who cares? The book is so charming, so intelligent, so gripping and potent in its unusual storyline, that I can't be bothered to debate with anyone what genre it should be considered; I'd rather talk about how much I loved it, then go and reread it.

5. H. G. Wells, The island of Dr Moreau
Action-adventure sci-fi, structurally at least but, underneath it, there's a philosophical and religious undertow that freezes the blood. It's science fiction pushed and pushed until it comes out the other side, and spills over into a vision of hell: the tormented creatures, agonisingly chanting a credo they're powerless to understand, ever helplessly regressing even as torture awaits them from their uncaring creator, utterly incapable of stability or safety, or anything but a desperate slip and slide from one pained state to another. The image that stayed with me is the cry of the panther being vivisected, its screams becoming sobs as the night wears on and it becomes, under the humanising knife, more and more conscious of what's being done to it. Terrifying.

6. Donna Tartt, The secret history
Modern Greek tragedy, crime thriller, elegy for lost youth, study of character? Again, it's a novel that doesn't easily bear comparison with other works - and yet how the reader falls into it, seduced by the precise lyricism of the flawed narrator, the vividness of atmosphere and the air of the mystical hanging over the mundane and the stark psychological frictions. So irresistible and seductive it's almost a guilty pleasure.

7. Ira Levin, The Stepford wives
A perfect little thriller, and much subtler than the movies would have you believe. Something is going on in Stepford, but exactly what is left hanging. Is the heroine's sci-fi theory correct, meaning that she's stuck in a town of murderers? Is she losing her marbles in a world of psychological horror, building up her fears of sexism and entrapment into a crazed fantasy? Is she right that there's something terrible happening, but wrong about what it is? The secret of Stepford hangs tantalisingly out of reach in a gripping and graceful little sleight of hand that keeps the book eternally fresh.

8. Michel Faber, Under the skin
What on earth is going on in this book? For chapter after chapter we don't find out. Instead, we simply follow the dubious heroine around at her own pace until we discover everything we need to know. Faber holds his nerve brilliantly and, in the end, the study of personality and the tragically confined viewpoints of the characters are what stay in the memory along with the horror of the premise.

9. Truman Capote, In cold blood
Technically a factual book but, knowing what we do about Capote, reading it with a questioning eye, can we trust him when he says there's no fiction involved? Can we believe his claim of perfect recall of conversations where he took no notes? Can we trust his honesty in his portraits of the two killers, his willingness or otherwise to do justice to both of them, his evasiveness about the effect of his own relationship with them? And yet, for all the questions raised about his ethics in writing it, in itself it's a strongly moral book, a passionate and persuasive cry against the death penalty, filled with a yearning for common humanity. Paradoxically, a work of true crime that works best if read as a work of fiction, an endless moral conundrum.

10. Gillian Bradshaw, The wolf hunt
A re-telling of one of the medieval Lays of Marie de France, it conveys the story of a werewolf Breton knight with a light touch that's wonderfully entertaining. It is also an intelligent and compassionate attempt to understand the characters through modern eyes. It should be a straight supernatural story, but somehow it doesn't feel like it; it's too naturalistic, too historically detailed, too convincing. Bradshaw is an author I've loved since I was a child. She has a great knack for writing historical fiction that occasionally features magic without ever letting the magic unseat the historical verisimilitude. The wolf hunt is the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy day or to take on holiday; entertaining and relaxing, she puts no strain on your attention without ever neglecting your intelligence. A lovely easy read, based on good old-fashioned storytelling.

Malcolm Tait's top 10 wildlife books
Guardian, 2006-08-16.

Malcolm Tait is the editor of Going, going, gone? (Think Books), an illustrated compilation of 100 animals and plants in danger of extinction, and the author of Animal tragic (Think Books), a collection of common misunderstandings about the natural world.

"There's a tendency among some to think of wildlife writing as being a waffly little affair that rambles on about otters or daffodils or babbling brooks, while the rest of us get on with something a good bit meatier like a juicy novel or a well-researched biography. How wrong that thinking is. It is our relationship with the natural world that over the millennia has formed us, informed us, and shaped the way we live and, when we are disconnected from it, we are left with a hollow void into which pour stress, depression and a vague sense of meaninglessness. Good wildlife books don't just tell us about wildlife, they tell us about the people who wrote them, and most importantly, they tell us about ourselves."

1. Richard Mabey, Nature cure
If the best wildlife writing reveals as much about the writer as the wildlife itself, then this is the best of them all. Mabey is brutally frank and honest about his own life, his depression, and his fear that nature may no longer hold the answers for him. The more he tries to engage with it, the more disconnected from the world he feels. But the book charts his path out of despair, as he finds a way to let nature back in and fire up the wild bits of his imagination. It's an inspiring book, written in Mabey's richly evocative language, and it's painful too: probably the best understanding of 'biophilia', mankind's innate relationship with nature, out there.

2. Rudyard Kipling, The jungle book
Kipling, I think, was where much of it began for me. I adored his animal tales as a lad, such as the idiosyncratic, rocking-chair-by-the-fireside fables of the Just so stories and the heroic and suspense-filled Rikki-tikki-tavi. But it was The jungle book that really gripped me, a rite of passage yarn in which the vicissitudes of life were represented by the forces of nature. Of course, I didn't understand all this at the time - I just loved reading about Baloo, Bagheera and all and singing along to the songs of the Disney version - but I now realise that I grew up with Mowgli, and that I've been going back to the jungle ever since.

3. Simon Barnes, How to be a bad birdwatcher
You know the feeling: you're reading a book, and as you turn every page you're nodding in agreement, as if the writer has popped into your head and committed your own thoughts to paper. This is one of books. It's about being a normal birdwatcher, reasonably knowledgeable, constantly passionate, but often a bit confused as to what you've seen or heard, and with the vague feeling that everyone else you're with knows so much more. It's the book for those of us who find birdwatching pleasurable, not competitive, and it's terribly funny to boot. I always smile, now, when I see a sparrowhawk. I urge you to read this book to find out why.

4. Steve Brooks & Richard Lewington, Field guide to the dragonflies and damselflies of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
You can't have a list of wildlife books without including a guide book although, with my shelves groaning with them, which one to choose? I've gone for this excellent little number, partly because it's clearly written and well laid out, partly because it's superbly illustrated, partly because it's published by the excellent British Wildlife Publishing team - but mainly because a whole new world has opened up for me since buying it. If you've never looked closely at dragonflies before, this book will set you in the right direction, and I guarantee that as you get to know these fascinating creatures you'll have new marvels to understand and enjoy every time you take a summer walk.

5. Peter Matthiessen, Birds of heaven
A master writer, probably best known for his treatment of the snow leopard. Yet this book about cranes, which he studied during a global tour, is possibly even greater. The book captures the majesty, elegance and plight of the birds, complete with Matthiessen's extraordinary eye for detail and ease of communication. The best way to sum up this book is to use his own words. "Perhaps more than any other living creatures," he writes, cranes "evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species - and ours, too, though we learn it very late - must ultimately depend for survival."

6. Ian Stewart, Nature's numbers
"If you think you hate maths," wrote a reviewer of this book, "let Professor Stewart convince you otherwise." Very true. Here's a great little book that explains mathematical patterns in the natural world in an easy way to follow, and reveals plenty of natural wonders in the process. Using maths to explain biodiversity, chaos, and even the numbers of petals on flowers, it's a good read, constantly informative, and a fine example of how different disciplines come together to give a clearer view of the world - a process named consilience by that great naturalist E. O. Wilson.

7. E. O. Wilson, The future of life
Talking of Wilson, here's a fascinating book that he brought out in 2002 which is a great example of conservation-based writing. The ecological debate will always rage on - should mankind continue to experiment with new sciences and discoveries, or are we destroying our world and ourselves in the process - and Wilson gets to the heart of the arguments superbly, driven by a constant love of the animals with which we share the planet. Agree with him or not, he's a stimulating writer and this is a stimulating book.

8. Edward Thomas, In pursuit of spring
More a travel book than a wildlife book, the text is nonetheless greatly formed by the encounters with nature that Thomas experiences on his trip from London to the Quantocks nearly a century ago. An aesthetic, observant writer, Thomas is heir to a long tradition of thoughtful British naturalists from Gilbert White in the 18th century onwards. And he's such a sweet man. Of the many books that have been published that cross nature-writing with travel-writing, I choose Thomas for his simple strength of character, his dedicated love of his family and the world around him, and for the poignancy of his death. Having feared for the future of the natural world, his own life was snuffed out a few years later in the first world war.

9. Cyril Littlewood & D. W. Ovenden, The world's vanishing animals
An unashamedly nostalgic choice. Published in two volumes (mammals and birds) in 1969, this was my introduction to the idea that extinction wasn't just for dinosaurs and dodos. I used to pore over Denys Ovenden's illustrations of familiar polar bears and black rhinos, and less familiar takahes and nyalas, and wonder whether I could do anything to help. Published by the Wildlife Youth Service, part of Peter Scott's WWF, it was a call to action for young folk. Trouble is, we haven't fully listened to it. The book's dustjacket records that about 1,000 animal species were faced with extinction at time of publication: today, the World Conservation Union's Red List of animals about which to be concerned contains over 16,000 entries.

10. J. A. Baker, The peregrine
The last in my list is, perhaps oddly, a book I haven't yet read. I've included it because I've only recently heard about it, I can't wait to read it, and I don't see why I can't find something new in this list, as well as you. By all accounts, the book is a reminder of the wildness of England (it was published in 1967), and a tour de force of language as Baker explains over and over again, yet grippingly and compellingly, the daily hunts of a local falcon. Eventually, apparently, one gets the sense that he and the falcon are as one. Sounds superb. And which book did I bump to get The peregrine on the list? Darwin's The origin of species. It's a great and important book. But then, you already knew that.

Felix Dennis's top 10 anti-poverty books
Guardian, 2006-09-04.

Felix Dennis is a poet (he endows the annual Forward poetry prize for best first collection), a publisher, and one of the richest men in Britain. He is the author of two collections of verse, A glass half full and Lone wolf (both published by Hutchinson). His latest book is How to get rich (Ebury Press), which he describes as "the world's first anti-self help book".

"Money may be the root of all evil, but what would we do without it? The books below are not a guide to the getting of money. Instead, they are books that goaded me into abandoning poverty. Which is a different thing - at least, for those of us who have been poor."

1. Charles Dickens, Great expectations
This is the Dickens novel I return to most often. Great expectations has been described as "Dickens's harshest indictment of society". Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money. Dickens can be a hard read today. His prose is serpentine, long-winded, full of what Kafka described as his "opulence and careless prodigality". Even so, and for all his faults, Dickens is the greatest of English novelists and will repay careful readers with a cornucopia of insights into the human condition. Especially poverty.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
When all is said and done, what is this classic adventure (supposedly written for children, but read more often by adults) all about? It is about the getting of money. The hero is an annoying twerp. The so-called good-guys are cut from one-dimensional cloth. But the villain ... oh, the villain! Is there a better-drawn character in popular British fiction than Long John Silver? George Smiley cannot hold a candle to him. What a man! What a rotten, debased, money-driven, thieving, double-dealing pirate! And he redeems himself, too! The favourite book of my childhood and a model for my career since. (The edition illustrated by the great Ralph Steadman is the one to go for).

3. Francis Bacon, The essays : counsels civil and moral
Not a nice man. Not even a good writer, except in his ability to condense the mundane into wit: "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread." So why have his Essays remained by the side of my bed for years? Because he knows. Because he understands. Because he is as wise as he is vicious and as generous as he is wise. Along with Newton and Locke, Thomas Jefferson thought him "one the greatest men who has ever lived, without any exception". Bacon's counsels on wealth and negotiating are priceless. Were he alive today, he would eat Warren Buffett's lunch for breakfast.

4. The letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother
What have these letters to do with the getting of money? Everything and nothing. Nothing because Vincent never sought money, except to eat and paint. Everything because the only way for most people to acquire money is to proceed as if such a quest is mad. Just as Vincent was mad, both metaphorically and in the flesh. When the going gets tough, when fortune and luck desert you, when bankruptcy is looming and all seems lost in the idiotic quest to be richer than your neighbour, possession of this book will winch you back from the brink of capitulation. It is the story of a man who never gave in. (The drawings aren't bad, either!)

5. Thomas Paine, Common sense
A pamphlet of such lucidity and power it "created modern America". Yet Tom Paine is something of an embarrassment to the United States. He garners none of the adulation lavished on Washington, Lincoln or Jefferson - or even Benjamin Franklin. He was too rough around the edges. Too noisy. Even so, Paine was a major catalyst and, for my money, the finest author among America's Founding Fathers. If you enjoy Common sense, move on to The rights of man - the British government once tried to hang him for writing it. Nearly everything he is arguing for comes down to money: who earns it, who spends it, who taxes it and who gets to keep it.

6. Adam Smith, The wealth of nations
I have to be kidding, right? Who in their right mind would wade through an unabridged version (and most abridged versions are a menace) of such a tome? My answer is: anyone who wants to understand capitalism and the conditions in which entrepreneurs survive and prosper. Besides, it's not as heavy going as you might think - especially if you purchase an edition with a running commentary in the margin and a superb index. There is a damn good reason this book is still in print 230 years after its first publication. Don't let its scholarly reputation put you off.

7. Hugh Johnson, Wine
A crucial spur. An early edition, abandoned in a boarding house by an over-the-hill opera singer fleeing his landlord, made its surprising way into my hands in the mid-70s. So this was how the rich spent their dosh? It took another ten years before I pulled the cork from my first bottle of decent Margaux - after that, it was plain sailing. There may be fancier books on wine today, but the enthusiasm and joie de vivre present in this early Johnson guide can still send me humming down to my cellar in search of yet another gift from the gods of the grape.

8. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The buildings of England
Another spur. Bless Penguin Books and, especially, bless the publisher Allen Lane, who made this series possible. Mr Lane did more for grammar school boys like me than all the post-war educational ministers rolled together. Here was glory. Here was beauty. And here was a fuzzy marker that not all Germans were the 'bad guys' - Pevsner was a German Jew who escaped Hitler in the 1930s. Above all, here was money. By God, what had it cost to erect these marvels? "One day", I swore to myself, "one day, I will build myself my own architectural marvel." And I did.
Touchstone : Pevsner Buildings of England

9. Mark von Doren (ed.), An anthology of world poetry
A generous, wide-ranging, eye-opening collection. Inside its battered covers, (which still have pride of place among hundreds of books of verse on my shelves), I met André Spire for the first time. And Francois Villon. And Thomas Love Peacock and a hundred others. As to the getting of money, Villon was a burglar and murderer - a one-man university on the joys of ill-gotten loot. Besides, I knew that if I wished to become a poet myself, I should have to make lots and lots of money, if I was to avoid the usual, dreary poet-in-the-rat-infested-garret syndrome.

10. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds
Once read, never forgotten. Mackay was a journalist and poet whose work is forgotten today, apart from this one marvellous book published in 1841. I won't spoil it by even hinting at the examples he chooses to illustrate outbreaks of public mania and mass idiocy, but his conclusions should be irresistible to anyone seeking wealth: (1) There's one born every minute; (2) Large lies are more easily believed than small lies; (3) When the music stops, be somewhere else.

Trevor White's top 10 books about dining
Guardian, 2006-09-11.

Trevor White grew up in the restaurant business before embarking on a career as a food critic in the great cities of the world. He is editor of The Dubliner and author of Kitchen con, a memoir of a life lived at the heart of the restaurant racket.

1. Joanna Blythman, Bad food Britain
Britain's best food journalist, this softly-spoken Scot fearlessly exposes the machinations of a food industry that is almost contemptuous of its own customers. Destined to become a classic, like Blythman's last book, Shopped : the shocking power of British supermarkets.

2. Andrew Todhunter, A meal observed
Arguably the longest restaurant review in history, and one of the wisest, was published just four years ago. Todhunter's passionate and forensic examination of one meal - at Taillevent, "a Michelin three-star restaurant considered by many critics to be the finest in France and thus the world" - is social history, culinary adventure, and, at its best, a love letter.

3. Myrtle Allen, The Ballymaloe cookbook
Ballymaloe is the beginning and end of Irish cooking. Three generations of Allens work in the country house hotel, restaurant and cookery school. Myrtle Allen - now in her eighties - still greets guests with charm and immoderate grace. Her seminal book of recipes, first published in 1984, remains a richly rewarding companion in the kitchen.

4. Jeffrey Steingarten, The man who ate everything
Described as a cross between M. F. K. Fisher and H. L. Mencken, Jeffrey Steingarten is the most gregarious food writer in America today. This collection of the lawyer's essays for Vogue is a scintillating introduction to the work of a man who will literally eat anything for a headline.

5. Roy Strong, Feast
From the extravagant spectacles of ancient Rome to the culinary dark ages, when the Catholic church became the only arbiter of table etiquette, and then on to the medieval period, with its trestle tables laden with flagons of wine, Strong explores the history of the world through man's behaviour in the dining room. The dinner party is, apparently, just a way of sustaining and reiterating the social order.

6. Eric Schlosser, Fast food nation
Eric Schlosser is a Morgan Spurlock for the metropolitan set; both have done the state some service. Disturbing and engrossing, this is the book that encouraged a movement that may just secure an improvement in the quality of the food we are lavishly brainwashed to consume.

7. Alan Richman, Forking it over
Critics who advertise their ignorance are an English specialty. In this collection of culinary musings, American GQ's food critic Alan Richman exhibits his outré charm - he calls honey "bee-puke". "I have been known," writes Richman, "to stand in front of my microwave, reheating coffee, wondering why it takes so long."

8. Simon Wright, Tough cookies
Wright is the former editor of the AA Restaurant Guide who resigned in protest over the rating, in his own guide, of Petrus (Wright's boss had tried and failed to reserve a particular table at the restaurant for an important lunch). In this memoir, Wright meets some of the great English chefs - and bitches on the guidebook racket.

9. Michael Winner, Winner's dinners
Like a cuddly bear with rotten teeth, Michael Winner is just a bit endearing. The good news for restaurateurs is that he is easy to recognise. He looks like Barbara Cartland. The bad news is that he is remarkably candid, and strangely incorruptible. Yes, he has favourites, like all of us, and no, he doesn't make any secret of that fact. But for a man who styles himself as a professional buffoon, what's interesting about Winner is his own intolerance of stupidity. It's not that he doesn't suffer fools. He gives them no reason to live.

10. Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen confidential
This celebrated memoir is a homage to the "whacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees ... drunks, sneaks, thieves, sluts and psychopaths" who work in restaurant kitchens. Are critics any less criminal than chefs? Look at the title of my book. Call it an act of worship if you wish. It was in fact a steal. Such acts are typical in the restaurant world, which is full of rip-off artists. Imitation explains why so many second-rate chefs survive. But a cook who dares to tell the truth? Now that's unusual. No wonder he did so well.

David Crystal's top 10 books on the English language
Guardian, 2006-09-20.

Professor David Crystal is one the world's foremost linguistic experts. His latest book, The fight for English (published by OUP) assesses the debate over rights and wrongs in English usage, with examples from early modern English via Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson to our modern developments such as email and texting, and explains why he believes that when it comes to spelling and grammar, we should say no to zero tolerance. He chooses his favourite books on the English language.

1. The Oxford English dictionary
If I were ever asked which book I would to take to a desert island, I would opt immediately for the second edition of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary - or OED, as it is popularly called - and hope that the island had an electricity supply so that I could download the online version or use the CD. It is without doubt the most comprehensive and detailed account of the history of English vocabulary ever. Its process of continual editorial revision provides a voyage of linguistic discovery that, I am happy to say, never comes to an end.

2. Randolph Quirk, The use of English
This is the book that opened my eyes - and the eyes of several generations of English students - to the range, versatility, and flexibility of the English language. It brought home the importance of always linking the study of language to the study of literature, and in its range of examples from both linguistic and literary sources it gives a perfect illustration of how the subject should be taught. There was a second edition in 1968, and in 1990 it was replaced by English in Use, which Quirk co-wrote with his wife, Gabriele Stein. But nothing could replace the freshness and impact of the original volume.

3. Albert C. Baugh, A history of the English language
This book just goes on and on. I used its second (1957) edition when I was an undergraduate and was fascinated by both the range of its coverage and the depth of its treatment. It manages to pack an enormous amount of illustrative detail into its 450 or so pages. Numerous other histories of the language have since been written, but this one holds a special place for its balanced views and accessible scholarship.

4. Roget's thesaurus of English words and phrases
No name has come to be more synonymous with "thesaurus" than Roget's. He has even become a common noun: I have "a Roget" on my shelves. Indeed I have a dozen Rogets, as his thesaurus has now appeared in numerous editions, and has been revised, expanded, and abridged more times than any other. It was a truly remarkable work for its period, and anyone who has tried to update it or rework its content (as I have) cannot fail to recognise the enormous labour that went into its compilation. It is the best first source of reference we have for those many occasions when we are dimly aware of the meaning we want to express and are searching for the best word with which to express it.

5. Bill Bryson, Mother tongue
I have the greatest of admiration for non-specialists who take an interest in a subject and explore it with respect and accuracy, adding a level of accessibility and an individual slant that academics would do well to emulate. Few have succeeded; and none have succeeded so well as Bill Bryson in this book. It's a delightful, easy-to-read survey - though with its good humour, wealth of anecdote, and boyish enthusiasm, "romp" would be a better word.

6. Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik, A comprehensive grammar of the English language
This was the grammar I had been waiting for since the 1960s - the first real "reference grammar" of modern times. If you think of a dictionary as a reference lexicon - a book in which you can look up any word you want and find out all about it - then this book did the same for grammar - or, at least, it moved closer to that goal than any previous work had done. The Quirk Grammar, as it is often called, is still the book to which I most often refer when exploring a point of English grammatical usage.

7. Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, Edward Finegan, The Longman grammar of spoken and written English
The Quirk Grammar was comprehensive in scope, but limited in the statistical information it provided about the different styles of English usage. LGSWE (pronounced "log-swee") was the first to start filling that gap. It provided a huge amount of data about the differences between British and American grammar, as well as about several important genres - conversation, fiction, news, and academic prose. Because its descriptive framework was largely the same as the Quirk Grammar, it proved easy to relate the findings of the two books. I'm always delving into this book.

8. Richard M. Hogg (ed.-in-chief), The Cambridge history of the English language
This amazing project was years in the making, and appeared over a decade from 1992. I'm not surprised it took so long. Marshalling some 50 academics to write major accounts of their field - in some cases, of 100 or so pages - and getting them to submit their pieces on time must have been a Herculean task. In fact, of course, some of them didn't submit on time, which is why the project took so long! But it was worth it, despite the wait: nothing is likely to match this history for its range and depth of coverage for a very long time.

9. Pam Peters, The Cambridge guide to English usage
If you find it helpful to go to Fowler, Gowers, Partridge, or any of the other famous pundits of the past for advice about English usage, then you will value this book. It is the first usage guide to benefit from the computer age. It is solidly based on a corpus of real data, and it is the first book to be truly international, providing information about differences between British, American, Australian, and other regional variants of English. It points the way forward towards the new, internet-fuelled genre of usage guides that will surely emerge in the present century.

10. David Crystal, The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language
I am often asked which of my own books on this subject I have most enjoyed writing. It is a difficult call, because I always enjoy whatever I happen to be writing, and for that brief period the ongoing project is the most important thing in the history of the universe. But this encyclopedia was special. It gave me the opportunity to present, for the first time, a full-colour illustrated account of English, and offered me a collaboration with publisher, picture-researcher, photographer and designer which was both challenging and highly creative. And it all started because the son of a friend asked me why he couldn't find a book on the English language with pictures in it.

Colum McCann's top 10 novels on poets
Guardian, 2006-10-03.

Zoli, the latest novel from the award-winning Colum McCann, published last month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tells the story of a Romani poet, following her from her early days with a travelling company of harpists to a life of fame under the socialist government of Czechoslovakia, to exile and a sort of return. Here he chooses his top 10 novels featuring poets.

"The American poet and fiction writer, Jim Harrison, has said that poetry at its best is the language you would give your soul if you could teach your soul to speak. Poets, he says, are an odd sort who feel called upon to make up strange, lovely songs about death and the indefinite reprieve we are all in the process of travelling through. Strange then, that there are so few poets at the centre of novels. Maybe it has to do with the old adage that poets can't drive and they also bum the novelist's cigarettes.

"In any case, poets have their fingers on a different pulse and it's generally a tough thing for a novelist to conjure up such a reliable poet. You end up swimming in waters that most other sensible people drown in. Still, all things excellent are both difficult and rare - and every now and then the novelists get it right. This, then, is an eclectic list of novels in which poets appear and sometimes disappear. The difficulty, as with any list, is in establishing where the silences are, or to make excuses for them. There are many novels about poets that I have left out: Kerouac's On the road, A. S. Byatt's Possession, Nabakov's Pale fire, Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and countless others. I have also included some raw contemporary books that haven't had a proper run against time yet. Not everything that I have chosen will rhyme for readers, perhaps because, like much good poetry, they're not always supposed to."

1. John Williams, Stoner
One of the great forgotten novels of the past century. I have bought at least 50 copies of it in the past few years, using it as a gift for friends. It is universally adored by writers and readers alike. The opening page declares John Stoner to be more or less a non-entity, his name becoming to older colleagues "a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones a sound which evokes no sense of the past." Born into a rural farming family, Stoner leaves the land to study and is soon sideswipped when, in a compulsory English class, he is asked to interpret a Shakespearian sonnet. Against all expectations, he becomes a professor of the classics at the University of Missouri. He teaches; marries; has a tragic yet gorgeous affair. He fights no obvious wars, nor wins any grand intellectual battles, except that with poetry. The book is so beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic. If any further recommendation is needed, the book was also a favourite of the late John McGahern who revered its profound craftwork.

2. Peter Carey, My life as a fake
Carey is one of the great ventriloquists of contemporary literature. My life as a fake is based on a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia during Carey's childhood: in the novel a phantom poet taunts and haunts us. No matter what the time or place, Carey is the sort of writer who is always there when the bread comes out of the oven.

3. Milan Kundera, The book of laughter and forgetting
"It's a novel about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and Prague, about Prague and the angels ..." This great, polymorphous work is also an ode to innocence, philosophy, poetry and the sense, as Kundera says, that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

4. Anne Michaels, Fugitive pieces
Another book of memory and forgetting. If I were to take a box of books with me towards wherever it is go when we're finished with where we are now, Fugitive pieces would be one of these. A poet, or rather a series of poets, lives at the book's very heart. Fugitive pieces begins with a stunning image from the Holocaust and moves ever outwards. It is a novel to be surrendered to and its triumph is the dignity it allows its reader and its central character, Jakob Beer.

5. Sean O'Reilly, The swing of things
At the opening of this contemporary novel, an Irish street poet intones for passersby: "Poetry on tap, the great classics of Irish literature. Joyce and his chamber pots. Wilde and his twilight balconies. Yeats and his randy ghosts. I'll take you turf cutting with Heaney or onion eating with Swift ... " The lad of the ceaseless hum becomes a major character in this novel from a young Northern Irish writer whose is now, perhaps, one of the most vital voices in current Irish literature.

6. Antonia Logue, Shadow box
Another young writer from Northern Ireland, Logue writes about the intertwined lives of Mina Loy, the modernist poet, Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight boxing champion, and Arthur Craven, the shaky human ground between the two. What a splendid cocktail, wonderfully well written. Words, like punches and dolphins, arrived in the most unexpected places.

7. Kevin Canty, Winslow in love
A novel that came out last year and just didn't get sung the way it should have been. Winslow, a burned-out poet soaked in gin and misery, takes a position at a small Montana College. He falls in love, as older poets seem to do - ridiculously backwards, as if with a younger self. Only someone as brilliant as Canty is able to drag us out of the college novel genre and bring to life a landscape of age and desire worthy of a Yeats poem.

8. Orham Pamuk, Snow
A Turkish poet spends a dozen years as a political exile in Germany. He returns to witness firsthand the clash between radical Islam and western notions. Beautiful, discursive, looping, intricate, bawdy, this is a novel that wanders in the very best sense. Whenever I go back to Pamuk's novel, I remember where I was when I first read it.

9. Marc Bokanowski, The dog fighter
A very fine debut novel from a young Californian writer. The story concerns a drifter in Mexico doomed to dog fighting. It's a peculiar and savage curse but rather than celebrating gore, the book becomes a meditation on language and choice. The character of "The Poet" - who happens to be the hero's conscience, or maybe his anti-conscience - is beautifully conjured. He sits in the square, smoking, opening up odd boxes of language and aphorisms.

10. James Joyce, Portrait of the artist
I just couldn't leave Joyce's novel off this list. We tend to forget that there's a good degree of irony in Stephen Daedalus's adolescent urge to "go forth and forge in the smith of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race." The deeper irony is that Joyce himself accomplishes that high desire in his later novels where he does indeed "create life out of life." This is one of the world's most acutely realised portraits of a poet-in-training. Impossible for it not to be both a beginning and an end.