This is biography of the very highest quality.Pete DaviesTravel: Stephen Smith's Land of Miracles (Little, Brown) is a wonderfully observant account of Cuba, elegantly written with a dry wit and a nice edge of self-deprecation. If you think you have already read more than enough about Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee's wonderfully intelligent and luminously evocative Virginia Woolf (Vintage) will change your mind. Mitchell's book is a tour de force of exhaustive scholarship which reads like a thriller. The bigger scandal is the Establishment cover-up it reveals to protect Lord Aldington's reputation by withdrawing vital evidence from his trial.

Both seemed to me works of such mighty power, and so relevant to our own time, that I shall always think of them not as expressions of the past but as memorials of my own fin de siecle.But I reviewed half a dozen excellent new books, too, and one in particular excited me as plainly the first volume of a definitive work: N A M Rodgers's The Safeguard of the Sea (HarperCollins), the opening voyage in his naval history of Britain - authoritative, graceful, intensely readable.John CampbellThe most astonishing book I have read this year is Ian Mitchell's scrupulous account of the Tolstoy-Aldington litigation, The Cost of a Reputation (Topical Books, pounds 15): privately published, because no commercial publisher would touch it, which is a scandal in itself. Equally funny, in a snobbish, self-deprecating, rather feline way, is James Lees-Milne's Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-74 (Murray). Here he worries - unnecessarily - about incontinence and senility, and wonders "who on earth can these Chinks be?" after spotting Gurkhas outside St James's Palace.Jan MorrisI shall remember 1997 chiefly because of two extraordinary European novels of the past which I read (or rather finished) for the first time: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Minerva) and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (Picador), both in translation from the German. Mahon's despair at the blandness of modern life is shared by the narrator of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version (Chatto), a wise-cracking Jewish Montrealer: 18th-century in its energy, this must be the funniest novel in years. Like his fellow-Ulster Protestant Louis MacNeice, he is elegant, urbane and classical in form; no doubt his preference for writing about metropolitan angst in Paris or New York rather than peat-cutting or sectarian strife has contributed to his undervaluation. Crimes and Splendours (Bulfinch) is both an impeccably produced retrospective and an attempt to view his work as the culmination of a tradition stretching back to the pioneers of American landscape photography.Jeremy LewisIn The Yellow Book (Gallery Press), Derek Mahon proves again that he is the best Irish poet of the Heaney generation. It is also a perfect illustration of reading and criticism as lived - as opposed to desk-bound - activities.

Richard Misrach's extraordinary photographs of the western deserts of the US are fairly well known now. Here, Brussels sprouts and parsnips are for sculpting into elaborate dragons and pigs.Geoff DyerSven Lindqvist's Exterminate all the Brutes (Granta) was many things: a reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an account of a journey into the Sahara desert, and an investigation of the genocidal impulse that underwrote the colonialist enterprise Lindqvist's book is virtually unprecedented. As someone who loves cookery books, but not cooking, I relished the subversive Play with your Food by Joost Elffers. In 1934, lesbian heiress "Joe" Carstairs purchased an island in the Bahamas where she ruled supreme. An antidote to this lack of free speech is the free spirit described in another royal biography, Kate Summerscale's The Queen of Whale Cay (Fourth Estate).

British taxpayers shell out millions to give the rest of the world something to tittle-tattle about - yet we are so feudal, we deny ourselves the very pleasure we pay for. Dismissed as "tittle-tattle" by those toadying for knighthoods, this astonishing book is unavailable here. Thanks also to Tinky Winky's Bag (BBC Children's Books) for provididng many a peaceful five minutes.Charlotte CoryKitty Kelley's The Royals (no UK publisher) has made me realise just how brainwashed we all are. Sadder, but just as absorbing, Tim Lott's memoir The Scent of Dried Roses (Penguin) does for Southall what Proust did for Paris. And in her second novel Ella and the Mothers (Sceptre), Rachel Morris shows herself a shrewd judge of femininity. A sprawling London panorama, it features a fabulously prickly cast of single mothers, newspaper magnates and priggish young men fonder of designer kettles than their wives.