Roy Jenkins died recently and his obituaries were many, detailed and lengthy. He is remembered both as a skilled politician of the first rank both in Britain's Labour party and then as a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party with David Owen and Shirley Williams. And as a superlative political biographer of the first rank with definitive works on Gladstone, Asquith, and, now, Churchill.

Your reviewers' very broad range of reactions to this biography are entirely consistent with the reactions Churchill himself produced during his long career. Never was a british politician more hated, reviled, loved and honoured than Churchill. Indeed, during the Thirties, it appeared that he would go down in history as a politician who missed greatness by a significant margin.

Jenkins has achieved a political biography that is readable, clear and, for its subject matter, concise. His distinguished political career in the House of Commons gives him a unique ability to evaluate Churchill as a man of the commons, the quintessential parliamentary practitioner.

He starts by evoking Churchill's remarkable early years, where he moved from an undistinguished school record to daring and arduous travels as a soldier/ journalist. Wracked by money troubles most of his life, we read entertainingly of Churchill's correspondence with his mother, the slightly scandalous, and frequently broke Jenny Jerome as they commiserate/ complain to each other about their stratitened circumstances.

There was in Churchil a tremendous need for power, one that often went unsatisfied. He achieved extraordinary political success at an early age (by the standards of the times) but then his career stalled severely. He was trusted neither by the Liberals nor by the Tories (and at times by very few others).

The story of his early opposition to Hitler is too well known to be repeated in a review. History records that he was raised to power and became the lynchpin of England's ultimately successful (though terribly costly) prosecution of the second world war.

Jenkins does a masterful job of describing Churchill's relationship with FDR, and the history of WWII unfolds magisterially in his hands. One has, however, the distinct impression that the longer the war lasted, the less Churchill was able to affect its outcome, a necessary consequence of American entry, and the need to consult/ co-exist with Stalin.

Churchill's prescience was just as marked post-war when he coined the "iron curtain" as an expression to describe the advent of the cold war. While much could perhaps have been done towards the end of WWII to change this outcome, FDR was too sick, and Churchill too weak. However, his ability to foresee outcomes opaque to others remained exceptionally sharp.

In between these massive subjects, Churchill's unique relationship with his wife, Clementine, is treated sympathetically. At one point, Jenkins describes Clementine's "astonishing ability to be absent at all of the really important times in Churchill's life".

Once Churchill left power he became, inevitably, less interesting; therefore his final years are treated briefly by Jenkins. Indeed, in old age, Churchill became a little pathetic and it is seemly for his biographer to avoid a detailed chronicle of his prolonged decline.

I was in my final year at Oxford when Churchill died. His funeral, self-designed under the tile "Operation Hope Not", was really the end of the victorian era. As his coffin left Westminster Abbey for its final journey by boat and train, the Queen gave Lady Churchill precedence, an unprecedented act at the time underlining the unique place Churchill still occupied in English society. England had won the war but lost its empire, its economy, its place in the world and now its emblematic wartime leader.

Jenkins has written an important, accessible political biography of one of the giants of the twentieth century although in all material respects, Churchill's roots were firmly anchored in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. As his last major work, it serves to underline Lord Jenkins' status as the premier english political biographer of his time. He notes that when he began this biography he regarded Gladstone as the pre-eminent Prime Minister of modern british history. When he finished the book, he had changed his mind and anointed Churchill in his place -- most would agree.

The truly remarkable thing about Elizabeth David was not so much that she could write enthralling and compelling cookbooks ("Mediterranean Food", "French Provincial Cooking", "Italian Cooking"), but that she transformed a glum, drab post-war England by the beauty of her prose and her ability to evoke the sunshine and brilliant colours of the mediterranean. And, further north, the simple beauty of cuisine bourgeoise, home cooking french style.

It was this book that got me started on a lifetime of home cooking. Like all great cookbooks, it can be read and savored without cooking at all. Her ability to evoke time and place is startling -- for example, her recipe for little courgette souffles is wrapped in the story of how she first enjoyed them. Of course, this was in a small country restaurant where the proprietor used his own recipe to make them for her.

She talks vividly about La Mere Poulard and her Mont St. Michel omelettes, for which she offers the original recipe. Roughly translated from the french, it reads: "Monsieur, I get some good eggs, I put them in a bowl and beat vigorously. Then I put them into a pan with good butter and stir constantly. I will be very happy if this recipe gives you pleasure".

I remember, over 30 years ago, the first time I made her recipe for pork chops "to taste like wild boar". They do indeed, and very good they are. Her recipes for classics like Cassoulet, and Bouillabaisse are vivid and provide the cultural context as well as precise directions. Her description of a bouillabaisse on the beach makes you want to catch the next plane there.

She explains the environment of her recipes, their milieu, and their progenitors so that you get right inside the whole theory and practice of french cooking. This is not haute cuisine, though it is not always simple to execute. But her sympathy for the process of cooking and her ability to describe it precisely prefigured writers like Richard Olney and Alice Waters, who owe her, as do we all, a great debt.

In any case, she is directly responsible for the appalling culinary assaults I have perpetrated on family and friends for longer than I care to remember. I still use the book, though most of its pages are now stored directly in my memory.

Auster is an extraordinary writer -- his prose spare and elegant, his focus the shifting shadows between reality and illusion. Never was a book more appropriately titled.

The protagonist, academic David Zimmer, has suffered the nearly unimaginable, but quite credible tragedy of losing his family in an air crash. His response is to drink, to shut himself away, and, when briefly re-introduced to his former life, to be appallingly obnoxious.

His chosen therapy is to write a book about a forgotten (and as it turns out, disappeared) silent film star. The publication of this study produces the remarkable news that his subject is still alive. The story of his subject Hector's life post-Hollywood mirrors the escape Zimmer himself is trying to make from the awful reality of his own tragedy. The parallels between Zimmer as author and Hector as subject are striking.

The resolution of this marvellous novel is both sad and shocking, and yet, as with all Auster's work, there is a note of hope at the end, coupled with the sense that what is real, and what is not, is divided by the thinnest possible line.

If this book were judged only on its evocation of the end of the silent movie period, it would be a complete success. Containing, as it does, many layers of complexity built around what we know to be real, imagine to be real, and imagine to be imagined, seen against the backdrop of unforgettable characters whose own reality is compelling, this is an extraodinary novel by a writer at the height of his powers. Read it more than once -- it will repay you many times over.

Gary Wills is a practicing and committed catholic as well as a rightly celebrated author (Nixon Agonistes et al). It is important to bear this in mind as you read this scholarly, well-researched and devastating indictment of the Catholic hierarchy up to, and very much including popes ancient, modern and current. Wills builds his case methodically, chapter by chapter, and presents a vision of the structure of the catholic church as committed to defending its past no matter how tortuous the reasoning. Whether focused on the church's responsibility towards the jews and in particular its behavior before and during world war II, or on the current pope's near medieval obsessions that may make John Paul II's principal legacy, according to Wills, a "gay clergy", the analysis is relentless and unanswerable. His passages on Humanae Vitae and its predictably tragic consequences are particularly compelling as are his descriptions of the rank manipulation of Vatican Councils in the 19th century and the origins of papal "infallibility". Although completed before the current wave of pedophilia scandals, it prefigures this massive problem with an analysis of cases in Texas. Whether on the status and contribution of women, on the rise of Marianism, or the fuller involvement of the laity in the church, Wills is unerringly perceptive --- and right. This should be required reading for every cardinal and bishop in the United States, in fact the entire hierarchy of the church. It is neither an easy subject nor an easy book to read, but it demands your attention from the moment you start. (I was slightly stunned to find a copy at Costco -- when I looked again, it was no longer there).

Olney is acknowledged by the best in the food field (like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley) as an unimpeachable source of excellence in understanding, tasting, and (by the way) cooking French food. He is, I must acknowledge, opinionated, even arrogant -- he is also almost always right. This book should be read as well as cooked with; absorb it through the skin if you can. My favorites include roasted calf's liver -- absolutely sublime -- and lamb shanks with garlic (unforgettably good). As a european, I acknowledge his view of scrambled eggs as they should be -- soft and creamy, not the overcooked, dried-out buffet eggs of the american breakfast table. And his recipe for poached eggs is perfect -- boil water, turn off the flame, break in eggs, cover, leave.

Simple french food doesn't mean simple cooking; it actually takes real work. But this is the best overall treatise I have read (among hundreds). My second copy is falling apart, I have given it to many friends and I will go on buying it until they take me to the great restaurant in the sky. Don't be without it.