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30 December 2000
Rob Grant's top 10 comic science fiction novels
1. The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
2. The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
3. Discworld by Terry Pratchett
4. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick
5. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
6. Venus On The Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout
7. Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer
8. Ringworld by Larry Niven
9. Colony by Rob Grant
10. Backwards by Rob Grant
 
04 December 2000
Mary Warnock's top 10 philosophy books
1. A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume
2. The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
3. Individuals by PF Strawson
4. The Bounds of Sense by PF Strawson
5. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
6. Beast and Man by Mary Midgley
7. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
8. Sense and Sensibilia by JL Austin
9. The Object of Morality by GJ Warnock
10. The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle
 
09 November 2000
Marian Keyes's top 10 relationship books
1. Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
3. Normal Girl by Marly Jong-Fast
4. Secret Dream World of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
5. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
6. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
7. Drinking: a Love Story by Caroline Knapp
8. The Travelling Horn Player by Barbara Trapido
9. Fabulous Nobodies by Lee Tulloch
10. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
 
09 November 2000
William Sutcliffe's top 10 relationship novels
1. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
2. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
3. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
4. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
5. Underworld by Don DeLillo
6. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
7. The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
8. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
9. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
10. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
 
02 November 2000
Michele Hanson's top 10 books about mothers and daughters
1. Once in a House on Fire by Andrea Ashworth
2. Remind Me Who I Am Again by Linda Grant
3. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
4. Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip Roth
5. Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski
6. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
7. Shamela by Henry Fielding
8. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
9. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
10. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
 
18 October 2000
Richard Vinen's top 10 history books
1. England your England by George Orwell (1941)
2. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays by Bernard Cohn (1987)
3. Ce Que J'ai Cru Comprendre (What I thought I understood) by Anne Kriegel (1991)
4. Oni: Stalin's Polish Puppets by Teresa Toranska (1987)
5. Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfields (1997)
6. Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levis (1981)
7. Dark Continent. Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower (1998)
8. Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France, 1870-1914 by Eugen Weber (1977)
9. A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes (1996)
10. Night Frost in Prague: the End of Humane Socialism by Zdenek Mlynr (1980)
 
04 October 2000
Andrew Motion's top 10 poetry books
1. Lyrical Ballads by Anon (1798)In fact by Wordsworth and Coleridge
2. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems by John Keats (1820)
3. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical by Alfred (not yet Lord) Tennyson (1830)
4. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
5. North of Boston by Robert Frost (1914)
6. Poems by Edward Thomas (1917)
7. Poems by WH Auden (1930)
8. The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin (1955)
9. North by Seamus Heaney (1975)
10. Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop (1983)
 
28 September 2000
Alistair Beaton's top 10 New Labour bollocks
1. What they said:
Many of Labour's improvements will not occur overnight.
(Labour Party policy document, January 2000)
What they meant:
Many of Labour's improvements will not occur.
2. What he said:
For better or for worse, we have a democratic system in this country.
(Lord Falconer, minister of state in the Cabinet Office, on Question Time, BBC TV, 11 May 2000)
What he meant:
I didn't get where I am today by being elected.
3. What he said:
You can always tell when an election is about to happen. The Tories head straight for the gutter and start playing the race card.
(Jack Straw, shadow home secretary, speech to Labour Party conference, October 1996)
What he meant:
That's a very nice gutter you've got there. May I join?
4. What he said:
It's a pity we can't have a more intelligent debate.
(John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, Speech to Labour Party Conference,September '99)
What he meant:
I wrote this speech myself.
5. What they said:
A fairer system of student grants.
(Lifelong Learning, Labour Party policy document, 1996)
What they meant:
No student grants.
6. What they said:
Labour aims to achieve a better qualtity of life for all by pursuing joined-up policies.
Labour Party policy document, January 2000
What they meant:
Tony Blair will be in charge in everything.
7. What they said:
Labour believes in the interdependence of town and country
Labour Party policy document, January 2000
What they meant:
We all have second homes.
8. What he said:
Responsibility is what I call the fourth R that is essential to successful schooling.
(Tony Blair, speech at the University of London, 23 June 1995)
What he meant:
The other three are:
Ranting at teachers
Rubbishing schools
Rogering LEA's
9. What he said:
A strong civic society takes seriously its obligations to our elderly.
(Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, House of Commons, 21 March 2000)
What he meant:
75p.
10. What they said:
The country needs a transport system that is safe, efficient, clean and fair.
(Labour Party policy document, January 2000)
What they meant:
France.
 
26 September 2000
Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday's top 10 internet and technology books
1. The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan
2. Interfaces of the Word by Walter J Ong
3. Hypertext 2.0 by George P Landow
4. Modest_Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse by Donna Haraway
5. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle
6. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing by Jay David Bolter
7. The Cyborg Handbook by Chris Gray
8. The Electronic Word by Richard Lanham
9. Neuromancer by William Gibson
10. The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry by Gordon Graham
 
05 September 2000
Anthony Bourdain's top 10 books about food
1. The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller
2. White Heat by Marco Pierre White
3. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
4. The Kitchen by Nicolas Freeling
5. The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola
6. La Cuisine du Marche by Paul Bocuse
7. The Epicurean by Charles Ranhofer
8. The Ivy by AA Gill
9. Le Bernardin Cookbook by Eric Ripert
10. Nose To Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson
 
10 August 2000
Professor Jean E Howard's top 10 books on Shakespeare from the 90s
1. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays by Janet Adelman
2. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame by Gail Paster
3. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus by Margreta de Grazia
4. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities by Jonathan Goldberg
5. Shakespeare Among the Moderns by Richard Halpern
6. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim Hall
7. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England by Richard Helgerson
8. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama by Karen Newman
9. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context by Patricia Parker
10. Shakespeare Without Women by Dympna Callaghan
 
19 July 2000
Linda Grant's top 10 Jewish books
1. The Truce by Primo Levi
2. The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden
3. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
4. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
5. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and other stories by Delmore Schwartz
6. Don't Call it Night by Amos Oz
7. The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick
8. Buchmendel by Stephan Zweig
9. Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present by Deborah Dwork and Robert van der Pelt
10. Konin: A Quest by Theo Richmond
 
23 June 2000
Caroline Sullivan's top 10 books on rock and pop
1. Billion Dollar Babies by Bob Greene
2. STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield
3. Powder by Kevin Sampson
4. Groupie by Jenny Fabian, Johnny Byrne and Jonathon Green
5. I'm With the Band by Pamela Des Barres
6. Everything: A Book About the Manic Street Preachers by Simon Price
7. Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star by Ian Hunter
8. The Rolling Stone Album Guide ed Anthony Decurtis
9. Starlust by Fred and Judy Vermorel
10. I Hate Rock' n' Roll by Tony Tyler
 
31 May 2000
Mike Phillips's top 10 crime novels
1. A Coffin for Demetrios by Eric Ambler
2. Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
3. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
4. The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
5. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
6. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
7. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
8. The Way We Die Now by Charles Willeford
9. Murder in the Central Committee by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
10. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
 
30 May 2000
Susan Blackmore's top 10 books
1. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
2. Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
3. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
4. The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
5. The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Roshi Kapleau
6. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
7. Phantasms of the Living by E. Gurney, F.W. Myers and F. Podmore (1886)
8. Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
9. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
10. Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome
 
27 April 2000
Robin Houston's top 10 books on programming
1. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing by Philip Greenspun
2. Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides
3. Inner Loops by Rick Booth
4. UNIX Network Programming by W Richard Stevens
5. The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P Brooks Jr
6. Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl
7. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
8. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
9. Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
10. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
 
06 April 2000
Robert McCrum's top 10 books of the twentieth century
1. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
2. Ulysses by James Joyce
3. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
5. Murphy by Samuel Beckett
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
8. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
9. A Bend In The River by VS Naipaul
10. Nostromo by Josef Conrad
 
06 April 2000
Robert McCrum's top 10 books of the twentieth century - Top 10 US/English books of the last century
1. Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
2. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
3. USA by John Dos Passos
4. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
5. Stories by Ernest Hemingway
6. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
7. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
8. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
9. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
10. Song of Solomon by Toni Morison
 
30 March 2000
Peter Ho Davies's top 10 short story collections
1. Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov (ed. Richard Ford)
2. Dubliners by James Joyce
3. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor by Flannery O'Connor
4. Collected Fictions by Borges
5. The Collected Stories by Ernest Hemingway
6. Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
7. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley by Grace Paley
8. The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes
9. Selected Stories by Alice Munro
10. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
 
29 March 2000
Jacqueline Wilson's top 10 children's books
1. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
2. Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
3. What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge
4. The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett
5. Nancy and Plum by Betty Macdonald
6. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
7. Lavender's Blue compiled by Kathleen Lines
8. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
9. The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman
10. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
 
22 March 2000
Tim Radford's top 10 books on science
1. Seeing and Believing by Richard Panek
2. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
3. Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees
4. Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
5. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
6. The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life by Paul Davies
7. Life: An Unauthorised Biography by Richard Fortey
8. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
9. The Diversity of Life by Edward O Wilson
10. The Oxford Companion To The Year by Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens
 
20 March 2000
Toby Litt's top 10 crime novels
1. A Study In Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Dead Clever by Scarlett Thomas
3. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
4. The Big Lebowski by Ethan and Joel Coen
5. A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr
6. Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
7. Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell
8. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
9. The Ipcress File by Len Deighton
10. The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
 
20 March 2000
Kate Atkinson's top 10 books
1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
2. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. Just William by Richmal Crompton
5. What Maisie Knew by Henry James
6. Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover/Collected Stories by Donald Barthelme
7. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
10. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
... And I can't believe there wasn't room for 11. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
 
20 March 2000
Jon Courtenay Grimwood's top 10 cult SF novels
1. Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
2. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
3. Vurt by Jeff Noon
4. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
5. The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar
6. Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
7. The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End Of The World by Haruki Murakami
8. Red Shift by Alan Garner
9. Death: the High cost of Living by Neil Gaiman/Chris Bachalo/Mark Bukingham
10. A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
 
25 February 2000
Norman Spinrad's top 10 novels
1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
3. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
4. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick
5. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
6. Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine by Alexandre Dumas
7. Looking for the Mahdi by N Lee Wood
8. The Once and Future King by TH White
9. Thirty Six Views of Mt Fuji by Hokusai
10. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
 
21 February 2000
Malcolm McLaren's top 10 books of the moment
1. Peter Pan by JM Barrie
2. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
3. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
4. Christian Dior by Francoise Giroud
5. The Private Case by Patrick Kearney
6. Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
7. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
8. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
9. The Story of O by Pauline Reage
 
21 February 2000
Vic Marks' top 10 books on cricket
1. The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley
2. The Cricket Captains of England by Alan Gibson
3. Harold Gimblett, Tormented Genius of Cricket by David Foot
4. 46 Not Out by RC Robertson Glasgow
5. Cricket With A Swing by John Clarke
6. A Lot of Hard Yakka by Simon Hughes
7. The Art of Cricket by Donald Bradman
8. A Century of Great Cricket Quotes by David Hopps
9. Tales From a Long Room by Peter Tinniswood
10. Beyond a Boundary by CLR James
 
07 February 2000
Joanna Trollope's top 10 nineteenth-century novels
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
3. Persuasion by Jane Austen
4. Vanity Fair by WM Thackeray
5. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
6. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
7. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
8. North and South by Mrs Gaskell
9. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
10. Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
 
04 February 2000
Libby Brooks's top 10 women's novels
1. The Women's Room: Marilyn French
2. Beloved: Toni Morrison
3. The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath
4. The Bone People: Keri Hulme
5. Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë
6. The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood
7. The Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf
8. Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier
9. Frankenstein: Mary Shelley
10. The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway
 
04 February 2000
Mohamed Al Fayed's top 10 reads
1. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
2. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. Bring Home the Revolution by Jonathan Freedland
5. A History Book for Scots by Walter Bower
6. Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding
7. The Tutankhamun Prophecies by Maurice M. Cotterell
8. How Tory Governments Fall by Anthony Seldon
9. The Private World of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Hugo Vickers
10. Tom Paine by John Keane
 
04 February 2000
Mariella Frostrup's top 10 books to impress a prospective lover
1. Chronicle Of A Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
3. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
4. Four Letters Of Love by Niall Williams
5. Anyone Here Been Raped And Speak English by Edward Behr
6. Into The Heart Of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon
7. Naples '44 by Norman Lewis
8. Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
9. The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
10. The Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith
 
04 February 2000
John Hegarty's top 10 books for would-be advertisers
1. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
2. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
3. Fatherland by Robert Harris
4. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy by Charles Leadbeater
5. Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate by Steven Bach
6. Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
7. Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough
8. From Those Wonderful Folks who Brought you Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising War by Jerry Della Femina
9. 100 Greatest Advertisements by Julian Lewis Watkins
10. The Tortilla Curtain by T Coraghessan Boyle
 
14 January 2000
Jenny Colgan's top 10 comic novels
1. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
3. Any Jeeves at all by PG Wodehouse
4. With Love From Hell by Matt Groening
5. The Young Visiters, Or, Mr Salteena's Plan by Daisy Ashford
6. Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
7. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
8. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend
9. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
10. Our Dumb Century by The Onion
 
07 January 2000
John Tusa's top 10 books on culture
1. & 2. Autobiography by Kenneth Clark
3. Galina by Galina Vishnevskaya
4. Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times by Peter Heyworth
5. Something Like Fire: A Memoir of Peter Cook edited by Lin Cook
6. James Joyce by Richard Ellman (Oxford University Press, 1959)
7. An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner
8. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
9. Life of Rossini by Stendhal
10. Eisenstein by Marie Seton
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