14 November 2007
Peter Ashley's top 10 railway poems
1. The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
2. Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class by John Betjeman
3. Railway Rhymes by CL Graves
4. Harviston End by Peter Ling
5. Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
6. Restaurant Car by Louis MacNeice
7. On the Departure Platform by Thomas Hardy
8. The Send-Off by Wilfred Owen
9. The Tourist's Alphabet by Mr Punch's Railway Book
10. Changing at York by Tony Harrison
 
13 November 2007
Ray French's top 10 black comedies
1. Sudden Times by Dermot Healy
2. Eleven by David Llewellyn
3. The Ledge by Blanaid McKinney
4. The Observations by Jane Harris
5. The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
6. The Joke by Milan Kundera
7. The Madolescents by Chrissie Glazebrook
8. Something Happened by Joseph Heller
9. Under The Frog by Tibor Fischer
10. The Rise & Fall of the Queen of Suburbia by Sarah May
 
23 October 2007
Alison MacLeod's top 10 short stories
1. The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
2. The Dead by James Joyce
3. The Rocking-Horse Winner by DH Lawrence
4. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
6. Meneseteung by Alice Munro
7. Love is not a Pie by Amy Bloom
8. Lilac by Helen Dunmore
9. Vanilla Bright like Eminem by Michel Faber
10. Weddings and Beheadings' by Hanif Kureishi
 
17 October 2007
Wesley Stace's top 10 ventriloquism books
1. Dumbstruck: a Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven O'Connor
2. Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
3. The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist by Henry Cockton
4. Memoirs and Anecdotes of Mr Love, the Polyphonist by George Smith
5. Bunter The Ventriloquist by Frank Richards
6. I Can See Your Lips Moving: the History and Art of Ventriloquism by Valentine Vox
7. Other Voices: Ventriloquism from BC to TV by Stanley Burns
8. The Ventrilo - Throw Your Voice Like A Professional! (author unknown)
9. Practical Ventriloquism by Robert Ganthony
10. True History of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
 
15 October 2007
Kate Colquhoun's top 10 unusual cookbooks
1. The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel
2. Modern Mezze by Anissa Helou
3. How to Feed Your Friends with Relish by Joanna Weinberg
4. Beyond Nose to Tail by Fergus Henderson and Justin Piers Gellatly
5. Beans: A History by Ken Albala
6. The New English Kitchen, Rose Prince
7. Pork and Sons by Stéphane Reynaud
8. Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton Paterson
9. The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
10. The Pedant in the Kitchen, by Julian Barnes
 
09 October 2007
Rachel Seiffert's top 10 books about troubled families
1. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
2. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
3. The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton
4. Honky by Dalton Conley
5. JD Salinger - Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction
6. The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
7. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
8. Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
9. Haus Without Guardians (Haus ohne Hüter) by Heinrich Böll
10. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
 
11 September 2007
Joanne Harris's top 10 kids' books with kickass heroines
1. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
2. The Black Tattoo by Sam Enthoven
3. Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr
4. The Angel Experiment by James Patterson
5. The Diamond Of Drury Lane by Julia Golding
6. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
7. Fearless by Tim Lott
8. The Wish List by Eoin Colfer
9. The Dare Game by Jacqueline Wilson
10. Spilled Water by Sally Grindley
 
29 August 2007
Gemma Malley's top 10 dystopian novels for teenagers
1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
4. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
5. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
6. The Children of Men by PD James
7. The Chrysalids by John Wyndam
8. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. The Children's Story by James Clavell
10. The Diary of Anne Frank
 
29 August 2007
The 10 most popular misconceptions about Oscar Wilde
1. 'Oscar' is the best-known 'Wilde'
2. He was homosexual from his schooldays
3. He coasted through university, with a reputation for langorousness and a love of lilies
4. Apart from writing a couple of plays, a few children's stories, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Picture of Dorian Gray he doesn't seem to have done much
5. Being Irish was just an accident of birth; he was an English author, surely?
6. 'Earnest' was a code-word for 'gay' and wearing a green carnation was a 'secret' sign of homosexuality
7. Oscar Wilde's arrest was delayed by several hours to allow him to catch the last boat-train and escape to the continent
8. Once Oscar Wilde was arrested, tried and imprisoned, Lord Alfred Douglas, who essentially got him into the mess, abandoned him
9. Oscar Wilde died of syphilis
10. Oscar Wilde was merely a hedonist who, as he admitted, put his genius into his life but only his talent into his works
 
27 August 2007
Catherine Sampson's top 10 Asian crime novels
1. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong
2. Playing For Thrills by Wang Shuo
3. Crime De Sang by He Jiahong
4. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
5. Jack the Ladykiller by HRF Keating
6. Out by Natsuo Kirino
7. All She Was Worth by Miyake Miyabe
8. Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto
9. Murder At Mount Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki
10. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
 
25 July 2007
Thomas Bloor's top 10 tales of metamorphosis
1. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
2. The Greek Myths, Volumes 1 and 2, translated by Robert Graves
3. The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones
4. The Dragon's Pearl (Chinese folk tale)
5. The Owl Service by Alan Garner
6. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis
7. The Selkie (Scottish folk tale)
8. The Witches by Roald Dahl
9. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
10. Pinocchio (original story by Carlo Collodi)
 
11 July 2007
Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 books about psychological journeys
1. Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
2. Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
3. Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik
4. Vurt by Jeff Noon
5. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
6. Children of Violence Quintet by Doris Lessing
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
8. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr
9. Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
10. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
 
04 July 2007
Neil Griffiths' top 10 books about outsiders
1. Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky
2. L'Etranger by Albert Camus
3. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
4. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
5. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
6. Beethoven by Maynard Solomon
7. The Poems of William Blake
8. The Outsider by Colin Wilson
9. Native Son by Richard Wright
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
 
05 June 2007
Sarah Salway's top 10 books about unlikely friendships
1. Burn Marks by Sara Paretsky
2. Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes
3. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
4. Mapp and Lucia by E F Benson
5. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
7. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
8. A Month in The Country by JL Carr
9. Time After Time by Molly Keane
10. The Railway Man by Eric Lomax
 
21 May 2007
Adam Thorpe's top 10 satires
1. Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling
2. Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
3. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
4. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
5. The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
6. Exemplary Stories by Cervantes
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
8. The Dunciad by Alexander Pope
9. The Goon Show Scripts by Spike Milligan et al
10. Crap Towns 1 and 2 by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran
 
14 May 2007
Jamie Ivey's top 10 books about wine
1. Mon Docteur, Le Vin by Gaston Derys, watercolours by Raoul Duffy
2. Sideways by Rex Pickett
3. A Good Year by Peter Mayle
4. A vineyard in the Dordogne by Jeremy Josephs
5. Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure by Donald and Pete Kladstrup
6. Romancing the Vine: Life, Love and Transformation in the Vineyards of Barolo by Alan Tardi
7. Wine: A Life Uncorked by Hugh Johnson
8. Vineyards and Vignerons by Robin and Judith Yapp
9. Bon Appetit! Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle
10. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald
 
08 May 2007
Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists
1. James Joyce
2. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
3. Martin Heidegger
4. Paul Celan
5. Franz Kakfa
6. Georges Bataille
7. Francis Ponge
8. Maurice Blanchot
9. Samuel Beckett
10. Alain Robbe-Grillet
 
18 April 2007
Sam Taylor's top 10 books about forgetting
1. The Trial by Franz Kafka
2. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K Dick
3. The Last of Philip Banter by John Franklin Bardin
4. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Lanark by Alasdair Gray
6. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
8. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
9. The Man With the Shattered World by Alexander Luria
 
10 April 2007
Dan Rhodes's top 10 short books
1. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe
2. The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
3. The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger
4. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
5. The Plains of Cement by Patrick Hamilton
6. Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
7. Zazie In The Metro by Raymond Queneau
8. Candide by Voltaire
9. Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb
10. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 
04 April 2007
Fiona Campbell's top 10 books set in Japan
1. The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki
2. I am a Cat by Natsume Soseki
3. Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki
4. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
5. Singular Rebellion by Saiichi Maruya
6. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
7. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
8. Dreaming Pachinko by Isaac Adamson
9. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
 
30 March 2007
Alex Barclay's top 10 psychological thrillers
1. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
2. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
3. Mr Clarinet by Nick Stone
4. The Straw Men by Michael Marshall
5. Every Dead Thing by John Connolly
6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
7. The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips
8. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
9. Every Secret Thing by Laura Lipmann
10. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
 
08 March 2007
Ruth Padel's top 10 women poets
1. Sappho
2. Emily Dickinson
3. Elizabeth Bishop
4. Anna Akhmatova
5. Marina Tsvetaeva
6. Sylvia Plath
7. Anne Carson
8. Carol Ann Duffy
9. Jo Shapcott
10. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
 
01 March 2007
Richard Gwyn's top 10 books in which things end badly
1. The Bible by various authors
2. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
3. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
4. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
5. The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
6. The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
7. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
8. Heaven's Edge by Romesh Guneskera
9. Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
10. Sheepshagger by Niall Griffiths
 
12 February 2007
Elise Valmorbida's top 10 books with a happy ending
1. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
5. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
6. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
7. The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
8. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
9. Anne of Green Gables (and the sequels) by LM Montgomery
10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
​