Unlike most existentialists, De Beauvoir cared about people, and could write devastating studies of female loneliness.

Wilde's most searingly ironic play, with one of the bitterest happy endings in literature.

The first 'serious' book I read, one that taught me that narrative in modern fiction wasn't always to be trusted. And one of the great historical epics of the 20th century.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The arrogant narrative voice and atypical humourlessness is a real turn-off. But this remembrance of times past is the closest English ever got to Proust.

Brecht's reworking of his 'Threepenny Opera' is the purest, most clear-sighted and funniest expression of political cynicism I know.

Any one who feels the author of 'Alice' produced too little will find much inspired nonsense, games, wordplay to relish here (and, in the sections dealing with photographing juveniles, squirm).

Though not up to his pals Swift and Pope, and hardly as funny as Brecht who would remodel it, Gay's comedy is still one of the few highlights of post-Restoration English theatre.

Forget Strindberg and Flaubert - modern literature as we love it begins here: ugly, loud, scattershot, violent, dubiously funny.

The first volume of what is surely the greatest English novel of the twentieth century, the 'Dance to the music of time' - Waugh called it the comic Proust; I can't better that.

Can we blame Garcia Marquez for the wishy washy tripe that followed in its wake? Family histories always make the best novels, and they don't come much more enthralling than this.