I was not surprised to read that after Smith became party leader he expressed his innate detestation of

I was not surprised to read that after Smith became party leader he expressed his "innate detestation of trickiness with the press". Macintyre reasonably assumes that when he complained "we're talking about the government of the country, not the entertainment industry", he had Mandelson in mind. After Smith became leader, Mandelson was left out in the cold. Smith's successful battle for "one-member-one-vote" changed the culture of the Labour Party and prepared the way for all the other reforms.

But after Smith's death Mandelson attacked his "one more heave mentality". Macintyre is right to describe that episode in his courtship of Tony Blair as beyond my forgiveness.I have no way of knowing if, during John Smith's brief leadership, Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson were (as Mandelson now claims) distressed that the Labour Party was not being changed out of recognition. Nor do I know if Peter Mandelson reacted to John Smith's death with the single- minded opportunism which Macintyre describes. At John Smith's funeral, a senior member of the Parliamentary Party told me that, within hours of the doleful news, Mandelson had approached him on Gordon Brown's behalf At least for once he managed to end up on the winning side And then he fell like Lucifer. The clarity with which Macintyre analyses his ducking and weaving only makes the reader wonder why it did not happen sooner.When the end came he had, technically and legally, committed no offence.

Late, but just before he had to take formal responsibility for the inquiry into Geoffrey Robinson's business affairs, he told his permanent secretary that he had borrowed pounds 373,000 from the Paymaster-General. If Mo Mowlam or Clare Short had done something similar, they would have survived. But then no other Labour Cabinet Minister would have felt the need to confirm his social status with so desirable a property. I was sorry to see him go - or at least to see such an absurdity bring him down. It was the speech that he made immediately before his resignation - rejoicing that the government had turned its back on traditional socialist values - that I thought disqualified him from Labour office.But ideology is not what this book is about. It is a meticulous, if sometimes misinformed, account of Mandelson's life and work and is, therefore, the story of intrigue, manipulation and the calculation of political odds. For all its readable fascination, it would have been better never written Mandelson: The Biography gives politics a bad name..

On Iain Sinclair's Downriver (1991) 'For him, capitalism is a form of terrorism, with money moving across London like napalm.'On Anthony Burgess'sEarthly Powers (1980)'In 1984 he produced a book which listed his 99 favourite novels. People suspected this was the hundredth.'On Anne Rice'sInterview with the Vampire (1976)'With Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, this is one of the great tales of the supernatural, a mythic exposition of the meaning of good and evil.'On Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy (1950)'In Heyer's milieu lack of looks is always a disadvantage, but Wit and Style make up for it.'On Will Self's My Idea of Fun (1993)'In this pungent Swiftian attack, using as many nasty images as possible, Self cuts to the gut and watches his subject bleed, usually to death.'. Ever since the invention of the printing press, those who most love books have been prey to an awkward, paradoxical thought; that there are far too many books in the world. In secret moments, these book lovers may even look back with nostalgia to that fortunate scroll-and-scribe era when, a little after middle age, educated people with good libraries and not too many pressing engagements could conceivably reach a point when they had read everything. If we lament our book-swamped age, it may be out of an awareness that it is not by reading more books but by deepening our understanding of a few well-chosen ones that we develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. How clever we would be if we only knew three or four books well, Flaubert once wrote to Louise Colet (who was reading too much). And yet this patient focus on a few titles is made ever harder by the abundance of new books, and by the deliberate attempts of publishers to make us feel badly read, to frustrate our wish to deepen our loyalties to a few works.

The modern book lover is condemned to a nauseous feeling of under-read-ness; a visit to a library or large bookstore may provoke as much despair as exhilaration. So it may be the desire to cut a path through this dense literary foliage that explains why there have been so many recent lists of great books, choices that indicate not just what we must read, but - more importantly and therapeutically - what we don't have to bother with. Given that there have been more than 500,000 novels published in English since 1950, we should feel very grateful to Carmen Callil and Colm Tibn for whittling the mountain down to 200 of the greatest. (Actually as one discovers, it's only 194: the missing six will be added to the paperback edition, after being chosen by readers of the hardback, who are invited to send their entries on a form to Picador's offices. The idea of a "people's six" may seem voguishly democratic or absurd, depending on temperament.) After a brief introduction ("the books we chose are here because we loved them ..."), The Modern Library is made up of alphabetically arranged entries on the top books, all about 200 words long, which tell us when the author was born, what year his or her great work was written in, and roughly what the plot is. Then there are lists of Booker and Whitbread Prize winners, and finally, the form ("Your chance to see your favourite book in The Modern Library ...").The most obvious, and absurd charge that one might make against this book is that the editors have chosen the wrong 194.