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The best books of 2016

The Vanishing Man:In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming(Chatto Windus, 304pp)

Mark Hudson: "Velzquez's monumental masterpiece Las Meninashas obsessed Cumming over25 years. And she is not alone in that. At its heart, claims Taylor, are two inquiries: what is literary culture, and what is taste? The looseness of his theme allows him to stray where he wants, at one point meandering into the field of popular lyrics, and discerning the improbable influence of Nancy Mitford's TheSun King behind the Beatles' song Here Comes the Sun."

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Rupert Christiansen: "Composed over a quarter of a century and embracing some of his most boldly exploratory and profoundly felt music, Beethoven's 16 string quartets have come to rank among the greatest achievements of western art. In this brief but beguiling book, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takcs Quartet, takes us inside the complexity of these masterpieces elucidating the history of their creation and explaining, with the minimum of technicality, the challenges they pose to performers and audience."

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Sinclair McKay: "The novelist Emile Zola gave the rue des Martyrs vintage alhambra pendant price copy a thrilling tang of scandal in Nana, making the street a backdrop to prostitution and lesbianism. In Sciolino's account, the past and the present entwine promiscuously. Here are Debussy and Satie living it up at "a rowdy cabaret"; and, a little further back, Ravel as a small boy in the street. Toulouse Lautrec and Pissarro are to be found picking up supplies of paint from a celebrated fin de sicle art shop. Honor de Balzac is glimpsed visiting his sister who knock off van cleef and arpels alhambra pendant lives at number 47."

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First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson (Fourth Estate, 415pp)

Kate Chisholm: "Wilson, whose earlier books have explored a history of baking aids and culinary utensils and some dark truths about the food industry, has discovered that it's possible to free ourselves from the complicated food rituals and obsessions that too often lead us to put on weight (or for some of us to lose it), and which are usually based not on what we know intellectually to be good for us but on the emotional baggage we accumulate through life."

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The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, 192pp)

Duncan White:"With The Noise of Time Barnes has written a novel of deceptive slenderness: a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In scale, it appears similar to The Sense of an Ending, but is without that book's taut, thriller ish structure; less tidy but more ambitious. Long standing readers will recognise his commitment to reinventing himself: one of the things Barnes most admires in Flaubert is his never having written the same book twice."

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