Good Writes?

Brian Leiter rather generously remarks that Christopher Hitchens was a B+ writer and C- mind. (There has been an unseemly fuss over Hitchens recently. In the week which also saw Vaclav Havel pass, this proves only that journalists are desperately self-inflated by personal anecdote.) Personally, I am impressed by Hitchens's retentiveness and breadth, but appalled by his flaccid writing and flabby thinking. (For an example, read his memoir, Hitch 22, but only if you have an appetite for self-punishment.)

So: who is any good as a stylist? I scanned recently read low-brow non-fiction for an answer. . .

. . . My candidates among them: Adam Gopnik, Margaret Atwood, John Berendt of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Margaret Macmillan of Paris 1919, Niall Ferguson on money, and Jared Diamond. Among history writers, I find Tony Judt and Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi) compelling, but I am not sure that style is the reason. (Come to think of it, Judt's autobiographical snippets in NYRB in the months before he died were wonderful.)

I turn the question over to you, Dear Readers. Who are the writers you have enjoyed recently?--Preferably still alive or only recently dead. Throw philosophers in, if you like -- though alas I don't think this is going to broaden the choice very much. Do provide a couple of lovely sentences to entice us to read more.

PEOPLE, PEOPLE: low brow non-fiction, please. Very happy to see all of these suggestions, especially the endorsement of Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami, both old favourites. But I meant this to be a hard exercise, even if I wasn't as clear as I should have been. So: non-fiction of a universally accessible kind.