Books of the Year: perfect presents for Christmas

MICHAEL BURLEIGH Historian and author of 'Moral Combat' (Harper Press)

Kwasi Kwarteng’s limpid Ghosts of Empire (Bloomsbury) was my top history title in a dull year. Bryan Appleyard’s The Brain is Wider than the Sky (Weidenfeld) is a beautifully written defence of human complexity in the face of the corporate mechanisation of our lives. If you are frustrated by automated queuing, this is one for you. Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong With America – and How it Can Come Back (Little, Brown) is the kind of searching polemic one wishes had a British equivalent, for our problems are greater than theirs.

LADY ANTONIA FRASER Writer; 'Must You Go?' (Phoenix) is available in paperback

I read three wonderful novels this year: Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side (Faber), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (Picador) and Edward St Aubyn’s At Last (Picador). Unlike Paris, I won’t attempt to award a golden apple to one of them since they all deserve it equally (just as they all deserved to be on the Booker shortlist from which they were unaccountably omitted).

NIGEL JONES Historian and author of 'Tower' (Hutchinson)

Into the Silence by Wade Davis (Bodley Head) is huge bag of a book into which Davis stuffs a history of British mountaineering; an exposition of Tibetan mysticism; searing stories of the Great War; and the enduring mystery of George Mallory’s quest to climb Everest. Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis (Faber) looks at the same era through the haunting story of Edward Thomas, an unhappy genius who finally found his poetic vocation only for it to be snuffed out by a passing shell. All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings (Harper Press) hardly needs my pennyworth of praise to add to its avalanche of acclaim but this global oral history of the Second World War is the best there is.

ANTHONY HOROWITZ Author of 'The House of Silk' (Orion)

I never knew how painful and difficult the history of modern Greece had been until I read The Thread (Headline Review) by Victoria Hislop, my favourite of her three novels so far. With a large cast of memorable characters, it tells the story of Thessaloniki from the great fire of 1917 to the present day and manages to be at once a romance, a thriller (the Second World War sequences are brilliant) and a sombre reflection on how Greece got to where it is today. Another book I loved was Craig Brown’s One on One (Fourth Estate), a medley of bizarre meetings, each one told in exactly 1,001 words. Delightfully eccentric.

DAVID ROBSON Writer and critic

In an otherwise lean year for fiction, two beautifully understated novels got only a fraction of the attention they deserved. The Forgotten Waltz (Jonathan Cape) by Anne Enright explored the perils of adultery in conservative Dublin, using humour and pathos in perfect combination. I also admired Tim Pears’s Disputed Land (Heinemann), in which a low-key family gathering in the Welsh Marches blossoms into an elegiac meditation on our relationship with the land we inhabit.

JUDITH FLANDERS Historian and author of 'The Invention of Murder' (Harper Press)

It is safe to say that the studying-for-a-PhD-in-Russian-literature memoir is a thinly populated genre. But Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta) is anarchically funny and, ultimately, a hymn to the pleasure of reading. Maria Edgeworth’s re-issued Patronage (Sort Of Books), written in the same year as Mansfield Park, has a roller-coaster plot that made it the perfect summer-holiday read. And this Christmas I plan to hole up with CJ Sansom’s backlist. I’ve just finished Dissolution (Pan) and the remainder make a reassuringly high pile.

ANDREW ROBERTS Historian and author of 'The Storm of War' (Penguin)

Professor Frank McDonough has edited an important book of essays by no fewer than 30 distinguished historians entitled The Origins of the Second World War (Continuum), which sheds fresh light on that fascinating and febrile period; Julian Lewis’s Racing Ace: the Fights and Flights of “Kink” Kinkead (Pen & Sword Aviation), about one of the bravest airmen of the 20th century, is exactly what an action biography should be; and Robert Hardman’s Our Queen (Hutchinson) is a superb portrait of the Queen as she enters her Diamond Jubilee year, largely in the words of the courtiers and Palace staff who work with her.

JANE SHILLING Writer and critic; 'The Stranger in the Mirror' (Chatto & Windus) is out in paperback in January

There are gaps in my reading so huge that I don’t like to think about them. Most of the non-English classics remain a mystery, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I’d never even tried: too difficult, I thought. Too full of Guelfs and Ghibellines and obscure medieval philosophy. But AN Wilson’s remarkable Dante in Love (Atlantic) has changed all that. The purpose of this beautiful volume is to rescue Dante from his melancholy position as “one of the great unreads”. Passionately, lucidly, seductively and convincingly, Wilson insists that the Comedy is not the exclusive property of scholars and experts, but speaks to us all.

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Historian and biographer; his next book will be 'Titanic Lives' (Harper Press, January)

Two books that are caviar for the mind rather than fast food. Sean O’Brien’s poems November (Picador) will be a joy for anyone who cares about the word-perfect use of language, and savours piercing emotions uttered with rueful delicacy rather than a mad screech. The wintry sadness of O’Brien’s poetry is oddly uplifting, because his imagery is so quick, nimble and dashing. Resurgent Adventures with Britannia, edited by William Roger Louis (IB Tauris), is a quirky collection of biographical essays of English cultural and political leaders over the past century. With contributors like Neal Ascherson, Archie Brown, Selina Hastings, Dan Jacobson and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the sparkling intelligence never falters. Reading this book is like eavesdropping on Establishment figures ruminating in a privileged sanctum.