Catholic wedding gift idea

Beryl Bainbridge

The book I am most immersed in this Christmas season is John Birt's autobiography, The Harder Path (Time Warner). Forget whether you think he dumbed down, or indeed helped to destroy, the Reithian idea of the BBC, and simply follow the life story of a clever Catholic lad brought up on the outskirts of Liverpool. Disregard at least 300 pages, unless you work for the BBC, and concentrate on his childhood and the love he had for his parents. I think he's telling the truth, as he sees it.

J G Ballard

As Americans work themselves up towards the second Bush war, the rest of us might usefully take a hard look at who we really are. John Gray's Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (Granta Books) is a clear-eyed assessment of human nature and our almost unlimited gift for self-delusion. A deeply provocative and unsettling book. Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (Penguin) is another overdue wake-up call, puncturing the modern myth that we are largely creatures of our upbringings. Sadly, as Pinker shows, the savage within us is rarely noble. Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a scientific detective story, a brilliant cross between Edgar Allan Poe and Gray's Anatomy. Why are our hearts on the left side? Why do clocks go clockwise? Why are men's testicles unbalanced? An exhilarating read.

Joan Bakewell

Straw Dogs by John Gray is an absorbing book, full of challenging ideas you want to argue with. But there is hardly time before Gray rushes you on to his next set of defiant claims: "We may well look back on the 20th century as a time of peace." Worrying but, strangely, not depressing. In 2002, the Arts Council made an award for translation. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, translated by George Bird (The Harvill Press), reached the shortlist of six. (The winner was W G Sebald's Austerlitz.) It's a dark fable of life in post-Soviet Russia, with that frantic despair and resigned humour you find in Gogol. But if it weren't so Russian, this penguin would be a friend of Wallace and Gromit. Panorama: 50 years of pride and paranoia by Richard Lindley (Politico's) is a classic text about a legendary programme, with a terrific mix of the early struggles, the highs and lows of a supposed golden age, and heartfelt polemic against the marginalising of the current affairs flagship, which now goes out late on Sunday night. Media folk will enjoy the gossip and the name-calling. But the broader public will be given an honest insight into one corner of television's history.

Lynn Barber

Two biographies of minor 20th-century writers gave me great pleasure, though for very different reasons. Selina Hastings's Rosamond Lehmann (Chatto & Windus) is a near-perfect example of the traditional literary biography, told with wit, intelligence, clarity and just the right degree of acerbity. Roger Lewis's Anthony Burgess (Faber and Faber), on the other hand, is a mess, a Tristram Shandy of a narrative, with more digressions than drive. But there are passages of such brilliance -- especially when he rails against his subject, whom he has come to hate over the 20-year course researching this book -- that I found it exhilarating as well as infuriating. Lewis is a mad obsessive, more of a stalker than a biographer, but he certainly brings new life to what can otherwise seem a rather tame genre.

Hugo Barnacle

Truer Than True Romance by Jeanne Martinet (Ebury Press) was an anthology of those terrible old American romance comics for girls, but with all the captions and speech-bubbles rewritten by a wised-up modern woman to produce absurdly funny parables of self-delusion, lost airline luggage and bad hair. Spies by Michael Frayn (Faber) was a compelling variation on The Go-Between, showing wartime suburban intrigues from the viewpoint of a small boy in firm possession of the wrong end of the stick. The Bat Tattoo (Bloomsbury) by Russell Hoban worked ideas about art and life into a story of middle-aged romance, which makes it sound pretty ordinary; in fact, it was rich and strange. New in paperback, Going Out Live by Mark Lawson (Picador) is a media satire about the tabloid humiliation of a TV host. It seems even more painfully well-observed than it did on first reading.

Peter Bradshaw

Jonathan Franzen's show-stopping The Corrections (Fourth Estate) rolls over the opposition like a tank -- but that was last year. The best fiction of 2002, for me, came from Claire Messud, whose The Hunters (Picador) is an intriguingly paired set of novellas, beautifully constructed and conceived. Reading her is like an encounter with a higher order of intelligence. For my money, Zadie Smith did not disappoint with her second novel, The Autograph Man (Random House), a witty account of celebrity obsession. In show business, the movie mogul Art Linson's What Just Happened?: bitter Hollywood tales from the front line (Bloomsbury) gave a hilarious account of producing films like Fight Club. And for sheer laughs and terrific writing, Frank Skinner's autobiography (Arrow) was superb. His account of losing his virginity to a Birmingham prostitute is one of the most remarkable pieces of confessional writing I have ever read.

Jason Cowley

I greatly admired Ignorance by Milan Kundera (Faber), a story about two emigres returning to Prague after a long absence, in which the author combines all of his old irony, his gift for essayistic disquisition and playful eroticism with a new and sombre awareness of transience and mortality. Published in France before the events of 11 September 2001, Platform (Heinemann; translated by Frank Wynne) is a work of thrilling confrontation, in which Michel Houellebecq once more proves the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity. John Gray's anti-humanist polemic Straw Dogs is as enthralling as it is provocative. Is there a more consistently interesting thinker in Britain?

Amanda Craig

Allison Pearson's searing comedy about working motherhood, I Don't Know How She Does It(Chatto), perfectly describes the exhaustion, frustration, and redemption that children bring to ambition. Philip Hensher's ambitious and absorbing account of Victorian Afghanistan in The Mulberry Empire (Flamingo) makes him outstanding and exciting. Kate Jennings's Moral Hazard (Fourth Estate) is a prescient little satire about a young writer's struggle to support her senile husband by working on Wall Street. My favourite, however, is Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor (Macmillan), an exquisite tale of revenge, love, beauty and honour set in 13th-century feudal Japan. Violently pleasurable, it's the first of a trilogy; and, like Tolkien, leaves adults and adolescents alike completely desperate for the sequel.

Edwina Currie

Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (Sceptre) tells of a man who attempts to return to his roots in South Africa, with tragic consequences for himself and those he befriends. Shades of William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach, I thought, but exquisitely moving. Linda Grant's Still Here (Little, Brown) tackles the same theme of return, this time to modern Liverpool, with flashbacks to the firebombing of Dresden thrown in. Linda's mother and mine were great friends, so I was pleased to find her perceptions of the world we both grew up in razor-sharp. I also caught up with Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten: memories of a chemical boyhood (Picador) and relished the stinks and flashes of teenage chemistry that seduced me, too; what oddities we must have seemed to our contemporaries, but how irresistible is the magic of science for its own sake. This is Michael Frayn territory, but the book I am reading now is by his distinguished missus, Claire Tomalin -- Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self(Viking). Pepys wrote his diary for on ly ten years as a young man and no full version was published until 1970,300 years later. But the picture he painted of events and people is more vivid and durable than any official chronicle. So may it be for us all.

Patricia Duncker

It's been a wonderful year for fiction by women and I have been spoilt for choice. I read the new Donna Tartt, The Little Friend(Bloomsbury), with great pleasure, astonishment and delight. It is the Middlemarch of the Mississippi, packed with hard drugs and lethal snakes. Yet more sinister and menacing is Bella Bathurst's first novel, Special (Picador), which casts a disturbing eye over the sexual behaviour of teenage girls. Carol Shields's Unless (Fourth Estate) didn't win the Booker, but I think it should have done. Among the gentlemen, George Szirtes is the poet of my choice. His collection English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe Books) is scary and masterful.

Antonia Fraser