Joan Bakewell
Christopher Frayling adores films, and he has put all his passion into his stupendous biography Sergio Leone: something to do with death (Faber & Faber). Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) is such a scholarly book that it made me wish I had sat at the feet of its author and studied English with him. No Logo by Naomi Klein (Flamingo) is a worrying account of how much we are unwittingly in the grip of brand-imaging.

J G Ballard
Patrick Marnham's The Death of Jean Moulin (John Murray) is a brilliant mix of detective story and Second World War history. As in the best detective stories and the best history, the ending is ambiguous, although Marnham offers his own solution. The case is especially tricky, because Moulin is a national hero and his ashes lie in the Pantheon. De Gaulle's emissary to the French Resistance, Moulin was seized by the Gestapo in a curiously contrived ambush and then tortured to death by Klaus Barbie. But who was the real Jean Moulin? Was he, as some suspected, a French Kim Philby, laying the ground for a communist takeover of France? Did he, in some way, will his own capture? Marnham raises huge issues which, thankfully, he never resolves.

Hugo Barnacle
My favourite new novel was Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton), a multi-generational social comedy set in, of all places, Willesden. What made it stand out was Smith's ability to identify with such a wide range of characters: old buffers and hip youngsters, bad boys and do-gooders. The short-story anthology All Hail the New Puritans (Fourth Estate), edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, did not herald some radical new aesthetic as the editors claimed, but it did contain a number of striking pieces. I nearly always bin review copies or give them away; I decided to keep this one.

Michael Barrett
Among the best books this year to try to explain the history, science and politics of the Human Genome Project was A Passion for DNA (Oxford University Press), a collection of essays by James D Watson, who, along with Francis Crick, first un-ravelled the double helical structure of DNA. Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust (Hyperion Books) is a ferocious attack on governments that have allowed infectious diseases to return with a vengeance. Africa remains the spiritual home of parasitic disease, in no small part because of the inefficiencies of contemporary African governments. Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (Fourth Estate) describes the absurdity of one such administration - Mobutu's Zaire.

Martyn Bedford
With so much safe fiction around, my reading tilts ever further towards the quirky; writers such as Nicola Barker and Haruki Murakami, whose oddness - of story, character, situation or prose - is deliciously dislocating. This year, several novels were startling enough to leave a lasting impression: Will Self's How the Dead Live (Bloomsbury); Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (Faber & Faber); Swimmer by Bill Broady (Flam-ingo); and What Are You Like? by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape). But the two I liked most were Susan Elderkin's Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains (Fourth Estate), with its lyricism and sheer originality of premise, and House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (Doubleday), for his marriage of experimental form with the queasy tension of a page-turning horror story.

A S Byatt
Two novels. Lawrence Norfolk's gripping, layered mix of classical Greek boar-hunt and modern wartime Europe, In the Shape of a Boar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is a tale of treachery and poetry, related to the tragedy and greatness of Paul Celan. Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai (Chatto & Windus) - brilliant, original, moving and new - is a novel about the fate of unusual intelligence and a resourceful young boy. Both Norfolk and DeWitt are fabulators of a high order. Both take risks with language and narrative, and they are never less than intensely readable. Frank Kermode's book on Shakespeare's language is a great pleasure - which is great praise at a time when the pleasure principle seems to have disappeared from both student reading and professional criticism.

Jason Cowley
My book of the year is Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (Duck Editions). A cultural conservative, monarchist and extreme pessimist, Reck-Malleczewen was a man out of time, at once listlessly estranged from mid-century German modernity and mournfully engaged with it. A Prussian aristocrat, he spent much of his life in rural isolation on his Bavarian estate. His diary - published for the first time in Britain this year, but widely known in Germany - covers the period from 1936 to February 1945, when, having refused a call-up, his elegant disdain for Nazism led to his being murdered at Dachau. Reck watched as his nation was gripped by a mortal sickness, and his observations and contempt for Hitler are unforgettable. I have largely lost interest in contemporary fiction, but I admired the artistry of Pankaj Mishra's debut novel, The Romantics (Picador), a kind of anti-Bildungsroman set in Benares, in which a young, introspective Brahmin retreats from the world after a failed romance.

Patricia Duncker
This has been a vintage year for my foreign fiction reading. The Italians carried the day. Marta Morazzoni's devastating novel, The Alphonse Courrier Affair (Harvill), set in a tiny French village, is fast-paced, gripping and resonant with emotions usually associated with Greek tragedy. Paola Capriolo's A Man of Character (Serpent's Tail) is shaken and stirred. I also admired and enjoyed Patrick Gale's Rough Music (Flamingo), a powerful tale of family conflict and catastrophe, set in a haunted Cornish landscape.

Julian Evans
Blindingly obvious, is how you could describe Harold Bloom's case for reading in How to Read and Why (Fourth Estate). But modern blindness - the sightlessness that only reads adverts and lifestyle magazines, and subcontracts wisdom to technology - shows that the great critic's arguments are far from superfluous. Bracing and stuffed with the manic-obsessive pleasure of reading, this is the great handbook of a neglected activity. Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up (Jonathan Cape) makes it a battleground: his essay on Updike, Mailer and Irving is a brilliant assault on the effeteness of content in the American novel. Of all the novels I read, American or otherwise, Michel Houllebecq's juxtaposition of science and sexual liberation, Atomised (Heinemann), is the most Balzacian in content, and is fed by a grand conviction about the way we live now. Houllebecq burns, while other novelists fiddle. Magnificent.

Richard Gott
The book I most enjoyed is Martin Gilbert's collection of Churchill documents from 1941, The Churchill War Papers: the ever-widening war, volume 3 (Heinemann), a wonderful reminder of the pithy prose and sharp memos that existed in the days before spin and soundbite. But because this splendid volume retails at £95, you would have to be very rich to give it for Christmas. David Macey's Frantz Fanon: a life (Granta) is this year's biographical tour de force, while Robert Harvey's Liberators: Latin America's struggle for independence 1810-1830 (John Murray) is a superb retelling of an epic yarn.

John Gray
Jorge Luis Borges is never boring. In addition to his celebrated fiction, he wrote a great many essays, sometimes in unlikely places. In The Total Library: non-fiction 1922-1986, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) - capsule biographies of figures as different as Oswald Spengler, Paul Valery and Ernest Bramah, book reviews and notes on writers equally various - Borges rehearses all of his distinctive themes. The tricks of time and memory, the nothingness of personality, the symbols and metaphors that recur throughout the world's literatures and in our own lives - these Borgesian ciphers are presented with a style and zest, at once playful and serious, that never palls.

Anthony Howard
The best biography I read this year was Charles Williams's Adenauer: the father of the new Germany (Little, Brown). Running it close was the final volume of Robert Skidelsky's classic trilogy, John Maynard Keynes: fighting for Britain 1937-1946 (Macmillan). The book I enjoyed most was The Letters of Kingsley Amis edited by Zachary Leader (HarperCollins). It is best read alongside - although preferably before - Martin Amis's Experience (Jonathan Cape). The author's portrait of his father as an old man is beautifully done.

Kathryn Hughes
You may not think that you're remotely interested in Wladziu Valentino Liberace (latterly known as plain old Liberace), but you will be if you read Liberace: an American boy (University of Chicago Press), a model biography by the equally flamboyantly named Darden Asbury Pyron. Pyron, an academic, uses Liberace's longish life (he died of Aids just before reaching 70) to illuminate almost a century of American history, from the Great War to the Reagan years. Liberace was not an educated man, nor a political one, but the passions and tensions of his life intersected uncannily with the great currents that were powering the United States through the Depression, Second World War, Vietnam and beyond. This book is required reading for economic and social historians, as well as those who like sequins.

Mick Hume
In the year of Big Brother, confessional biographies and e-mail snooping laws, take refuge in Jeffrey Rosen's resolute defence of the private sphere, The Unwanted Gaze: the destruction of privacy in America (Random House). And in a year when adverts for the Imperial War Museum's "Holocaust Exhibition" encouraged us to "Come and see what man can do when he puts his mind to it", two very different books - Kenan Malik's Man, Beast and Zombie (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Roger Scruton's updated Animal Rights and Wrongs (Metro Books) - made compelling cases for putting humanity above the beasts. Those worrying about seasonal over-indulgence can draw comfort from The Tyranny of Health (Routledge), Michael Fitzpatrick's scalpel-sharp dissection of the morbid symptoms of our health-obsessed age.

Brenda Maddox
The emotional power and wealth of revealing detail made The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (Fourth Estate), my most rewarding reading of the late months of 2000. Here we have the whole triumph-to-tragedy in the writer's own wonderful words. The schoolboy correspondence with his mother, the love letters to his wife and the eloquent letters to the press, pleading for the reform of British prisons, serve as a strong counterbalance to the whole sordid business of Bosie et al. In light of recent events, The Arrogance of Power: the secret world of Richard Nixon by Anthony Summers (Victor Gollancz) is an even greater feat of investigative reporting and assembly of documents than when I first read it earlier this year. Summers makes powerful use of the evidence now available: Nixon was cheated by electoral fraud in 1960 but, coming back to be genuinely elected another day, he was a dangerous and near-lunatic president. For a more controlled and elegant illustration of a conservative wielding political power, Andrew Roberts's Salisbury: Victorian titan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) will be hard to beat.

Kenan Malik
Two novels, one from the beginning of a literary life, the other from near its end - Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Saul Bellow's Ravelstein (Viking). White Teeth is not the masterpiece that some critics have talked it up as, but it is cocky, confident, and the writing is, at times, mesmerising. Ravelstein is typical Bellow - beautifully observed, wickedly funny and deeply humane. Poets have made a big splash in recent years, but one who has been unjustly overlooked in 2000 is Derek Walcott. Tiepelo's Hound (Faber & Faber) may not possess, say, the sinewy immediacy of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, or the poignancy of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, but it is a wonderfully crafted meditation on the nature of art, the character of vision and the relationship between the metropolis and the margins.

David Marquand
My first choice is Nemesis 1936-1945, the enthralling and terrifying second volume of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler. It begins with Hitler glowing with power, authority and confidence immediately after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936. It ends with his and Eva Braun's joint suicide in the bunker amid the ruins of Berlin in May 1945. This is classic narrative history at its best, written with a verve and passion that leave the reader emotionally drained. Every page carries you on to the next. I also got a lot of pleasure and intellectual stimulus from Edmund Dell's posthumous history of the British Labour Party, A Strange Eventful History (HarperCollins). It is a mordant, witty and sardonic account of what Dell sees as a wild-goose chase. According to him, the basic Labour project - to achieve socialism through democratic means - was doomed from the start. I'm not convinced. I don't think the Labour Party was ever truly socialist. Its repeated failures, in my view, have been because of Labourism, not socialism. But Dell fights his corner with enormous dialectical skill and intellectual power. A must for everyone interested in British politics in the 20th century.

Andrew Martin
I'm now persona non grata at one Highgate boozer, because earlier this year I sat there reading Experience by Martin Amis and laughing disturbingly every five minutes. I've loved all Amis's books, but this one perhaps even more than most - not so much because it's his first substantial non-fiction as because he just seems to be getting better all the time. Also recommended is White City Blue by Tim Lott (Penguin), a story of touchingly uncool young men (they support QPR, for heaven's sake) growing up in an unfashionable part of London. With this novel, as with Lott's non-fiction debut, The Scent of Dried Roses, the appeal is in the richness of the tone: a constant upwelling of sadness offset by drollery.

Frank McLynn
Biographies of movie stars or directors are usually lowbrow scissors-and-paste jobs, but this year has produced two outstanding books in this field, which in erudition, psychological acuity and readability can stand comparison with the most heavyweight literary or historical biographies: Print the Legend: the life and times of John Ford by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster) and Sergio Leone: something to do with death by Christopher Frayling. One of the best is Prince of Princes: the life of Potemkin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), an example of how to make a page-turner out of the most profound scholarship.

Pankaj Mishra
I read mostly histories and biographies this year; non-fictional literary forms now seem to offer the complex kinds of knowledge about the world that the novel once made available. I was impressed by David Reynolds's ambitious attempt to write a "global history" in One World Divisible (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), and found Andre Aciman's False Papers (Farrar Straus Giroux) a very satisfying sequel to his Out of Egypt. Gitta Sereny's The German Trauma (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) showcased a lifetime of subtle thinking and writing about a difficult, if over-discussed, subject. Mark Mazower's The Balkans: a short history (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is almost as good as his Dark Continent. Anthony Summers's biography of Richard Nixon turned out to be a terrifying study in pathology.

Jan Morris
I lost myself in They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy (Arcadia), the second volume of a wonderfully romantic Hungarian epic translated by Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Banffy-Jelen. I was impressed by the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomsbury), although more by the subject than the book. And I found the second volume of Alan Clark's Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) almost as incorrigibly irresistible as the first.

Toby Mundy
Told with energy and savage invention, Human Punk by John King (Jonathan Cape) is an epic novel that describes the raucous death of industrial England and its rebirth as a bullying, fragmented, nihilistic country. John Updike's prequel to Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius (Hamish Hamilton), is wonderfully accomplished. It charts brilliantly (and apparently effortlessly) how Claudius and Gertrude are transformed from passionate companions into the nefarious and anxious King and Queen of Shakespeare's play, and depicts Hamlet as a marginal figure who, at 30, should have left behind his bad moods and enthusiasm for acting. Finally, the most beautiful book of the year: The Earth from the Air by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Thames & Hudson), a stunning collection of aerial photographs to amaze and inspire.

Ben Pimlott
Two outstanding books of 2000 are a reminder of the British obsession with the personal in politics. In The Prime Minister: the office and its holders since 1945 (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), Peter Hennessy takes the reader on a scholarly romp through echoing corridors, shooting off insights and well-sourced gossip in all directions. Bill Rodgers's Fourth Among Equals (Poli-tico's) is a witty and thoughtful analysis of a political generation which demonstrates that the least flashy member of the SDP gang was also, in many ways, the shrewdest.

Michele Roberts
Twenty years ago, when I worked the club and pub circuit as a young poet, and was also the poetry editor at City Limits listings magazine, I was commissioned to check out the poetry scene in Bradford. That's where I first came across the punk poet Joolz, a fiery live performer of passionate work. Joolz Denby has not only survived from those heady days, but gone from strength to strength. Her thriller Stone Baby (HarperCollins), which won the first New Crime Writer award, is by turns burningly sincere, tough and tender, funny and acute. What makes a woman fall for a ripper? Read Joolz and find out.

Ziauddin Sardar
All those with an innate fear of mathematics should put Denis Guedj's The Parrot's Theorem (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) on their essential reading list. Deftly wrapped around the history of mathematics, this wonderful mystery of coded letters and elusive proofs is designed to make mathematics as accessible as dancing. Guedj's narrative is propelled by a host of Omar Khayyam-type colourful characters from classical Islam.

Roger Scruton
Of the novels that I have read this year, two stand out for their truthfulness: Man and Boy by Tony Parsons (HarperCollins) and Disgrace, last year's Booker winner, by J M Coetzee (Vintage). Both confirm, for me, that you can describe the modern world as it is, with the great abyss of nihilism that is opening beneath it, only if you hold on to a measure of the old-fashioned moral sense which that world denies. Among works of non-fiction, I recommend - at any rate, for fellow lovers of eastern Europe - Anne Applebaum's remarkable account of her journey through the ex-Soviet borderlands, Between East and West (Papermac). And Nell Stroud's description of her apprentice days in the circus, Josser (Little, Brown), tells the tale of another fascinating journey, this time through the emotional borderlands of England.

Will Self
Carlo Gebler's Father and I (Little, Brown) - a spare, lean, haunting account of his abusive, depressive father - was a harsh purgative for anyone who likes a carefree roll in the snows of yesteryear. Written with Gebler's trademark no-frills prose, and relentless attention to the detail of a child's life as it is lived, this memoir also provides a vivid evocation of Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s. London: the biography by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus) pullulates with infective and fervid life as the Great Wen itself. Ackroyd's will stand as the London book de nos jours. His periphrastic method - circumnavigating the city through space, time and the senses - ensures that not one single page is without entertainment, amusement and instruction. The Ghost of Madness (Jonathan Cape), Ray Monk's brilliant successor to his study of the first half of Bertrand Russell's ludicrously long life, pitilessly shows how time, anxiety and weakness of character cracked the great edifice of its subject's intellect, until all that was left was a puppet capable of being manipulated by a bunch of Trots.

Miranda Seymour
One of the funniest books of the year was Brian Thompson's A Monkey Among Crocodiles (HarperCollins), the life of a little-known lady who became famous as the most vigorous litigant, self-taught, of the 1880s. Her apotheosis was to be crowned, at 50, as the face of Pears soap. I was moved and impressed by Carlo Gebler's Father and I. Andrew Crumey is one of the most original novelists around. I wish that Mr Mee (Picador), in which he mixes together murder, fairy tales, Rousseau, pornographers and the internet to dazzling effect, had made it on to the Booker list. It deserved a place there.

Henry Sheen
The mind has mountains. Anyone who doubts this should turn to the non-fiction (1922-86) of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, an eclectic collage of book and film review, essay, lecture, biography, pensee and literary prologue. The biographies are characteristic: brevities of half a page that enshrine the distinction and intolerable sadness of fleeting lives. To read Borges is to find the mist and clouds that oppress the mind suddenly dissolved.

Edward Skidelsky
I was put off reading The Clay Machine-Gun by Victor Pelevin (Faber & Faber, translated by Andrew Bromfield) after a Moscow friend of mine described Pelevin as "typical post-Soviet crap". But then, an English friend told me that The Clay Machine-Gun had changed his life, so I decided to give it a go. The novel features Vasily Chapaev, illustrious Red Army officer and legend of thousands of Soviet jokes, in the improbable guise of a Zen Buddhist master. The first chapter begins with a group of Bolshevik sailors brewing a disgusting concoction called Baltic tea, made by dissolving cocaine in vodka. I began to agree with my Russian friend; but, as I read on, it became apparent that this fashionable interest in drugs and Buddhism is just a mask concealing a fiendish metaphysical intelligence. And Pelevin has this distinction: he is the first Russian writer since Pasternak who appeals to us for purely literary, not political, reasons.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
A father and son show their worst and their best, not to say how much they have in common. Kingsley Amis's Letters reminded me what a bullying boor Kingsley could be, and how intensely funny. Martin Amis's Experience reminded me what a posturing booby he can be, and what a wonderful writer, at his best in this superb portrait of his father. Two other books complement each other sombrely. Nemesis 1936-1945 is the second half of Ian Kershaw's remarkable biography of Hitler, and Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich (Macmillan) tells the story of how a great European nation succumbed to "faith, hope and hatred". By comparison, The Letters of Oscar Wilde are almost cheerful reading, and are again complemented - by John Ruskin: the later years (Yale University Press), in which Tim Hilton concludes his great life of Wilde's mentor.

Robert Winder
I wish I knew German, then I could have enjoyed Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch. As it was, I had to make do with the English original: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J K Rowling (Bloomsbury). Several top critics stepped forward to rubbish the whole magical enterprise, but this must have been mere bleating at the fortunes cascading on the author. Sure, she describes an unreal, imaginary world with stock characters - but you could say the same about Homer's Odyssey. And you don't have to be a senior critic to spot that it's a boarding-school romp - any seven-year-old is wise to that. Even if I hadn't liked it, a 700-page hardback with no pictures that makes young children curl up with excitement can't be all wrong. I was beguiled by Nabokov's Butterflies (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), a fat bundle of winged passages by the maestro. And to celebrate Chaucer's 600th anniversary, I skipped through The Canterbury Tales. They seemed as fresh and sharp as ever, although totally unreal: stuffed with fancy coincidences and improbable tall stories. Completely irrelevant to today's world. Lot of fuss about nothing, some might say.

Peregrine Worsthorne
My main book of the year is unquestionably Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a highly cultivated Junker, steeped in Spengler and Nietzsche, who, from 1936 onwards, observed Hitler, first with aristocratic disdain, then with undisguised disgust, contempt and horror until, in mid-sentence on 14 October 1944, he was dragged away by the Gestapo to Dachau, where he was eventually executed by a shot in the back of his head. The diary portrays Nazi Germany from a deeply conservative, pessimistic angle, with a quality of writing that can justly be compared with di Lampedusa. My second choice is Democracy in Europe by Larry Siedentop (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), the perusal of which by Eurosceptics might just raise their superficial level of public debate. And, if I may, Old New World by my wife, Lucinda Lambton (HarperCollins) - a coruscating celebration of the old-fashionedness of America, which was once seen as pioneering the way ahead.

Elizabeth Young
A nerve-wracking year for "real books", which were menaced constantly by political memoirs, celebrity ghost-writing or foodie horrors. History-as-fiction is usually awful, too, but Patricia Duncker's lambent prose and visionary strength in James Miranda Barry (Picador) overcomes all reservation. Best first novels: in the US, J T LeRoy's depiction of teenage prostitution, Sarah (Bloomsbury), was both pitiful and original; over here, Jo-Ann Goodwin explored the sacred and the secular in her unjustly neglected novel of Doncaster low life, Danny Boy (Bantam).