Antonia Fraser
Historian. Her biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson this year. She is now working on a book about the Battle of the Boyne
I admired R.F. Foster's The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland (Allen Lane, £20 in UK) enormously for being at once challenging, illuminating and witty. I cowered at the memory of enjoying - if that's the right word - Angela's Ashes as a result of Foster's essay on the subject; at the same time, his essay on Elizabeth Bowen was inspirational, and I shall now read Bowen's Court. Andrew Roberts's Napoleon and Wellington (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25 in UK) is lively and controversial, like all his writing, as well as being extremely readable. It made me fascinated all over again with two great men I believed I had studied enough for a lifetime. The best novel I read this year by far was V.S Naipaul's Half a Life (Picador, £15.99 in UK): the prose is crystalline and seductively so - you hardly realise that you are consuming a work of genius until you are plunged deep into a dramatic story which stretches across three continents.
Dr John Reid
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
I started reading Endgame in Ireland (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.75 in UK) by David McKittrick and Eamon Mallie at 11 p.m., and at 3 a.m. realised that I should put it down and do my own work! For anyone involved in Northern Ireland politics, this is a fascinating and highly readable account of the peace process. In California Dreaming (Viking, £10.99 in UK), Scots-born Laurence Donegan has written an entertaining and highly original look at life in the US from a different angle. I never knew selling cars could be so much fun. As a historian, I welcome the contribution Simon Schama's books and accompanying television series have made in stimulating popular interest in British history. In Volume 2 of his History of Britain (BBC Books, £31.25 in UK), he presents an interesting and controversial reassessment of Cromwell's role in Ireland. Like the best history writing, Schama engages the reader and unlocks the knowledge of the past in order better to understand the present.
Eamon Delaney
Novelist and critic. His book An Accidental Diplomat was published by New Island this year
In fiction, most interesting was The True History of the Kelly Gang (Faber & Faber, £16.99 in UK) by Peter Carey, which won this year's Booker Prize. It is a well written, haunting exploration of a violent story. I also enjoyed Findlaters - The Story of a Dublin Merchant Family, 1774-2001 by Alex Findlater (A&A Farmar, £35) for its fascinating social history of Dublin. Another form of documentation I found well worth checking out was Fish, Stone, Water - Holy Wells of Ireland (Atrium-Attic Press, £20), by Anna Rackard and Liam O'Callaghan: a reminder of our Christian - and pagan - past, with its nicely laid-out photographs and text.
Ann Marie Hourihane
Journalist and broadcaster. Her book She Moves Through the Boom is published by Sitric Books
It seems that I rarely read books in the year of their publication. If it had been up to me, Moses would have waited until the 10 Commandments came out in paperback. The books I enjoyed most included the Odyssey, translated by E.V. Rieu (Penguin Classics, £3.50 in UK), which has been out for some time. As Randolph Churchill said on reading the Bible: "Why did no one tell me about this before?"
A book published this year which I enjoyed was Keith Ridgway's collection of short stories, Standard Time (Faber&Faber, £9.99 in UK) - an Irish writer who is truly modern, the winner of this year's Rooney Prize, and not given half enough attention. Surprise of the year was Period Piece by Gwen Raverat, nΘe Darwin (Faber&Faber, £9.99 in UK), an unsentimental memoir of her Oxford childhood. I couldn't face another Harry Potter, but read The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (HarperCollins Children's Books, both £5.99 in UK) which will be enjoyed more by adults than by children.
Hughie O'Donoghue
Painter. His exhibition Naming the Fields was shown recently at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. His exhibition Richer Dust is currently on tour in the UK
Seamus Heaney's Electric Light (Faber and Faber, £8.99 in UK) has been a constant travelling companion since it was published. In particular, 'The Sonnets from Hellas' connected very directly and powerfully with me as at the time I was trying to make paintings from some faded old photographs my father took while camped with his platoon on a farm in Greece in the early months of 1945. The poems ring true and create vivid images in my mind, clearly written by a great scholar in command of the language. I found Jonathan Self's book Self Abuse (Love, Loss and Fatherhood) (John Murray, £16.99 in UK) a shock to read. It oscillates between being very funny and bleakly tragic, painting a picture of the emotionally traumatised world so many of us inhabit. What fascinated me about this book was not just its bravery and candour but the way the author walks the tightrope of trying to tell the truth or what he feels to be the truth without being self-serving.
War Diaries 1939-45 by Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 in UK), edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, was also a must for me. This new volume includes much previously unpublished and censored material. Again, it is the candid and direct quality of the observation of events that captivates. The impression comes through very clearly of a great man in control of himself and his thoughts while the world around him collapses into chaos. This book will be a great antidote for anybody who is growing a little tired of Hollywood's version of the second World War.
William Wall
Novelist, poet and short story-writer. His latest novel, Minding Children, was published by Sceptre this year
A book that changes the way you see things - physically see things, I mean - is rare indeed, but David Hockney's Secret Knowledge (Thames and Hudson, £35 in UK) is that kind of book. His thesis - that artists from about 1450 onwards secretly used optical devices to realise better images - will have you looking again at the Caravaggio your granny left you. I found Secret Knowledge visually stunning and a terrific example of a master still learning his craft. J.M. Coetzee's collected essays in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999 (Vintage, £22.85 in UK) are predictably and pleasurably precise, informed and challenging. He is particularly good on his fellow Africans Gordimer, Lessing and Paton, and on the culture and experience of displacement and post-colonialism. This is literary criticism at its clearest and best.
Finally, anyone interested in Ireland's literary history should not allow David Marcus's recently published Oughtobiography (Gill and Macmillan, £19.99) to slip by unnoticed. A warm, engaging and ultimately romantic book about one man's lifelong love affair with literature, I think it should be compulsory reading for the xenophobes of the Department of Rejection and Repatriation: for here is a distinguished Irishman whose Lithuanian Jewish family would have been repatriated faster than you could say "John O'Donoghue", and whose absence would have left Ireland a poorer place.
John Banville
Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times; his new novel, Shroud, will be published next year
My discovery of the year is W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK), his new book - hard to know how else to label it - is a superb meditation on time, loss and retrieval. This is a new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy and much else besides. Sebald shows us, as we much needed to be shown, that greatness in literature is still possible.
Best read was undoubtedly The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (Bloomsbury, £25 in UK), edited by John Lahr. Tynan was one of the finest critics of his time, and these remembrances, dating from the last decade or so of his life when he was struggling with chronic writer's block as well as the emphysema that would eventually kill him, are his final testament: elegant, witty, scabrous, frequently obscene and supremely funny. John Montague's Company: A Chosen Life (Duckworth, £14.99 in UK) is a warm memoir of a young poet's days neither down nor out in Paris and Dublin, with interludes in America. Fine and generous vignettes of Beckett, Brendan Behan, the publisher Liam Miller, Seβn ╙ Riada and many more. Elegiac but always celebratory. Part two, happily, is promised.
Caitr∅ona O'Reilly
Poet. Her first collection of poetry, The Nowhere Birds, was published by Bloodaxe this year
This year I enjoyed poet Lavinia Greenlaw's first novel: Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo, £12.99 in UK) for the same qualities I admire in her poetry: clarity of perception and a language style both cool and warm at the same time. I found Emily Barton's first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron (Canongate, £9.99 in UK), witty and refreshing. And, although the volume doesn't reproduce Madoc's cryptic segments on separate pages, I was happy to acquire a copy of Paul Muldoon's Poems 1968-1998 (Faber, £10.39 in UK).
Garret FitzGerald
Author and former Taoiseach
The Past In Hiding, by Mark Roseman (Penguin £11.40 in UK), is a very moving book about the extraordinary manner in which a German Jewish girl survived in Germany "on the run" after her family were finally taken away to a concentration camp in 1943. During the last decade, the author accomplished a remarkable feat of detection in tracing these events through the recollections of survivors of the period and documents in German archives.
I enormously enjoyed The Tale Of Murasaki by anthropologist Liza Dalby, (Vintage, £6.99 in UK), an "imagined reminiscence" pieced together from fragments of the diary of Murasaki Shikibu, author of the 11th-century Tale of Genji. By comparison with the stage Europe's culture had reached at that time, one cannot help being struck - and, as a European, humbled - by the extraordinary sophistication of Japan's civilisation around AD 1000.
Mary Lovell's The Mitford Girls (Little Brown, £20 in UK), is a fascinating account of the relationships between the Mitford sisters over 80 years - in particular the interaction between ties of affection and hostility formed in childhood and tensions arising from polarised political stances taken up before and during the second World War, particularly by Hitler's friend Unity, Oswald Mosley's wife Diana and Communist Decca. A book about this family could not but be entertaining, but this one also brings out sadder aspects of the lives of several of these fascinating women - two of whom, Diana and Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, survive.
A.T.Q. Stewart
Historian. His latest book The Shape of Irish History was published by Blackstaff Press this year
Dr David Whitehouse, a professional astronomer and BBC science correspondent, has written The Moon: A Biography (Headline, £14.99 in UK), which is packed with interesting detail and photographs, recounting man's long love affair with the chaste goddess who "walks the night in her silver shoon". I share the author's opinion that the Apollo 11 landing was the most significant event of the 20th century, if not all recorded history.
Richard Hamblyn's Invention of Clouds (Picador, £14.99 in UK) is an engaging biography of a scientific pioneer who has been forgotten. Luke Howard was a Quaker pharmacist who took up meteorology as a hobby and devised the system of classification of clouds which we use to this day.
Coming down to earth, I greatly admire Maria Kelly's History of the Black Death in Ireland (Tempus, £15.99) - a work of meticulous scholarship, this book is the first full-length study of how the bubonic plague reached Ireland in the summer of 1348, and what the consequences were, a subject which recent events have made horribly relevant.
Caroline Walsh
Literary Editor of The Irish Times
To her fans, a new collection of short stories by Alice Munro is a major event, and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Chatto & Windus. £14.99 in UK ) is vintage Munro. Whether it's the small towns of Ontario or the badlands of Saskatchewan, her evocations of the Canadian landscape ensure we are there, too, alongside her characters, all cast with unerring psychological depth. Another tour de force from one of the great practitioners of the short story.
Blood-Dark Track: a Family History (Granta Books. £16.99 in UK) is the family memoir novelist Joseph O'Neill had to write. With both his grandfathers imprisoned for different reasons during the second World War, it must at times have seemed like the story he was born to unravel: the tale of IRA man Jim O'Neill, interned in the Curragh, and Turkish hotelier Joseph Dakad, who set out one day to buy lemons and ended up being jailed in Palestine as an Axis spy. The fact that, as with most family pathologies, questions linger long after you've put the book down only makes it more haunting.
Finally, Code by Eavan Boland (Carcanet, £6.95 in UK) sees her returning to the mastery of the domestic that distinguished her early collections like Nightfeed, but having benefited from her explorations of history along the way. Poems to stop you, wonder struck, in your tracks.
Biddy Jenkinson
Poet. Her most recent collection, Rogha Dβnta, was published by Cork University Press last year
Adamnβn at Birr, A.D. 697, edited by Thomas O'Loughlin (Four Courts Press, £31), is a collection of essays by Thomas O'Loughlin, Mβire Herbert and Mβir∅n N∅ Dhonnchadha in commemoration of 'The Law of the Innocents' and a translation into English by Mβir∅n N∅ Dhonnchadha based on her new edition of the work. In AD 697, in Birr, Co Offaly, at the instigation of Adamnβn, abbot of Iona, a law was promulgated, by order of the nobles, clerical and lay, along with their lords and ollamhs and bishops and sages and confessors, to "lay down some ground rules for warfare between the various groupings that made up Irish people at the time". This early attempt to establish a more peaceful society was inspired by an angel who directed Adamnβn to " . . . make a law that women be not killed in any manner by man, whether through slaughter or any other death, either by poison or in water or in fire or by any beast or in a pit or by dogs, except they die in childbirth in lawful bed".
In the Service of Peace: Memories of Lebanon from the Pages of An Cosant≤ir, the Defence Forces Magazine (Mercier Press, £9.99), edited by Comdt Brendan O'Shea, is a collection of lively "stories from Lebanon". It marks the withdrawal of Irish soldiers from the area after 23 years of peacekeeping - mission accomplished. Aimsir ╙g (CoiscΘim, £8.50 per book), edited by M∅cheβl ╙ Cear·il is an exotic two-volume tussie-mussie of short stories, poems, essays, criticism and scientific articles that presents the current work of a hundred or more authors who write in Irish. It is handsomely presented and beautifully illustrated.
Eoin Colfer
Author. His recent book for children, Artemis Fowl, is published by Puffin
My first choice is Yeats is Dead (edited by Joseph O'Connor, Cape, £8.99 in UK), the ideal book to take on planes and trains because it reads well in short visits. What I liked about it was the way each author took a character and expanded that personality in areas the reader could never see coming. It was nice to be introduced to Irish authors I might not have considered reading. Marion Keyes and Pauline McLynn, who wrote two of the funniest chapters, definitely merit further investigation.
Dublin (Doubleday, £9.99 in UK) by Sean Moncrieff is a contemporary thriller which I approached with severe scepticism - beware the celebrity novel - but found myself surprised and captivated by its energy. A fastpaced, carnage-filled journey across Dublin, Moncrieff's debut hints at great things to come. A classic, The Catcher in the Rye (Penguin, £6.99 in UK), has been reproduced for the first time by Penguin in its original US text. And even though I am not a student anymore, a recent re-reading still managed to evoke all the familiar feelings of paranoia and alienation.
Joseph O'Neill
Barrister and author. His book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, was published by Granta Books this year
I like books that combine a quirky sensibility and rigorous prose. That is why I enjoyed Pasquale's Nose (Chatto & Windus, £15.99 in UK), a funny, profound, cerebral snapshot of a small Italian town by the new US writer Michael Rips. Also Susie Boyt's The Last Hope of Girls (Review, £12.99 in UK), an extraordinarily nuanced portrait of a young woman trying to assemble the means of happiness in contemporary central London; and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK), another masterpiece of historical and metaphysical rumination from Europe's most mournful writer.
Mary Ryan
Novelist. Her book, Hope, published by Headline this year, is a fictionalised account of how her ancestor, Thomas Walsh, became a millionaire in the American goldrush
Andrew Miller is a writer of astonishing gifts who peels his characters back to the quick with language that never misses a note. In Oxygen (Sceptre, £14.99 in UK), his complex characters - all at a crisis in their lives - are unravelled with a depth and elegance that is breathtaking.
Friends Indeed (Hodder, £10.99 in UK), by Rose Doyle, is a riveting historical novel pivoting on the friendship between two women who, because they will not bow to the crippling strictures of their day, find themselves among the Wrens of the Curragh - the women (mostly camp followers) who lived on the Curragh in furze "nests" during the 19th century. Beautifully written, this book illustrates a little known segment of Irish history, the tenor of 19th-century life in Dublin, and the misery and bankruptcy of any social order where women are powerless. As I love poetry, I treated myself to the Collected Poems of Michael Hartnett (Gallery Press. £25 hbk. £13.95 pbk) who died two years ago aged only 58. "Coruscating" is a word used on the blurb, and it is true, but often in conjunction with a hypnotic lyrical wistfulness.This is a book I will bring with me when I go to France for Christmas.
Gabriel Josipovici
Critic and author, and professor in the Humanities Graduate Research Centre at the University of Essex
It's good to see that the old masters are still at it. In March Claude Simon published Le Tramway (Editions de Minuit, €12.20) one of his best books for years, a memoir/novel about the tram that would take him, as a child, from Perpignan to the nearby beach. In October, Alain Robbe-Grillet broke a 20-year novelistic silence with La Reprise (Editions de Minuit, €15.09), a cunning meditation on Kierkegaard's Repetition, set in immediate post-war Berlin. What a joy to handle books that one can read and reread, crafted objects that yield something new every time, instead of the pre-packed anecdotes that pass for fiction in the English speaking world. Jerome Lindon may have passed away, but Editions de Minuit is still the place to go if you're looking for exciting fiction.
Otherwise, for me, the year has belonged to the visual arts, with a number of stunning London exhibitions. Pride of place must go to Goya: Drawings From the Private Albums at the Haywood (Lund Humphries in association with the Haywood Gallery, £35 in UK) the catalogue of which contains a brilliant essay by Tom Lubbock on Goya and gravity. Anyone who has ever given a thought to the way we humans stand and walk upon the earth should read it and study Goya's amazingly witty and disturbing images.
As Timothy Hyman says in his superb review essay in Modern Painters (summer 2001), this was "one of the great moments in London's exhibition history, a show such as I never expected to see and cannot hope ever to see again".