History
By Dermot Keogh
It has been another fecund year for Irish history. Two books have given me much pleasure in recent weeks: Declan Kiberd's Irish Classics (Granta Books, £25 UK) and Marianne Elliott's The Catholics of Ulster. (Allen Lane, £25). Professor Kiberd has produced a classic on Irish classics - a delightful and challenging read from a voice that moves effortlessly between disciplines. Here he casts modern Irish history in a new light. Marianne Elliott has chosen to leave the secure ground of her own specialisation to provide us with a sweeping survey of Ulster history from earliest times to the present. One must admire this wide-lens approach, and the historical vision and imagination needed to produce such an important book. I found Diarmuid O'Giollain's Locating Irish Folklore Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork University Press, £14.99) an outstanding work of scholarship. Tim Pat Coogan's Wherever Green is Worn (Hutchinson, £25 in UK) must also be seen as a work based on a use of a wide scholarly lens. John Horgan demonstrates yet again his proven investigative skills in oel Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider (Gill & MacMillan, £19.99). It is a challenge to the tyranny of political correctness. Padraig Yeats's Lockout Dublin 1913 (Gill and Macmillan, £19.99) is a rattling good read, as are Brendan Barrington's The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart (Lilliput Press, £10) and Richard Abbott's Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922 (Mercier Press, £15.95). Susan McKay's Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Blackstaff, £16.25) and the edited volume by Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, After the Good Friday Agreement (UCD Press, £15.95) are required reading.
On European history I recommend the second volume of Ian Kershaw's 1,168page Hitler, 1936-1945 Nemesis (Allen Lane, £25 UK) and Simon Schama's A History of Britain (BBC Books, £25 UK).
Politics
By John Horgan
Many years ago, a fascinating book called The Strange Death of Liberal England put its finger on the fact that the Northern Ireland problem was not just a problem for Ireland, but one which went to the heart of the British constitution, that great, unwritten structure which is the ultimate foundation of the scepter'd isle's claim to greatness. It was prophetic. Today, many years later, the shaky foundations of that constitution are becoming ever more exposed to public view, and a number of books published recently give them a rigorous examination. Andrew Marr's The Day Britain Died (Profile, £7.99 UK) is one. Raising, as it does, the spectre of fully-fledged federalism as the only solution for a country which in some sense is coming apart at the seams, it offers a sombre prognosis for the UK in an age of globalisation. Tom Nairn's After Britain (Granta Books, £17.99 UK) contains further prophecies of doom, about which all that can confidently be said is that it is, undoubtedly, far too early to tell. But both theses are intriguing, and expressed in that apparently effortless prose that is the hallmark of so much good British political writing. Still at the centre of this devolutionary maelstrom is David Trimble, and Henry McDonald's Trimble (Bloomsbury, £16.99 UK) is a well-crafted political story that shows what a good journalist can do when he puts his seven-league boots on. In the Republic, too, there is a bumper political crop, not least Stephen Collins's The Power Game: Fianna Fail Since Lemass (O'Brien Press, £20), an invaluable primer to the period which not only sums up all we know but provides an important new evidential framework which helps to explain many of the connections. Anyone who expects Barry Desmond's Finally And In Conclusion (New Island, £9.99) to be the last word from this source should know better, but it has some fascinating revelations and insights.
Cooking
By Orna Mulcahy
The most tempting book on the shelves this Christmas is Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess. (Chatto & Windus, £25 UK). In this follow-up to her hugely successful How to Eat, Lawson conjures up the gorgeous picture of a women - you - fluffily attired in cashmere and kitten heels, drawing trays of divinely aromatic cakes from the oven. Definitely one for the bedside table.
The Avoca Cookbook (Avoca Handweavers, £17.99) has been walking out of Avoca outlets and bookshops since it was published in the spring. Hugo Arnold's brisk style, combined with recipes that are genuinely easy to handle, make this a great standby book for family meals or to impress friends. The Return of Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, £20 UK) has more fast and feisty recipes for people who love good food but served up in a hip, slapdash style. I've hankered after many a book on Indian cookery by Madhur Jaffrey but always found the recipes fiddly and difficult. Not so her new Step-by-Step Cookery, a clear and colourful guide of Indian and Far Eastern cuisine that includes recipes from Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines (Ebury Press, £26 UK). The Observer writer and former Marie Claire food editor, Nigel Slater, has a brand new book out called Appetite (Fourth Estate, £25 UK) but I prefer his previous book, Real Food, which has just been released in paperback (4th Estate, £17.65 UK). A winner at this year's World Cookbook Fair in France, Pure Indulgence (A&A Farmar, £9.99 UK) shows that, yes, you can make an entire meal using Bailey's Irish Cream: a neat, well illustrated hardback with recipes from restaurant chefs all over Ireland.
Biography
By Helen Meany
Edwardian Dublin is the place to escape to this Christmas, though it wasn't quite big enough for George Moore: Adrian Frazier's George Moore, 1852-1933 (Yale, £29.95 UK) is a brilliant and witty study of the author of Hail and Farewell and A Drama In Muslin who had hoped to be a Paris-based painter but settled for London and literature. Fool of the Family: a life of J.M. Synge by W.J. McCormack (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25 UK) carefully places the playwright in his airless social and religious (Plymouth Brethren) milieu in Co Wicklow. In Hugh Lane 1875-1915, (Lilliput, £25) Robert O'Byrne mines the National Library's archive to present the art dealer's story stripped of romanticism but all the more absorbing for that. "Anyone interested in biography soon finds that all roads lead to Boswell's Life Of Johnson," writes Adam Sisman, author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task (Hamish Hamilton, £17.99 UK), an elegant study of the biographer's art. In Hans Christian Anderson: the Life of a Storyteller (Allen Lane, £20 UK), Jackie Wullschlager confidently recreates cultural life in 19th-century Denmark and depicts the creator of the dazzlingly imaginative fairytales as vain and snobbish, insatiably craving approval. Ripples from 1789 permeate Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes (HarperCollins, £19.99 UK), in which this passionate time-traveller examines his own writing impulses, blending critical essays on writers - most notably Mary Wollstonecraft - with selective autobiography. Martin Amis could give lessons in how to with-hold as much as disclose, as his unreliable memoir, Experience (Cape, £18 UK) brilliantly demonstrates. Where would contemporary biographers be without Freud? In Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (Wiley, £19.99 UK), Louis Bregar presents a perceptive, measured account of Freud's work and his creation of a personal myth that was embellished over the years. He emerges as a great but deeply flawed figure with a frustrated hunger to be an artist. Where there's Freud there's Jung, of course, and Ronald Hayman's fascinating study, A Life Of Jung (Bloomsbury, £25 UK) shines a sceptical light on the Swiss psychiatrist's influential blend of mysticism and psychotherapy. Too much animus perhaps?
Natural World
By Michael Viney
Quiet days after Christmas make some space for the mind: perfect for reading Homage to Gaia (Oxford University Press, £19.99 UK), the autobiography of James Lovelock, whose momentous theory that Earth behaves as an evolving, living organism is steadily gaining acceptance. As we follow much of Europe into rural flux, Jorwerd, by Geert Mak, (Harvill, £12 UK) a young Dutchman's study of change and decline in a small Frisian village, is movingly relevant to small-town Ireland, dormitories, blow-ins and all. Irish Indoor Insects, by James O'Connor and Patrick Ashe (Town House, £16.99) is a zestful guide to our sometimes-surprising domestic companions. For natural history proper, Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats by Nick Davies (Poyser, £24.95 UK) is the year's outstanding monograph, enjoyable both for its weird family of birds and on the niceties of natural selection. And two books that relish both folklore and science . . . Sea Beans and Nickar Nuts by Charles Nelson (BSBI Publications, £13.95 UK) is a social and botanical history of the strange tropical drift-seeds that reach our west coast (a must for beachcombers); while The Giants Causeway and the North Antrim Coast by Philip Watson (O'Brien, £6.99) is a splendidly illustrated tour of a natural geological marvel and its attendant wildlife.
Poetry
By Gerald Dawe
Collected Poems can sometimes look like tombstones on a poet's writing life. This year Gallery Press published Richard Murphy: Collected Poems (£13.95pbk/£25 hbk) as a salutory reminder of just how good Murphy is: a volume bearing an incredible lightness of being. If The Weather in Japan (Cape, £8 UK) continues in the elegiac composure lovers of Michael Longley's poetry have come to expect, its worldliness is also legendary and not to be missed. Thom Gunn, the Anglo-American, published Boss Cupid (Faber, £7.99 UK), a book about loss and resilience if ever there was one; his Ezra Pound; Poems Selected by Thom Gunn (Faber, £4.99 UK) introduces the great modernist to a new generation who probably know more about Pound's political follies than they know his poetry.