Still Bailey had something that Brandt lacked an unabashed love of finery and showing off

Still, Bailey had something that Brandt lacked, an unabashed love of finery and showing off. The best photographers are seldom puritans and do better work for advertising firms than for dictators. Margarita Tupitsyn's El Lissitsky (Thames and Hudson pounds 40) is a competent account of the Russian artist's photographic propaganda and neat, rulered design.. MARINA WARNER Wendy Doniger, in Splitting the Difference (University of Chicago pounds 38.50) looks at men, women, gods and goddesses, doppelgangers and desire, in Sanskrit and classical myths.

Losing the Dead (Chatto pounds 15.99) by Lisa Appignanesi, about her family's survival in occupied Poland, explores the stratagems, fables, lies, and silences between her mother and herself - a powerful, honest, and painful act of love and memory. John Gage's Colour and Meaning (Thames and Hudson pounds 29.95) continues his brilliant exploration of art, paint, the spectrum and vision - colours will never appear self-evident again. Posy Simmonds' graphic novel Gemma Bovery (Cape pounds 14.99) is very funny and sharp about French and other follies and faiblesses. WILL SELFAndrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers (Faber pounds 16.99) was the novel I most enjoyed this year. No need to journey to South Africa or the Indian sub-continent for profundity, when it's straight up the M6.

Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship by Brigitte Hamann (Oxford pounds 25) was the history book I enjoyed most this year. The River: A Journey back to the Source of HIV and AIDS, by Edward Hooper (Allen Lane pounds 25) was the investigative and revelatory text of the year as far as I was concerned. Hooper's theories on the iatrogenic character of the HIV outbreak, and the dangers of inter- specific medical procedures, are a chilling reminder of our need to control all the Frankensteins in their neat, white coats.GEOFF DYERIf it seemed incredible that a novel as slickly feeble as Ian McEwan's Amsterdam could have won last year's Booker, then the prize's credibility was salvaged by J M Coetzee's masterly Disgrace (Secker pounds 14.99). This consummately literate novel was rivalled in my affections only by a consummately illiterate one, Daren King's Boxy an Star (Abacus pounds 9.99), a lyrical and lovely hymn to the brain-ravages of too much teenage pill-popping. At first I was bemused and disappointed by Michael Hofmann's new collection, Approximately Nowhere (Faber pounds 7.99); after this initial resistance Hofmann's patrician demotic and shrugged-off pathos worked as eloquently and subtly as anything he has written.MATT THORNEIn Your Face by Scarlett Thomas (Flame pounds 5.99): a dirty, dangerous book disguised as a straight-forward detective story; approach with caution.

Affinity by Sarah Waters (Virago pounds 9.99): The anguish at the centre of this novel reverberates with greater resonance than anything else I've read all year. New Writing 8 eds Tibor Fischer and Lawrence Norfolk (Vintage pounds 7.99): a must-read collection of the best of British prose and poetry. The classic I discovered this year was Updike's Rabbit books. This was the first time I read them in order, and was amazed as the sustained decadence in Updike's portrayal of suburban America.MARK BOSTRIDGEThe book that made the greatest impact on me this year was Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age by Ruth Harris (Allen Lane pounds 25), a brilliant exploration of the visions of Bernadette Soubirous in a Pyrenean grotto, and the development of the rituals of the Lourdes pilgrimage, and their consequences for the Catholic Church and 19th-century France.

Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury pounds 25) was an engrossing account of France's first modern woman, while in The Hours (Fourth Estate pounds 6.99), Michael Cunningham used fiction to convey the power of reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. The book I finally got around to reading was Lampedusa's elegy for the feudal nobility of Sicily, The Leopard (1958). Its dignified wistfulness and beauty make it one of the century's masterpieces.emma tennant The Sorcerer's Apprentice by John Richardson (Cape pounds 20). Traditional horrors of Christmas will vanish with this funny, informative and frequently scandalous account of "Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper", who built up one of the world's most important private collections of Cubist paintings A classic I read this year is Prosper Merimee's Colomba. More violent and moving than his Carmen, this story of the first Mafia heroine needs to be reprinted on its own.joan smith The biography I've appreciated most this year is Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh.