Doug McAvoy

National Union of Teachers general secretary

I enjoyed John Cole’s reign as the BBC’s political correspondent. His perception and insight on current affairs always impressed. His very readable memoirs, As it seemed to me (Weidenfeld) reflect on his years as journalist and correspondent and reinforce my view of his sound judgment, particularly as he views the Thatcher years.

And now a gem. You don’t have to be a north-easterner nor even a football fan to enjoy The Far Corner by Harry Pearson (Warner Books). Pearson’s obvious love of the game from Premier league to Federation Brewery Northern league 2 comes through in a series of delightful and humorous tales.

Gillian Shephard

Secretary of State for Education

This year I very much enjoyed Regeneration by Pat Barker. I found it harrowing in its realism, authentic in its characterisation, and entirely original in its viewpoint. The mixture of real and fictional characters works well and its exploration of mental illness is neatly woven into the story telling. Pat Barker also skilfully evokes the whole grimy and gloomy atmosphere of the period. It was not a quick read, but a statisfying one.

Tim Supple

Artistic director The Young Vic

This year my most useful read was Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Penguin). It opened my mind to the depth and relevance of the Grimms and taught me to take seriously the child’s experience of the tales. My most enjoyable read was Alan Clark’s Diaries (Phoenix). A man whose politics I find revolting, but whose wit and intelligence I found gripping and illuminating. I am at this moment in the thrall of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Faber and Faber), which I had avoided for years and now feel that I could have happily read annually.

Michael Morpurgo

Author short listed for the Whitbread Beefeater Children’s Novel Award

One outstanding choice. Here is a poet to make your heart sing. Every poem in Se n Rafferty’s wonderful Collected Poems is both touching and telling. Hardly anyone knows of Se n Rafferty. He did not want to be known. But after this, want it or not, his poems will be known. For here is some of the most lyrical and poignant writing of this century. There are echoes of Yeats, of Donne, of Hopkins - but it is Rafferty. We learn from Nicholas Johnson’s long and absorbing interview with the poet what the poems have already suggested to us, that this was a kind and gentle soul with a rare genius. His work, posthumously published, deserves all the acclaim he never sought. If there are any more poems still hidden away, then let Carcanet and Nicholas Johnson search them out for us. A treasure trove has been found. It belongs to all of us.

Julia Neuberger

Author and broadcaster

My return to novel reading after judging the Booker was marked by real pleasure in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Casting Off (Macmillan), an elegant end to her four-volume Cazalet Chronicle. I also enjoyed Ernest Raymond’s Mr Olim (Cassell) a period piece about a schoolmaster I had never read, lent me by John Roberts at Eton. Meanwhile, Carol Brightman’s edition of the letters of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, Between Friends (Secker and Warburg), was my book of the year, an alternating between world events and philosophical questions on the one hand and slipped discs and making dinner on the other. Just like (woman’s) life.

Lastly, there was Theo Richmond’s Konin (Cape), a loving reconstruction of a vanished Jewish community and world in a Polish town.

Gerald Wilson

Secretary of the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department

Danish author Peter Hoeg’s intricate and brutal Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Flamingo) is part thriller and part meditation on the North and the nature of belonging. If the ending just fails to deliver all that the rest of the book promises, Hoeg makes up for it with his beguiling cast of characters headed by the resourceful and enigmatic Miss Smilla .

Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (Doubleday) is laugh-out-loud funny. In his account of an off-season meander through Britain from Barnstaple to John O’Groats, Bryson adds genuine affection for the country he is writing about to his tried and tested recipe of self-deprecation, detailed observation and excoriating side swipes at everything from litter to literature.

In Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (Macmillan) Gitta Sereny tries to answer two questions: why did this intelligent, humorous architect give his soul to Hitler and was he, as he claimed in the Nuremberg Trials, ignorant of the Final Solution? Based on three years of conversations with Speer, this is a readable, vivid and honest book leaving the reader wondering if Sereny herself was not just a little seduced by Speer (Macmillan).

Larry Westland

Executive director, Music for Youth

A busy year of Keeping Music Alive in Our Schools has prevented me from much serious reading. I did, however, struggle “Paine-stakingly” through the republican arguments in Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor (I BTauris). Though I sympathise with much of its content I fear that, now reduced to a real life soap, the monarchy in its present form will run and run.

I also struggled with the first 20 or so pages of the excellent Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (Doubleday) but then it was fun all the way. One gem, The Studland peninsula, is well known as the only place where you can see all seven British reptiles - the grass snake, smooth snake, adder, slow worm, common lizard, sand lizard and Michael Portillo.”

Earlier in the year I discovered a wonderful second-hand anthology Scottish Love Poems, edited by Antonia Fraser (Canongate). A verse from W Price Turner’s “Reproaches” touches an old nerve: After Haydn symphony the man with the baton announced there was no point in playing Mahler to your empty seat.

Sadly the book is now out of print.

The most rewarding book of the year was Will Hutton’s The State We’re In (Jonathan Cape). The good thing about it is that it abounds in ideas for getting out of said state. Far more importantly it details the fault lines of a laissez-faire capitalism that arrogantly excludes co-operation.

Seamus Hegarty

Director National Foundation for Educational Research

Top of my list are two outstanding novels set in rural USA, each surely destined to become a classic. Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World (Doubleday) is a restrained but powerful narrative which charts the fall from a state of grace. No parent or child carer will be untouched by it. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (Fawcett Columbine) provides a powerful transposition of the Lear theme to a family farm in Iowa.

William Trevor excels even by his standards in Felicia’s Journey (Viking). His evocation of the banality of evil and his dispassionate eye over contemporary Britain make for an uncomfortable but compelling read. Dan Franck’s Separation (Black Swan) is an unusual dissection of people falling out of love; despite this analytical thrust, it is surprisingly effective.

Two very different thrillers demonstrate what life there is still in the genre. Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel (Flamingo) is a heady mixture of art history, chess and glimpses of contemporary Madrid. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (Bloomsbury) weaves love and betrayal, racial tension and community values into a tense courtroom drama.

Anthea Millett

Chief executive, Teacher Training Agency

My enjoyment in being read to continues unabated and I used a book token to buy another talking book. This time I chose Barchester Towers (Cover to Cover Classics). Timothy West’s reading is splendid. It captures Anthony Trollope’s keen, but not unkindly, portrayal of the foibles, follies, virtues and vices of human nature - male and female, ecclesiastic and temporal. Expensive but well worth the cost.

Short train journeys demand short books and the Penguin 60s Classics fill the bill admirably. Also, at 60 pence each you can give rather than lend them to friends. Meeting Dr Johnson, James Boswell’s record of the summer of 1763, is only one of more than 50 titles. It contains many conversational gems but none more apposite to education, in view of the unending debate about curriculum and pedagogy, than “Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learned them both.” My third choice is Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon (Faber and Faber), a macabre tale of death and political intrigue set against a sinister, magnificently evoked grey and gusty winter in Venice. His detective, Aurelio Zen, is as engaging as ever and Dibdin’s continued ironic comment on Italian economic, political and social life adds strong touches of humour.

And finally, what about Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course? (BBC Books). I have acquired the latest edition which has already run into 16 reprints, the last two in 1995. A well deserved, staggering success. Clear, concise recipes presented in an attractive easy-to-decipher format with rich, almost edible, photographs. Happy reading, and eating, over the holiday.

Brian Cox

Chairman, Arvon Foundation

Tony Harrison’s television film about Hiroshima was for me among the most important artistic events of the year. His combination of rhyming verse with spectacular images creates a new medium for poetry, a form of communication I should like to see other writers emulate.

The other major literary event of my year was my discovery of Pat Barker. My wife took Regeneration on our camping holiday in France this year, and we were both amazed by her ability to capture the voices and atmosphere of Craiglockhart, where W H Rivers, the army psychologist, met Sassoon and Owen. The mixture of fiction and fact makes the narrative especially moving. Since then I’ve read The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road and The Man Who Wasn’t There, and I’ve no doubt Pat Barker is a major novelist.

Nick Tate

Chief executive School Curriculum and Assessment Authority

My three books made me think about how we were, how we are and how we might be.

For years I have been trying to pluck up courage to read the 14th century Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland (Oxford). Long days sitting on a Normandy beach finally gave me the space to do this. I read as much as I could in the original, but turned for support to an excellent modern version by A V C Schmidt (Dent). Six months later what sticks in the mind is Langland’s overwhelming sense of the reality of spiritual things.

Anita Brookner is my favourite modern author. Driving around London, I keep on imagining her characters among the pavements and dappled plane trees of Bloomsbury and Notting Hill. As with earlier novels, A Family Romance (Penguin) is a compelling account of the pyrrhic victory of order and stoicism over emptiness and despair.

Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-moralization of Society (Institute of Economic Affairs) is serious stuff. As an historian of Victorian Britain, she exposes the late 20th century’s preoccupation with individualism, hedonism and relativism. I was left alarmed at the cultural amnesia which prevents us from standing back from our society and seeing the extent of the moral shifts which have been taking place.

Andrew Davies

Novelist, adaptor of Pride and Prejudice

Besides re-reading Emma, Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, and Ian McEwans’s The Child in Time (Picador), all with pleasure, but also for baser motives not unconnected with my fiction-reprocessing factory, I enjoyed Simon Gray’s Fat Chance (Faber) which recounts the latest ( Stephen Fry) chapter in his illustrious but disaster-strewn career as a dramatist. I love his continuing bafflement at the awful way people (including himself) behave. David Lodge’s Therapy (Secker and Warburg) seems at first engaging but lightweight but develops into a complex and moving novel. Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (Gollancz) was a great improvement on Fever Pitch, having the negative virtue of not being about chaps watching other chaps play football.

Kit Wright

Poet

Stuart Nicholson, who has already biographised Ella Fitzgerald, did the same this year for Billie Holiday (Gollancz) and a splendid study this is of a great artist. Not the least service the author, in his sedulous, eloquent way, performs for his subject is to point out that her life was by no means wholly, or deterministically, tragic. A full discography complements the book. I was delighted by Penguin’s celebratory sixty pencers and wish they could proliferate for ever. Of these I most enjoyed John Updike’s sizzling stories, Friends from Philadelphia, but only slightly more than the Gothic grunge of Poppy Z Brite (a likely name!) in a cold collation entitled His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.

Lynne Truss

Novelist, Times columnist

For as long as I can remember, I have been researching a comic novel on Tennyson and Lewis Carroll. Such a focus tends to limit peripheral reading, so my choices this year are all from writers whose new books I refuse ever to miss. Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love (Viking) is set in a London hall of residence in the early 1970s. Beautifully written, it evokes the hunger, horror and eye-liner of that insecure period. Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years (Chatto) is a typically brilliant and wise study of a “what-if”, in which a woman runs away from home and family. And catching up with 1994 award-winner William Trevor’s sad and sinister Felicia’s Journey (Penguin Pounds 5.99) seemed all the more powerful set against the context of the Rosemary West trial.

Eric Bolton

Professor of teacher education, Institute of Education, University of London

Most of my reading during 1995 has been done while travelling, or while working abroad. That might account for the poetry; which seems suited to the short bursts of activity that characterise reading on the move. I have carried around Amy Clampitt’s three collections of poems What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure and Westward (Faber and Faber). Her cool voice speaking of blueberrying in Maine, or seeking Wordsworth in The Lakes, was doubly welcome in the barely changing seasons of the tropics.

My novel is Native Speaker by Chang rae Lee (Granta Books). Its depiction of the life of a second generation immigrant in the States attempting to control his life by intellectual thought and will power, is almost flawless. Form and substance merge as the almost too perfect writing mirrors the modulated, controlled life of the hero: it is also a cracking suspense story, and a first novel.

Finally, 20 years on I am re-reading Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand to that teasing voice asking such important questions for the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority as, “The condition of mankind is, and always has been so miserable and depraved that if anyone were to say to the poet: ‘For God’s sake stop singing and do something useful like putting the kettle on or fetching bandages’, what just reason could he give for refusing?” - answer on not more than two pages of A4.

Griff Rhys Jones

Actor, presenter of Bookworm (BBC TV)

This year I enjoyed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (Vintage) Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson (Bloomsbury) To War with Whitaker by the Countess Ranfurly (Mandarin) The Prince, the Showgirl and Me by Colin Clark (HarperCollins)

Sir Ron Dearing

Chairman, School Curriculum and Assessment Authority

Personal indulgence for me is half an hour in a second hand book shop: new books and new bookshops lack the surprising discovery. But I make an exception for the new illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland, which can be full of surprises, as the artist interprets the story. Hitherto I have never much liked the Tenniel illustrations, but as coloured by Harry Theaker and Diz Wallis in the Pan Books Edition I am a convert.

Francis Wheen

Author, broadcaster, columnist

My book of 1995 - and indeed of every year since 1975, when I read it for the first time - is Laurence Sterne’s comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy, now available in a handsomely produced Everyman hardback at Pounds 9.99. Critics who praise contemporary novelists for their “daring” post-modernism - authorial interjections, topsy-turvy narrative and so forth - should occasionally be reminded that the whole caboodle was invented by an eccentric Anglican clergyman more than two centuries ago. “Nothing odd will last,” Dr Johnson once said, in a rare lapse of judgment. “Tristram Shandy did not last.” It is Tristram Shandy’s very oddity that has guaranteed its immortality.

Maggie Semple

Director of Education and Training at the Arts Council of England

Haunting, compelling, disturbing - a year of mythical fiction, galvanic ideas and intriguingly interrelated plots. Now, when I walk past a bakery, enter a flower shop or travel in a confined space I remember Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (Penguin), a beautifully crafted novel about the alchemy of scents, used as a metaphor for the human condition.

The mysterious tension between day and night knowledge in Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh (Black Swan), creates a memorable novel of contradictions and finely tuned debate - “set in the time of the angels to whom everything is always present”.

Reef (Granta), by Romesh Gunesekera, gently and elegantly describes the subtle relationship between food tastes, mirrored in relationships between people and their environment. The coral reef provides the rhythm of the story - at times violent and at others soft.

R K Narayan is a great storyteller. His Tales from Malgudi (Penguin 60s) are witty, the characters are instantly recognisable and the logic of their actions so obvious. I felt like shouting through the pages to suggest that a different course of action was needed - but then I would have interrupted the alchemy.