Biography CLAIRE TOMALIN'S splendid Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, Euro31.99) never reduces the poetry or fiction to the strange, often sad life of its maker, but illuminates it by finely observed contexts of class, character and culture.

A satisfying trio of poets' biographies, each of which grapples with conflicts between art, faith and desire, is completed by John Stubbs's Donne: The Reformed Soul (Viking, Euro26.99).

Donne, rake and courtier turned cleric, may be canonised as one of Shakespeare's greatest peers.

But to deny to newcomers - as the academic would - the chance to meet him, and his genius, via an engaging narrative is truly philistine.

Yet biography does evolve, changing its focus and its boundaries. Fashionably, but with assured scholarship and storytelling flair, Ross King selects one decisive passage in the career of Manet and his friends and foes in The Judgement of Paris (Chatto & Windus, Euro26.81): an engrossing account of how avant-garde artists' battle with the salons helped to fix the visual style of our world.

Jenny Uglow's warmly sympathetic depiction of the Romantic-era woodcut artist Thomas Bewick and his circle, Nature's Engraver (Faber, Euro30 approx), puts a once-patronised Tyneside innovator centre-stage, weaves his story into the radical politics and natural-history cults of his age, and reclaims his lovingly attentive art.

The new biography often opts to look at the figures around over-familar icons. Rodney Bolt does so in his pacey and spirited life of Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (Bloomsbury, Euro29.80), tracing this unsinkable scamp from Venice to New York.

Memoir TWO fine memoirs by leading poets address the tangled roots of talent. John Burnside's A Lie about my Father (Cape, Euro17 approx) brings to tender, painful life the poet's damaged and damaging parent, "falling at his own velocity" from Cowdenbeath to Corby. Just as evocative, but quieter in its family passions, is Andrew Motion's In the Blood (Faber, Euro23 approx). It balances the pastoral pleasures of a minorgentry childhood with a prickle of risk that presages the shocking climax.

Two ruefully amusing American writers' memoirs emerged from the mid-century mid-west, and helped to explain a generation that later blundered into global power. Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone (Fourth Estate, Euro13.99) is the more obviously artful: its selfdeprecating fragments take in shared icons such as Peanuts and the Pythons, as well as private passions - German literature, or the solitary poetry of birdwatching.

Fans will find Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Doubleday, Euro19.99) as adorable as they could wish, but it hides a chill beneath its charm.

His anecdotes from a blessed 1950s childhood in Des Moines build into a rather sophisticated book about "heartland" simplicity.

We should end with a (big) bang, although I might be on shaky ground in classifying Michael Frayn's formidable, but friendly, The Human Touch (Faber, Euro29.80) as a creative autobiography. Yet this is a wittily discursive summing-up of Frayn's career-long immersion as playwright and novelist in the philosophical questions posed by post-Einstein science. He argues we're all on shaky ground, as we struggle via our senses and our selves to make sense of an incorrigibly mobile reality.

Showbiz THE year's most unusual showbiz book was David Thomson's Nicole Kidman (Bloomsbury, Euro16.99). What made it so unusual was that it made no attempt to hide Thomson's infatuation. More like romantic poetry than film criticism, love letter than biography, this billet doux should have been a one-way ticket to Pseud's Corner, but his adoration gives this eccentric paean an intimacy it would otherwise have lacked.

Bewildering, exasperating, sporadically inspired, it has as many bum notes as bon mots, but it's never dull.

If you're similarly besotted with Kidman, you probably still harbour a jealous interest in her ex-husband, analysed by Iain Johnstone in Tom Cruise: All The World's A Stage (Hodder & Stoughton, Euro27 approx). After Thomson's declaration of undying love, it's a relief to find that Johnstone isn't smitten. He admires Cruise, but his tone is respectful not reverential. Like Thomson, Johnstone knows his movies, and his matter-of-fact appraisal is a welcome antidote to Thomson's more florid flights of fancy. Johnstone's businesslike biog feels as if written at arm's length - but this distance allows him to state some awkward facts about Cruise's Scientology. It's hard to believe he could have been quite so frank in an authorised biography.

You can't get much more authorised than And It's Goodnight From Him. . . The Autobiography of The Two Ronnies by Ronnie Corbett (Michael Joseph, Euro28 approx). Barker died before the book was written, but Corbett's memories of his shy costar are remarkably vivid, and these tender recollections more than make up for his own, often banal, reminiscences. Corbett is a likeable narrator and a transparently decent chap, but when talking about himself he can be Pooterish.

The same could be said of Michael Palin's Diaries: The Python Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Euro28 approx). Like Corbett (who worked with him on The Frost Report), Palin is very perceptive about other people - less so about himself. If you can plough through the domestic minutiae, and rather plodding ruminations, there's a wealth of fascinating stuff about Monty Python.

Boyd Hilton is almost as exhaustive in Inside Little Britain (Ebury, Euro19.99), which chronicles every spit and cough of Matt Lucas and David Walliams's mammoth national tour. This flyon-the-dressing-room-wall account reads more like a script than a conventional biography, but it does give you a pretty good idea of what Britain's most outrageous double act are really like. Offstage, Lucas and Walliams seem like a couple of sentimental maiden aunts, as if their grotesque caricatures have used up all their bile.

Fans of more old-fashioned biography (and comedy) will probably prefer Tommy Cooper:

Always Leave Them Laughing (HarperCollins, Euro28.85), a book with unrivalled access to (and knowledge of) its elusive subject.

John Fisher produced some of Cooper's TV shows, he's a member of the Magic Circle, and his expertise and insight compensate for somewhat pedestrian prose. However, the showbusiness book of the year is Rupert Everett's Red Carpets & Other Banana Skins (Little, Brown, Euro14.99). This could have been awful - a Hollywood memoir by an actor in midcareer, mindful of his famous colleagues' reputations. In fact, it's like Everett's best acting - elegant, seductive and full of fun.

It's a wonderful surprise to find that he's a brilliant autobiographer - witty and evocative, with a cinematic eye for mood and detail. And, unlike Ronnie Corbett, he has a sensational tale to tell.

Romance?

THE moorland romances of the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier are never far away from our vision of the perfect Christmas read. Draw up a chair, then, for debut novelist Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (Orion, Euro15.99). Set in an isolated Yorkshire farmhouse, this literary potboiler relives the secret history of Vida Winter, a reclusive novelist with a past. It's a windswept feast of abandoned babies, incestuous siblings and feral twins.

There's gothic of a more temperate kind in A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy (John Murray, Euro19.36). In the sequel to her bestselling Liars and Saints, Meloy catches up with the Santerre family - a tightly knit Catholic clan. The flaky heroine sleeps with her uncle; mother finds salvation in the arms of a freckly woman: sun-kissed schlock for the seasonally affected.

Staying in California, Douglas Kennedy's Temptation (Hutchinson, Euro10.42) gives the Hollywood blockbuster a welcome makeover. Wannabe screenwriter David Armitage wants to be rich. When he finally sells a script, he indulges in every cliché Tinseltown has to offer.

His inevitable breakdown owes more to Scott Fitzgerald than Larry David.

Parvenu statesman Cicero tried hard to avoid flying too close to the sun. Robert Harris's Imperium (Hutchinson Euro10.42) retells the earlier life story of this workaholic poet and politician from the point of view of Tiro, his personal assistant, in an epic keen to draw parallels between Rome BC and Washington DC.

The students in Marisha Pessl's hit debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking, Euro25.32) are well versed in the Classics and internecine intrigue - an American campus novel whose erudite veneer (and whodunit subtext) will appeal to a generation too young to remember Donna Tartt's The Secret History.

Readers who can no longer be bothered with novels about young people and "university nodules" will find a kindred spirit in Marie Sharp, 60-year-old heroine of Viriginia Ironside's comic novel No! I don't want to join a bookclub (Fig Tree Euro13.99).

The babyboomers' answer to Bridget Jones: her fictional diaries grapple with atrophic sex, orthopaedic shoes and seniors with too much hair.

Ian Fleming's favourite seduction technique was sausages in front of the fire. A more gourmet approach is to be found in Geling Yan's The Uninvited (Faber, Euro13.99), when factory worker Dan Dong is mistaken for a journalist, and enters a new world of free lunches and cash handouts. In this exquisite indictment of corporate China, Dong ends up supping from the breasts of semichilled sex workers.

Yasmin Crowther's memorable Iranian family epic The Saffron Kitchen (Little, Brown, Euro22.34) is a more dignified affair. After 40 years in London, Maryam revisits her girlhood village.

Memories of an authoritarian father, a general under the Shah, are tempered by the pleasurable shock of the minarets and mountains of home.

A coffee table book for those with particularly big and solid coffee tables, acclaimed marine photographer Philip Plisson's Ocean is an eye-wateringly beautiful collection, showing how in thrall to the splendour and fury of the sea he is. Included amongst the 200 pictures are an impressive scattering from the Irish coastline. Published by Thames & Hudson, there are 416 pages and it costs about Euro60