Biography titles are always in high demand at Christmas and there will be many hundreds of titles out there vying for your attention. The titles I’ve chosen are not the ones with the big marketing budgets, they are not about the Stars of the moment but to me they represent the best of the art of biography and including perhaps something a little more unusual and overlooked.

Alan Bennett will never be overlooked and his personal family memoir A Life live Other People’s is now available in a small gift format. Gillian Freeman’s Footprints in Paris is one of my books of the year,  a astonishing piece of exploration of history and place.

With 2009 having been such a dire year I was especially on the lookout for humour to add some cheer with two laugh-out-louds, Guy Browning’s Maps of My Life and Michael Simkins’ Detour de France. There’s plenty of humour too in Byron Rogers’ Me: The Authorised Autobiography and Mary Beards’ It’s a Don’s Life.

There are two titles for lovers of letters and diaries, Louisa Lane Fox’s Love to the Little Ones, an anthology of parental trials and tribulations over the past four hundred years and Frances Woodsford’s Dear Mr Bigelow, a selection of the many letters she wrote to the elderly American gentleman, Mr Bigelow in the post-war period.

And that leaves me two titles to recommend, both explorations, Sara Wheeler covering the vast Arctic territories in Magnetic North and Susan Hill conducting an exploration through her books in Howard’s End is On the Landing.

Along with these we do have have a selection of some of the high profile titles for Christmas so, all in all a bumper crop that will include something for everyone.

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