His technical assurance lends a marmoreal beauty to poems about dying, danger and memory in the time of Aids. Art history comes my way too seldom as a reviewer, but I've relished the shrewd reappraisals in James Christen Steward's The New Child (Washington), a lavishly detailed account of the way English 18th-century artists changed the way we look at our beloved little monsters.Angela LambertPat Barker's The Ghost Road (Viking) was the best book I read this year, 'nuff said. I also greatly enjoyed Margaret Forster's Hidden Lives (Viking), a memoir of three generations of her own family in Carlisle which throbbed with authenticity and painful discoveries. The first is a debut novel by an Indian writer of exceptional gifts, Vikram Chandra's Red Earth And Pouring Rain (Faber), a fusion of magic realism with bravura historical set-pieces. I never read enough poetry, but Mark Doty's My Alexandria (Cape) announced that rarest of birds, an American poet who is neither preening, portentous nor self-absorbed.

The most over-rated book of the year was Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island (Doubleday) - the usual repetition of how the author was cheated and insulted by surly locals whom he later punished by writing unfunny stories about them.Jonathan KeatesThe problem is that I've enjoyed practically everything I've read this year, but three books stand out. For once, the Booker judges got it right, with Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (Viking). It's full of unforgettable characters and themes which jump time and place to recur with uncanny similarities: ferrymen and fearful hounds, divine queens and dread lords, visitors on hopeless quests for lost loved ones.Roy HattersleyThe best biography of the year was Peter Ackroyd's Blake (Sinclair-Stevenson), an exciting evocation of the poet's life and times, a revelation for people who think of him as simply the author of "Jerusalem".Roy Jenkins's magisterial life of Gladstone (Macmillan) - written only as one politician can write about another - was a close runner-up. Too close to the bone for the prudish Victorians, today Fanny deserves to come back into her own. Ann Wroe's A Fool and his Money: Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town (Cape) is history as quest, told with such vivid turns of phrase that it reads like watching a film Alice K. Turner's History of Hell (Robert Hale) traces the idea of the Great Below from Ancient Mesopotamia through medieval harrowings to modern times (hell is other people, said Sartre; hell is oneself, said T.S Eliot). Mother of the more famous Anthony but just as good a storyteller, Fanny spins a compulsively readable and very funny yarn of debt, double-dealing and the seamier side of Bath society.

Finally, John Hollander's field-changing collection, American Poetry of the 19th Century (Library of America, 2 vols).Christina HardymentFanny Trollope's Widow Barnaby (Alan Sutton), first published in 1839 and reprinted this year to accompany Teresa Ransom's excellent biography of the author, is Jane Austen with the gloves off. Joan Smith's Full Stop (Chatto), the fifth of her intelligent crime novels, opens up the disturbing but little-discussed subject of sexual fear - an experience most women would find absorbingly familiar. This thoughtful portrait of a dauntless feminist and pacifist combines the readability of a novel with the authenticity of fact. More recent history comes from the BBC's superb team of exiled reporters, distilled into From Our Own Correspondent, The First Forty Years (BBC/Pan), which would make a good Christmas present.

And once again Hilary Mantel produced my favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love (Viking) is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom.Lyndall GordonMark Bostridge has made a distinguished debut with his life of Vera Brittain co-authored with Paul Berry (Chatto): a full-scale biography that leaves behind the standard plod of pedigree to grave. The appendix suggests a receipt to cure every female ailment: it includes, among its 37 ingredients, purified peonies, Macedonian pellitory and fleawort. A Village Affair and The Rector's Wife (Black Swan) were the best. But my favourite book this year must be Tsuguhito Takeuchi's enthralling study of early cross-cultural social and trading links, Old Tibetan Contracts from Central Asia (Daizou Shuppan Publishing).Sue GaisfordHenrietta Leyser's Medieval Women (Weidenfeld) is the best history book I've read for years, full of stories and surprises and written with gentle elegance from enormous knowledge.