A choice of stocking-fillers

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing something for people to buy for other people who would rather have been given something else. Having produced one or two of the things myself, I suspect that most Christmas books aren’t even opened, let alone read. And possibly for good reason, because the majority of them are crushingly mediocre. Here, though, are a few that are really rather good.

Big beast among the cartoon books this year is Mrs Weber’s Omnibus (Jonathan Cape, £20), the collected Guardian strips of Posy Simmonds. It’s beautiful and it replaces several battered large-format paperbacks I now realise I lost years ago.