Literary and historical doorstoppers have come thick and fast this year: Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury, £25 in UK) brilliantly evokes the Parisian milieu of this sensual, narcissistic novelist whose principal theme was sexual love, depicted as a delicious malady and an enslavement. Another prolific French novelist and free spirit is celebrated in George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large (Chatto & Windus, £20 in UK). Belinda Jack untangles the multiple identities of this complex 19th-century woman of letters, whose flamboyant life was probably her most memorable creation. Francis Wheen gets to grips with Das Kapital in his authoritative biography of Karl Marx (Fourth Estate, £20 in UK) and Benita Eisler pays Lord Byron the compliment of taking him seriously in Byron: Child Of Passion, Fool Of Fame (Hamish Hamilton, £25 in UK), which emphasises his thwarted political ambitions.

The compelling story of a contemporary political leader with Byronic tendencies in his private life is chronicled by John Keane in Vaclav Havel - A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (Bloomsbury, £25 in UK). Though occasionally laboured, this is a candid, fully rounded portrait of Havel's courage, perception and humour as well as his betrayals and evasions. Out Of Place: A Memoir (Granta Books, £25 in UK), by the stellar cultural critic, Edward Said, recreates a vanished Palestinian childhood, while meditating on the experience of living between two cultures and languages.