Christmas Books 2014: best gift books If these won't do, it would be an excellent year for sticking to the classics. The Folio Society has reissued that 1930 jewel 1066 and All That (Folio Society, £18.95) by W C Sellar and R J Yeatman. Retelling English history in the form of a schoolboy's garbled rote-learnings, there is ceaseless delight to be had in its parade of Good Things, Bad Kings and vice versa. The end-of-chapter test papers are infamous: "How would you deal with the Venomous Bead? Be quick. Outline joyfully (1) Henry VIII, (2) Stout Cortez. Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once. Naturally, come Christmas shopping, the stocking filler is only one line of attack. Another school of book-gifting favours the sumptuous reprint of a novel or poem. Now that a paper book's sensuous pleasure is its chief advantage over a digital text, the shops are awash with covetable editions. F Scott Fitzgerald's works, for instance, have been reissued by Penguin (all £14.99) in gilt-patterned Jazz Age jackets so attractive that one hardly knows whether to wear them, eat them or read them. A more seasonal candidate is T S Eliot's The Ariel Poems (Faber, £14.99); his six illustrated poems for Christmas collected for the first time in a single volume, between festive red covers. Anyone with a thirst for handsome books should look at the lists of three small publishers. Pushkin Press specialises in tactile, well-translated editions of writing from abroad. This year, one could try the hilarious short stories in Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, £12) by Teffi, a sort of female Saki in pre-Revolutionary Russia, beloved by Lenin and the last Tsar alike. Slightly Foxed, too, reprints forgotten texts in fine editions; recently, the beloved historical novels of Ronald Welch, of which the first, Knight Crusader (Slightly Foxed, £16), would fill someone's midwinter dreams very pleasantly with Saracens and jousting. But Slightly Foxed's best offering is its quarterly, in which a dozen or so elegant essays make a case for various amusing but neglected books. A subscription (£40/12 months) would make an inspired gift for a hungry reader. Of all reprints, the most distinctive are the dove grey jackets of Persephone Books. Covetable this year is The Country Life Cookery Book (Persephone, £12), written in 1937 by Ambrose Heath (unctuous nom de plume of a Francis Miller). Considering each season scrupulously in turn, his neat phrases instruct on tarts and gratins, leeks à la Grecque and cutlets à la Reform. Almost more edible than the food described are the beautiful etchings by Eric Ravilious, depicting jovial "horns of plenty" and quizzical sheep. Devotees of the land not interested in cutlets might be better off with Mark Cocker's outstanding Claxton (£14.99, Random House). His year-long cycle of daily writings from a single valley in Norfolk proves the infinite variety to be found in a confined space (and that there is such a thing in Norfolk as a valley). Those of martial temperament could not be better pleased than with A History of War in 100 Battles (William Collins, £25) by the historian Richard Overy. Intensely visual, his piecemeal story of war and its development is almost more image than text. Many names will be familiar - Rorke's Drift, Salamis, Dien Bien Phu - but at least some will be obscure; and Overy's overarching conclusions are worth the attention of even the most encyclopedic bore. Biographies do a brisk trade at Christmas; an alternative to the standard form is to be found in two outstanding anthologies. Meeting the Devil (Windmill Books, £12.99) is a collection of more-or-less autobiographical pieces from the London Review of Books: Julian Barnes writes on not getting the Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel on being assaulted in a hospital bed. Prefaced by Alan Bennett, the writing is always very fine. For those with an eye on antiquity, a splendid book has emerged from a Radio 3 series as Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome by Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke (OUP, £18.99). Resurrecting ancient authors to speak to modern concerns, these thoughtful essays ask why the poets of the Great War wrote so often about Achilles, and how Euripidean tragedy, with humans as choiceless, hapless pawns, has influenced neuroscience. One could read this avidly on Christmas Day and for years to come. Another unusual book this year is The Art of Smallfilms (Four Corners Books, £25), with wonderfully surreal photographs of the puppets and props used by the British firm to film iconic children's television series from the 1960s and 70s: Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. Any child will be amused by the superb flights of fancy - pink mice-like creatures rocketing into space and venturing genteely over lunar plains - while those no longer young will remember these scenes from television, and fall in love with them all over again. But the primus inter pares of gift books this year might well be Nairn's London (£9.99, Penguin Classics), the 1966 handbook by an architectural critic of true genius. "A record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham," was how Ian Nairn described it, and his writing gives such eloquence to buildings that it could fill Dagenham with day-trippers. This paperback edition, long overdue, fits neatly in a coat pocket, which is exactly where you need it.