What are the best books for Christmas? Almost by definition not those on the lists compiled by other newspapers. Their reviewers choose titles to recommend on the same basis that freshers select the book they want to be seen behind in the pub or café - to look cooller or cleverer than they really are. Their choices are either achingly on trend (Joseph O'Neill, Malcolm Gladwell) or just a teensy bit show-offy intellectual (the new life of Gabriel García Márquez, Malcolm Gladwell). And everything recommended in the other papers is a time-bound choice, a book that rolled off the presses in the past 12 months and that the publishers need to see puffed before the remainder van draws up.

The really best books for Christmas aren't selected on the basis of coollness, cleverness or contemporaneity. There are other criteria that count.

The first type of book you want at Christmas is the nostalgic wallow. This is not a season for experimental fiction, such as the book by that Canadian bloke in which each chapter uses only one vowel. It is a time for traditional pleasures. Admittedly, not those that have become too much of a seasonal cliché, such as A Christmas Carol or The Pickwick Papers, the Bristol Cream sherry and Warnink's advocaat of fiction.

Instead, go for the rich clarets and vintage ports of English literature - Trollope's Barchester novels, the more austere Austen (Persuasion and Mansfield Park), big heart-bursting Hardy tragedies (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, but not Jude the Obscure - just too dark) and all the overlooked Edwardian classics - Arnold Bennett, Chesterton's Father Brown stories, all Conan Doyle, including Brigadier Gerard as well as Sherlock Holmes, and M.R. James's ghost stories.

The second type of essential book is the reading buffet - into which you can dip during a few moments of snatched peace as the fruit of your loins dismantle their Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, or in which you can lose yourself fully after they have gone to bed. Diaries and letters are best here. I love the political, so a Harold Nicolson or Chips Channon will do me, and I am keen to sample the new collection of Hugo Young's jottings. But even better are properly actorly showbiz and entertainment scribblings. Dirk Bogarde's or Noël Coward's letters. Simon Gray's brilliant, hilarious and moving Smoking Diaries. Harriet Walter's Other People's Shoes.

The third genre worth reading at Christmas is the melancholy memoir. Instead of thrusting the brutal ugliness of an immersion in misery in your face, the melancholy memoir gently takes you back in time to note what we have lost, in the company of a charming, witty, philosophical and thoughtful guide. This year two quite brilliant examples have been published - Jeremy Lewis's Grub Street Irregular and Ferdinand Mount's Cold Cream. Both are very, very good.

But quite the best examples are two books that I never tire of pressing on friends. They are the memoirs of Michael Wharton, who wrote The Daily Telegraph's Peter Simple column, published as The Missing Will and The Dubious Codicil. Please, please, try them.

The final sort of book you want at Christmas is the Nice Fat History. I recognise this, like goose instead of turkey, cheddar rather than Stilton, hock not sauvignon blanc, is a particular Gove Christmas taste. But it is one that I will continue to champion because sublime pleasures are no less special for becoming mainstream. And I think that the more mainstream we make history-reading, the better. That is why I would unhesitatingly recommend, from the current crop, Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders, Simon Sebag-Montefiore's Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Ian Kershaw's Hitler and, from decades ago, Robert Blake's Disraeli and Frank Owen's Tempestuous Journey: The Life of David Lloyd George.

A parting word. The true book-lover doesn't need a book to be new to love it - quite the opposite - so if you are thinking of giving a book as a gift this Christmas then, as with port, it is best to go vintage.

Game over

The phrase of the week has, I fear, been “game on”. It has been used by unnamed, figures from both main political parties to signal their general readiness to join ideological battle. As someone who has been firing off fusillades from my little trench in the middle of the political battlefield for years now, I didn't realise that we needed a sign to get going. But if we do, can it please not be this uniquely ugly phrase. I can't think of a worse piece of political language save, perhaps, the ubiquitous and meaningless “fit for purpose” (which is, like “fresh initiative”, effectively a tautology).

“Game on” was the title of a witless Nineties sitcom and the phrase itself springs from the tragic world of lad culture - as in “Samantha is game on for some love action”. Can we please show that we've moved on and drawn a line in the sand? Or are we destined to see this phrase rolled out across the country and accepted by both spin doctors and political journalists as a necessary part of their partnership working?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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