Christmas is one of those times when the world gives books, almost as if a nostalgia for filling the mind with images suggested by words has as deep a pull on our unconscious mind as the birth in the manger of that Jewish preacher who said we should love the next person the way we love ourselves. It becomes a toss-up as to how much we treat our loved ones to what we would like ourselves or feed them their own poisons. Not everyone who is attracted to Julian Burnside QC's Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice is going to rush to read Julia Fox's The Infamous Lady Rochford, about Jane Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's sister-in-law who was also executed and whose story is told in sumptuous Antonia Fraserian prose. Some will double up, of course: a feeling for the rustle of the silk of history and the power and the glory of a turbulent Tudor past is not incompatible with a sense of justice and outrage at its betrayals, though Burnside may share more readers with that most intense and intellectually impassioned of Muslim-Australian voices, that of Waleed Aly in People Like Us.

You would have to belong to a very broad church indeed to give equal time in your heart of hearts to Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth, though both authors can shape a sentence. His Holiness is intent on getting to a religiously coherent (and orthodox) image of Christ, whereas the old Hitch is at war against the Evil of Religion. It's not hard to think that the man who in his time has had a go at cutting down Che Guevara, Princess Margaret and Mother Teresa was always making his way round to God.

In Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer skirts around Shakespeare by speculating - with an abundant, overcompensating licence - on what Anne Hathaway might or might not have got up to. It's Greer with her dry-as-dust hat on, poring over village records in order to speculate on a thousand mundane possibilities. A testing book if you don't have a feeling for world-we-have-lost archaeologising. While we're on the subject of the man who created the most after God, Bill Bryson's pocket life of Shakespeare, The World as a Stage, is suave and readable, though a bit ordinary, but AD Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker is one of the finest critical accounts of the Bard for years. And if you already have a straightforward collected Shakespeare, you might also like to invest in the RSC-approved Complete Works, handsome to behold and edited by Jonathan Bate, and there's the RSC's Shakespeare: The Life, the Work, the Treasures, a gorgeous picture book with extractable documents, for the young and luxury-loving.

Among literary fiction, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is a bleak evocation of that aspect of the early '60s that was a prolongation of the fumbling-in-the-dark of the '50s when it came to love, marriage and the old in-out. It's the story of a young married couple falling apart right at the outset and it's superbly done, with the right amount of warmth and optimism to make the denouement credible. Don DeLillo, the reigning progressive American master in later mid-career, has an arresting and poignant novel about the impact of September 11 in Falling Man, which cuts between a husband, his wife, his girlfriend and a group of terrorists. Not major DeLillo, but showing his matchless signature. Norman Mailer's swansong, The Castle in the Forest, also plays with the shadows of history, in this case the childhood of Hitler, no less. It's Mailer on a middling good day, though the novel is a lot longer than it needs to be.