My reading is partly controlled by what I have to read as research for my work, and what I am sent to read as a judge for literary prizes and bursaries (this year I am judging the Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography). But I always find time to read simply for pleasure.

One of the most pleasurable novels I have recently read is Emma Brown by the Irish novelist and short-story writer Clare Boylan. Beginning with a few pages written by Charlotte Brontë not long before her death, Clare Boylan continues the story that Charlotte might have written had she lived longer. There is a good deal of surreptitious scholarship behind this literary conceit, such as lines from Charlotte Brontë’s own letters woven into the narrative and some well-researched social observations almost Dickensian in their lurid detail. But it’s the story that counts – a story full of romantic misadventures and terrific escapes from danger. It had me turning the pages frantically. It’s outrageously readable and I found no difficulty in suspending any disbelief I might have felt. Surely someone must make a film of this book.

Relations by Jane Miller is a most unusual mixture of family history, sociology and autobiography. Jane Miller is an exceptionally skilful and perceptive writer and I admire this book enormously. Each of her chapters resembles a layer in an archaeological discovery that seems to expose a separate aspect of the truth, but actually contributes to the reader’s general understanding of the author’s origins. This series of stories is unique, yet I feel that it runs parallel to other family narratives and will stir surprising echoes and reflections in many readers’ memories. It certainly has in mine.

Now I have reached pensionable age, I find myself re-reading books I read many years ago. It is a dangerous habit and can lead to much disillusionment, but one book I am now re-reading, Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism, has retained all its subversive vitality and charm. When I first read this essay in my teens, I was stimulated by the way Wilde turned many of the clichés I was used to hearing upside down. ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia,’ he wrote, ‘is not worth even glancing at’. He took the sanctimoniousness out of socialism and converted it into a creed that would, he promised, ‘relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others’. His view of history changed my own view then, and it remains pretty well my view today. ‘One is absolutely sickened,’ he wrote, ‘not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted’. Wilde’s lasting value lies in his challenging opinions. Read him today on our fashionable brands of cant – on the degradations of charity, the necessity for agitators and the dictatorship of democracy based on ‘that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion’.

I also have on my table a novel that I remember reading with a sense of enchantment when I was in my twenties. Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote Mr Fortune’s Maggot in the mid-1920s after a vivid dream in which she saw a middle-aged man standing alone on an island beach, wringing his hands in despair. ‘I jumped out of bed,’ she recorded, ‘and began to write it down’. Her book tells the story of Timothy Fortune, an ex-bank clerk who enters the church and who, equipped with a second-hand harmonium and a sewing-machine, escapes to a distant island where he appears to convert only one of the natives - a boy who in fact converts him. I loved the humour when I first read this novel and I still do. But as a fable of paradise found and lost, an allegory of happiness, it seems to me now to contain eternal truths.

Finally I am reading again Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica – a wonderful and exciting story of children and pirates, I thought it, when I first read the book in my childhood. But as I approach my second childhood, it strikes me as being far more than this: a sinister and amoral revelation of human nature. In fact it is both of these things and one of those rare books, a minor masterpiece that can be read at both levels.

You’ll notice that, though I am a biographer, I have included no biographies in my list. I like to think that poets, playwrights and novelists are constantly reading biographies.

Michael Holroyd, who is president of the Royal Society of Literature, has written biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, and two volumes of family history, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic.