CARRY THE RIGHT prayer book this Christmas and even the most long-winded church service can slip by in a delightful - if slightly risqué - daydream. A splendid facsimile of the recently rediscovered Macclesfield Psalter (Thames & Hudson, £49.95/offer £44.96) offers a fascinating spy-hole on to the medieval imagination. The spiritual and the saucy, the ethereal and the lewd entwine in the intricate miniatures and lavish marginal illuminations that might on the surface be all about piety, but laughter and ribaldry are never far behind.

Another vividly eccentric vision is explored in a monumental biography of the great modernist Marc Chagall. Jackie Wullschalager, given access to previously unseen letters, leads her readers into the mind of a Russian-born pioneer who looked at the world as if through the window of a washing machine. He sent cows and fiddlers, brides and roosters tumbling giddily round in lovely luminous canvases whose colours run as traditions tangle and merge. Chagall: Love and Exile (Allen Lane, £30/£27) is a lively and sympathetic biography that follows its subject from the anarchic energy of his early ambition to his slow suffocation by later success.

The achievements of Chagall's fellow Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, are also proudly celebrated this year with the publication of a truly vast picture book published to complement an exhibition of his work which, currently showing in Munich, will travel to Paris and New York in the next few months. Kandinsky (Prestel, £99/ £89.10) follows the progress of this founder of abstract painting through his experiments, despairs, hopes and discoveries towards the vivid improvisations in which he set out to capture emotions on canvas. The high-quality reproductions in this volume are complemented by biographical photographs and explanatory essays.

A voyage of a more quietly intriguing sort is pursued by Eric Karpeles in his quirky but charming compendium Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, £25/£22.50): a beautifully presented anthology of the images that inspired that most visual of literary masterpieces A la recherche du temps perdu. Karpeles not only digs out and reproduces the works to which Proust makes specific reference but, where a painter is mentioned to indicate a mood or evoke an aesthetic, he selects a work that he thinks can best capture it. Together they build up into an enticingly het-erogeneous collection which, accompanied by textual fragments (in English translation), leads the reader farther into an imaginative labyrinth towards those ponderous depths where the painterly and poetic merge.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Gifts

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Fiction

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Crime

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Biography and memoir

• Christmas bestsellers

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Art

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Food

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Music

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Travel

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Children's audiobooks

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Film & theatre

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Graphic Novels

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Back to basics

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Poetry

• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Children's 2-10

If you prefer the package tour you probably couldn't do better than Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World (Granta, £15.99/£14.39). In a series of seven lucid chapters she jets from the histrionics of the auction house to the sybaritism of the Venice Biennale with trips to the studio, the Turner Prize and the art fair in between. This is a lively, compulsive and splendidly gossipy manual. Names drop more thickly than splatters on a Jackson Pollock canvas as Thornton watches, too enchanted by status and money to ask searching questions - but perhaps obtaining access precisely because of that.

I wonder what the horse-loving Simon Barnes would make of the dust jacket. A pony seems to be hanging from a gallery wall. And Simon Barnes' latest book, written in collaboration with his art historian sister Rachel Barnes, is all about equine art. But The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art (Quercus, £25/£22.50) takes an invigoratingly fresh tack. Huge reproductions of some of art history's loveliest equine paintings are accompanied by a pair of brief commentaries. One deals with the aesthetics, the other with the horseflesh; one tells you about artistic movements, the other puts the equine through its various paces; one looks at the brush strokes, the other is more interested in the grooming. Two different worlds meet in a wonderfully passionate appreciation of horsey pictures.

More conventional in approach, but just as beautifully illustrated is The Dog: 5,000 Years of the Dog in Art (Merrell, £29.95/£26.96) in which Tamsin Pickeral follows her own exploration of the horse in art history with a volume that looks at the cult-ural story of the canine. From the prehistoric hunting companion to the Rococo lap pet, from Rembrandt's poodle to Lucian Freud's whippet, from mythical totem through religious icon to romantic symbol, the dog has sat faithfully by Man's side.

You would certainly feel safer with a Mesopotamian mastiff beside you as you set out on a dramatic photographic tour of the Assyrian Palace Sculptures (British Museum Press, £19.99/£17.99). Paul Collins leads a breathtaking lion hunt in his marvellous introduction to one of the Brit-ish Museum's fiercest and most famous treasures.

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