I'M GINGER: I HATE beaches. Summer days spent hiding in holiday cottages, suffering the double humiliation of being both puce with sunburn and ginger in the first place, with the company only of unloved paperbacks and after-sun balm, may indeed be the origins of my careers: writing imagined lives from history, and for that matter acting them on stage.

Better a darkened rehearsal room in August, a library or the cloud-flecked sunshine of the imagination. But when I travel a biography often becomes the favoured companion; a personable guide to the place I am in or an imaginative journey that can be as adventurous and rejuvenating as travel itself. Just don't ask me for a beach read.

It all began for me with Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser (Phoenix, £9.99/offer £9.49). This was a gift from Great Aunt Celia, who seemed to think that this tale of guilt, lust, imprisonment and Reformation politics was all a ten-year-old would be looking for on holiday. Still exemplary of its genre.

From the Times Archive: 1976 letter from Antonia Fraser, author of Mary Queen of Scots

From the Times Archive: 1976 letter in reply to Anotonia Fraser's letter on Mary Queen of Scots

David Niven was one of those actors who seemed to have an effortless ease with prose. Bring on the Empty Horses (Hodder, £7.99/£7.59) offers a laugh on every page and an engaging side-angle on Hollywood in its heyday. It makes for the perfect Brit-in-California read.

From the Times Archive: 1975 review of Bring on the Empty Horses by David Niven

The ultimate insider's guide to Hollywood is William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade (Abacus, £10.99/£9.89). It reads now almost as a parody of show business, perhaps because so much that he writes about has since become part of our collective consciousness. Even so, an education and a pleasure in movie egos lost and sold.

While we were watching Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert, my son asked me which hit song he was famous for. Long Walk to Freedom (Abacus, £12.99/£11.69) is the song itself: a hymn to forgiveness and dignity in the face of state oppression that gives you faith in humanity and in Africa's future.

I nearly suggested the memoirs of Catherine the Great, a rewarding but tendentious romp that I read on a beach in Greece. But sand and sun lotion ruined my copy, and more widely available anyway is Simon Sebag Montefiore's paperback Catherine the Great and Potemkin (Phoenix, £10.99/ £9.89). It fills in all the gaps that the tsarina's memoirs left and supplies psychological and political insights that cannot fail to engage. A real political page-turner and epic romance.

This is the summer to read Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father (Canongate, £8.99/£8.54). The only politician's life I have read that made me cry, it ranges from Chicago to Kenya to Hawaii but also across all the geography of American politics and the challenges of the early 21st century. Written years before Obama's bid for the presidency, it remains elegant and surprising prose as well as a solid personal statement.

The finest insight I know into the real world of working in a kitchen is Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury, £7.99/£7.59). Searingly honest and scabrous, it's a bar-brawl of a book that is a workout for the belly, not just for its many laughs but for its frequent descent into the nauseous underworld of catering. Bourdain's A Cook's Tour is also fine for travelling with; no restaurant will ever feel quite the same again.

Stephen Fry's Moab is My Washpot (Arrow, £8.99/£8.54) is the author's wry reminiscence on his first 20 years. Having never been fortunate enough to go on holiday with the man himself, let's settle for this unexpected tour of suburbia, prison and adolescence: every mum with a troubled teen should read this.

I am very taken with northern France, which most Brits motor past on the way south, and A Very Unimportant Officer: Life and Death of the Somme and at Passchendale , edited by Cameron Stewart (Hodder, £18.99/£17.09), is something unusual and fresh on the subject of the Great War; the written testimony of one of the men who survived. Edited sympathetically and unobtrusively by his grandson.

Though I would be torn between Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54) and her Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self, there is no denying that Dorset remains a more attractive summer destination than Fleet Street. There could be no better West Country companion than Hardy in Tomalin's assured and compassionate hands.

For a writer who has spent so much of her time in the company of 19th-century courtesans, in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, £18.99/£17.09) Frances Wilson breathes unexpected warmth into the life of that patron saint of spinsters, the Wordsworth sister whom I had always suspected of being bored, bitter or both. It turns out that Dorothy is maybe the finer guide to the times and place than William. One for the Lakes, or anywhere.

I have longed to go to China since reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (HarperPerennial, £9.99/£9.49). It is one of the most exotic and extraordinary and life-affirming journeys of the mind that I have ever been taken on. As much a tour, for a man, of the foreign landscape of mothers-and-daughters as the equally far-flung horizons of the Cultural Revolution.

Closer to home although equally exotic is An Aristocratic Affair: The life of Georgiana's sister, Harriet Spencer, Countess of Bessborough by Janet Gleeson (Bantam, £8.99/£8.54). With Keira Knightley soon to appear in the film The Duchess, be ahead of the crowd with this vivid portrait. Illegitimacy, bizarre ménages, scandal and debauchery; how unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.

Ian Kelly is the author of Casanova and returns to the National Theatre in The Pitmen Painters this winter.

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