Not much happens in Roger Moore's My Word Is My Bond (with Gareth Owen, Michael O'Mara Books, £18.99/offer £17.09). There is no dirt, no scandal, no skeletons jingly-jangling in the closet: nothing that marks out a good celebrity autobiography. Moore just seems pleasant, a little but not off-puttingly luvvie-ish (like many autobiographical celebrity memoir writers). It's a lovely, ambling read. A typical anecdote ends: “I found myself saying to my agent what Niven used to say to his, ‘I don't work in January and February as that's when we have the snow. Then in the summer I like to go to the South of France to swim and sail.'” Remember that one.

Many critics leapt on Cherie Blair's autobiography, Speaking For Myself (Little, Brown, £18.99/£17.09), for being too glib, self-serving, tawdry and demeaning. But the memoirs, serialised in The Times, for which Mrs Blair is now a columnist, are a riot of colour and indiscretion. Take one peachy confrontation. Cherie relates the occasion when André Suard, her hairdresser, intervened after Alastair Campbell sneered at her for finding herself mired in scandal. “Don't you dare talk to Cherie like that,” Suard “explodes” at Campbell.

“You mind your own business,” Campbell tells him. “Remember you are just a f***ing hairdresser.” Suard emerges as a lovely potential Martini buddy should he ever have a spare moment between blow-dries of the rich and famous.

Paul O'Grady is another engaging spinner of tales: in At My Mother's Knee... and Other Low Joints (Bantam, £18.99/£17.09) we read of the teatime-TV host's early life growing up in Birkenhead. O'Grady has that rare ability to connect with any audience, whether on screen or on beer-soaked stage as Lily Savage (the early years) in the sweatbox of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

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

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O'Grady is a wonderful, evocative scene-setter, whether it's his repressive Roman Catholic education or losing his virginity (to a woman). He recalls his aunt: “‘Some feller on the bus today said I looked like Marlene Dietrich,' she'd say when she came home from another long shift, proudly pulling her ‘Marlene Dietrich' face in the mirror, a spot of gurning that involved sucking her cheeks in, closing her eyes till she could barely see, and letting her fag hang from the corner of her mouth.” After he gingerly raises the subject of being gay with his mother she turns around to face him holding a birdcage. “‘Is there any point keeping this old thing?' she asked, completely ignoring what I'd said. ‘Let's face it, I've no intention of getting another budgie. Dirty, messy things, scattering their seed all over the bloody house.'”

Some autobiographies are nothing more than lists: of achievements, of evenings with other famous people, with not enough stardust or revelation. Being a Scot (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20/£18) by Sean Connery is a dull, gruelling read and more a dry historical trudge through Scottish history than revealing memoir.

Michael Parkinson's Parky (Hodder & Stoughton, £20/£18) is more engaging when he's talking about his childhood, growing up in Yorkshire - his mother would knit through movies, he had a fantasy of being a journalist in snap-brim fedora - than in the grinding roll-calls of guests on his famous TV chat show that pepper the later chapters. Yes, he gets the odd scoop (Tony Blair talks glancingly about his religious beliefs), but when you get to sentences such as “Ricky Hatton, Paul Anka and Michael Winner were the stars of our fourth show”, your attention may forgivably wander.

Dawn French's Dear Fatty (Century, £18.99/£17.09) is conceived as a series of letters: to her dead father, to Jennifer Saunders (Fatty), her husband Lenny Henry, her adopted daughter Billie, Madonna, her friends, the Monkees, David Cassidy - and, at the end, George Clooney, begging him to accept defeat and leave her alone, she's happily married, OK? The voice in the letters is as chatty, funny and human as the voice of French the comedian, and her letters to her father and Henry are particularly revealing, especially to Henry, as they have always kept their relationship so private. Her last letter is a farewell in all senses to her father: “Even the simple act of writing ‘Dead Dad' at the start of a letter has been comforting and has given me a closeness to you I have missed so much.”

Like French, Julie Walters's That's Another Story (Orion, £18.99/£17.09) and Maureen Lipman's Past-It Notes (JR Books, £18.99/£17.09) have the inviting warmth of two voices we feel we know transformed into gossipy, intimacy-revealing print.

For sheer tabloid rollercoaster value Fern: My Story (Michael Joseph, £18.99/£17.09) and Jonathan Ross's aptly titled Why Do I Say These Things? (Bantam, £18.99/ £17.09) are unbeatable nosy-parker fare. Fern Britton has the soap opera tangles (weight issues, car crash, love life tribulations) that would make her the perfect guest on her own morning chat show. Written before the Andrew Sachs controversy, Ross in his elegant - and notably unluvvie-ish - memoir says he's “never really had a bad day”, and that he approaches life “like a happy idiot, and in that spirit I try to find something to enjoy in a small and Zen-like way about everything”. Hmmm, everything? Expect Tigger to bounce back.

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