Play it again …
A life in music: Once confined to art galleries, Philip Glass's minimalism now attracts huge, mainstream audiences. Now 70, he celebrates a bright future for serious music.
‘Who’s the midget?’
Christoper Sandford's Polanski left Chris Petit still searching for the man behind the camera.
The original Bridget Jones
Joan Bakewell revels in Selective Memory, a delightfully self-effacing memoir from frontline feminist Katharine Whitehorn.
Portrait of a killer
Laura Wilson takes a journey into the mind of the undisputed queen of detective fiction in Agatha Christie: An English Mystery.
A touch of expertise
James Fenton on knowing your stuff.
The places that scare you
Obsessed with rooms, dolls, missing limbs and mirrors, Louise Bourgeois's work, often drawing on her troubled childhood, lures novelist Siri Hustvedt into her own past. At 95, the artist is still producing art of terrifying emotional power.
My stepdad, CS Lewis
Many have written about him, but most saw the author of The Chronicles of Narnia as an isolated scholar. Here his stepson Douglas Gresham remembers a hero.
Boy wonder
Hermann Abert's biography WA Mozart is finally available in English, says Stephen Pritchard.
All the muse that’s fit to print
The influence of David Bailey looms large in Marie Helvin's The Autobiography, says Morwenna Ferrier.
On top of her world
Melissa Benn enjoys the memoirs of a disenchanted Blair babe in The Oona King Diaries.
Mind over matter
Joan Grant's tales of her previous incarnations made her a bestseller in the 1930s and 40s. Easy to dismiss as a fraud, she was an extraordinary storyteller whose best story was herself, argues Claire Armitstead.
The poet of collision
Rereading: Dashiell Hammett knew that his day job as a detective for the anti-trade union Pinkerton agency made him in large part a fascist tool - his guilt, writes James Ellroy, was the driving force of his crime fiction.
The beautiful and the damned
The bohemian group of Bright Young People produced not only some of the most celebrated novelists of the early 20th century, but its own literary form - 'the party novel'. Beneath the gossip and frivolity of its subject matter lay a sense of disquiet and impending tragedy, writes DJ Taylor.
James Dean in tights
Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev reveals a supreme commitment to art that is an example to us all, says Simon Callow.
This is your life
Blake Morrison’s memoir, written in grief after the death of his father, has now been made into a film. What does it feel like to see your childhood on the big screen? And to be played by Mr Darcy?