This other Eden
Mike Marqusee enjoys avid India fan Soumya Bhattacharya's engaging memoir about his devotion to the gentleman's game, You Must Like Cricket?
The narrow corridors of faith
Hilary Mantel is gripped by the beautiful and brutal exactness of John Cornwell's Catholic memoir, Seminary Boy.
Better the devil you know
Henry Ansgar Kelly's learned, horns-and-all life of Lucifer is full of good intentions. Too bad the style is diabolical, says Peter Conrad.
Champion for a wronged man
The much maligned husband of Virginia, Leonard Woolf has his reputation fully restored in Victoria Glendenning's landmark biography, says Paul Levy.
How ordinary people live in extraordinary times
Rafael Behr finds that Rory McCarthy's compassionate and honest journalism reveals the reality and horror of day-to-day life in post-Saddam Iraq in Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated.
We get the picture
The theft of a Chagall inspires Dara Horn's The World to Come, a Yiddish literary odyssey. Viv Groskop finds out more.
Every man in his humour
Simon Callow savours Stanley Wells's entertaining account of the English Renaissance theatre and its luminaries, Shakespeare and Co.
You go, girl
Bernardine Evaristo sizes up Terry McMillan’s next Hollywood blockbuster, The Interruption of Everything.
A fresh spirit
After Virginia Woolf's suicide, her husband Leonard fell in love with a married artist. She was his 'Dearest Tiger', he her 'greedy sparrow'.
Hurrah for MI5, saviours of Blighty
Emily Stokes isn't convinced by Stella Rimington's latest foray into the world of espionage, Secret Asset.
Of empires and dynasties
Hilary Spurling enjoys The High Road to China by Kate Teltscher and Oracle Bones by John Murray, two very different but equally fascinating books that offer compelling insights into China ancient and modern.
The bride wore black
Melissa Benn on Susan William's account of an extraordinary postwar attempt to suppress a mixed-race relationship, Colour Bar.
How Rousseau invented reality TV
David Edmonds and John Eidinow are firmly set against David Hume in their account of a great 18th-century intellectual battle, Rousseau's Dog, says James Buchan.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
In search of paradise
Andrea Wulf enjoys Jane Brown's vivacious study of the 18th-century garden pioneer Henrietta Luxborough, My Darling Heriott.