A robot to DIY for

Dylan Evans on a novel approach to scientific investigation in Steve Grand's Growing Up with Lucy

The day my music died

Novelist Tim Lott was in love with records; they were his addiction. Then the relationship turned sour and he binned them. He tells how he got his life - and collection - back together.

It’s a state of mind…

Joan Didion's essays on her native California say much about its deluded sense of identity. But while Where I Was From purports to be a memoir, she gives little away about herself, says Harriet Lane

A flicker of genius

Gaudier-Brzeska, the Frenchman who brought modernity to sculpture, was only 23 when he died in battle. Paul O'Keeffe struggles to recount so short a career at such length, says Deyan Sudjic

Why force will never bring peace

After the atrocities in Spain, Jonathan Schell's polemic on violence and warfare, The Unconquerable World, offers an alternative history lesson, says Robert McCrum

Crumpets, sir, or yellow-cake?

James Buchan on Hans Blix's Disarming Iraq, the UN chief weapons inspector's honest appraisal of the build-up to invasion

Correspondents’ course

Jonathan Steele takes the temperature of reporting on the war in Iraq with accounts from Rageh Omaar, Oliver Poole and Toby Dodge

Crime writing

Erwin James is moved by Mark Salzman's account of juvenile offenders finding a voice, True Notebooks

Khan of all he surveys

Sue Bradbury follows the story of the once and future ruler of the Mongols in John Man's Genghis Khan

Balfour’s bubble

The politician who became a conman... and his cronies. Kathryn Hughes on Jabez, David McKie's Victorian tale for our times

Dun dreaming

Joan Didion's Where I Was From debunks Californian mythology, says Blake Morrison

A boy from the islands…

Growing up in a white English family on the Orkneys gave the author Luke Sutherland an unusual identity crisis. What was more important? His colour, his culture or the right trousers?

An iron fist in an iron glove

From the KGB to cult hero - two books, Inside Putin's Russia and Putin's Progress, show how Russia's hard-line President has created the cult of Putinism

Blunt weapon

Hans Blix's Disarming Iraq is as dry and reserved as his judgements. In short, it reads like a Sven-Goran Eriksson press conference

Blood and guts

Roundheads, Cavaliers and Cromwell’s legacy: Blair Worden assesses three studies of the English civil wars