Just the ticket

Ian Jack welcomes David Hare's new play, The Permanent Way, and the light it sheds on public issues

Off colour

Elaine Showalter on My Life in Orange, Tim Guest's memoir of a miserable childhood in the Bhagwan cult

Looking back in anger

Nicholas Lezard finds a necessary corrective to US-centred accounts of the conflict in Cambodia in François Bizot's harrowing memoir, The Gate

Ballots and bullets

Tzvetan Todorov examines the horrors of the 20th century and attacks the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Hope and Memory

Wholly Roman empire

James Buchan enjoys Audrey Burl's Catullus, an imagined life of one of Rome's greatest poets

Love letters lost and found

A 12th-century nun's story still holds surprises, finds Stephen Romer, reading James Burge's Heloise and Abelard

This ill-fated queen

Mary Queen of Scots was ruled by her heart while her English cousin ruled with her head. True or false? In John Guy's My Heart Is My Own, Sarah Gristwood finds that bad luck rather than bad statesmanship led to Mary's downfall

Rupert and other bears

Michael Wolff charts the decline and fall of the global media industry in Autumn of the Moguls

Oranges and lemons

Tim Guest gives an insider's view of how a charlatan fooled many people most of the time in his childhood memoir of life in a commune, My Life in Orange

The noisy poet

Andrew Motion searches for new insights into the life of an eminent Victorian in Iain Finlayson's Browning

Selling out to the ghetto

Nicholas Lezard considers Percival Everett's Erasure, a watertight satire on race and the American condition