How Fischer swept the board in his cod war

In Bobby Fischer Goes to War, David Edmonds and John Eidinow try to put the 1972 world chess championships at the heart of the Cold War, but drown in a sea of jargon, says Jay Rayner

Catherine the Great?

Historians, novelists and screeenwriters have dealt harshly with Catherine de Medici. Leonie Frieda mounts the case for the defence in her new biography of the woman who sparked the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre

Meanest streets

James Brown's hard-boiled memoir, The LA Diaries, invites comparison with Tobias Wolff and James Ellroy, says Tim Adams

Fantasy fellas

Men and women are not all that different. So who needs The Many Faces of Men, Stephen Whitehead's simplistic, cliche-ridden guide to blokes?

It’s a little bit funny…

The Office is better than Fawlty Towers. Discuss. Ben Thompson takes on the tricky task of analysing 90s comedy in Sunshine on Putty

In lingua veritas

Victor Klemperer's diaries, The Lesser Evil, are a monument to his profound commitment to language and truth, says Stevie Davies

A perfect match

Hermione Lee enjoys Henrietta Garnett's Anny, a life of Anne Thackeray from a biographer just right for her subject

Survival strategy

Tibor Fischer says Hungary's finest contribution to Holocaust writing, Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt, is not a book for the squeamish

Four wobbles and a frenzy

Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg's In an Uncertain World persuades Richard Adams that the Clinton administration's greatest asset was its chief economist

The vision thing

Liz Jobey on Diane Arbus: Revelations by Elisabeth Sussman, Doon Arbus et al, an exhaustively researched memoir of a photographer who still divides opinion

Smoke signals

It took John Updike two years to get his first short story published. Now, 50 years and 55 books later, he has compiled a selection of his earliest work, some of it out of print for decades. Here he reflects on the biographical echoes