Roller-Coaster by Ian Kershaw review – impressive close for Europe history series

The final instalment in the Penguin series, spanning 1950-2017, coherently brings a long and complex narrative up to date

Slowhand by Philip Norman review – Eric Clapton and the years of excess

The rock star secured fame by bringing US southern music to a new audience. Then the unrestrained hedonism began

All mouth and dodgy trousers … how the king of high street retail became the unacceptable face of capitalism

Benedict Cumberbatch voices the festive grump in this frenetic, family-friendly animation of the Dr Seuss story

Staged in the round, Elayce Ismail’s production relocates Dylan Thomas’s dramatic poem about the people of Llareggub

The author of the gay cult classic Call Me By Your Name explores one man’s life through his erotic fixations

The LBC radio host considers the political moment and hits out at the scaremongering of rightwing media

An elderly art dealer confronts dark thoughts and danger in this beautifully drawn graphic novel

Stephen Sharkey adapts Smith’s immigrant tale with zest but struggles to contain the novel’s dizzying temporal leaps

A writer’s gothic tale is brought to life and a kidnap victim is left with strange powers in this month’s must-reads

Nuanced, elegiac essay collections by two New Yorker stalwarts offer welcome relief amid the current rancour of US politics

A bleak Northern Irish town is the setting for Eoin McNamee’s shifting novel of dark secrets

A manifesto for a new political movement by a former speechwriter for Tony Blair contains few proposals that we haven’t seen before

Eric Idle’s ‘sortabiography’; Stephen Fry’s retelling of the Greek myths; and Shaun Bythell’s confessions of a misanthropic bookseller

Ben Schott’s new ‘Wodehouse’ novel is an amusing and well written homage to the master