The burden of history

Linda Grant is moved by Amos Oz's quest to understand his mother's life and death against the background of the establishment of Israel, A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Plum pudding

Nigel Williams tucks into Robert McCrum's satisfying life of a comic master, Wodehouse.

Poetic licence

Jad Adams enjoys Diana Souhami's Wild Girls, a jolly romp through the rebellious life of Natalie Barney, heiress and seductress.

Gilded pawn

John Freely follows a Turkish prince through Renaissance Europe in Jem Sultan. What a shame his sources are so bland, says Kathryn Hughes.

Metamorphosis

Sometimes a life seems created for an artist after death. Michael Hofmann isn't sure what Nicholas Murray has contributed to our understanding with his biography of Kafka.

Oxford pays its debt to ancients in Pindaric song

At the closing Olympic ceremony in Athens on August 29, a British former Olympic fencer, Dame Mary Glen-Haig, will recite lines in a poetic form first heard there 2,500 years ago, composed by a modern-day Oxford academic.

A touch of Frankenstein

I, Robot, Isaac Asimov's vision of the future of robotics and the complications inherent in their interaction with humans, was a revolutionary book, but the film is outmoded, says Philip Ball.

Rivers of crud

The destructive nostalgia of Michael Collins's The Likes of Us should have no place in modern Britain, says Mike Phillips.

Any of his smells

Andrew Motion revisits the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath through Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband