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

A perfect match

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

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

Ted, Sylvia and me

In a uniquely intimate portrait of Sylvia Plath, The Observer's former poetry editor recalls being her confidant and mentor and tells of the strange experience of seeing himself portrayed in the new film of her life. By Al Alvarez.

John Terraine

Controversial military historian who was behind the BBC's series The Great War.

A princely position

Meddler or intellectual? John Crace asks academics if Prince Charles is worth listening to

Worldwide quest for the magic of Middle Earth

Millions of hobbit-lovers and elf enthusiasts are being cajoled to advance the frontiers of knowledge by joining a £40,000 study of why the Lord of the Rings is so popular.

Health check

Bedside Stories, Michael Foxton's account of life as a junior doctor, makes Phil Whitaker chuckle

Life and liberties

Orson Welles is almost too large a subject for a single volume. David Thomson looks at the latest account of the film legend in Peter Conrad's The Stories of His Life

Dracula’s long shadow

Alfred Hickling wades through the Christmas crop of showbiz biographies and finds there's more bite to Christopher Lee's memoir, Lord of Misrule, than to authorised lives of David Niven and Alec Guinness