Here’s the deal

Jay Parini on Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Conrad Black's incomplete picture of an American legend

Chinese whispers

Chiang Kai-shek nearly won a country. Jonathan Fenby tells the story of a man who was Mao Zedong's greatest adversary in Generalissimo

Scotch on the rocks

Raw Spirit, Iain Banks's quest for the ultimate whisky, leaves David Horspool thirsty for something more

Game for a laugh

Ian Malin finds the lighter side of England's second-row enforcer in Martin Johnson: The Autobiography

A welcome to the real world

Gabriel García Márquez's autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, shows how his love for his mother and first home provide the basis for his fiction

Consuming passions

Mark Sanderson discovers how kitchen rituals transformed a lost boy in Nigel Slater's memoir, Toast

Identifiable courage

Ewen MacAskill finds a rare exception to the rules of foreign reporting in John Simpson's The Wars Against Saddam

Predictably unpredictable

The quirks of Martin Bell's memoir, Through Gates of Fire, do not detract from his moral authority, says Ed Vulliamy

Winged wonders

In Audubon's Elephant, Duff Hart-Davis recounts the troubled birth of Birds of America, the most beautiful book ever printed. James Buchan feels the width

Putting grammar on the radar

Grammar back in fashion? It never went out, says Luke Meddings. But which is the best model for teaching it today?

In a noble cause

Martin Kettle reviews presidential biographies by Robert Dallek and Nigel Hamilton and says that, to our shame, condescension still defines British attitudes towards even the best of America's leaders

Forever Fifties

Stefan Kanfer shows how Lucille Ball was trapped by one TV show in his biography of the 50s icon, Ball of Fire