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

Health check

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

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

Naughty but nice

Rick Wakeman enjoys Pictures of an Exhibitionist, Keith Emerson's honest account of his life in rock'n'roll

The fear factor

William Taubman's assessment of Khrushchev's influence intrigues Archie Brown

No way out

JoAnn Wypijewski is disturbed by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's outsider's chronicle of life in the New York ghetto, Random Family

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