A long way from home

Robert Bickers' Empire Made Me, the life story of one insignificant member of the British empire, gives a glimpse of an extraordinary world, writes John Spurling

Goya’s cheerleaders

Adrian Searle enjoys two very different approaches to a genius of Spanish art in Goya by Robert Hughes and Goya: To Every Story There Belongs Another by Werner Hofmann

‘I must have Prof!’

Ben Pimlott enjoys Adrian Fort's biography of Churchill's xenophobic, reactionary one-man think-tank, Prof: The Life of Frederick Lindemann

Seamus Heaney: Bags of enlightenment

Two decades ago, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes collaborated on a landmark poetry anthology. Six years ago - a year before Hughes died - they renewed their partnership. Together, Heaney says, they hoped to wake the sleeping poet in every reader, and to combine learning with pleasure

Strange bedfellows

Jad Adams learns more than he needs to know about the playwright's sex life in Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Jeeves at the FO

Douglas Hurd was always measured, detached, a safe pair of hands, writes John Nott. In short, the perfect butler - as his Memoirs attest

Brought to book

As bad as the allegations against Arnold Schwarenegger are, what depresses most is the intellectual and moral poverty of the response to them. John Sutherland on sexual harassment, the California election and the Nobel prize for literature.

All in the imagination

Children's Book Week is the ideal opportunity to get children writing, says the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

The stroppier the better

Judith Hawley finds Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation enhanced by her collected letters and Barbara Taylor's study, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination