Tales of the city
Biographer, novelist, historian: Peter Ackroyd is as prolific a writer as he is a drinker. And for his new book he has borrowed Chaucer's characters and transposed them to the love of his life - London.
Memories are made of… what?
Andrew Motion on what brain science can tell us about the mechanics of remembering in James McGaugh's Memory and Emotion
Ordinary people
Normality can be an over-stuffed bag, says Ian Sansom, after reading Amy Bloom's extended New Yorker essay, Normal
Rock of ages
James Buchan on Stephen Baxter's portrait of the man who overthrew biblical geology, Revolutions in the Earth
Lessons to learn
Anna Francis is about to embark on a new life teaching English in Japan. But before she goes, there's the little matter of brushing up on her grammar
DNA used in attempt to solve Christian mystery
Genetic fingerprinting might soon clear up the origins of medieval parchments and even the Canterbury Gospels, thought to have arrived in Britain in 597AD.
A despot and a flirt
Boots, billiards, babies on his knee. Robert Service on the domestic banalities revealed by Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Joseph Stalin
The high priest of fascism
Tobias Jones is deeply suspicious of Nicholas Farrell's attempt to rehabilitate Mussolini
A lover, not a liker
Natasha Walter is intrigued by Andrew Wilson's portrait of the contradictory Patricia Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow
Supermac, coelacanth of British politics
The Macmillan Diaries, skilfully edited by Peter Catterall, fascinate Ben Pimlott, although he regrets the silence on Suez
How Dylan’s lyrics struck a chord
Bob Dylan's lyrics have been the subject of university literature courses and countless scholarly discourses, but now they are attracting a different form of attention.