Carry that weight
Phil Hogan finds Playback, George Martin's de luxe memoir, heavy on the pocket but light on interest, even for Beatles diehards
A good woman in Africa
Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins, follows a Westerner who travelled to the Sudan, married a warlord - and changed nothing, says Geraldine Bedell
Innocence abroad
Kevin Rushby on Deborah Scroggins's biography of a well-intentioned young woman caught up in a brutal African conflict, Emma's War
Robin Hallett
Teacher at the forefront of African historical studies.
Flower power
There was more to art deco than elegance, glamour and eroticism. Its designs ushered in the modern world, says Sebastian Smee
Walter Benjamin meets Monsieur Hulot
Joseph Roth's reports from Berlin, collected in What I Saw, illuminate the early days of Nazism, says James Buchan
Outcry as historian labelled a Soviet spy
Foreign Office papers 'prove Christopher Hill was a mole'.
Are you sitting comfortably?
A survey has found that not enough children are reading at home. But, says Sophie Parkin, help is at hand - thanks to a small army of volunteer storytellers.
Police chief’s passion for rude poetic rebel
John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, wit, libertine, and author of some of the filthiest verses composed in English, will be celebrated in a chamber opera to be premiered on Thursday
Student spelling and grammar at ‘crisis’ levels
Research by Bloomsbury, the publisher of the student edition of the Encarta Concise Dictionary, has revealed 'a degree of crisis' in the standards of spelling and grammar of an entire generation of English-speaking university students
One day in the kingdom of darkness
Jean-Paul Kauffmann raises questions of truth and identity in his study of Delacroix's Wrestling With the Angel, says Andrew Motion