Changing Lives?
This extract from the last chapter of Changing Britain, Changing Lives, by John Bynner, Elsa Ferri and Mike Wadsworth, is reprinted with kind permission from the publisher, the Institute of Education.
Christopher Hill
Marxist historian whose radical interpretation of the 17th century changed the way we think about the English revolution.
Lives through the lens
As Victoria Olsen and Joy Melville bring out a pair of biographies of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lucasta Miller welcomes the chance to re-evaluate a poetic vision of Victorian Britain
Secrets and lives
AS Byatt enjoys Janet Malcolm's journey through the work and times of a notoriously private playwright, Reading Chekhov
With the immediacy of yesterday
Barnaby Rogerson's biography, The Prophet Muhammad, has come at just the right moment, says Jason Webster
Waxing lexical about teaching
Learners should start out building language from phrases, and grammar will follow, argues Nick Hamilton
Martha, the woman who loved Freud but hated his ‘porn’
A new biography will throw light on the woman behind Sigmund Freud - his wife, inspiration and cocaine companion, Martha.
Making history
Julia Lovell enjoys Four Sisters of Hofei and Sounds of the River - a pair of memoirs that chart China's transition to modernity
She is walking through the kitchen…
Ian Sansom is not wholly convinced by Augusten Burroughs's tale of dysfunctional American family life, Running With Scissors
Summoned by bombs
Andrew Motion finds the personal blending with the political in Russell Martin's account of the making of Guernica, Picasso's War
United front
Vain, lazy, in thrall to handsome young men... but James Stuart was a successful king to both the pugnacious Scots and the assertive social classes of England, writes Alan Stewart in The Cradle King
Blood feud
Sarah Gristwood tells how Arbella Stuart was too royal for her own good in her biography of the queen England never had
Buy lattes and get online at Britain’s first idea store
Library in run-down area of east London gets a superstore-style makeover - and draws a new generation of readers.
Clarke wades into Bard exam controversy
The education secretary has demanded an explanation from the exam watchdog for its plans for a "dumbed-down" Shakespeare test for 14-year-olds.