Tomalin wins Whitbread book of the year
In the end the wife won it. Claire Tomalin last night won the £30,000 Whitbread book of the year award for her biography of Samuel Pepys, just as her husband Michael Frayn had predicted all along.
The authentic smell of Pepys’s London
An edited extract from Hermione Lee's Guardian review of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.
Lord Dacre
Leading historian, he made his name with The Last Days of Hitler but tarnished it with the Hitler diaries.
He’s seen the future in the Stars and Stripes
20:21 Vision holds few surprises as the editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, asks if American capitalism will shape the 21st century
Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution
Nobel laureate under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression.
Woolf in chic clothing
Virginia Woolf was a difficult novelist with a reputation for battiness and bad dress sense - a heroine for many, but hardly an obvious Hollywood star. Until now, that is. Maria Alvarez tracks a remarkable transformation.
Precious Ramotswe and me
How did a Scottish professor of medical law come to write novels about a Botswanan private eye? Alexander McCall Smith talks to Marcel Berlins.
Tinseltown without glitter
The strange and brilliant lunacy of the City of Angels proves elusive for AM Homes in her new book, Los Angeles
Meet the invisible man
Bringing the mysterious Andrew Marvell to life is a tall order for Christopher Peachment in The Green and the Gold
A good roll in the muck
The copious and grubby details of a bizarre marriage provide a fascinating picture of Victorian daily life in Diane Atkinson's Love and Dirt
Lights! Camera! Think!
In Derrida, we see the French deconstructionist making breakfast, choosing a jacket and lighting his pipe. But films about philosophers haven't always been so lacking in action, says Stuart Jeffries
Tales of everyday torture
Bitterness propelled François Bizot to write an intense, dignified memoir of his time as a captive of the Khmer Rouge, The Gate
The man who put his moves before the movies
Warren Beatty is better known for his conquests than his acting. Chris Petit on Ellis Amburn's frank biography, The Sexiest Man Alive