Blind ambition

Edwina Currie reveals more than just the identity of her 'highly placed lover' with the publication of her diaries

An extraordinary life

Anthony Sampson appreciates Eric Hobsbawm's candour in his impressive autobiography, Interesting Times

Curse of the minstrel

Nick Tosches sets off in search of Emmett Miller, the voice of 1920s America, in Where Dead Voices Gather

Hungarian camp survivor wins literature Nobel

The £639,000 Nobel prize for literature has gone to a Hungarian-Jewish former concentration camp inmate whose novels resolutely refuse to portray the Holocaust - or life in general - as a moral issue.

Browse but don’t borrow

Many university libraries either do not allow the public to borrow books or charge them for the privilege, but how does this square with lifelong learning, wonders David Williams.

Built to last

Andrew Saint on Lisa Jardine's thundering new study of Christopher Wren, On a Grander Scale

Searching for the missing link

Birds? Reptiles? Fakes? Archaeopteryx fossils have been generating controversy since 1861. Paul Chambers investigates a very strange creature in Bones of Contention

Mr Kirkpatrick’s rebellion

William Dalrymple's White Mughals argues that the decline of the Mughal empire was mirrored by the Indian conquest of the European imagination. Pankaj Mishra looks at the evidence

Turbulent poet and femme fatale

Absurd claims have been made for Pushkin's intellectual and moral pre-eminence, but Catriona Kelly is impressed by TJ Binyon's intelligent study of the Russian poet's life

Here, there and everywhere

Simon Louvish follows the up-and-down career of Peter Sellers in Ed Sikov's exhaustive biography, Mr Strangelove

Placism, not racism

Peter Ackroyd argues that immigration - of people, ideas, styles - is the key to Englishness in his idiosyncratic yet deeply political survey, Albion