Eat your heart out, Nigella
Feast, Roy Strong's history of banquets from ancient Greece to the Victorians, gives Ian Sansom a touch of literary indigestion
Ouch!
Even by the bitchy standards of the literary world, the TLS's review of the latest book by Russian scholar Orlando Figes was savage. What happens next? asks Jason Cowley.
What made everyone head out west
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush And the New American Dream by H.W. Brands, reviewed by Peter Schrag
How the US listened in as the Soviets got the bomb
Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa by Thomas Laird, reviewed by James Rupert
A large and singular life
Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Life beyond the diary
How can you write a biography of Samuel Pepys? Claire Tomalin lets the world's most famous diarist speak for himself
Move over, Darwin
'I used to drive to a town 40-50 miles away. In a quiet spot, I would stop, put my wig and high-heeled shoes on, make up and generally make myself presentable. Then I would drive to town as a lady from the shire on a shopping trip'
Sins of the father
The world remembers the Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse as the rigid evangelical patriarch of his son's famed memoir. Ann Thwaite sets the record straight in Glimpses of the Wonderful
The man who can
John Simpson's latest autobiography is insightful and funny, writes Roger Mosey
Raise up your hands to Jesus
The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy by Colleen Carroll. Reviewed by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Moving and shaking from the left
Dick Howard reviews Forging Democracy: The History of the Left In Europe, 1850-2000 by Geoff Eley
Bangladeshi author’s book banned for attack on Islam
Taslima Nasreen's Strong Breeze has suffered the same fate in Bangladesh as her earlier books, Shame and My Days As A Girl.
Eileen Colwell
Gifted storyteller and creative pioneer of children's libraries.
Dome, sweet dome
Lisa Jardine thought that Christopher Wren's critics had been silenced three centuries ago. But then she dared to praise St Paul's...