Two exceedingly close calls
Michael Olmert reviews American Bison: A Natural History by Dale F. Lott and The Extinction Club by Robert Twigger
Life is meaningless. And yet…
Britain's most sceptical thinker is caricatured as a misanthrope - but John Gray reveals his visionary nature in his provocative Straw Dogs
Stevie wonder
It's a century since the birth of Stevie Smith. Kate Kellaway celebrates the eccentric poet's work
Dispatches from the home front
Frank Kermode is impressed by Trains of Thought, Victor Brombert's elegant memoir of a boyhood interrupted by war
That sinking feeling
Arnold Wesker - grateful not to be included in the group for once - finds Humphrey Carpenter's 'literary comedy', The Angry Young Men, short on insight and long on gossip
A question of faith
When Eric Hobsbawn came to England in the 1930s he became a Marxist and began a distinguished academic career. His new autobiography reveals that at 85 he remains an 'unrepentant communist'. Maya Jaggi on the historian who made us fall in love with history again
Captain’s log
Tony Horwitz makes Cook's voyages all the more heroic by describing his time aboard an 18th-century ship in his biography of the explorer, Into the Blue
Power failure
Gerald Kaufman takes issue with Friends and Rivals, Giles Radice's assessment of Labour's three great nearly-men
French up in arms over foreign ‘threat’ to Larousse
As it celebrates 150 years of publishing, France's national literary monument is facing a possible takeover, says Alain Salles
Don’t let the bugs get you
The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Michael Shnayerson and Mark J. Plotkin, reveiwed by Ed Regis
Potent brew of murder and superstition
Johnathon Yardley looks at The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town by Helmut Walser Smith
Good and dirty
We remember DH Lawrence for his novels, his poems, even his paintings. But what about his remarkable plays, asks Richard Eyre.
Even pornographers found Lady Chatterley too much
The British library has bought a copy each of two rare US pirate editions of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley.
Enter the philosopher, with an axe
His obsessions were human sacrifice, surreal porn and monkey-ogling - but what were Bataille's faults? Peter Conrad reviews Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography by Michel Surya.