Unholy alliance
Anja Klabunde's biography of Magda Goebbels may not be the Hello! magazine version of Nazism, but it does gloss over horrors, says Robert Service
One man’s war against his own past
Ray Ryan finds Roy Keane's autobiography is unrepentant and relentlessly angry, but revealing
Clinging to the wreckage
AS Byatt enjoys Alethea Hayter's elegant meditation on Wordsworth's attempt to come to terms with the death of his brother, The Wreck of the Abergavenny
Breaking the mould
Paul Foot enjoys Ian Gilmour's meticulous study, The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time
Water, water everywhere – and a great deal to drink
Shadow Warrior, David McTaggart's autobiography, is admirably frank about his failings. Paul Brown remembers his friend, the founder of Greenpeace
A leaden-footed folly
Hywel Williams: The ambulance-chasing obtuseness of Martin Amis is a reminder: literati should avoid political posturing.
Spreading revolution
Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
It’s hard to let go of the living
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Little
Disarming the Soviet state
Sakharov: A Biography by Richard Lourie
Shakespeare and da Vinci named as composers in child survey
· Quiz: do you know your classical composers?
The Manhattan projection
Philip French on Celluloid Skyline by James Sanders, a study of New York's visual impact on the world
‘With fame I become more stupid’
The seventh volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein charts his transformation from obscure physicist to world celebrity
Wish you weren’t here
Chris Petit assesses a peculiarly English approach to porn, as revealed in Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton's Once More, with Feeling, the journal of a blue movie