Education in demand?

Annette Hayton and Anna Paczuska examine the reality of gaining access to higher education, and considers the influence of economic, social, political, and individual factors in this extract from their new book Access, Participation and Higher Education .

Back to school

Jane Smiley is only a lukewarm advocate for Charles Dickens in a biography that has a whiff of the classroom

Another Parlor game

Jeremy Poolman's postmodern 'history' of George Custer's wife, A Wounded Thing Must Hide, says less about her than about the author's obsessions

The history woman

Before biography was fashionable, Antonia Fraser made the past popular. Her private life has been a source of fascination. But the former Tory MP's wife who converted to Catholicism and votes Labour knows what it means to be an outsider.

Dickens the movie star

Simon Callow assesses novelist Jane Smiley's biography of the 'first celebrity writer', Charles Dickens

Mystic pieces

Jay Parini on the letters of Gershom Scholem, an Emerson for modern times

The truth is relative

Einstein's theory may have to be turned on its head, but that's nothing new for science, says Martin Gorst.

Beer and Sussex

Joseph Pearce skirts around the anti-semitism at the heart of an utterly individual literary presence in his biography of Hilaire Belloc, Old Thunder

Riding roughshod

James P Rubin discovers how kickbacks and horsetrading enabled one man to dominate the US Senate in the third volume of Robert A Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson