Bum rap

Denton Welch: Writer and Artist praises the bravery and craft of the formative and cultish author

‘O I must tell Osbert!’

Selina Hastings's biography of Rosamond Lehmann recounts the poisonous gossip of the lives and loves of the early 20th century novelist

The shock of new books

Peggy Reynolds explains the importance of Vintage Living Texts, a new resource to help teachers teach contemporary novels for which there is no accessible body of research.

Doom and Bloomsbury

In Rosamond Lehmann: A Life, Selina Hastings depicts a woman whose novels mirrored her life of fated loves and searing emotion.

When a prince goes postal

Jonathan Gregson's Blood Against The Snows examines the events surrounding the 2001 royal massacre in Nepal.

Non-fiction round-up

Sonic Boom | Serendipities | Mirror, Mirror | The Trial of Henry Kissinger | In the Name of Justice | A Double Thread

Zealous workman in Darwin’s cathedral

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould

Reporting from Africa

Black Livingstone A Tale of True Adventure In the Nineteenth-Century Congo by Pagan Kennedy

A particularly pyrrhic triumph

The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory by Derek Leebaert.

There was a bookish man

The strange crime of William Jacques has rocked the sedate world of letters. But can greed alone explain why this privileged young man stole, doctored and sold hundreds of rare books from our great libraries?

When Pinochet came to tea

Andy Beckett follows General Pinochet from Santiago to Wentworth in Pinochet in Piccadilly, but does he go far enough?

General studies

Isabel Hilton on Pinochet in Piccadilly by Andy Beckett, a story of Anglo-Chilean relations

Flights of fancy

Freeman Dyson's ideas about space travel were on a cosmic scale. Now he's thinking small. Tim Radford reports.