The sound of discord

An avant garde composer who eschews melody, he is acclaimed as a genius. But his critics say he has led music up a blind alley. His bizarre beliefs and unorthodox home life have raised eyebrows, but he recently caused outrage when he said that the World Trade Centre attack was 'the greatest work of art'. John O'Mahony reports

The politics of personality

The Blair-Brown psychodrama in James Naughtie's The Rivals embodies New Labour's flaw, says Roy Hattersley

Bricks and mortals

How do you judge architecture? By the way buildings look - or how they feel? And do they only acquire meaning when they are full of people? Stephen Moss continues our series on 'difficult' art forms

Memoirs of a vanished land

Luke Harding on the work of the American historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, who chronicled the rich architectural heritage of Afghanistan, which has been tragically obliterated by the Taliban

Lenin’s lieutenant

Revolutionary, mother of five and Lenin's lover, Inessa Armand became one of the most powerful women in Russia. But until now, her story has been suppressed by party censorship, writes biographer Michael Pearson

The ego has landed

Julie Burchill gets the cheapest of thrills from the horror of Victoria Beckham's memoirs - Learning to Fly

A spy like us

Chris Mullin believes that all has not been revealed in Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 and still has questions for Stella Rimington

The good apprentice

Alex Clark on Peter J Conradi's attempt to find the real Iris Murdoch out of her own hazy self-image

Bring on the Mitford gels… again

The duchess, the fascist, the communist, the Nazi, the novelist and, er, the other one... Mary S Lovell drives The Mitford Girls along at a cracking read

Don’t give up the Today job

Britain is now ruled by two of the weirdest characters to rise to power in modern politics. One is a Christian radical and public-school rebel who used to round up girls with the phrase: 'Let's go, honeys'. The other is a Christian socialist, who has, in the words of a senior civil servant, 'all the social skills of a whelk'.

Fifty years of hurt

They called it the battle for realism, and it wasn't a pretty sight. James Hyman follows British art's trail of violence from the tormented Bacon to the butcher Hirst

No sex please

Michael Carver leaps to the rescue of a great wartime leader undermined by Nigel Hamilton's The Full Monty: Montgomery of Alamein 1887-1942

More myth than man

Laurens van der Post was a writer, war hero and guru to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher. But, says his biographer JDF Jones, he was also a compulsive liar whose hatred of Mandela proved a threat to South Africa's future