Evasive manoeuvres
Nick Cohen reads Does America Need a Foreign Policy? and finds that Henry Kissinger is quick to rail against tyrants, but completely oblivious to his own guilt
What is to be done?
Nicholas Lezard feels his blood boil at corporate barbarism after reading George Monbiot's Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain.
What’s the point of ballet?
Mark Lawson has been wary of ballet ever since he was forced into a pair of tights at the age of seven. Now at last he may have worked out what it's all about. He begins our series on 'difficult' art forms.
A singular writer
Trinidad-born, he had a breakdown at Oxford but went on to build a reputation as a world-class novelist. More recently, his personal life has come under scrutiny, his views have drawn accusations of racism and homophobia, and he has found himself at the centre of a literary feud. Maya Jaggi on an outspoken author who now regards the novel as an outmoded form and sees his 'original' travel books as future classics
The tears of a clown
Geoffrey Moorhouse reaches under the settee and explores the contradictions of Alan Bennett in Alexander Games' biography Backing into the Limelight.
One foot in the grave
After Diana, we have fallen back in love with death, says Jad Adams after reading Vigor Mortis by Kate Berridge and If the Spirit Moves You by Justine Picardie.
Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology
In the first chapter, Dorothy Nelkin investigates the connection between genetics and religion.
Student Survival Guide by Lucy Clarke and Jenny Hawkins
From Freshers' week antics and party games to renting a house and health care. This is the ultimate guide to surviving university, written by those in the know.
A boy’s own – and boys only – guide to the planet
In A.C. Grayling's The Meaning of Things, Jo Griffiths finds a brand of humanism that virtually ignores half of the human race
Behind the fringe
A new biography, Backing Into the Limelight by Alexander Games, fails to deal with the amorphous duality of Alan Bennett, the shy joker, or with the incoherence of his life's work, says Peter Preston
Shakespeare’s hidden lesbians
Did the Bard view Cleopatra as a Sapphic heroine? A new study suggests many of his female characters were secretly gay.
No change given
John Gribbin says there are no great discoveries or surprises in Nobel Prize winner JD Watson's memoir