Wellington’s lucky break
The use of cryptography in warfare goes back much further than the Enigma code in the second world war. Mark Urban tells how one man's notebook helped turn the tide against Napoleon
Sight unseen
His autobiographies chart his search for identity from a difficult childhood in India to his position as a fixture in New York's literary scene. Blind since the age of three, he defies his disability as much in life - refusing to use a white stick or guide dog - as in the rich visual imagery of his work. Maya Jaggi on a remarkable writer.
In living colour
Joseph Harker charts Britain's mixed-race experience in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Mixed Feelings and Mike Phillips' London Crossings
Culture vulture
Phil Baker on Andrew Hussey's The Game of War, an account of the radical legacy of Guy Debord, situationist extraordinaire and now victim of the Spectacle he fought
Behind every great man…
Sisters, mothers, muses: Rachel Barnes meets an extraordinary quartet of Victorian women in Judith Flanders' A Circle of Sisters
Sir Fred Hoyle
Always a controversial astronomer, he rejected 'big bang' theory, turned his back on Cambridge and was mysteriously denied a Nobel prize.
Punctuation without pyrotechnics
HW Fowler's Modern English Usage was every bit as revolutionary in its way as The Waste Land. Jenny McMorris tells the story of his life in The Warden of English
What you see is what you get
Adrian Tinniswood fails to flesh out Christopher Wren's life - but he is good on sexuality at the court of King Charles in His Invention So Fertile
The Russian revolutionary
He went from peasant village to the Kremlin and began the process that would end the cold war. Then, 10 years ago today, a coup attempt led to his departure. Jonathan Steele, who covered that upheaval, on the former Soviet president now enjoying a modest revival
The Strange World of Thomas Harris – extract
Hannibal Lecter was voted cinema’s ‘best baddie’ this week. But where did this aesthete, gourmand and flesh fancier come from? David Sexton traces a surprising literary lineage.
Critic savages ‘pretentious’ US literati
Literary pages of American newspapers engage in row over what constitutes good literature and pretentious nonsense and whether reviewers are deliberately ignoring readable literature in favour of fashionable pretension.
Vocal traditions
Bernard Capp on Adam Fox's examination of 200 years of oral and literate traditions
Dark days
A British academic is offered a prestigious job at a Californian university. There is just one problem: he is an alcoholic, and his life is spiralling out of control. Extracts from John Sutherland's new book.
Exiled to paradise
Thousands of Jews who fled Nazism and found a haven in the Caribbean have been lost to history. Joanna Newman went to the West Indies in search of their stories