Pulp fiction

Neil Rennie celebrates superheroes with Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture In America by Bradford C Wright

Mafeking revisited

The publication of previously unseen documents reveals new, contradictory evidence on the Boer war. Justin Cartwright reports.

Rupert bare? Hardly

Rupert Murdoch's secrets are still safe in the hands of Neil Chenoweth. Emily Bell finds reading Virtual Murdoch a dispiriting experience

Why Mandelson had to go

Andrew Rawnsley caused a political sensation with his book Servants of the People. Now, in this exclusive extract from his updated bestseller, he reveals the truth behind the second fall of Blair's closest and flawed friend

Scared for life

Elisabeth Mahoney is left jittery and jumpy by an exhibition about trauma

Guillotined by history

Hazel Mills sees Marie Antoinette rehabilitated in Antonia Fraser's biography that shows her to be not simply a queen with a penchant for jewel-encrusted gowns, but a diplomatic pawn

The invisible war

David Hearst reads brave dispatches from Chechnya, a land where there is officially no conflict, in A Dirty War by Anna Politkovskaya, and hopes that the truth will out

A rational animal

Hywel Williams leafs through The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell to find passionate genius wrapped around an adolescent heart

Still a mountain to climb

Joe Plomin reviews The Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education; Institutions, Academics and the Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning and interviews its author Norman Evans

Library is a closed book for schools

Eleven British secondary schools have refused the gift of a £3,000 library of classic books written in the past three millennia because they are "too difficult" for their pupils, it emerged last night.

Brothers Gibb v the Bard

Cambridge University has been accused of dumbing down over an exam which asked students to discuss the Bee Gees' lyric: 'It's tragedy... Tragedy/ when you lose control and you got no soul, it's tragedy.' But how would six prominent writers answer the question?