Love in the library
Patricia Fara enjoys David Bodanis's Passionate Minds, a vivid evocation of Emilie du Châtelet, and her lover, Voltaire.
Manet and the history men
Tom Lubbock on an art book that loses sight of its own purpose, Ross King's The Judgement of Paris: Manet, Meissonier and an Artistic Revolution.
Laird of the marshes
David Morphet admires Rory Stewart's attempt to bring order to occupied Iraq as told in Occupational Hazards
Don’t blame it on the Buddha
John Gray enjoys Pankaj Mishra's thought-provoking account of European influence, Temptations of the West.
The dream sale for Jung scholars
An extraordinarily rich collection of manuscripts around the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung, including working papers, unpublished lectures, letters, drawings and photographs, will be sold at Sotheby's today.
Critics’ choice
The book: Just Like Tomorrow | The web: Reproduction and cloning
Scholarly squeeze
Tristram Hunt: Allowing undergraduates into the British Library's reading rooms has led to exclusion, not inclusion.
The real deal
Joanna Briscoe is snared by Kate Holden's glittering story of addiction and prostitution, In My Skin.
Unputdownable but unspeakable
Andrew Brown: Bad books sell better than good ones because so many people are semiliterate.
The master and his mistresses
Elizabeth Cowling offers a new perspective on the life of a genius with her edition of Roland Penrose's notebooks, Visiting Picasso, says Matt Collings.
Entangled with the Boston Strangler
Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont is a classic mystery unravelled by a gifted narrator, says Jay Parini.
Roundabouts and Roundheads
Diane Purkiss illuminates the English civil war through the human detail of her people’s history, says Kathryn Hughes.