The devil’s own spy

Chris Petit reads Craig Cabell's affectionate account of how Dennis Wheatley drank himself through the second world war.

Jinn palace

Mike Phillips on Tahir Shah's The Caliph's House, an unusual account of house-buying abroad.

The long discipline of happiness

Blake Morrison is impressed by John Burnside's truly original memoir, A Lie About My Father.

Patrick Nowell-Smith

Obituary: Moral philosopher and ready contributor to the sum of human happiness

Prodigy on a mission to turn children into lovers of literature

She dashes off poems and reads Voltaire in her spare time. Now Adora, eight, is coming to tell British pupils how to write.

Back to school for red-faced council

Council officials apologise after misspelling the word grammar on a road sign outside a school.

Sir Peter Strawson

Obituary: Prime philosopher of Oxford's golden age, and champion of both the richness of ordinary language and of natural beliefs.

Immortal longings

Richard Davenport-Hines captivates Simon Callow with the powerful imaginative vortex of Proust's life and work in A Night at the Majestic.

Image consciousness

Claire Armitstead on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl by cross-dressing prizewinner Grayson Perry and Wendy Jones.

Down the long slide

Andrew Motion is entertained by Simon Gray's meandering musings in The Year of the Jouncer.

The ragged-trousered alchemist

Renaissance mage, visionary and militant medic - Philip Ball reveals Paracelsus as all that and much more in The Devil's Doctor, says PD Smith.

Mozart: the man and his myths

Lucasta Miller on a quartet of Mozartian biographies from David Cairns, Anthony Holden, Julian Rushton and Stanley Sadie.