Brave old world
In an extract from a new book, Max Morris recalls how he played his part in delivering a great Labour education project: the creation of the comprehensives.
At home with the creator spiritus
Gustav Mahler's letters to his wife are sometimes too painful to read, writes Alan Hollinghurst.
The bad girl of Rome
Kathryn Hughes appreciates Sarah Bradford's reappraisal of the infamous Lucrezia Borgia.
Breasts, bottoms and so forth
Desmond Morris rightly admires the beauty of the female hand in The Naked Woman, says Catherine Bennett. But has he never seen a bunion?
The society of swine
Lyall Watson's The Whole Hog and Fergus Henderson's Nose To Tail Eating are enough to get Ian Sansom reaching for the pork scratchings.
Not just a pretty face
Eric Ives revisits the life of Henry VIII's most influential queen with The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. But do we learn anything new?
Library show for word rhyming with hunt
Entitled 26 Letters, the latest British Library exhibition sounds inoffensive to the point of blandness. But many visitors have quickly become hysterical with laughter, or just plain hysterical.
Maximum Bob
Mike Marqusee is relieved to find that the first volume of Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, is honest and heartfelt.
The cat off the mat
Anthony Thwaite enjoys A Working Life, Jeremy Treglown's biography of the novelist and celebrated man of letters, VS Pritchett.
Never forget
Peter Hain is moved by Hilda Bernstein's account of one family's battle against the apartheid machine, The World that Was Ours.
Don’t deride Derrida
Terry Eagleton: Academics are wrong to rubbish the philosopher.
Patrick Wormald
Obituary: Brilliant Anglo-Saxon historian whose major work set the emergence of English law in its full social and cultural perspective.
‘It looked like a poemy, girl’s diary’
Young critics had lots to say about the Guardian Children's Fiction prize shortlist. By Claire Armitstead.