Books

Antonia Fraser’s biography takes on a life that ‘reads like a Victorian sensation novel’

The actor, screenwriter and author shares the books which have meant the most to him

Kathleen Stock picks her way through the complex and contentious issue of trans-activism

Brad Stone explores everything Jeff Bezos has done ‘that has made him the richest man in history’

Frances Wilson sifts through D.H. Lawrence’s legacy for ‘what remains urgent and alive’

Nancy Mitford’s comic novel The Pursuit of Love, newly adapted for the BBC, mythologised her family as a group of adorable oddballs. But what was the …

The Scottish-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has put the pandemic in the historical context of catastrophes

Serhii Plokhy’s ‘gripping narrative’ reveals the bad decisions that led to the Cuban missile crisis

Ignore the outside world and immerse yourself in these life-changing novels

Catherine Ostler’s ‘scintillating’ biography of Elizabeth Chudleigh

John Sutherland’s ‘eye-opening’ book about the poet and his long-term girlfriend

Edmund de Waal pens a unique companion volume to his 2010 bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes

Clinton Heylin’s 528-page tome – which only takes us as far as 1966 – proves the singer to be a ‘fibber’ 

A ‘riveting, serious and deeply intelligent’ biography of the complicated author 

Philip Hoare’s book on Dürer is a ‘captivating journey’ blending biography, art history, nature writing and memoir 

The diaries of the Tory MP provide an ‘unrivalled guide’ to society and politics in the interwar years

 Teachers, librarians and writers about the books they think all teens should read by the time they’re 16

Heads, teachers and librarians tell us about the books they think every child should read by the time they are 13

Though blinkered on certain issues, Peterson provides more sounds advice in his new book

In his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize, Ishiguro tells a story with ‘devastating significance’

In a ‘deeply impressive book’, Higgins explains the power of his ‘intelligence agency for the people’ 

In a ‘wonderfully astute’ biography, Robert Maxwell is painted as ‘the perfect villain’ 

Kuper tells the story of the ‘least known but the most damaging of all the British double agents’

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan ‘analyse what lay beneath the mask’ of one of Britain’s most written-about painters

Richard Bradford’s biography of Patricia Highsmith portrays a woman who ‘courted emotional violence’

Pasternak Slater delves into the unhappy tale of T.S. Eliot’s ‘problem’ wife, who ended up in a psychiatric hospital

Toby Wilkinson explores the dark side of the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology

Check out these recipe collections and create some delicious meat-free meals

A look at the recommended reads from the past 12 months