A fascinating examination of how the prevailing causes of death have changed through history. It is a story of growing medical knowledge and social organisation, and is refreshingly optimist... read more
Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot: they got to know one another as Oxford students during WW2, and went on to have huge influence on subsequent decades.
Set in 1742, this is a rollicking reworking of Moonfleet in which a wild, cross-dressing teenage girl joins a bloodthirsty gang of smugglers to avenge her father's murder.
Five piercingly brilliant essays on stories from the margins, art, Black history, and the crossroads of Africa and Asia as well as with the West. First work of non-fiction by an author much ... read more
King Mansolain is a thousand years old and fading; his devoted attendant Hare ushers in a caravan of storytellers to keep him alive - a rabbit, a donkey, a mouse, a dwarf, a witch - while wa... read more
The story of PayPal, a Silicon Valley startup with a few scruffy tech-heads at the helm. It is now one of the most successful and ubiquitous companies in the world, whose alumni aren't doing... read more
The spark for this remarkable memoir was a scribbled list of paintings that belonged to the Parisian author's great-grandparents - Degas, Renoir, Monet, Tiepolo etc - of which she knew nothi... read more
Last autumn we had the great Dutch writer's 533: A Book of Days, a sort of diary of the pandemic on Menorca. Now we have this single poem which repeatedly refers back to images of wartime; h... read more
Portraits of ER from 1926 to the present, drawn from the huge collection at the National Portrait Gallery - Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibowitz, David Lichfield, Andy Warhol and many others.
The legendary Russian pianist, friend of Pasternak and other greats, who fell from grace to live precariously on the fringes of Soviet society. EW is the author of fine biographies of Shosta... read more
We heard about Molotov's library in Rachel Polonsky's superb Molotov's Magic Lantern (£12.99). Now we have a portrait of Stalin through the books he read - and he was an avid reader all his... read more
The author is a US journalist who, in 2016, accompanied an Afghan driver determined to leave his country for the West. It is an extraordinary account of how this ghastly odyssey works from t... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more