Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by…

Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books…

The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I…

The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I…

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the…

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins,…

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately…

Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a…

‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling…

It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history…

Fleeing the revolution and forced to scrape a living as taxi drivers and seamstresses, the exiles were generally a melancholy crowd, united by mutual loathing

Greil Marcus chooses seven celebrated songs, ranging from the 1960s to the present, to explore the diverse sources of Dylan’s inspiration

People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk…

‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant…

Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that…

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American…

Alison Weir’s study of five Plantagenet queens is dominated by Isabella, the wife of Edward II, whose vengefulness led to the Hundred Years’ War

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years,…

Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of…

Nick Hornby yokes the two in an enjoyable jeu d’esprit – but, apart from troubled childhoods and prodigious energy, the thing they really share is Hornby’s admiration

Queasy nostalgia gives way to mounting anger in a satirical novel about post-war Britain, seen through the eyes of a Birmingham family

Infant twin girls, in the first year of their lives, muse on everything from the futility of existence to the purpose of memory