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

Both progressive and traditionalist Catholics mistook its message from the start, leading to 60 years of needless disruption in the Church, says George Weigel

Edward Brooke-Hitching’s freakish gallery includes giant Olmec heads, cans of excrement, nightmarish prison scenes and a woman’s face sprouting luxuriant hair

The screen idol emerges from this posthumous memoir as painfully insecure and a long-time alcoholic – but also modest, generous and a devoted family man

Restless anxiety fills these latest short stories, revolving around class, violence against women and general destabilisation

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 fears the Cape Wrath Trail may prove too much for her husband, suffering with CBD – but the indomitable couple continue to thrive on adversity

While poverty and racial prejudice disturbingly persist, Jimi Famurewa prefers to celebrate the vigour of the black community’s churches, markets, clubs and restaurants

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