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Morris Minor: The biography, By Martin Wainwright

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Which of today's cars might a thirtysomething recall in 2040 with a fugitive and unearthly fondness? A Smart car, perhaps: chic, cleavered, surreal; or maybe a Skoda, re-tailored, yet eternally low-tech.

Hester: The remarkable life of Dr Johnson's 'Dear Mistress', By Ian McIntyre

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

When Johnson first went to dinner with her, in 1765, she was Hester Thrale. Her husband, Henry, was a philandering, fox-hunting MP and the owner of a lucrative brewery in his constituency, the Borough of Southwark. Dinner was at an insalubrious spot in Dead Man's Place, near a vinegar factory and the old Clink prison. The venerable lexicographer was easily the most important visitor ever to go there.

A way with words: Lexical wizard Henry Hitchings on the crazy history of our language

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

It's rather nerve-racking, interviewing an acknowledged master of the English language. I tell Henry Hitchings that I feel as though I'll have to take extra care with my choice of words. "Don't," he says briskly, as he ushers me into his book-lined 13th-floor Bermondsey flat. Fortunately, his attitude to language is anything but stuffy, snobbish or prescriptive.

Humour: Parody poopers

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

It's in the nature of publishing to plan ahead, and this is truer with so-called humour books than in almost any other area of the trade. After all, those TV tie-in paste-up jobs take time to be knocked together in the design department, and then you've got to get the damn things printed by tiny Chinese slave children to make sure the products are in the shops in time for Christmas – in other words, late July. So the accountants who commission the books can hardly be blamed for failing to foresee the horrors to come, between delivery and Christmas. Thus, none of the books under review foresaw the global economic meltdown. There's no 101 Things to Do With an Unemployed Hedge Fund Manager, which is a shame. True, there is a mordantly miserablist cartoon book in the shops at the moment, but as it's by me I don't suppose I should review it.

The Silence Room, By Sean O'Brien

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

This strange, brilliant debut collection of short stories by the celebrated poet Sean O'Brien takes us back to a world of Gothic splendour and horror. It also takes us into the modern world, and gothicises it in turn.

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, By John Updike

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

This is not so much a collection of essays as an orgy of feelings, facts, comments, musings, meditations. Do not consume at one sitting. What comes across above all is the sense of a man who is simply very nice, his Byzantine urbanity notwithstanding. In reviews, the generosity and the care Updike shows to other authors is humbling. His criticism always seeks out the best in his opponent's position.

Wine: The best possible tastes

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The arcane world of wine attracts its share of villains. Take Hardy Rodenstock. Once a producer of Germany's notoriously unexportable schlager music, he went on to sell rare wines of improbable provenance to the gullible wealthy. Now Rodenstock, a man who once showed off a walnut he'd stuffed with a condom to Jancis Robinson, faces legal proceedings for fraud, many multi-millionaires are stuck with pricy bottles not even good for drinking, let alone selling, and the high priests of fine wine look very silly indeed. The very readable The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace (Crown £14.99) tells the curious and frankly impressive tale of how a man born in a town called Kwidzyn saw fools and money and separated them. That's a proper swindle.

The Way It Was, by Stephen Chalke

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

When Stephen Chalke proposed a book about 1950s cricket, publishers were united in their indifference. So he published it himself, to great acclaim. In the ensuing 11 years he has written a further 10 – two named as 'Wisden' Books of the Year – and this latest is a collection of his magazine and newspaper articles, focusing mainly on county cricket between 1946 and 1969.

Food: Get creative in the kitchen

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

To be told there is nothing for breakfast, is cold comfort for which one's half-strung nerves are not prepared, and throws a damp upon the prospect of the day," says William Hazlitt in his 1827 essay "On the Want of Money". Hard to disagree, particularly now that it won't be long before none of us will have the cash to slap breakfast on the table either – if you believe the gloomier predictions. The quotation is from A Food Lover's Treasury by Julie Rug and Lynda Murphy (Frances Lincoln £9.99) , a jolly compendium of observations on food taken from classic literature. It would be a relatively cheap present, which puts it in step with the times. Publishers are rushing to produce books on thrifty cooking. Two high-profile contenders have already appeared, both reprints from kitchen stalwarts: Delia Smith's sensible 1970s effort, Delia's Frugal Food (Hodder & Stoughton £17.99) and Marguerite Patten's Best British Dishes (Grub Street £25). Patten, now 93, is a product of austerity Britain and, though the book isn't overtly about saving money, she always has one eye on the issue ("a good proportion of British fare is based upon economical food").

Why I Love: Heavy hardbacks

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

For me, reading is a physical pleasure. I have all the right equipment. I settle on the sofa, prop two cushions on my lap and settle my book into my reading frame. It's great for heavy hardbacks. Reading in bed, I have a very focused lamp that doesn't wake my husband and has a flexible neck so mine doesn't have to be. I even have a pair of bendy reading glasses, so I can read lying sideways.

The Autobiography of the Queen, By Emma Tennant

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Here's a world in which our gracious monarch, sick to death of her public and private duties, ups stumps and heads for St Lucia, incognito. How on earth could the Queen even hope to do that? It is one of many unanswered questions in this engaging but unenlightening tale. It works well enough as a fable but less well as a novel, as something where thoughts and motives are properly investigated.

The Language of Others, By Clare Morrall

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Jessica Fontaine, this novel's narrator, has had an unusual background, with a mother who drifted about their white elephant of a manor house, ignoring her daughter's eccentricities. Now she leads a remarkably conventional adult life. Except, that is, for her terrible marriage, and a curious inability to relate to others, a quality shared by her son, Joel, but not, mysteriously, by her sisters.

A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, By Karl O Knausgaard

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

What a strange book this is. Look at the subtitle – "A novel of the nature of angels and the ways of man" – and you'd reasonably think, that it is about angels, and the history of their interaction with mankind. And it is, sort of.

Forgotten authors No 16: Margery Sharp

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Her best-known book was for children, and although Disney bowdlerised it into animated tosh, it made Margery Sharp more famous than she would otherwise have been. The Rescuers concerned a pair of rodent agents for the Prisoners' Aid Society of Mice, sent on a mission that involves the daring rescue of a Norwegian poet and the thwarting of an evil Persian cat named Mamelouk.

From Demons to Dracula, By Matthew Beresford

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The vampire of antiquity was a ghost, who became enfleshed as the revenant, the ghoul; then, particularly in eastern Europe, it turned into a blood-sucker. Under the ministrations of western novelists, he pupated into the seductive, cape-wearing aristocrat of modern myth. This process Matthew Beresford delineates with great clarity, but a large amount of supposition.

Art: Bacon with trimmings

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Prestel's monolithic Kandinsky (£99) weighs a stone, has a handsome slip-cover and includes a good facsimile portfolio of Kandinsky's Kleine Welten prints, originals of which fetch £150,000 apiece. All of which might lead you to think of this less as a coffee-table book than as a coffee table, in which you would be wrong. Prestel editions are as weighty in learning as they are in kilos. This one is edited by a pair of the world's foremost Kandinsky scholars, Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg, and its unpublished archive material alone makes it a must-have for anyone with a yen for the father of abstraction.

Terry Pratchett: 'If I'd known what a progressive brain disease could do for your PR profile I may have had one earlier'

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

This is just perfect. Here is Terry Pratchett, white-bearded and diminutive behind a towering double-row of six computer screens, as their greenish glow plays on his face. He looks like the Wizard of Oz.

Crime: Mayhem from Sicily to Scotland

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Any year that sees a new work by the redoubtable Baroness James of Holland Park is a good one, and another chance to encounter Commander Adam Dalgliesh should always be a cause for celebration. In The Private Patient (Faber, £18.99), PD James gives her readers a generous helping of murder and musings on revenge, innocence and guilt. Take a step back into a more brutal age with the latest Matthew Shardlake mystery, Revelation (Macmillan, £17.99). CJ Sansom's novels, set amid the stench and scandal of the 16th century, are impressive both for their intricate detail and serpentine plot twists. Revelation sees Shardlake on the trail of a proto-serial killer wreaking bloody havoc across Tudor London.

Film & Theatre: Cads, saints and fans in the limelight

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Stockings are out for most performance books this Christmas, and people thinking of giving Taschen's Ingmar Bergman Archives or Stanley Kubrick Archives might find even a pillowcase inadequate. They will need deep pockets, too, since, at £120 and £39.99 respectively, the books don't come cheap. But it's hard to imagine a film-lover who would not be thrilled by these exhaustive explorations of two masters of the medium.

The Word On: Malcolm Gladwell

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Gladwell's books would be more intellectually honest if he simply dispensed with his frameworks altogether, but then ... he wouldn't be the cultural figure he is now. Like 'Freakanomics' guru Steven Levitt, Gladwell promises to unravel our knottiest problems with the simplest of paradigms. By turning the macro into micro, he frees life of its chaos. Gladwell, in short, is in the hope business.

Great Tales from English History, By Robert Lacey

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Lacey's deft use of detail puts flesh on the bones of hazy historical figures. The ferocity of Edward I's temper is rec-orded in a bill for repairs to the coronet of his daughter Elizabeth after the irate monarch threw it into a fire. The absurd term "Highness" for royalty was introduced by the ill-fated Richard II, who "liked to sit enthroned for hours doing nothing much more than wearing his crown and 'talking to no man'." These highly readable nuggets build into revelatory narratives. Readers can follow the story of English Jews from a Masada-style mass suicide in York, through expulsion by Edward I to quiet readmission by Cromwell.

Sport: Revolution with an oval ball - and heaven and hell on wheels

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

There has been no sporting blockbuster this year, but much fine writing. Best-written of all is John Carlin's fantastic Playing The Enemy (Atlantic, £18.99). Carlin makes a convincing case for the 1995 Rugby World Cup final as the pinnacle of Nelson Mandela's career, the moment he had worked towards for decades. As The Independent's man in South Africa from 1989 to 1995, Carlin is superbly equipped to chronicle the rebirth of a nation, and his account – which will be a film, with Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as François Pienaar – is utterly compelling.

The Hour I First Believed, By Wally Lamb

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

In his long-awaited third novel, best-selling American novelist Wally Lamb delivers a whopping doorstopper of a book. Those who love a good plot will not be disappointed. Lamb opens at Blackjack Pizza, where teacher Caelum Quirk is getting a takeaway, served by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just days before they gun down 13 students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado. That's just the beginning.

Boyd Tonkin: Fact and fun with the stars of geek heaven

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

"What are you reading?" asks hippy-drippy Candice-Marie (Alison Steadman, of course) as her passive-aggressive prig of a husband sulks in his sleeping-bag during the camping holiday from hell that is Mike Leigh's Nuts in May. "The Guinness Book of Records," comes the reply. Readers who enjoy an aimless browse in reference books –a constituency that swells by an unquantified percentage each Christmas – have to contend with the idea that this activity may shade into borderline-sociopath behaviour. But, however solitary our dipping, at least we're not alone. In Hanif Kureishi's new novel, Something To Tell You, the narrator – a literary shrink – finds out that his son's favourite book is the Argos catalogue. Now there's a lad after my own heart.

Sue Townsend: 'I often write about my faults'

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

I've got this big fear," says Sue Townsend, "of being boring." Ah yes, well, you would have, wouldn't you? If you had created a character which became a book which became a bestseller 26 years ago and which, eight books later, was still a bestseller now. If your books had sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. If you were widely hailed as Britain's leading comic novelist, and had the supernatural ability to wrench even the famous Paxman sneer into a smile. Yes, of course you'd worry about being boring.