It's a joy to read but you won't learn many details about the artist known as Banksy – aside from him being tall, bespectacled, and bearded (sometimes).

In the decades around 1900, postcards were "a seemingly instant communications technology… just as the Internet is today."

Anyone who has read Robert Morrison's illuminating biography The English Opium-Eater will acknowledge his credentials as editor of this startling work, both revelatory and nightmarish.

A century – and city – of duels, dung and gin cocktails

"The Inside Story of Pink Floyd" reveals the disharmony underlying the metronomically perfect albums that made the band's massive fortunes.

Rather as the Jews refer to God as JHWH, the rational for His existence is expressed throughout this non-apologia ("I'm not sorry") as HPtFtU or "the human propensity to fuck things up".

No, not another new book from the assiduous Macintyre – this Paraguayan yarn appeared in 1993 – but it is a story as odd and involving as Double Cross and Operation Mincemeat.

David provides vivid accounts of battles involving British redcoats who formed the national army after the Glorious Revolution of 1685.

The high cost of loving oneself, or one's horse, and other sex crimes

A remote province of Italy is the setting for a compulsive investigation of dark corners of the human heart. Though he lived 500 miles away, Jones found himself attracted by Basilicata.