Books

Mr (or Mrs) 15 per cent

The best agents are unobtrusive and make sure attention is focused on their writers

A class act?

Polly Toynbee’s memoirs test the reader’s patience

Those golden years

Ultimately it’s the music that brings to each of us our personal Bowie

Twists of the tongue

When competing languages collide, demography eventually supersedes prestige

Who said feminists forgot about men?

Educating Caitlin Moran (and her critics)

Lost in the eye of the hurricane

Crisis is the pinwheel of modern democratic politics

Asking the right questions about race

If racial disparities don’t equate to racism, then what does explain it?

The people’s captain

What our politics can learn from Kevin Sinfield

What’s the matter with women?

Perhaps they should be more like men

Pandemics, plagues and pestilence

Germs have been laying waste to civilisations for 50,000 years