In this month’s fiction selection, John Self discovers novels that successfully use their style to enhance rather than simply describe the story

The winner of the Wolfson Prize for History significantly advances neither our knowledge of Toussaint Louverture nor Haiti

The drives behind the Victorian periodical press and penny literature

From midnight Parisian walks and femmes fatales to jazz and corruption, Jeremy Black rounds up the best murders

The first title in Yale University’s highly regarded “Jewish Lives” series to be devoted to a murderous scoundrel

The solemn, febrile and deeply bonkers ferment of interwar modernism

Barnier’s Secret Journal should interest British readers due to the insights on whether the UK could have negotiated a better deal

This book is an apt metaphor for the state of freedom of speech in modern Britain

Reading Doom might not save us, but it leaves us with a better appreciation of the complex politics of catastrophe

Was Iceland responsible for the French Revolution, the moon landing and the discovery of America?