Books

Despising all that they hold dear

Politics is but a subset; the true villain is belief, says Jonathon Green of Jonathan Meades’s new release

Scapegoat of a paranoid era

Anne Sebba’s book on Ethel Rosenberg is a towering memorial

Cheeky blinder

Isobel Williams’s treatment of selected poems is literary charcuterie, as neat as it is naughty

Tangled up in the myth of Dylan

Age hasn’t withered Dylan. He was always running towards it, arms open wide.

The making of a maelstrom

How the Anglophile Kaiser Wilhelm went to war with Britain

“We did everything we could”

This book offers an insider’s account of the extraordinary (in)decision-making among Johnson’s team during the most tumultuous year in modern history

Faustian bargains of the review world

Jeremy Black delves into a history book which disappoints and a biography not to be missed

Riffing on the poetic tradition

William Poulos says that in his wisdom and readability, Llewelyn Morgan serves his subject well

Riotous isle of vanilla gangsters, lemurs and a DJ president

In his new book on Madagascar, John Gimlette tells of trouble in paradise

Hartlepool and the dignity of Labour

After losing Hartlepool to the Conservatives, the Labour Party would do well to take heed of Jon Cruddas’s new book