From laugh-out-louds to gripping plots, Jeremy Black recommends murder mysteries for the end of the month

While the authors of Francis Bacon’s latest biography deliver nothing new on the art, they do show how Bacon lived his life with a unique intensity

Dinah Casson’s book will inspire and galvanise anyone involved in British provincial museums

What about the past should and could be mapped, and how to do so, are vexed issues in cartographic studies

The Story of Scottish Art is not a scholarly work of art history; it gives an easy-to-read account of artists’ lives with a faintly awestruck tone

Despite its length, Philip Mansel’s biography of the Sun King is ‘a welcome prize for any reviewer’

Stuart Ritchie’s ‘Science Fictions’ reveals a scholar committed not only to his own discipline but to the wider principles underlying all intellectual endeavour

Emily Tamkin’s ‘The Influence of Soros’ is a lucid, subtle and fair-minded attempt to grapple with a tremendously complex legacy

As a pupil, Alexandra Wilson frequently encountered racially loaded assumptions. In court, clients assumed she was a defendant

Janis Tomlinson’s new biography of Francisco Goya is a well-informed, comprehensive biography that would make an excellent gift for any art lover