Anna Baddeley

I’ll never forget my first piece of secondary school Maths homework. Our hapless teacher, fresh out of training college and anxious to be liked, instructed us to decorate the front page of our exercise books with the slogan: “Maths is Fun!” Even the dimmest wits among us could see she was up to something. If

If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now

If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters. Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford This sympathetic biography

Anyone who’s been charged with plagiarism knows there are two ways to save face. Either own up and claim you were making a statement, or deny and employ the ‘Great Minds’ defence, like I did when accused of copying Tacitus in my A-Level history coursework. The funny thing about Q.R. Markham, whose much-hyped spy thriller

The Man Booker committee has appointed Peter Stothard as the chairman of next year’s judges. What a dreary decision. I’ve nothing against Sir Peter Stothard; the TLS is a fine, upstanding publication — although whether it can be said to ‘zip along’ is a matter of taste. No, it’s more that in picking someone so literary

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too. It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide

We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’

Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine

Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and

“We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?” asks Jeremy Paxman in Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, the tie-in book to his forthcoming TV series. Paxman’s aim is to look at how the empire shaped Britain, tracing its influence in

With one eye on as yet empty Christmas stockings and the other on cold winter’s nights, here is a short list of essential non-fiction titles recently released in paperback. 1) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee This “biography” of cancer by a New York oncologist whisks readers from the first documented appearance of the

It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over

Who’s Jeffrey Sachs? Leading American development economist and United Nations adviser, Sachs is broadly on the left of the political spectrum. His most famous book is The End of Poverty. What’s the book about? Another analysis of the current financial crisis, the book is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription, focusing on America. What are

Be honest, how many times have you used your local library in the past year? If you live in Kensal Rise, the answer is “not enough”. Before it was locked up last week, after the High Court overturned a last-ditch appeal by campaigners, its pretty Victorian library had been getting only 850 visits a week.

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany

Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary

David Sexton on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Evening Standard) ‘It all feels very GCSE … there’s too much verbal prancing, too little that’s original being said, particularly when the poems are not personal. You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it’s a trivial art. But it is not.’ David Annand

Two big pieces of digital publishing news this week: first, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire – the ‘iPad killer’. Then yesterday, the launch of Bloomsbury Reader: a new digital imprint resurrecting hundreds of out-of-print titles by HRF Keating, Storm Jameson, VS Pritchett and other writers that used to be famous. It has

That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong with America? And How it Can Come Back Who’s it by? Thomas L Friedman (Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum (Professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University). What’s it about? How America lost its superpower status