Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg
If we can afford to live alone, we doThe way Eric Klinenberg perceives the interviewees for his book on living alone, you really wouldn't want to be one of them. Nicky's voice is "soft and a bit squeaky". Kimberley from New York has "a sweet but somewh...
The Severed Head by Julia Kristeva – review
A survey of ways in which the severed head pops up in literature, art and lifeThankfully for Britons, cutting people's heads off is something that happened a long time ago, during the fancy dress period of history. Henry VIII did it to his wives, Eliza...
Middle Age: A Natural History by David Bainbridge
Why the years between 40 and 60 are the best, and evolutionary science agreesIn western culture middle age is mostly seen as a featureless stopping-off point between the more anguished periods of youth and old age, a dull no man's land of mil...
Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd
An underpowered life of an author of stylish sensationalismYou can see why Peter Ackroyd would pick Wilkie Collins as his next biographical subject. Everything about that odd little man makes him perfectly fitted to roam through Ackroyd's imaginative u...
Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years by Louise Foxcroft
Atkins, Hay, Dukan – are they all the same?Going on a diet in January is what we are supposed to do, along with feeling guilty about credit card bills and anticipating summer holidays. It is the way in which the natural function of eating has become ...
The Real Mrs Beeton by Sheila Hardy
Cookery pioneer Eliza Acton is much-championed but ultimately unknowableMiss Acton has long been set up as the saint to Mrs Beeton's sinner. Where Isabella Beeton (pictured) is Victorian in a stodgy, over-boiling the veg, old biddyish kind of way,...
Cover story
This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks. Publishers have responded by bringing out exquisite new releases and revamps of classics• Join our Flickr group celebrating beautiful booksIn his recent Booker acceptance speech, Juli...
Edward Burra, transgressive painter of English countryside and dockside bars
His cabbages are sinister and his barmaids are transvestites. Edward Burra's watercolours of rural England and Marseilles and Harlem street life are wonderfully distortingNo one has ever been sure what to do with Edward Burra, the British painter whose...
Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester
Georgette Heyer was a better writer than this biography allowsIn 1960 the Attorney General, Lord Somervell, left his entire Georgette Heyer collection to the Inner Temple Library. Quite apart from having a name that makes him sound as though he had ste...
My favourite Dickens: Bleak House
By Kathryn HughesMonthly serial, March 1852-September 1853Dickens wrote his ninth novel at that perfect hinge in his career when he was finally able to channel his creative exuberance into a sustained and sophisticated piece of narrative art. All the u...
Ford Madox Brown: pre-Raphaelite pioneer and working-class hero
Although he shares some stylistic traits with the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the artist preferred the mess of everyday life to the lofty mythological subjects of Rossetti and Burne-JonesHear the words "Ford Madox Brown" and "Manchester" in the same se...
Lucia Etxebarria: truly an extraordinary author | Kathryn Hughes