Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity by Michael Munn
A ludicrous study of Hitler recasts the Führer as a precursor of Simon CowellMichael Munn has spent his life – at least as he implausibly tells it – schmoozing with the beautiful and the damned. He bonded with Steve McQueen while riding pillion on...
The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years by Christopher Sandford
The Rolling Stones' merchandise, rather than their music, has ensured their survivalPopular culture gobbles up its favourites and almost immediately spits them out, so how come the Rolling Stones – who until very recently still creakily cavorted thro...
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley; Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by Simon Callow – review
Callow's spirited salute to Dickens misses the darker depths revealed in the great man's lettersThe grandees who gathered recently to commemorate Dickens's bicentenary in Westminster Abbey – where, incidentally, he had no wish to be buried – piousl...
What Are Universities For? by Stefan Collini
Stefan Collini's defence of universities is heavy on hand-wringing and light on real answersThe rhetorical question is a hollow-sounding device, much favoured by monologuising dons: asked for the sake of effect, it doesn't feel obliged to provide an an...
Books for giving: art
An exhaustive history of art proves more than a handful, Hockney is chatty but dotty – and genius springs from the man who gave us the shower scene in PsychoThe Art Museum (Phaidon £125) weighs well over a stone, and is less a book than a virtual bu...
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – review
Umberto Eco's picarasque novel about 19th century Jew-haters is a gift for conspiracy theoristsImagine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco, who before he took up fiction 30 years ago in The Name of the Rose was a semiotician and a medieval...
Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher's wisecracks and waspish rants fail to mask her Hollywood self-regardCarrie Fisher's latest collection of wisecracks and kvetching rants is less a book than a standup comedy routine that you read while sitting down. Reading, in fact, hard...
Magnum Contact Sheets by Kristen Lubben – review
A coffee-table book of Magnum Photos' contact sheets offers a glimpse into a dying artThe Magnum agency, set up by photojournalists Robert Capa, David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger in 1947, was a product of the jittery postwar era an...
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson – review
A life of the late Steve Jobs catches the great man's many contradictions with unerring skillTechnology begets the future and, thanks to Steve Jobs, it sketched the next phase in the evolution of lame-brained Homo sapiens. The headquarters of Apple in ...
Girl in a Green Gown by Carola Hicks
Carola Hicks is good on the exotic history of the Arnolfini portrait but never truly demystifies the paintingSome paintings refuse to stay quietly on the wall. The characters in them slip out of the frame, casting off the picture's still, fixed moment ...
Judging a book by its cover
Lord of the Flies, the masterpiece that launched William Golding's career, has never lost its relevance, even as Faber continually updated its imageWhen I first read Lord of the Flies at school in Tasmania 50 years ago, I thought – as most boys proba...
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by AS Byatt
AS Byatt's contribution to Canongate's series on myths and legends takes the Norse apocalypse Ragnarok and triumphantly forges it anewStories begin when characters set out on their travels and end when they arrive at a destination or return wearily hom...
