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...
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: do we need new film versions?
Haven't we seen it all before? Is there any point in film and television revisiting the Brontës, Austen and Dickens? Well, yes, especially if the renderings of the British classics are as innovative as the two set for imminent release – Andrea Arnol...
‘Writing this book was the most fun I ever had’
The American author discusses the bizarre sexual fantasy world of his new novel, House of HolesIf you wonder why writers write, there's a succinct answer – at least on behalf of the male ones – in Nicholson Baker's new novel House of Holes, an anth...
The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes
An early novel by a great Portuguese writer manages to thrill despite the foulness of its visionThe land at the end of the world is poor little Portugal, backed on to a thin slice of the Iberian peninsula by boisterous Spain; it is also – in this ear...
Dante in Love by AN Wilson – review
Any merit in AN Wilson's study of Dante is lost as he pushes his own fuddy-duddy agendaThe title, I must warn you, is misleading: this is less a book about Dante in love than an excuse for AN Wilson to vent his own ideological hatreds. In place of...
