Point Man by Mark Townsend – review
Mark Townsend's eye-opening account tells some bitter truths about the Afghan warThe truth about war – its slaughter, its unbearable stress – can be more visceral than any fiction. At first, Mark Townsend, home affairs editor of this paper, seems b...
The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson by Louis Barfe
A new life of Les Dawson celebrates a great British comic talent too often overlookedIt's May 1967, in the days when Britain really had talent. Hughie Green is hosting yet another of his Opportunity Knocks. And here, at last, comes fame, banging on the...
The Ascent of Media by Roger Parry – review
Roger Parry's scholarly journey through the history of media contains important lessons for today's digital pioneersAt first glance, this seems just another media studies textbook for first year students to put on their shelves (while Michael Gove purs...
Spooks never kept us safe | Peter Preston
The film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy keeps alive the myth that cold war spies actually matteredJohn le Carré doesn't like it. "I don't watch Spooks," he said at his Tinker Tailor cinema launch. "It's crap." Too many fast women and fast shoot-outs: to...
The Revolution Will Be Digitised by Heather Brooke – review
A vivid dispatch from the digital battlefieldHeather Brooke is a force of nature in journalism. She instinctively knows the enemy: power, with its attendant bureaucracy closing ranks to keep secrets safe. She knocked it flat as she first prised out the...
The past in a pineapple ring | Peter Preston
I still remember my first chicken biriani, in 1958. Whatever Jamie Oliver and co do, food will always be living historySpring may be a distant memory, but the detritus of decades is still the same old problem. So let's try an autumn clean. And here, un...
Memoirs by William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg's memoirs have plenty to tell us about the phone-hacking scandalAnd lo! as the crisis of Wapping, politicians and cops grows ever more frenetic, along comes an owlish octogenarian in a woolly cardigan recalling the genteel calm of tim...
The Offensive Internet edited by Saul Levmore and Martha C Nussbaum – review
A timely study from the US looks at the questions arising from privacy and a lawless internetOnce upon a more hopeful time, technology provided a suddenly empowering means of communication which united friends, families and communities of scholars acro...
The Unfinished Global Revolution by Mark Malloch Brown – review
An extraordinary treatise on how to create a better world by a man who knows a thing or two about international affairsGlobalisation means hedge funds, tax havens and everything we're currently invited to despise. Globalisation means bankers truffling ...
Make way for the new in the book world | Peter Preston
Save Our Libraries Day overlooked one thing: technology has changed our reading habitsMy problem on Save Our Libraries Day was deciding which local library to try to save. The one 500 yards down one side of the hill, or the one 500 yards the other way?...
22 Days in May by David Laws | The Big Society by Jesse Norman
An insider's account from David Laws of the coalition negotiations is intriguing, but Jesse Norman's explanation of the 'big society' is a much meatier read, says Peter PrestonAlso in tomorrow's Guardian Review: Books of the Year, chosen by Hilary Mant...
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