Sport

The Sunday Times review by Nick Pitt: from cricket square and tennis court to racetrack and football pitch, we celebrate this year’s sporting...

Gardening

The Sunday Times review by Caroline Donald: growing your own fruit and vegetables or letting your garden run stylishly wild? We pick a bumper crop of...

Biography

The Sunday Times review by Frances Wilson: from the fabulous and the frightening to the wits and the bitches

Art

The Sunday Times review by Frank Whitford:entrancing, disturbing, reassuring: our roundup of the best art books of 2009

The Times Christmas books: food

For lovers of fine cuisine, reading about food comes a close second to consuming it

The Times Christmas books: wine

A flood of books for oenophiles has poured on to the festive market. We sort out the grand cru from the literary sheep-dip

Pops by Terry Teachout

The Sunday Times review by Robert Sandall: in public he was smiling and sunny, but the real Louis Armstrong, as this excellent life shows, was a far...

Waiting for Princess Margaret by Emma Tennant

The Sunday Times review by Lynn Barber: fact, fiction and memory become a fuzzy blur in this tale of growing up in a Scottish baronial castle

Blood, Iron and Gold by Christian Wolmar

The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie: this epic history reveals just how much the modern world owes to the spread of the railways

The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison

The Sunday Times review by John Carey: drug addict and alcoholic, Thomas De Quincey was one of English literature’s least savoury characters

Shooting Leave by John Ure

The Sunday Times review by Robert Harris: An entertaining account of the young British officers who risked life and limb to gather intelligence in...

Literary criticism by Frank Kermode and Zadie Smith

A fascination with E.M. Forster sent Kermode and Smith on a long journey

The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany By Graeme Gibson

This celebration of hunting animals is not for the faint-hearted

The week’s paperback nonfiction: November 21, 2009

In short: the week’s nonfiction; November 21, 2009

Palin's memoir: a thick book from thin material

Love, revenge and politics make for an action-packed book which will go down a treat among the Republican's allies

Colleen McCullough to undergo brain surgery

Author of best-selling novel The Thorn Birds suffers from disorder that causes excruciating pain to all parts of her face

My week: Anna Perera

I’ve done my bit to shut Guantanamo — now it’s your turn, Mr President

Profile: Alice Sebold

The author's novel The Lovely Bones, based on her own rape ordeal, thrust her into the light she shuns

Flushing out the high priests of climate change

It is up to the scientific establishment to set out better ground rules and insist on more openness

Time and place: Pete Irvine

The writer recalls living in ‘yuppie mansion’ beside the Forth Bridge with his neighbours Jim Kerr and Stephen Hendry

Colleen McCullough to undergo brain surgery

Author of best-selling novel The Thorn Birds suffers from disorder that causes excruciating pain to all parts of her face

Crime novels of 2009

The Sunday Times review by Joan Smith: 2009 has been a vintage year for crime fiction, We present the best of the bunch

The Times Christmas books: sci-fi / fantasy

From Cold War aliens to a Harry Potter for adults, there’s a wealth of choice for the armchair escapist

The Times Christmas books: thrillers

Dan Brown and Stephen King sold by the shelfload, while Stieg Larsson’s trilogy found a fiery closure. But Peter Millar finds many more stories...

Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon/What Becomes by AL Kennedy

The Sunday Times review by John Spurling

Short Girls by Bich Minh Nguyen/Generation A by Douglas Coupland/Peace by Richard Bausch

The Sunday Times review by Robert Collins

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov ed Dmitri Nabokov

The Sunday Times review by Kevin Jackson: there’s the elderly gent with a taste for young girls, and plenty of adultery, but Nabokov’s...

Sin in the cities

The Sunday Times review by John Dugdale: sleaze in Berlin and Havana, spook-lore and piracy rub shoulders in our thiller roundup

The week’s paperback fiction: November 21, 2009

The Times / WHSmith Paperbacks of the Year 2009; Number 4

In September we launched the only UK award exclusively for paperbacks. The longlist of 50 has been trimmed to a shortlist of 12; over the coming...

The week’s crime fiction: November 21, 2009

Cold to the Touch by Frances Fyfield Rain Gods by James Lee Burke Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse Ghoul Britannia by Andrew Martin Lost by Gregory Maguire

As the nights grow longer and colder, it’s time for some winter chillers

In short; the week’s fiction; November 21, 2009

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Walls’s grandmother was born dirt poor in Texas but she embodied the pioneering spirit

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Times review by Tom Gatti

The chief’s plans put to the vote

In this excerpt from The Future of Work, Richard Donkin looks at ways to balance decision-making

Hands off my kids

Running for vice-president was never going to be easy, but Sarah Palin was unprepared for the media storm unleashed on her family

Ofsted’s hidden cult of failure

A whistleblower tells how her fellow inspectors fret more over pupils’ lunch boxes than their literacy

Short story by award-winning writer Helen Simpson

This week is the last chance for published authors to enter the prestigious Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award

Sarah Palin: my life with a Down's child

In her memoir, US vice-presidential candidate tells of the problems and the joy of living with her special needs son

Signs that a big company is about to go wrong

In this excerpt from The Upside of Turbulence, Donald Sull lists the early warning signs of 'active inertia'

Cormac McCarthy talks about The Road

The Road tops our pool of the decade’s best 100 books. In a rare interview, its author, Cormac McCarthy, talks about religion, fatherhood and...

Fragments of Nabokov...

Vladimir Nabokov wanted his last novel burnt. But it survived and, 32 years after his death, we publish this extract

Alex Rider exclusive: Incident in Nice

A short story adventure starring the teenage spy, written exclusively for The Times by the author of the popular series

A cold man tamed by his dogs

At the start of their marriage, the club owner Mark Birley had few paternal instincts, recalls Annabel Goldsmith in her memoirs, but an unexpected...

Who's who in TS Eliot's letters

Extracts from TS Eliot's letters

In 1922, TS Eliot was on the edge: his poem The Waste Land had made him a literary star, but he was broke, and exhausted from working in a bank by...

Too wild to live

The matriarch of one of Britain’s most colourful families, recalls her beloved first-born son, Rupert, and his disappearance in treacherous...

The Most Romantic Love Letters Ever

Among the most romantic words ever put to paper, these letters capture the desire and despair of lovelorn women down the ages

Mary Beard’s spiky blog has become an internet sensation

Whether tackling the Afghan conflict or sexy statues, the Cambridge professor is always provocative. Here Beard introduces her favourite posts

How The Times went to war with a government

A new book by Tim Coates reveals how this newspaper’s reports from the Crimean War shaped the way conflicts are covered

Little changes in war reporting

Extract from the foreword to Tim Coates's 'Delane's War' by Patrick Mercer MP, former officer and Tory defence specialist

A gluten-free flan flung in middle-class faces

A new book sending up the fads and fancies of the chattering classes is a surprise hit. our correspondant and its author play I Spy among the olive...

Terrorised by toddlers

Schools now expel pupils as young as three. Are children so bad? No – it’s adults’ fault

Vice work if you can get it

Freakonomics authors show how call girls earn more by working less