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

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

The week’s paperback 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

The House of Borgia by Christopher Hibbert and Martyrs and Murderers by Stuart Carroll

The Sunday Times review by Nick Rennison

Martin Luther King by Godfrey Hodgson

The Sunday Times review by Stephen Robinson: without Martin Luther King, as this book argues, would there have been no Barack Obama?

Up and Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson

The Sunday Times review by Frances Wilson: an intriguing study of the changes in the master-servant relationship since the Middle Ages

The Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis

The Sunday Times review by Nick Rennison: cleverly presented portrait of a ship and all who sailed in her

Bob Marley by Chris Salewicz

The Sunday Times review by Robert Sandall: the new Hendrix, the black Dylan: Marley filled a gap in the 1970s music scene that made him a global...

Cheever by Blake Bailey

The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon: the hidden life of a man whose tales of philandering commuters and lonely housewives defined Mad Men...

Open by Andre Agassi

The Sunday Times review by Lynne Truss: he hated the game, played with alarming aggression and hid behind his hair; all is revealed in this...

Mike Atherton reviews Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi

The brilliant Las Vegan’s memoir tells how he came to hate the sport that made him famous

In short: the week’s nonfiction: November 14, 2009

The week’s paperback nonfiction: November 14, 2009

The Hugo Young Papers: A Journalist’s Notes from the Heart of Politics edited by Ion Trewin

'The room was dark. Berlusconi likes the dark'

Extracts from Patrizia D'Addario's book Gradisca, Presidente which recalls encounters with the Italian Prime Minister

Harry Potter’s US cousin is a Greek demigod

A film about a boy who turns out to be the son of the Greek god Poseidon is provoking howls of plagiarism from Potter fans

Top 10 hardbacks - non-fiction

The Sunday Times Bestseller List, November 22, 2009

Nightmarish power of Maurice Sendak's classic

Where The WIld Things Are, now a Spike Jonze film, is disturbing and dark: precisely what today's children need

Top 10 paperbacks - fiction

The Sunday Times Bestseller List, November 22, 2009

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

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

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

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

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Times review by Tom Gatti

Profile: Stephenie Meyer

The author’s tales of chaste teen love, death and ethical bloodsuckers are huge sellers and now a second movie is here

The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam

The Sunday Times review by Maggie Gee: a ballsy retelling of the author's Old Filth, this time from the wife's point of view

Wanting by Richard Flanagan

The Sunday Times review by David Grylls: a vulnerable young Tasmanian girl and Dickens intersect in this poignant tale of deprivation and desire

Crime roundup

The Sunday Times review by Joan Smith: the influx of excellent Nordic writers continues apace: Joan Smith praises a starry trio in her pick of the...

Short Story: Ophelia's Revenge by Frank Skinner

Only the brave would dare put a new spin on the Shakespeare classic Hamlet, but the comedian has taken up the challenge

Your Face Tomorrow: 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marias

The Times Twitter microfiction competition

Much against expectations, and inclinations, John Humphrys discovers that you can tell a decent story in 140 characters

In short: the week’s fiction: November 14, 2009

The week’s audio books: November 14, 2009

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

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...

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

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

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

Everything you know about Global Warming is wrong

The Freakonomics authors are back and this time they claim a giant hosepipe in space could save the planet

Britain must start to play diplomatic hardball

The former ambassador to Washington says the Foreign Office has been neutered by government and msut rediscover national interest

The secret behind the veil

Caught in a rigid society that stifles affection even within marriage, women in the kingdom are turning to lesbianism

"People are what he is bad at. People, and prose."

Writers have never feared brandishing the poison pen, especially to insult their colleagues, as a new book shows