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The Russian Countess by Edith Sollohub

The Sunday Times review by Antony Beevor: Russian aristocrat's beautifully written memoir of how she survived the traumatising events of the 1917...

Concerning EM Forster by Frank Kermode Weidenfeld £14.99 pp180

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

The Sunday Times review by Phil Baker: a strikingly designed novel about a failed relationship told through a series of auction lots

Ghost Colonies by ED Wright

The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie: a murky history of colonial disasters, from the Vikings to cult leader Jim Jones

Going Rogue by Sarah Palin / Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe

The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hitchens: two books — a biography and her own much-trumpeted memoir — paint an alarming portrait...

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

The Sunday Times review by Rory MacLean: the author, who lived in East Berlin under the baleful eye of the Stasi, movingly and succinctly portrays...

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy

The Sunday Times review by John Dugdale: the final instalment in Ellroy’s crime trilogy concludes his ‘sewer crawl’ through the...

A Crisis of Brilliance by David Boyd Haycock

The Sunday Times review byJohn Carey: a lucid study of the tensions between five artists divided by social status but united by the experience of...

The Retreat by Michael Jones

The Sunday Times review by Max Hastings: the atrocities of Hitler’s fatally mismanaged battle for Moscow are brought vividly to life

JG Farrell in His Own Words edited by Lavinia Greacen

The Sunday Times review by Robert Harris: JG Farrell was the great lost hope of British literature. This engrossing collection of his writings takes...

It's a Don's Life by Mary Beard / Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

The Sunday Times review by Edmond Gordon: spry pithy blogs from the classics professor and witty and original criticism in Zadie Smith's essay...

Splendour & Squalor by Marcus Scriven

Iain Finlayson’s non-fiction reviews of the week: December 12, 2009

Paperback nonfiction - Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark

The Times review by Christina Koning. Plus a round-up of this week's other nonfiction paperbacks

Zac Goldsmith: Not such a green god

Tories’ supreme eco-warrior now finds himself out on a limb

The Sunday Times Christmas books: history

From master forgers to 18th-century London prostitution, Andrew Holgate uncovers a world of mischief in the year’s best history books

The Sunday Times Christmas books: stocking fillers

By Brian Schofield: parlour games for boys, an angry young man’s guide to 2009, and everything you wanted to know about the year’s news...

The Sunday Times Christmas books: stage and screen

The mad, the bad and the downright beautiful: Antonia Quirke lines up the year’s most sparkling volumes

The Sunday Times Christmas books: music

The queens of Motown rub shoulders with Louis Armstrong, Britpop, the rise and fall of DJs, the Hacienda and the record industry’s woes. Robert...

The Sunday Times Christmas books: classical music

The Sunday Times Christmas books: science

Darwin and climate change dominated the scientific community’s agenda this year. Philip Ball picks the titles making a bang

The Times Christmas books: money

Mayhem, meltdown and John Maynard Keynes - getting to the heart of the credit crunch

The Times Christmas books: politics

The rights and wrongs of leaders’ memoirs

The Times Christmas books: biography

Drunks, depressives, Nazi sympathisers; many great writers had much to hide as a rich crop of life stories show

The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones and White Ravens by Owen Sheers

The Sunday Times review by Robert Collins: ingenious modern retellings from the Mabinogion

Short Story: Junkspace by Michael Collins

‘Should Dad tell Lucy that British children are getting fatter faster than anywhere else in Europe? How do they break the news?’

The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Bookshop shelves are groaning with paperbacks, but how do you choose the best? A new award is the answer, says one of its judges

Kate Saunders’ fiction reviews of the week: December 12, 2009

Your face tomorrow 3: poison, shadow and farewell by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal

The cost of living: early and uncollected stories by Mavis Gallant

Paperback fiction - The Group by Mary McCarthy

The Times review by Sarah Vine. Plus a round-up of this week's other fiction paperbacks

The Times Christmas books: crime

A rising body count - and some laugh-out-loud jokes

Times Christmas books: graphic novels

The principles of mathematics and the dignity of labour find powerful realisation in word and image

Book Extract: Women will change our companies

In this excerpt from Business at a Crossroads, Tom Lloyd looks at the promise created by more women in senior roles

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

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