Sports Calendar

Ian Dury by Will Birch

The Sunday Times review by Lynn Barber: charming, manipulative and a self-styled cockney geezer, Ian Dury might not have always been nice, but he...

The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge

The Sunday Times review b James McConnachie: an epic account of the crusades details appalling acts of cruelty on both sides

The Last Empress by Hannah Pakula

The Sunday Times review by Max Hastings: she appeared on the cover of Time and wooed America. But the wife of General Chiang played a key role in her...

Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart: an entertaining study of the American obsession with positive spin and the extraordinarily negative...

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s by Edmund White

An anecdote-filled cruise through the personalities, gossip and gay action of Seventies New York

In short: this week’s nonfiction: January 23, 2010

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich isn’t merely unmoved by the cult of positive thinking, she think’s it’s downright damaging

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

A poster boy for the Iraq invasion became a symbol of its bungling

Viva South America! A Journey Through a Restless Continent by Oliver Balch

A tour through nine Latin Ameican countries reveals murder, corruption — and an endearing energy

Literary moans and groans: quotes of the year

The Sunday Times review by John Dugdale: our prizes for the best gripes and most toe-curling erotic prose of 2009

Zadie Smith, her father and British comedy

The author writes about a mutual passion for the likes of Monty Python and the punchline she can’t escape — his death

Zadie Smith, her father and British comedy

The author writes about a mutual passion for the likes of Monty Python and the punchline she can’t escape — his death

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

The Sunday Times review by Peter Parker: a light-hearted work that is not quite a novel, more a spoof encyclopedia of imaginary fascists and their...

Plan for Chaos by John Wyndham

The Sunday Times review by Nick Rennison

The Museum of Innocence by Orham Pamuk

The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp: the real star of this novel of sexual obsession is Istanbul — the city that Pamuk so illuminatingly...

The week’s paperback fiction: January 2, 2010

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

More than the tale of a doomed affair, a new novel from the Nobel prizewinner celebrates Istanbul

The week’s crime fiction: January 2, 2010

From London to Oz, death knows no borders

The week’s children’s fiction: January 2, 2010

Where angels tread

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

Madness in Manhattan

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

In short: the week’s fiction: January 2, 2010

Literary moans and groans: quotes of the year

The Sunday Times review by John Dugdale: our prizes for the best gripes and most toe-curling erotic prose of 2009

Negative equity

'The decision to dissolve a marriage of nine years’ standing made for a warmer evening than they’d conducted in months'

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

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

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

The secret behind the veil

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