Smash Hit

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...

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

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

"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

Beware of men in hot climes: women in MI5

'It's difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than being with a woman agent who suffers from an overdose of sex'

Gaddafi was ‘greatest terror threat of 1980s’

Authorised history of MI5 reveals how Colonel Gaddafi’s regime authorised the killings of Libyan dissidents in Britain

MI5’s long hunt for spy it had already caught

In the second extracts from his book, Christopher Andrew describes the rise and fall of the ‘Magnificent Five’

Thatcher tried to get union ‘wreckers’ identified

The Winter of Discontent had strengthened the Prime Minister’s belief in the importance of counter-subversion