• February 13 2024
  Review

  I Seek a Kind Person — saved from the Holocaust by an advert

  Julian Borger tells the remarkable story of how his father and seven other Viennese children who were adopted via newspaper classifieds

  new 40 minutes ago

  
• February 8 2024
  The best books of the week

  Georgi Gospodinov review — an anatomy of melancholy

  ‘The Physics of Sorrow’ and ‘The Story Smuggler’ by the International Booker winner are wistfully revealing about life in post-Communist Bulgaria

  
• February 7 2024
  The best books of the week

  Hannah Arendt’s lessons in life and politics — We Are Free to Change the World review

  How would one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers handle the challenges of today? A new biography offers intriguing answers

  
• January 25 2024
  Review

  Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó — from ‘crazy mRNA lady’ to Nobel laureate

  A riveting account tracks a snakes-and-ladders path, from tough beginnings in Communist Hungary to paving the way for Covid vaccines

  
• January 23 2024
  Review

  Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets — behind a wall of silence

  Clair Wills’s story of a family discovery is compelling not just on a personal level but as a vignette of recent Irish history

  
• January 19 2024
  Review

  The Rebel’s Clinic — should Frantz Fanon inspire us?

  The anti-colonial militant is a major figure for activists, but controversy over his calls for revolutionary violence remains

  
• January 11 2024
  ReviewNon-Fiction

  More: A Memoir of Open Marriage — the joy of extramarital sex

  Rather than rejecting monogamy outright, this thoughtful foray into free love asks if polyamory can enrich a couple’s relationship

  
• January 10 2024
  Review

  Better Broken Than New — Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s entertaining, shocking memoir

  An English eccentric’s account of life as a perennial traveller and perpetual outsider

  
• December 12 2023
  Review

  Chaplin vs America — red scares, scandal and a star in exile

  Scott Eyman’s compelling, empathetic account traces Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace in postwar America

  
• December 12 2023
  Review

  Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns — portrait of an economic colossus

  This splendid biography of ‘the last conservative’ is also an insightful history of 20th-century thinking

  
• December 5 2023
  ReviewNon-Fiction

  The Money Kings — the profound legacy of America’s Jewish banking dynasties

  Daniel Schulman’s richly detailed chronicle is a timely corrective to historical distortions that have helped feed antisemitism

  
• December 5 2023
  Nilanjana Roy

  Take refuge in the gossip of the gilded age

  Memoirs of the socialites and swells of an earlier era offer perfect festive reading — without today’s celebrity spin

  
• November 29 2023
  ReviewBooks

  The story of Francis Ford Coppola — Sam Wasson on the godfather of cinema

  The Path to Paradise digs deep into a man whose achievements are almost too much for one life — never mind one book

  
• November 17 2023
  FT SeriesBest books of the year 2023

  Best books of 2023 — Sport

  Simon Kuper selects his must-read titles

  
• November 16 2023
  Non-Fiction

  ‘Thrillingly told’ account of Canadian wildfire scoops Baillie Gifford prize

  ‘Fire Weather’ named winner of UK’s leading award for non-fiction at ceremony in London

  
• November 16 2023
  FT SeriesBest books of the year 2023

  Best books of 2023 — Literary non-fiction

  Carl Wilkinson selects his must-read titles

  
• November 15 2023
  FT SeriesBest books of the year 2023

  Best books of 2023 — Pop music

  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney selects his must-read titles

  
• November 10 2023
  ReviewTelevision

  Robbie Williams, Netflix — the polished inside story of the megastar

  The latest biographical documentary to land on the streaming service has the usual carefully managed narrative

  
• November 3 2023
  ReviewBooks

  Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga — tales with a twist

  The Rwandan writer playfully explores storytelling and colonialism

  
• October 27 2023
  Review

  The Fall by Michael Wolff — a combative view of Murdoch’s endgame

  The biographer returns to the media mogul and finds a once-powerful figure shaded by ‘doubt, ambivalence, regret’

  
• October 17 2023
  Review

  Father and Son by Jonathan Raban — a moving coda to a writer’s life

  The English novelist’s final book blends a memoir of his convalescence in America with the story of his parents’ WWII romance

  
• October 13 2023
  Review

  Alone by Daniel Schreiber — seeking seclusion

  A heartfelt memoir on being single, living alone and the existential experience of loneliness

  
• October 4 2023
  Review

  Pure Wit — Margaret Cavendish as protofeminist

  Dismissed by Virginia Woolf as ‘an elf’, the prolific 17th-century poet and playwright is given a more positive appraisal in a new biography

  
• September 27 2023
  Review

  The Maverick — George Weidenfeld, publisher to saints and sinners

  Thomas Harding’s biography uncovers the secrets of a chameleonic outsider who made himself a fixture of the cultural establishment

  
• September 13 2023
  Review

  Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson — clashes of the titan

  An exploration of the tech billionaire’s epic feats, which is long on reporting detail but shorter on the meaning of Musk