Hiding under the floorboards with Brian Eno, and other pop stories
Cult songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is a charming and compulsively perceptive work
Cult songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is a charming and compulsively perceptive work
Our all-consuming, ultimately unsustainable ideal of romance can be traced back to courtly love in the time of Henry VIII
Britain’s favourite vicar-turned-author talks losing his husband, being ghosted and why – at last – he’s open to pastures new
The novelist on the freedom of fiction and how modern society self-medicates through football
Who said comics have to be comic? This year’s crop gave us haunted spas, apocalyptic visions – and the beauty of pastoral France
This Christmas, young readers can look forward to tales of His Majesty, three wily monkeys and a sumptuous reimagining of Peter Pan
Looking for a Christmas present for the music-lover in your life? Try Johnny Cash's lyrics, Sly Stone's memoir or Paul McCartney's snapshots
Our top thinkers turned the quest for hard truths into a mind-blowing funride
Year two of the war produced breathless tales of resistance, rebuttals to Russian propaganda, and the death of a promising young writer
This year, marriage went under the microscope in engrossing tales of mutual obsession, catastrophic union and doublethink
The Tory meltdown was a sign of the fractious spirit of the times. But consensus is possible – here are our politics picks of the year
In the 16 best poetry books of the year, readers meet Shakespeare's wife and Chekhov's sisters, a French comte and a wild London hyena
From ‘catawampus’ to ‘hobbledehoy’, in Origin Uncertain the linguist Anatoly Liberman takes us on a riveting tour of strange etymologies
Keir Starmer, centrist king, is set to take power – which, as this bizarre essay collection (featuring Tony Blair) reveals, is awful news
Sami Kent’s The Endless Country is a personal history of Turkey’s first 100 years of independence, and it overflows with surprising stories
Richard Overy, one of our finest military historians, turns from the facts of warfare to the ideas behind it in his compelling book Why War?
Great and good of literary and celebrity worlds gather for memorial to author, who died aged 73 last year
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, Han Smith’s debut novel, is far too stylised to let its emotional heart show
The novelist on the freedom of fiction and how modern society self-medicates through football
Former DJ says ‘brutality’ of broadcasting world impacted her mental health and plans to focus on wellness empire
How to Be a Genius Kid, by ‘Waldo Pancake’ (Jim Smith), sees two cartoon narrators whisk us through eight fascinating lessons
The Wonderdays, by Clare Povey, has a solid villain, a daring journey and a sensible, albeit overly emphatic, eco-message
In Mary Cathleen Brown’s haunting debut novel, The Tall Man, a 12-year-old boy must solve an old mystery and save an imprisoned child
‘Hyperbole’, ‘harried’, ‘onomatopoeia’ – Colossal Words for Kids, by Colette Hiller and Tor Freeman, will have clever young tongues wagging
Tom Percival’s novel, The Wrong Shoes, tells of a stoic young boy and his struggling father. It’s touching, albeit a little too spelled-out
The War Horse author returns with a semi-autobiographical tale about D-Day’s legacy, beautifully illustrated by Michael Foreman
Ember Spark and the Thunder of Dragons, by Abi Elphinstone, has a conspiratorial narrator, a fizzing plot and even some sensible lessons
This splendid retrospective charting the author-illustrator’s career is a treat for those who know and love his books
Our Poetry Book of the Month choices include JH Prynne’s unlikely lullabies, and a dreamlike retelling of Greek myths from Sasha Dugdale
Christopher Childers has spent 10 years on The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse – and his translations sing from the page
From Raymond Chandler's slippery similes to a scene Austen hid, a new exhibition reveals great writers' early drafts and discarded ideas
As the Irish singer champions The Forgotten Yeats Sisters for Sky Arts, she talks about women in history and the thrill of rock'n'roll