The Baillie Gifford Prize rewards excellence in non-fiction writing, bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to new readers.

Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter

Rereading, feat Robert Browning being sad and sexy. Plus Earl Spencer, Stoicism, Carlo Rovelli and the latest new books

But Jeff Noon kinda got there first

A terrible precedent would also backfire politically while legitimising Nigel Farage’s plans for retrospective action on migrants

An Irk, Reform, Widowhood, some events, and new books this week

If public life contains a very high-profile, very vulnerable fantasist with an inexhaustible appetite for money and publicity, what is the duty of care that we all owe them? It’s a question that seems...

Thorpe Park; Baillie Gifford; Alan Bennett: An Apology; New & Improved book list; and some other stuff

I don’t think it lessens or trivialises the moral enormity of PC Harper’s death to feel uneasy about this case

Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on the Today programme this week to argue that Jason Arday’s publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unf...

The first in a regular series

This fictional memoir by Octavius’s right-hand man shows us bloodshed, betrayal and hectic jockeying for power

Holiday Backlist 3

An alarming email

Holiday Backlist 2

Frank Miller’s wild, outsized imagination revolutionised the world of super-heroes. His new book Push the Wall is a mix of autobiography and creative manifesto

Holiday backlist

A sad, heartbroken woman becomes obsessed with a famous writer in a continuously humorous and touching story from the Sorrow and Bliss author

The Metropolitan Police are investigating donations made to the party by Fiona Cottrell, mother of the fraudster ‘Posh George’, who has been funding Nigel Farage

The Metropolitan Police are investigating donations made to the party by Fiona Cottrell, mother of the fraudster ‘Posh George’, who has been funding Nigel Farage

Mything the point

Mything the point

It’s specially bizarre in this case though, that people are getting so ventilated about fidelity to the original of a story

ALT: In The Face! Las Vegas

Rhetoric, re-reading

Rhetoric, re-reading

The Reform party machinery seems to have shared Nigel Farage’s total lack of interest in the small stuff over George Cottrell

Rhetoric; not the Pepsi Challenge

Anatomy of (my) melancholy

Resignation Rhetoric Special