May 14, 2013
Dubai seems to be witnessing a sudden revivalist surge in the promotion of reading, with book cafes popping up across the city. Here's are guide to our four favourites. Read Article Check out Dubai's reading cafes
May 12, 2013
How did Abba come to exert such a remarkable influence on popular culture? And what was it like dancing in those platform shoes?
Read Article Required reading: Those super troupers Abba
May 11, 2013
The woman of the tile, a 'wounded and bereft animal', has her life transformed through her jealous involvement with an immigrant family in contemporary America. Read Article The Woman Upstairs: Claire Messud returns with a ferocious new work
May 09, 2013
Tessa Hadley's new novel charts, without sentimentality, the life of a woman who never fulfils her potential but is buffeted by the vagaries of her existence. Read Article Clever Girl: making everything out of nothing
May 09, 2013
John le Carré was the chronicler par excellence of the devious machinations of Cold War espionage, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall he's repositioned himself as an analyst of corruption and power in a lopsided world of big business and big government. Read Article Corporate accounts: John le Carré's reinvention as a chronicler of power and corruption
May 09, 2013
The historian Michael Burleigh's new work is more a polemical essay than a work of scholarship, but it describes how the start of the Cold War interacted with the end of the European empires in ways that still affect us. Read Article Ends of empire: 'The USA profited little and lost much from its misconceived liberal imperialism'
May 09, 2013
It first went into production 75 years ago and the last unit rolled off a Mexican assembly line 10 years ago - and in-between more than 21 million Beetles were sold, winning hearts and changing lives around the world. Read Article Beetle mania: How Volkswagen's iconic little car conquered the world
May 05, 2013
President Obama says Guantánamo Bay must be closed. So how did an anonymous naval base become the world's most notorious prison? Read Article Required reading: Guantanamo Bay
