MPH 2008

The demon wife of Fleet Street

Cosmo Landesman couldn’t believe his luck when he married Julie Burchill, the hippest girl in town. Too bad that she lived – and wrote...

The Pooh Also Rises by Alan Coren

A.A.Milne gets an Ernest Hemingway makeover in this extract from the new anthology celebrating the brilliant humorist and Times...

Stick with us, son, we’re gonna be big

Embarrassed since birth, Cosmo Landesman charts his parents’ relentless, madcap – and unsuccessful – pursuit of fame

Extract from Frank Skinner on the Road: Love, Stand-up Comedy and The Queen of the Night

Frank Skinner frets about the dangers and temptations of financial success

Exclusive extract from Payback by Margaret Atwood

The grande dame of fiction offers a timely meditation on debt and the shadow side of wealth

Son of a gun in the family business

Who knew that Elmore Leonard, the Dickens of Detroit, was also the head of a crime-writing dynasty?

10 Books Not To Read Before You Die

The producer of at least three television shows that you may quite like shares with us his definitive list of books that just aren't worth the bother

Zoe Heller book extract: The Believers

Zoe Heller's eagerly anticipated new novel, The Believers, is a darkly comic take on a family of political radicals in post-9/11 New York. Here's how...

All this used to be mine

Helen Mirren tells how a stash of old letters launched a quest for her roots and the family torn apart by the Russian revolution

Coming Back to Me: The Autobiography by Marcus Trescothick

Salman Rushdie investigates India's transsexual underworld

In his contribution to Aids Sutra, a collection of essays about the HIV/Aids problem in India, Salman Rushdie reports on the culture of...

Extract: The White War

In the gripping introduction from his new book about Italy's disastrous involvement in the Great War Mark Thompson describes the unparalleled...

The Blue Peter effect

Biddy Baxter on editing Blue Peter and the publishing of some of the thousands of letters the show received each week: plus how-to guide on PDF

Extract from The Private Patient

A sneak preview of the latest thriller from P.D. James

Life at One Fifth Avenue...

Candace Bushnell returns to the world of Sex and the City with a beautiful, twentysomething slacker who has come to New York to find her Mr Big:...

The letters between friends that span 50 years

JFK, British PMs and Hollywood moguls... The fascinating correspondence of Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Extract: A Strange Eventful History by Michael Holroyd

Read from this fascinating story of the stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the Burton and Taylor of the Victorian age

Guernsey under German rule

A novel about the island's occupation is set to become a bestseller. Islanders who lived during that time give their views

Where have all the real men gone?

Top American columnist Kathleen Parker argues that feminism has neutered men and deprived them of their noble, protective role in society

Madonna and Guy Ritchie: the truth

Her brother claims Ritchie is oafish, possessive and insecure