Blood, sweetbreads and jeers (Daily Telegraph)
Where Bourdain's prose was like someone pirouetting around an abbatoir with a chainsaw, Buford is more measured, offering the inquisitive view of a middle aged ingenu. In the end it gives us a better picture of how a great restaurant kitchen really feels.
Sympathy for the devil (Prospect)
Heidi Holland's biography of Robert Mugabe does something deeply unsettling - it makes one feel the dictator's pain.
Roald Dahl and the darkness within (BBC News online)
There's a perception that children's literature involves endless picnics where the strawberry jam and lashings of ginger beer never run out.
Far from the crowds in Hardy’s backyard (Financial Times magazine)
In a pretentious moment, one might call Hardy a writer of terroir. Far From the Madding Crowd, while lacking the tragic grandeur of Tess, Jude or The Woodlanders, is the first novel to refer to Wessex by name.
Frayn’s typewriter v messy reality (The Tablet)
It's a paradox that would bother Lord Reith or William Russell were they alive today.
What makes a truly great diary? (BBC news online)
It's 10 years since the death of Alan Clark - a politician who found distinction in his diary style, if not his career.
Great Lengths (Financial Times)
The indoor pool was a child of the industrial revolution: mass construction began only after the Baths and Wash Houses Act of 1846.
Cold comfort (Financial Times)
Two new books with almost identical titles illustrate the rise of a new literary phenomenon - the wild swimming tome.
From the frontlines of procrastination (Daily Telegraph)
Throughout this memoir, Egeland presents himself as one of the more assertive elements in the UN, who likes to "speak truth to power".
Cut is the branch (Daily Telegraph)
"I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins," Roger Deakin writes. The late author is on a mission to get to the heart of something huge and elemental - to understand not just trees, but the very essence of wood.