at the Complete Review

at the Complete Review

at the Complete Review

Philip Womack goes on a quest round Spitalfields with author Jeanette Winterson whose new book The Battle of the Sun is set in sixteenthcentury London

Melissa Katsoulis's Telling Tales and Gary Dexter's Poisoned Pens reveal writers with a talent for hoaxes and invective as well as prose finds Mark Sanderson

This sumptuous edition of Vincent van Gogh's complete letters shows that the artist was as adept with pen and ink as with paint and canvas says Martin Gayford

Eugene Rogan's history of the Arabs tells a story of humiliation at the hands of outsiders finds Noel Malcolm

Michael Prodger is disappointed by The Humbling Philip Roth's latest tale of the travails of age

Our reviewers' verdicts on the latest batch of paperbacks including the Letters of Ted Hughes and Tony's Ten Years by Adam Boulton

The family of Stieg Larsson the Swedish crime writer who died five years ago are engaged in a bitter fight over proceeds from the sale of his books.

Richard Benson on a perceptive study of place and family The Plot by Madeleine Bunting

Toby Clements on the sixth instalment in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series If the Dead Rise Not

Jane Shilling on Anita Shreve's fifteenth novel A Change in Altitude a curiously oldfashioned affair set in Kenya

Christopher Howse is caught up in the vast Georgian enterprise of illicit sex rummaging in The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank

Andrew Marr goes for a spin in a RollsRoyce Silver Ghost around the history of Britain from 1900 to 1945. Tom Payne reviews his new book accompanying the television series The Making of Modern Britain

Philip Womack finds luminosity and wisdom in an elegant volume of pieces from the New York Review of Books in which writers remember their dead friends.