Did Ian Fleming’s secret wartime mission inspire Goldfinger?
Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, digs into the 007 creator’s own experience of espionage
Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, digs into the 007 creator’s own experience of espionage
Our tales of buried treasure, the Jolly Roger and walking the plank can be traced back to the same shadowy author
Strange lights, tropical heatwaves and a grinning dwarf: Noah Angell has spent years collecting stories from spooked staff
Four strange 500-year-old instruments link Henry VIII’s fleet to the modern Royal Navy. A music archaeologist dives into their story
Who said comics have to be comic? This year’s crop gave us haunted spas, apocalyptic visions – and the beauty of pastoral France
This Christmas, young readers can look forward to tales of His Majesty, three wily monkeys and a sumptuous reimagining of Peter Pan
Looking for a Christmas present for the music-lover in your life? Try Johnny Cash's lyrics, Sly Stone's memoir or Paul McCartney's snapshots
Our top thinkers turned the quest for hard truths into a mind-blowing funride
Year two of the war produced breathless tales of resistance, rebuttals to Russian propaganda, and the death of a promising young writer
This year, marriage went under the microscope in engrossing tales of mutual obsession, catastrophic union and doublethink
The Tory meltdown was a sign of the fractious spirit of the times. But consensus is possible – here are our politics picks of the year
In the 16 best poetry books of the year, readers meet Shakespeare's wife and Chekhov's sisters, a French comte and a wild London hyena
Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers ranges from Benjamin Franklin to an eccentric typographer who threw all his type into the Thames
In The Illusionist, Robert Hutton explores how Dudley Clarke invented an ingenious new playbook of military subterfuge
Sacha Lord’s memoir, Tales from the Dancefloor, runs from the dirty and criminal 1990s to the contemporary superclub scene
Naoko Abe’s The Martyr and the Red Kimono interlaces three 20th-century tales of martyrdom, survival and hope, flying from Japan to Poland
In his new novel, James, Percival Everett takes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, flips its script, and forges a grimly comic masterpiece
Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania, is a characteristically uncompromising satire on modern life – but it’s light on genuine surprises
Greg James and Chris Smith criticised after comment about their book, part of a new series
Anomaly, by the Bosnian writer Andrej Nikolaidis, cycles deviously through a gallery of sinners confronting the end of the world
The children’s classic criticised for its ‘horrendous stereotypes’ was nonetheless made into a film. Then the real trouble began
Critics adored her gritty 1960 debut about a single mother: ‘she can suggest all the indignity of being sick in the Tube in half a sentence’
This edition, abridged by scholar Anjna Chouhan and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, manages to preserve astounding amounts of poetry
Clare Pollard’s first children’s book, The Untameables, puts a fresh spin on the Camelot myth with an adventuring 10-year-old hero
What Rosa Brought, which Jacob Sager Weinstein based on his mother’s childhood, is hauntingly told and sharply illustrated by Eliza Wheeler
The late Kate Saunders, it transpires, left behind A Drop of Golden Sun, a multi-layered story of children working on a war film
The Girl Who Wasn’t There is typically chatty and humorous, and led by a young heroine who sees what adults don’t
On Thursday some schools are opting out of the tradition of children dressing up because of the stress and cost for parents
Christopher Childers has spent 10 years on The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse – and his translations sing from the page
Our Poetry Book of the Month choices for 2024 include a verse novel about talking dolls and the latest genre-busting book from Anne Carson
From Raymond Chandler's slippery similes to a scene Austen hid, a new exhibition reveals great writers' early drafts and discarded ideas
As the Irish singer champions The Forgotten Yeats Sisters for Sky Arts, she talks about women in history and the thrill of rock'n'roll