8 h. ago The best fantasy books of 2025: from Katabasis to The Raven Scholar

Here’s what stood out this year

Politics

10 h. ago Horse Racing Betting Sites UK: Best Racing Bookmakers (December 2025)

Compare over 50 licensed horse racing betting sites and find out which bookmakers make the grade as the best horse racing betting sites for 2025

Politics

11 h. ago Rock around the Christmas tree with the best music books of 2025

From John Lennon to John Williams these are the years best books and biographies on music

Culture

14 h. ago The 9 best health books of 2025 to help you feel your best self in the new year

If you want to go into 2026 with health and energy then look no further than these books written to keep the doctor at bay

Politics

15 h. ago Yael van der Wouden : ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cured my fear of aliens’

The Safekeep author on her secret childhood reading, falling in love with Elizabeth Strout and why she keeps coming back to Zadie SmithMy earliest reading memory I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed – orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic – but I retain nothing of what I read. I do remember a book of dirty jokes I was obsessed with at the age of eight. I was convinced it was off limits to me (it wasn’t) and so I waited until my parents were at work to shamefully steal it from the bookshelf. One time, my mother found it under my pillow and I was mortified. I recall her being confused and putting it back with a mumbled “I don’t judge” as she left the room.My favourite book growing up hat must have been one of Thea Beckman’s novels, most likely Hasse Simonsdochter. Beckman was the author for young adults in 80s and 90s Netherlands. Continue reading...

Events

18 h. ago Making Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce review – the musical brothers behind the movie magic

Bob and Dick Sherman take centre stage in this well-researched account of how Walt Disney created a classicLike many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future. Continue reading...

Culture

32 h. ago Glitz, glamour gorgeous paintings: Find the perfect present with the best picture books of 2025

Lose yourself in the fabulous photographs in these picture perfect books

Politics

33 h. ago This book was the most read on Kindle in 2025 – and you can read it for free

This gripping thriller has topped bestseller charts all year

Politics

34 h. ago A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke audiobook review – an honest and hilarious memoir

The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-linersA lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,” she hooted, and did a little dance.Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and Fren...

Politics

36 h. ago Betting Sites UK: Compare The Best Online Bookmakers in December 2025

Compare over 60 licensed and regulated betting sites in the UK and find out which are the best online bookmakers for December 2025

Politics

40 h. ago Waterstones and Barnes & Noble owner looks to list booksellers on stock market

US hedge fund Elliott thought to prefer IPO in London over New York, which could be welcome boost to UK stock marketBusiness live – latest updatesThe owner of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble is reportedly preparing to list the booksellers on the stock market.Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that owns the most popular bookstores in the US and the UK, has spoken to potential advisers about an initial public offering (IPO), the Financial Times reported. Continue reading...

Politics

42 h. ago Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen review – a prescient classic of cryogenics

This resurrected Danish novel about a man who is ‘frozen down’, awaking in an Orwellian dystopia two decades later, is inventive, funny and all too timelyIn the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the...

Politics

62 h. ago Best Betting Sites UK: Top Online Bookmakers for December 2025

Compare over 60 licensed and regulated betting sites in the UK and find out which are the best online bookmakers for December 2025

Politics

64 h. ago Bog Queen by Anna North review – a tale that could dig deeper

This story of a teenage druid whose body is discovered in a peat bog has memorable moments – but its evocation of time and place is unconvincingAnna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life”, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.”Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wi...

Politics

66 h. ago The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore review – do we now know what causes schizophrenia?

A brilliant history of psychiatric ideas suggests we are on the cusp of a transformation in our understanding of severe mental illnessIn 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients a...

Events

66 h. ago The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore review – do we finally know what causes schizophrenia?

A brilliant history of psychiatric ideas suggests we are on the cusp of a transformation in our understanding of severe mental illnessIn 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients a...

Events

2 d. ago Virginia Roberts Giuffre: Epstein accuser’s memoir sells 1m copies in two months

Giuffre’s family calls the success of her posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl, ‘bittersweet’ after her death in AprilA posthumous memoir by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s best-known accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has sold 1m copies worldwide in just the two months after its release.Publisher Alfred A Knopf announced on Tuesday that more than half the sales for Nobody’s Girl came out of North America; in the US, the book is now in its 10th printing after an initial run of 70,000 copies. Giuffre’s book, co-written by author-journalist Amy Wallace, was published in early October. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago The Innocents of Florence by Joseph Luzzi review – how abandoned babies spurred a flowering of Renaissance art

The precarious, cruel but dazzling world of a foundling hospital is brought wonderfully to life by the author of Botticelli’s SecretJoseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages and Renaissance to our own times. A great populariser and advocate of the humanities in public life, he has done for Dante what his Bard colleague Daniel Mendelsohn did for Homer in An Odyssey and other books.This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s home town of Florence, a building Luzzi has been fascinated by since encountering it in 1987 on his college year abroad. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe devoted solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left by its gates on Saint Agata’s Day 1445, had been nibbled at by mice. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson review – startlingly original

The Indigenous Canadian author brilliantly captures the interdependence of humans and the natural world, in a darkly satirical critique of colonialismNoopiming, the first of Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s books to be published in the UK, means “in the bush” in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly original fiction is an ironic reference to Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, an 1852 memoir about “the civilisation of barbarous countries” by Susanna Moodie – Simpson’s eponymous “white lady” – a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where Simpson’s ancestors resided and she now lives.That 19th-century settlers’ guidebook went on to be hailed as the origin of Canadian women’s writing; Margaret Atwood adopted the Suffolk-born frontierswoman’s voice in her 1970 poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Though she mentions Moodie’s book only in an afterword, Simpson’s perspective is di...

Events

4 d. ago Pulse by Cynan Jones review – short stories that show the vitality of the form

The Welsh author vividly captures the solitude, hard labour, dramas and dangers of rural lifeIn these six stories of human frailty and responsibility, Welsh writer Cynan Jones explores the imperatives of love and the labour of making and sustaining lives. Each is told with a compelling immediacy and intensity, and with the quality of returning to a memory.In the story Reindeer a man is seeking a bear, which has been woken by hunger from hibernation and is now raiding livestock from the farms of a small isolated community. “There was no true sunshine. There was no gleam in the snow, but the lateness of the left daylight put a cold faint blue through the slopes.” The story’s world is one in which skill, endurance, even stubbornness might be insufficient to succeed, but are just enough to persist. Continue reading...

Politics