5 h. ago 'I've read over 100 books so far in 2025 — these are the five I couldn't put down'

I've read dozens of books this year, from romances and thrillers to short stories and sci-fi, but these five kept me turning the pages late into the night

Politics

28 h. ago ‘Literature has completely changed my life’: footballer Héctor Bellerín’s reading list

Former Arsenal player wins admiration for his taste in books, but admits one novel defeated himHéctor Bellerín’s summer holidays look a little different from your typical footballer. Rather than pictures from a recent jaunt to Ibiza clubs such as Ushuaia or questionable birthday parties, his Instagram is dominated by books.Images of paperbacks he’s read are all over his feed, a mix of classics and contemporary novels, with a majority from Spain and South America. Continue reading...

Politics

31 h. ago ‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

When he left the Soviet Union for a new life in America, the novelist never imagined he would live under another authoritarian regime. Then Trump got back into power ... Is it time to move again?Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they t...

Society

48 h. ago Best summer reads of 2025: Top selections for literary escapism

Explore a curated list of the best summer reads this year to pack on holiday or take to the park

Politics

51 h. ago London Open House Festival 2025: Preview of venues for booking released

London Open House Festival 2025: Preview of venues for booking released  ianVisits

Culture

52 h. ago Inside England's 'worst best' penalties as Chloe Kelly and Lucy Bronze saved Lionesses

England women's team booked their spot in the semi-finals of Euro 2025 thanks to the 'worst best' penalty shoot-out of all-time against Sweden, as a staggering nine spot kicks were missed

Politics

55 h. ago Remember When by Fiona Phillips review – an unsparing insight into early

The journalist and TV presenter’s memoir of events leading up to her diagnosis, aged just 61, is a moving account of a life slowly unravelling before her and her husband’s eyesIn 2019, the TV presenter and journalist Fiona Phillips booked a last-minute trip to Vietnam with a friend. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But not only did Phillips not invite her husband or children, she didn’t consult them, instead simply informing them that she was leaving the following week. It was an impulsive decision that she hoped would lift her out of a depressive episode that was manifesting in brain fog and anxiety. But for her husband, TV editor Martin Frizell, it was another instance of Phillips behaving oddly, a sign that things “were not all they should be”.Remember When chronicles, with illuminating candour, the changes that culminated in Phillips’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2022, at the age of 61. Billed as a memoir by Phillips herself, owing to her decline during the th...

Politics

57 h. ago Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov review – how it feels to lose a father

The International Booker winner explores Bulgarian family life under communism in this moving depiction of a son’s bereavementThe Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love. Continue reading...

Events

2 d. ago New book sheds light on Lincoln’s misunderstood killer: ‘he’s not that person at all’

In Midnight on the Potomac, author Scott Ellsworth looks back at the tumultuous last year of the US civil warScott Ellsworth’s new book, Midnight on the Potomac, is about the last year of the American civil war and “the crime of the century”: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865.Asked how the book came to follow The Ground Breaking, his acclaimed history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, Ellsworth said his thoughts focused on two areas: historical parallels to the modern-day US, and the true crime genre. Continue reading...

Events

3 d. ago Cure by Katherine Brabon review – moments of grace in meditation on chronic illness

Doubles and reflections abound in this subtle exploration of the stories we tell about sickness, centring on a mother and daughter who travel to Italy in search of healingGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailKatherine Brabon’s fourth novel follows a mother and daughter with a shared experience of chronic illness who travel to Italy in search of a cure. It feels like a companion piece to her elegant previous novel Body Friend, about three women who seek out different ways of managing their chronic pain after surgery. Cure continues Brabon’s metaphoric use of doubles, mirrors and reflections to explore the social dimensions of the body in pain. It opens in Lake Como, where, we are told, in autumn “clouds devour the hills around the lake” and the water “reflects the scene of disappearance. [It] cannot help but replicate the obscuring fog.” Vera has been here before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a small town in Lombardy, where she herself travelled with her...

Politics

3 d. ago The Sleep Room by Jon Stock review – the psychiatrist who abused female patients

This harrowing account of a British doctor and his shocking experiments on young women includes a testimony from the actor Celia Imrie, who was one of his patientsIn a hospital in Waterloo, London, in the mid-1960s was a psychiatric ward full of sleeping women. Suffering from disorders ranging from post-partum depression to chronic anxiety to anorexia, the residents of the “sleep room” were sedated and woken only to be washed, fed or subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). All were under the supervision of psychiatrist William Sargant, who at the time was hailed as a pioneer. Sargant claimed that a combination of enforced narcosis and ECT could fix disturbed minds. Failing that, the treatment would be surgical lobotomy.The Sleep Room is author Jon Stock’s gripping account of a scandal in which female patients were denied dignity and agency by a man who wielded absolute power over their bodies. The book is ably narrated by actors Richard Armitage, Antonia Beamish and Celia Imri...

Science

3 d. ago The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück by Lynne Olson review – surviving an all

The extraordinary story of the women who fought to bring their Nazi persecutors to justiceShortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding that “life in Ravensbrück was not nearly as terrible as we’ve been told”. De Renty stared at the woman for a moment, before explaining icily that a typical day in the camp began by stepping over the corpses of friends who had died in the night. They would probably have no eyes, she added, since the rats had already eaten them. And with that, the comtesse stood up and swept out.Ravensbrück always had a credibility issue, explains Lynne Olson in this consistently thoughtful book. The camp, although only 50 miles north of Berlin, had been liberated late, which gave the SS plenty of time to burn incriminating records. There was limited visual evidence, too, since no cameramen accompanied the Soviet army w...

Events

4 d. ago Pan by Michael Clune review – a stunning debut of teen psychosis

This wild ride of a novel is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescenceThe narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune’s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It’s a place exposed to “the raw death of the endless future, which at night in the midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs”. Just as frightening is Nicholas’s sense that “anything can come in”. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan – a possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety.Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic – indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. N...

Politics

4 d. ago Which bookies are offering Free Bets ahead of The Open Championship 2025

Golf's finest - the likes Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood - arrive at Royal Portrush ahead of the Open Championship which promises to be a busy market for the bookmakers this week

Sport

5 d. ago CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’

The longtime chronicler of the spy agency on his Legacy of Ashes follow-up and what keeps him up at nightIt may seem perverse to pity the Central Intelligence Agency. The powerful spy organization’s history is rich with failures and abuses – from the Cuban missile crisis to the post-9/11 torture program to its role in the overthrow of a long string of democratically elected leaders. But among the many consequences of Donald Trump’s open hostility toward America’s intelligence community is that no less a CIA critic than Tim Weiner now sounds like a defender.To understand why, Weiner – author of the unsparing history of the agency, the 2007 bestseller Legacy of Ashes – suggested a thought experiment in a recent interview: imagine spending years as an intelligence officer, working diligently to subvert the Kremlin, only to watch the US stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as it did in February when it voted against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. In that moment,...

Politics

5 d. ago ‘He didn’t think he was a good man’: new book reveals unseen portrait of JFK

In an exhaustively researched new book, J Randy Taraborrelli looks at the private, public and secret lives of the president J Randy Taraborrelli has already written five books on the Kennedy family but his sixth, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, is his first that’s directly about John F Kennedy, 35th US president from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas two years later.“I have been writing about the Kennedys from Jackie’s perspective for 25 years,” Taraborrelli said, referring to Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady who lived for another 30 years after he was shot, a figure of worldwide fascination. Continue reading...

Culture

5 d. ago Toni at Random by Dana A Williams review – the editorial years of a literary great

This illuminating account of Toni Morrison’s time at Random House reveals her determination to relate the ideas and words of black AmericaWhile a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison’s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison’s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison’s novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams’s interest lies in showing how Morrison’s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular eth...

Politics

5 d. ago Toni at Random by Dana A Williams review – Toni Morrison’s editing years

A fascinating account of the Nobel laureate’s pioneering work as an editor at Random HouseWhile a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison’s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison’s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison’s novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams’s interest lies in showing how Morrison’s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aim...

Politics

5 d. ago Andrea Gibson, poet and subject of documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, dies aged 49

Gibson, who was Colorado’s poet laureate and diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, died at their home on MondayAndrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer, has died aged 49.Gibson’s death was announced on social media by their wife, Megan Falley. Continue reading...

Events

6 d. ago Best cheap travel deals to book in July 2025: Flights and hotels

Need a holiday? Bag a getaway for less this month

Economics