Sylvia has the last wounding word
The second volume of Plath’s Letters begins with great happiness and poetic promise — and ends with the destruction of her marriage and her death
Low points of life with Father
This has been an extraordinary autumn for books about the havoc bad fathers wreak on their children. It is hard to know which father comes out worst: Jonathan Miller or Steve Jobs
A journey towards faith
A novel set during the Algerian war has chilling relevance to what is happening in the Middle East today
Lionel Trilling: America’s Matthew Arnold
The great critic’s letters reveal his struggles with anti-Semitism and disillusion with Marxism
New way to tell a terrible story
New graphic novels take on difficult subject matter: the lives of Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank
Acerbic enemy of cowardice
The latest volume of Frederic Raphael's diaries is a book full of bite and feline gossip
The link between art and heart
A new Barbican exhibition explores how two were often better than one in the creative process
Escaping the Moscow ghetto
How a brilliant young Russian mathematician was blocked by blatant Soviet anti-Semitism
Enter the Professor, Putin’s Balkan stooge
The maverick movie director Emir Kusturica backs Russian expansionism in the Balkans
Debt and damnation: Islam in Dante
Edward Said accused the poet of Orientalist prejudice — but he owed much to Muslim tradition