'A family secret is, I think, always a disaster.' Marie Darrieussecq: A Parisian literary sensation

'The book’s main subject is ultimately itself, the process of its composition and the limitations and opportunities afforded by the written word.' Nick Holdstock: An epic novel of German culture and historical violence

'Their quixotic plan to steal a crop-dusting plane from a local farm... improbably succeeds and they end up in West Germany, where they try to remake their lives.' Costica Bradatan: From Ceauşescu’s Romania to post-unification Germany

'Woven through the text is the image of the serpentine river god Nyami Nyami, Shamiso’s totem figure and a symbol of their burgeoning sense of queerness.' Kate Darach: Between Zimbabwe and Brighton, self and country

Brian Morton on national creatures, from the fox to the flea

The feeling of being at odds with the world hangs heavy over the characters in Half Light, Mahesh Rao’s intelligent, keenly observed fourth novel, set in

'All is not well: Dolman is resentfully frustrated, doubtful of his talent, and suspects that he has been deployed as a “marionette” in a drama he cannot yet comprehend' Andrew Motion: Obsession, sex and cartoon coppers in fin de siècle Venice

'Throughout the vicissitudes (and there are many) of their story, Sonia and Sunny, and most of those they live among, struggle with a disorientating sense of solitude.' Dinah Birch on Kiran Desai’s long-awaited, ‘oceanic’ second novel

'Rhys always stressed that the left-out and the high rollers live cheek-by-jowl.' Sophie Oliver on the importance of dress – and illusion – to Jean Rhys

'From the cacophonous outset, Born with Teeth brandishes the same message: life, in this period of history in Elizabethan London, was no laughing matter.' Michael Caines (@michaelscaines): Shakespeare and ‘a wild thing in a saucy doublet’ on stage

Paul Binding on a new look at the unappealing figures of Nordic folklore

'As light-hearted social history, it slips down as easily as the first pint of a Sunday lunchtime, and it is packed with pub quiz-winning nuggets of information' Travis Elborough: Are Sundays what they used to be?

'This glamorous Life writing began early. Weeks before Marlowe’s untimely and violent death, a shady intelligencer called Richard Baines had drafted the outline of the playwright’s afterlife' Emma Smith: Our ideas of Christopher Marlowe

'The state seeks to pacify the university: its goals are managerial rather than intellectual' Richard Sennett: The Anglo-American state vs the universities

'The rich ‘us’ in the global north need to transition to a far less resource-intensive way of life' Brett Christophers: To save the planet, do we have to destroy it?

'We really ought to do more to cultivate possible avenues of resistance' Gary Marcus: Assessing the threat from artificial general intelligence

Clemmie Read on a Bildungsroman for the digital age

Nooresahar Ahmad on a succession of spectacles and strange phenomena

'We have slept, contagiously, then rouse / to the road’s slick roar, to clocks shaking out / their numbers like an arcane dew' Before & after the night by Jemma Borg

'Churchill won the Nobel prize in literature; de Gaulle would have been a more worthy recipient' Julian Jackson: A parallel history of Churchill and de Gaulle

'His fear increased. Henry was on his own. / Half his good friends flew off to California. / He was or would have been a lone / one. / Daily at a distance his death / came over him, like flat oblivion.' Four Poems by John Berryman

'There is a quiet perfection about ‘For Louis MacNeice’' Shane McCrae on four previously unpublished poems by John Berryman

'Even his friends displayed a shattering helplessness when confronted with his mental instability' Michael Hofmann: The troubled life of a lyric poet from the New York School

'Athenians spent decades obsessively justifying their actions during those few months' Peter Thonemann on the brutal rule of the Thirty in Athens

'The Odyssey, with its stinks and stenches, its pigsties and drugged dinner parties, its beggars and bards, is not so high-flown as the Iliad.' A. E. Stallings: The epic of homecoming in a new translation

'Sicily was both a testing ground for and a rebuke to Plato’s dream of philosophical leadership.' Armand D’Angour on the cut-throat politics of Syracuse informed Plato’s thinking

'In Mesopotamian philosophy, writing had the power to reveal complex truths about the world.' Lydia Wilson: Mesopotamia, a civilization that thrived on complexity

'Wallace-Hadrill prefers to think of the city in antiquity in a more nebulous sense, one characterized by a resilience rooted in the continuous pragmatic evolution of a remarkably consistent ideal.' Michael Kulikowski on the loyalty inspired by ancient cities

'Augustine’s Africanness appears to have exposed him to ridicule from what we might call the “metropolitan elite”.' Jonathan Egid: An African perspective on Augustine of Hippo’s thought

'Why do we value the arts of discipline and toughness above those of overflow?' Frances Wilson on the long battle between emotion and irony

'Some of these papers are already classics, and all will be read with profit by any student or scholar of Roman history.' Robert Morstein-Marx on Roman republican political culture

'Aicha Kandicha is supposed to lure men in with her beauty, only then to reveal her huge fangs, bristling legs and cloven feet.' Mark Nayler: What supernatural folklore reveals about human nature

'In Kit, Richard Lloyd Parry has created a hero for our time: a millennial Winston Smith.' Justin Warshaw on the unlikely hero of an unnamed world

'His diary was written in a combination of shorthand and polyglot code, and almost no one has read the original manuscript.' Ruth Scurr on the debt to pleasure

'Nature bursts into devastations known as ideas, / And what to do with them but wear them?' Conversation by George Szirtes

'Birds are often deemed to be the most monogamous animals, but in fact they are socially and sexually monogamous only in rare cases.' Anna Machin: Diversify or die

'It also concerns snails and sisters, sex and lost mothers, lost grandfathers and deracination.' Kate McLoughlin on resistance and restoration in war and fiction

'Tynan’s characters live for the transcendent intensity promised by a great night out.' Michael Hughes on the lives of ‘compulsive sessioners’

'Schweblin uses successive crises as a means to break open her characters’ mechanical routines and force them to locate raw feelings.' Lucie Elven: Finding the soul beneath the skin

'While most people find it easy to agree that languages are of equal value, few can resist the feeling that their own language can decline and, conversely, that it can be improved.' N. J. Enfield on a study of pronouns

'The great hope presented by a book of this nature is that new light might be shed on the writer’s other work.' Declan Ryan: A poet's reflections on art, music and literature

‘All the events in Mary, Queen of Scots are framed through the memories of a near-death Elizabeth (Charlotta Öfverholm), who is guided, A Christmas Carol-style, through visions of the past.' Emily May on stilts, spiders and ceilidhs

'The year is 2119. Humanity survives on cheap protein spun from atmospheric carbon and soil bacteria; the average British life expectancy has withered to sixty-two.' Beejay Silcox on the aftermath of an ‘immortal dinner’

'Compared to the dynamism of the writing, do the subtle origins of human motivation and desire get short shrift?' Andrew Motion: Eight narratives revolve around a strange weather effect

'When she exposes biased court rulings, she receives death threats and misogynist abuse from colleagues.' Terri Apter: Addressing sexism and misogyny in the legal profession

Letters to the Editor: Authorship studies, Cleveland Street, The Durrells, etc

'Zhadan says that in Ukraine today there is no distinction between poets and non-poets.' Lindsey Hilsum: Kharkiv

'The turrets and pinnacles of its flamboyant châteaux gave shape to fairy-tale castles on screen and in print.' Boyd Tonkin on the ‘Mona Lisa of manuscripts’, finally on view

'Delacorte, who lived near the park (and had even been mugged in it), was happy to support the new theatre, though had no idea it would be named after him.' James Shapiro: Well met by moonlight

'A remarkable narrative omniscience shapes the novel’s plot, that of ordinary Germans caught up in a willed catastrophe.' Catherine Taylor on a portrait of a Bavarian town gripped by National Socialism