Everybody by Olivia Laing review – a book about freedom
A moving and clear-eyed history of bodily freedoms that takes as its central character Wilhelm Reich, inventor of the orgone accumulator
A User’s Guide to Melancholy by Mary Ann Lund review – senses of humour
A learned and readable picture of Renaissance medicine with less comic eccentricity than Robert Burton’s 1621 magnum opus
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor review – beyond words
Disaster in the Antarctic necessitates heroism at home, in this beautifully restrained interrogation of language, care and loss
Dear Gwyneth Paltrow, welcome to everyone else’s sad-potato life
As the health guru and actor reveals she went ‘off the rails’ by drinking every day during lockdown, I say those rails are our lives – is this a sales pitch?
Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’
In his new book, the author of The Big Short has turned his attention to Covid and the people who could have prevented it sweeping the US – had they been allowed to
Not Even This by Jack Underwood review – fatherhood, philosophy and fear
A poet confronts his anxieties about becoming a parent in this free-wheeling meditation on the theme of uncertainty
Doom by Niall Ferguson review – how to make sense of catastrophe
A study of horrible afflictions, from famines to pandemics, and our failure to learn from past mistakes
Yoga, karate, skiing … Alison Bechdel on her lifelong obsession with exercise
Ever since she was a child, the Fun Home cartoonist has been fascinated by fitness. The cartoonist talks about the ‘salvation’ of running, polyamory and being seduced by a fan
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel review – no pain, all gain
The author of Fun Home reflects on self-improvement, death and her lifelong obsession with exercise in an extraordinarily generous memoir
Prince Charles’s model village architecture? Give me brutalism any day
There is a large cohort of people who despise the look, but I am a broad church when it comes to architecture