Matter of life and death

Julie Myerson takes issue with Tiger's Eye by Inga Clendinnen, another example of the current fad for sick lit

So a fish does need a bicycle

According to a new US bestseller out here soon, there's only one way to keep Mr Right - just don't tell him when he's wrong

A better you?

It's new year, and the shops are full of books promising to transform your life. Laura Barton casts an eye over them

Laugh? I nearly cried

Giles Foden on links between weeping and whooping in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

The poetry of mind

Adam Phillips gets Andrew Rissik wondering whether we should read Freud as science or as literature with his collection Promises, Promises

Off their faces

Nicholas Lezard gets high on Mike Jay's Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century

Analyse this

Can you use literature and language to understand the workings of the mind? Adam Phillips appeals for more 'good sentences' in Promises, Promises

Labour of love

When Kate Figes wrote critically about the natural childbirth movement in this newspaper earlier this year she was engulfed in a storm of outrage. So what would happen when she met Sheila Kitzinger, the high priestess of the crusade against medical birth?

Red Adair in the nursery

Revered by some, loathed by many, Gina Ford is fast becoming Britain's most controversial childcare guru. Joanna Moorhead meets her...