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Almost a thousand people drowned in the waters between Libya and Italy in May. Yet still more migrants come. Can anything be done, or are we experiencing a crisis without [...]

Never Had It So Good: a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles Dominic Sandbrook Little, Brown, 824pp, £20 The low point in this encyclopaedic history of the 1960s [...]

Mind the Gap: the new class divide in Britain Ferdinand Mount Short Books, 316pp, £14.99 Most writers who object to the class system come at the subject from below. In […]

Jan Morris's Trieste is built for introspection and memories. In this incorrigibly subjective portrait of the city, Robert Winder discovers imperial nostalgia, a defence of the bourgeoisie...and kindness TRIESTE AND [...]

Ian McEwan is perhaps the most technically accomplished of all modern British writers, but there is still something missing from his work. ATONEMENT Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 372pp, £16.99 £13.59 [...]

A GENTLEMAN'S GAME Tom Coyne Atlantic, 264pp, £15 £12 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+£1 p&p) Golf and literature have not always swung smoothly in the same sentence. PG Wodehouse was not ashamed [...]

Travel writing was once defined as an 'Old Etonian on a bicycle in Stavanger'. Robert Winder on an exhausted genre that seems to be going nowhere in particular I have [...]

You can tell it's summer. There's an Ashes Test match at Lord's, the British. Open is teeing up in Lancashire, Wimbledon has been conquered by the biggest Split personality in [...]

The one thing to be grateful for, in the wake of Tim Henman's unlucky defeat in that three-day semi-final at Wimbledon, was that tennis is not often a team sport. [...]

Now that the evenings are drawing in, and with the football season already starting to rumble alarmingly into gear, the Ashes are at last under way. It's bad luck for [...]

The author Pete Davies was once asked to define football's World Cup for an American audience. He said that it was a tournament in which 22 foreigners in shorts run [...]

It was hard to say, in the aftermath of the US Open, which was the greater surprise: that Tiger Woods failed to add a historic fifth major win to the [...]

KALAKUTA REPUBLIC Chris Abani Saqi Books, 116pp, £8.95 £7.16 at www.newstatesman.ca.uk (+£1 p&p) Anyone who spends time rummaging through the weekly cascade of new books knows the feeling: an uneasy [...]

A HISTORY OF BOMBING Sven Lindqvist Granta, 224pp, £14.99 £11.99 at www.newstatesman.ca.uk (+£1 p&p) At a time when fashion seems to favour histories of small things -- the potato, the [...]

The simple fact of his being the son of a famous writer lifted Martin Amis to the upper slopes of celebrity. His own haughty talent kept him there. But how [...]

Wall-to-wall sport is all very well, but it does have an odd, strawberries-in-winter flavour. I mean, here we are, in the season of frost and floods, and what do we [...]

One of my favourite statistics of the past few years was the one that revealed the basketball ace Michael Jordan was paid more money for endorsing Nike shoes than the [...]

We all know that history repeats itself the second time as farce - but what does it do the fifth time? The new England manager, who is the first foreigner [...]

Robert Winder reads a new translation of Tolstoy's masterpiece, the first for 40 years, and wonders what happened to the flash and glitter of the book he loved ANNA KARENINA [...]

I cannot remember why I stuffed The Ring and the Book into a rucksack for a summer hitch-hiking tour of Europe. A cross between boastfulness and pragmatism, I expect: I [...]

Saul Bellow is a great writer but, according to his biographer, a bad man. Robert Winder on the glittering work and often tawdry private life of the American novelist The [...]

THE NEW ELITES: MAKING A CAREER IN THE MASSES George Walden Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 209pp, £18.99 £15.20 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+15% p&p) George Walden's new book -- a hot-tempered [...]

HOLISTIC REVOLUTION Edited by William Bloom Allen Lane, 416pp, £18.99 LIVES OF THE PSYCHICS Fred M Frohock University of Chicago Press, 264pp, £17.50 OUT OF MY MIND Richard Bach Pan, [...]

CELIA'S SECRET: AN INVESTIGATION Michael Frayn and David Burke Faber & Faber, 128pp, £12.99 £10.39 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+15% p&p) There are, as any writer will be quick to tell you, [...]

Why would a cricketer commit suicide? Robert Winder reads the lives of three great former players and is bewildered by their self-absorption and petty obsessions MYSTERY SPINNER: THE STORY OF [...]