US Edition
A knight of the realm who turned traitor, and was hanged
Roger Casement rejected the Empire, allied with Germany and, as Roland Philipps’s superb study Broken Archangel shows, paid dearly
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The filthy, drunken, cruel world of Victorian police courts
Never mind Dickens’s picaresque – Drew D Gray’s fascinating Nether World exposes the truth about the 19th-century criminal underworld
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Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel makes its opinions too clear
Caledonian Road, a sprawling satire, skewers the complacent middle classes with relish, but its taste for nastiness is not to its benefit
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3 Body Problem, Netflix, review: Game of Thrones creators go intergalactic with this ambitious mess
Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss take on Cixin Liu’s formidable Chinese sci-fi novel – with mixed results
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An ugly glimpse behind the scenes of an American megastore
Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman’s scathing second novel, follows a cast of characters worn down by the drudgery of warehouse life
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Is this the most incoherent book about gender yet?
Philosopher Judith Butler tries to rewrite biology in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, a muddled book that can’t even define its terms
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A former Nato commander predicts our future – and it looks terrifying
From ‘remote gene-editing’ to an insurrection in America, we’d best hope that 2054, a co-written novel, stays pure fiction
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The radical youth that still influences Pope Francis today
The Pope’s career, as related in his autobiography Life, has seen him frequently cause friction, and oppose everything from poverty to TV
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How the carnage on the Eastern Front transformed the First World War
Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive and meticulous history lays out the far-reaching consequences of the fighting in central and south-eastern Europe
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A mighty history: four centuries of French family tiffs
Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies is a chronicle of one of medieval Europe’s most powerful dynasties, the back-stabbing Capetians
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One man tackles the entirety of classical poetry – and triumphs
Christopher Childers has spent 10 years on The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse – and his translations sing from the page
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The arrests putting Narendra Modi’s ‘fascist’ India on trial
As Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations shows, the so-called ‘BK case’ exemplifies India’s degraded public life under the current prime minister
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How smartphones poisoned our children’s brains – and how to fight back
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a terrifying assessment of the digital carnage, and a clarion-call to parents everywhere
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The true story of a literary crime that went undetected for decades
Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger sheds light on a devilish dealer who made a fortune through fake first editions during the late 19th century
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A seducer, a scholar and a young woman with an unusual mind
Rosalind Brown’s slow-burning debut novel, Practice, follows a day in the life of an Oxford student whose perfectionism begins to fray
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Charles Spencer’s headmaster was a paedophilic villain – I remember him
A Very Private School relates the 9th Earl Spencer’s time at Maidwell Hall, the horrors of life there, and the dark figure of Mr Porch
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You’ve never thought about food – or London – as these writers have
London Feeds Itself, an essay anthology edited by food writer Jonathan Nunn, is a giddying, fascinating survey of the capital’s cuisine
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The ‘Angelina Jolie of Kurdistan’, and other vigilante warriors
Elizabeth Flock’s The Furies relates how three women from different continents took the law into their own hands, with lethal results
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Is Sussex England’s most mysterious county?
Alexandra Harris’s beadily researched history of Sussex takes us on an evocative journey with poets, bailiffs and a moose
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What links Bin Laden’s bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London?
In Shadow Lines, Nicholas Royle tracks down the owners of objects slipped into second-hand books – with amusing and surprising results
