Ian Parks grew up in a South Yorkshire mining family - as his new volume of poetry The Exile House hits the shelves, Jody Porter finds out his sources of inspiration.
Will Stone was left pondering an incoherent outing
This weekend sees a unique celebration of cinema at Glasgow's Southside Film Festival
GAFFE is the word usually applied to those excruciating moments when politicos decide to leap into their own mouths and give the rest of us a good laugh at their stupidity.
MAT COWARD reviews the month's best crime fiction releases - John Burke's Hang Time, The Mentalist by Rod Duncan and Carl Hiaasen's Nature Girl.
STEVE ANDREW recommends Stuart Parker's refreshing guide to Belarus as a key to understanding the politics of this much-maligned country.
WITH Linda Smith's early death from cancer last year, Britain lost one of its brightest comic talents. The collection of her works published soon afterwards, I Think The Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes, underlined how funny and politically astute she was and the great affection in which friends and colleagues held her.
THIS is a small book on a vast theme. Zachary Karabell purports to show, through "forgotten history," that the relations between Islam and the West have been marked by concord as much as by conflict. But the history is very familiar and there are no new insights.
THE basic argument of this detailed, wide-ranging work is clear - capitalism exists to create profit and maximising profit means cutting costs and corners.
CASH for honours to concealed donations might be the substance of British electoral intrigue, but these seem mere spots in the wind compared to the tidal wave of political corruption and Machiavellian machinations that are drowning US presidential campaigns.
JOHN MOORE finds that, if you scratch the thin surface, there's a lot more to know about the death of David Kelly than meets the eye.
APARTHEID not only existed in South Africa but also in Zambia and Zimbabwe, then called North and south Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, which is now known as Malawi.
THIS is a ravishing semi-autobiographical rites-of-passage novel. Our heroine draws us into her personal world, spinning a magnetic tale that could have come out of a Thousand and One Nights, in which she loses her virginity in both physical and political senses.