Rehash won't satisfy fans

11:48am Thursday 1st May 2008

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: IAN FLEMING + JAMES BOND Ben MacIntyre (Bloomsbury, £20)I feel for Ben MacIntyre with this latest attempt to chronicle and analyse the similarities and relationship between Ian Fleming and James Bond. It's not that MacIntyre, with this officially endorsed effort to accompany the current exhibition at the Imperial War Museum to commemorate the centenary of the Oxfordshire author's birth, does a particularly bad job.

Self-sufficient eco-twins

11:36am Thursday 1st May 2008

A degree course in nutrition and food science at Oxford Brookes University sparked Dave Hamilton's interest in cooking and growing food. Now 33, he and his twin brother Andy remember making nettle soup with their grandmother, who made pickles, chutney and jam.

Italy's descent into civil war

11:31am Thursday 1st May 2008

by Laura Wurzel ITALY'S SORROW: A YEAR OF WAR, 1944-45 James Holland (Harper Press, £25)Holland's book is a enthralling, detailed, exhaustively researched page-turner. He uses over 50 illuminating eyewitness accounts from Italian civilians and partisans, plus military personnel from both Germany and the Allied forces, to trace Italy's entry into the Second World War and descent into civil war.

Family memoir

3:03pm Thursday 24th April 2008

Pamela Morris had an extraordinary life. Sent from Paris, where she was a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, to ebullient Greek relatives in Corfu in 1918 after the death of her mother, she married into a stiff English family and found her way to Oxford, where she eventually became principal of St Clare's.

Paperback choice

2:08pm Thursday 24th April 2008

The Book of Murder Guillermo Martinez (Abacus, £10.99) It's not often that cinemagoers get to ponder Wittgenstein's theory that mathematics is the only thing we can be truly certain about. Martinez's previous book, The Oxford Murders, has been made into a film starring John Hurt and Eljah Wood. The author's maths research brought him to Oxford for a two-year post-doctoral post in the 1990s. His latest thriller exhibits the same fascination with numbers and probability, but is set in his native Argentina. This time a struggling writer is drawn into investigating a series of deaths. Luciana's parents and sister have died - she believes this is the work of a serial killer, but is it just chance?

Young adult novels

2:04pm Thursday 24th April 2008

The Bloodline Cipher by Stephen Cole (Bloomsbury, £6.99) is not exactly the teenage answer to the Da Vinci Code. Nevertheless, it does concern the tracking down of an ancient manuscript - in this case, a grimoire, which is believed to be a magical book of the law of the dead.

Reminder of railway age

2:02pm Thursday 24th April 2008

The removal of Oxford's historic London Midland & Scottish rail station, and rebuilding as a railway visitor centre at Quainton, near Aylesbury, was a labour of love.

Wartime memories

12:36pm Thursday 24th April 2008

OUR LONGEST DAYS: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR Mass Observation, ed Sandra Koa Wing (Profile Books, £8.99)Grim years in Britain of nightly blackouts and air-raids, food and petrol rationing, poor wages, frequently worse living conditions, and countless petty rules and regulations, are vividly described here by ordinary people who survived the ordeal.

Haunted house

2:14pm Thursday 17th April 2008

If you are a smoker struggling to give up the habit, don't read Lucie Whitehouse's novel The House at Midnight. Virtually all her characters smoke, and not just occasionally. They light up a cigarette when they are happy, they light one up when things get black and sometimes they just light up because they want to.

Local author

2:12pm Thursday 17th April 2008

As well as being a broadcaster and Social Democrat MP, Bryan Magee was also a philosophy tutor at Oxford, where he now lives. Growing Up in a War, (Pimlico, £9.99), is the second volume of his autobiography, a vivid description of a wartime childhood

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