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How We Met: Kate Nash & Laura Dockrill

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Kate Nash 21 is an award-winning singer-songwriter whose number-one album Made of Bricks, which has sold almost a million copies worldwide, included the 2007 hit single "Foundations". She is currently working on her second album. She lives with her parents in north London

Fir crazy: pine trees

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Last week I got another reminder that most people don't share my love of conifers. Over an official dinner, an eminent gardener went into a sustained rant against the mighty cone-bearers: "I just can't stand them," he said. "They are kitsch and tacky and in my mind they go totally into this box marked '1970s sitcom plants. Not to be opened.'"

The beet goes on: a slice of adventure

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

When I was young, working with my father, a fruit and potato merchant, I used to go to the Baxter's factory for him to pick up beetroot. I always remember that place; everything inside was stained red, from your fingers to the floors – it was beetroot heaven, and for me, beetroot is a great childhood memory.

My Style: Rosie Wolfenden

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Josephine Serieux: Your quirky, iconic jewellery designs have secured you a lifetime VIP pass to the cool accessories club. But how annoying is that term "quirky"? What does it even mean – like, how Woody Allen dresses?

Winter knitwear: the wonder of woolies

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Cardigans

Dr Feelgood: Can grain make you gorgeous?

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Under the microscope: Ultimate Spelt Body Therapy (£150, www.montyspa.com)

The world-famous Indian restaurant Trishna has come to London. But has it lost some of its spice along the way?

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

To cook perfect rice, as the actor and Indian food writer Madhur Jaffrey once said, the grains should be like brothers: close, but not too close.

The new parenting: Now who's the daddy?

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

A Google Image search for Marc and Amy Vachon throws up a glowing picture of all-American health and happiness. There they are, gathered around the kitchen table with their freshly scrubbed kids, chopping strawberries in communal domestic bliss. No one is sulking or screaming. The air, as far as one can tell, is not blue with threats nor heavy with simmering resentment. There is neither a snotty nose nor a tear-stained face in sight.

Ask Martha: I'm thinking of starting a blog in the New Year

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

I'm thinking of starting a blog in the New Year. Any advice? Harry, London

Credo: Carolina Herrera

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

I believe...

At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist, by Anne Fadiman

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Charles Lamb dreamt up his Essays under the influence of brandy and tobacco; under the influence of tea William Hazlitt dashed off Table-Talk; and it is under the influence of both the brain and heart that the "familiar essay" is written, as opposed to the critical essay (more brain) or the personal essay (more heart). Many writers have mourned the imminent death of the "familiar essay", but in this collection, Anne Fadiman testifies to its endurance .

The Choice of Hercules, by A C Grayling

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Hercules was watching over his cattle when a woman in a white robe approached him from one side and a woman with plunging decolletage from the other; the former offering him struggle and labour rewarded by immortal fame, the latter offering sex, entertainment and ease. The choice of Hercules is between Duty and Pleasure, the Good Life or the good life.

The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles, By Roy Jacobsen, trs Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

This intimate novel by one of Norway's leading writers begins on 7 December 1939, when Russian troops invade the small Finnish town of Suomussalmi and find it evacuated but for one man: Timo the woodcutter, who finds he has a bond to the place that he cannot sever. As the distant drone of engines approaches, he vows that he will never go anywhere else. He watches the town go up in black smoke: homes, school, the church where he was christened.

Where Shall We Go For Dinner?: A food romance, By Tamasin Day-Lewis

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

"I come from a long line of greedy women," admits Tamasin Day-Lewis. An hour after the death of her father, Cecil Day-Lewis, with whom she was staying in the country home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, 18-year-old Tamasin and "Jane" were unsure what to do. Is thinking about being hungry obscene, she wondered? Afflicted by a "sudden storm of hunger", they devoured doughnuts.

The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, ed Sarah Eyre and Ra Page

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The co-editor of this collection, Ra Page, recalls a recurring dream in which he finds himself back at his childhood home, but rather than finding the reassuring comfort of the familiar, nothing is quite what it used to be, with mortar dropping from cracks in the thinning walls. As Page says in his elegant introduction, unheimliche, meaning "unhomely", is the German word Freud used for the uncanny, and the homestead remains central to the concept: the uncanny "lies beneath the house, under that heavy architecture of habit and belief". In his 1919 essay on the subject, Freud listed eight uncanny tropes, irrational causes of fear deployed in literature, including inanimate objects being mistaken as animate (such as dolls and severed limbs), and the confusion between reality and imagination.

Conjugal Rites, By Paul Magrs

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The last time we saw Brenda, she'd survived encounters with Count Alucard, Sheila Manchu and Jessie the Womanzee, not to mention Goomba and the evil Mrs Claus. She's a bit of a survivor, is our Brenda. But then she is the Bride of Frankenstein. On the run for almost 200 years, this "thing of shreds and patches" was hoping for a quiet life as the landlady of a bed and breakfast in Whitby, only fate got in the way and turned her into a far older, less photogenic version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's not just vampires she's up against. Together with her friend Effie, who comes from a long line of witches, Brenda spends her days guarding the gateway to hell, protecting the good people of Whitby from monsters of every description.

Forgotten Authors, No. 10: Edmund Crispin

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

If you love an author, it's always a shame when you know that you can pull their entire output from your bookcase with one hand. But to Edmund Crispin, born Robert Bruce Montgomery in 1921, quality took precedence over quantity. He was the organist and choirmaster of St John's College, Oxford. This spirited, funny man then turned to composing movie music and wrote six scores for the Carry On films. If you listen carefully to them, you'll hear musical allusions which are more amusing than anything in the Carry On scripts. He was also an important critic and editor, but best of all he wrote the Gervase Fen books, 11 dazzling, joyous volumes, all but one of which were produced between 1945 and 1951.

Alasdair Gray: A secretary's biography, by Rodge Glass

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

"I knew I was not special then. I still feel jilted. How silly." "I had one of my occasional jealous fits that come about when I think of not being secretary any more." Hardly the kinds of authorial interpolation one expects in biography, but this is hardly a traditional biography.

Football books: 1966 and all that

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Uniquely, 2008 was a year in which the Premiership's top two sides were the finalists in the Champion's League. Alas, not uniquely, it also saw the English national side fail to appear in the European Championships. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth over "the state of the game" in the football press. Cue much confusion in the world of football books.

Music memoirs: Beat of the heart

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

At the age of seven, Marshall Bruce Mathers III liked to play with his uncle Todd's Colt 45. It was the same gun with which this early masculine role model later shot dead a suspected paedophile in a supermarket car park, though not the one with which he subsequently took his own life on his nephew's birthday. The suicide of Mathers' other – favourite – uncle, Ronnie, is commemorated in one of his lurid selection of tattoos; another adorns his wrist with the legend "Slit Me". Small wonder that the boy who would eventually be Eminem grew up with what a therapeutically minded society euphemistically terms "issues".

Teenage Girl Fiction: Model behaviour

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Yet another amazing story by Meg Cabot – a great one for Christmas, I simply loved it! Airhead (Macmillan £9.99) is packed with romance, adventure and stardom, the perfect recipe for a good girly read. It begins when Em (Emerson Watts), the main character and school geek, agrees to take her younger sister, after much persuasion, to the opening of a new "super brand" Stark Enterprises shopping mall. While talking to hot new singer Gabriel Luna, however, one of the store's large plasma screens falls on top of her – at the same time as the supermodel Nikki Howard collapses only a few metres away. Months later, Em wakes up in hospital, surrounded by her distraught family in tears and, to her great surprise, finds herself in Nikki Howard's body! Em needs to find out what has happened to her own body, and get used to her new life as a top supermodel. Despite my first impressions that it was going to be a bit trashy (which it slightly was) Airhead got much better as it went on. A slow-moving first half, yet still captivating, and I really mean it when I say that I could not put it down. After reading this book twice over in the space of only a few weeks, I still love it.

Children's Fiction: Boys' own adventures

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Children's Picture Books: We wish you a hairy Christmas

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

There's no getting around it, this year's Christmas shopping list must contain at least one picture book. A recent BBC Four series highlighted their charms, Booktrust has waved the banner for them all year long and Desert Island Discs leapt in at the last minute, reminding the nation of the wonder that is Allan Ahlberg. Surely you can make it as far as the first shelf in the bookshop to pick up The Baby in the Hat (Ahlberg & André Amstutz, Walker £10.99)? Billed as an early romance, it's the story of a young Regency fop who caught a baby in his hat, sailed the southern seas and came home at last to marry said baby (now grown up, of course) by way of 26 pictures and 172 words. Perfection – and apparently all true. If that's not for you, try The Pencil (Ahlberg & Bruce Ingman, Walker £10.99), in which a lonely little 2B draws itself some friends who get a little grumpy ("'My ears are too big,' said Mr. 'I shouldn't be smoking a pipe,' said a grandpa"). Then a rubber arrives and chaos ensues. I enjoyed their previous offering (The Runaway Dinner) but found its circumlocutions a little trying on the 20th read. This one has no such irritations. What's more, you'll be inspired to draw your own book when you've finished this one.

Hunter S Thompson: Trust him, he's a doctor

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

People used to remember where they were when President Kennedy was shot, on 22 November 1963. Hunter S Thompson was at his ranch in Woody Creek, Colorado, penning denunciations of the American government's new zip-code system. A neighbour came down the road with the news.

Close-up: Mick Bunnage & Jon Link

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Crudely drawn, crammed with profanities and guaranteed to raise a snigger, the cartoons of Mick Bunnage (near right) and Jon Link – aka Modern Toss – are set to cross the Atlantic, in book and then TV form, in January.