A better you?
It's new year, and the shops are full of books promising to transform your life. Laura Barton casts an eye over them
Laugh? I nearly cried
Giles Foden on links between weeping and whooping in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
The poetry of mind
Adam Phillips gets Andrew Rissik wondering whether we should read Freud as science or as literature with his collection Promises, Promises
Off their faces
Nicholas Lezard gets high on Mike Jay's Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
Analyse this
Can you use literature and language to understand the workings of the mind? Adam Phillips appeals for more 'good sentences' in Promises, Promises
Faugh! Pah! Whewgh!
Nicholas Lezard is all lit up by The Faber Book of Smoking
Labour of love
When Kate Figes wrote critically about the natural childbirth movement in this newspaper earlier this year she was engulfed in a storm of outrage. So what would happen when she met Sheila Kitzinger, the high priestess of the crusade against medical birth?
Red Adair in the nursery
Revered by some, loathed by many, Gina Ford is fast becoming Britain's most controversial childcare guru. Joanna Moorhead meets her...
Et cetera…
Steven Poole on psychobaubles in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series
Hate’s comfort
Dorothy Rowe's Friends and Enemies shows psychology falters without poetry says Andrew Rissik