Goodreads. LibraryThing. Bookreporter.com. Guardian Book reviews. The New York Times Books. Mafia State by Luke Harding. Andrei Lugovoi, who is wanted in Britain in connection with the murder of Alexander Litvenenko. Photograph: Justin Jin With its love of aberration and misfortune, news always tends to be more bad than good; since it focuses on governments, coverage of a country with a nasty one is liable to be especially grim. When I was a correspondent in Moscow, friends and I often debated whether, with our perpetual stories about expropriations and violence, we might be overdoing it – as our government handlers and some self-interested western financiers claimed. No, we concluded: if anything, the truth was in some ways worse than we reported – because tracing the trails of violence and graft to the satisfaction of English libel law was often impossible.
The importance of Luke Harding's book lies in its first-hand account of a relatively mild but telling bout of state-sponsored harassment, of a kind that, like much else in Russia, is intentionally opaque and deniable. There is one exception. Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, by Jeremy Paxman. There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible. But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call "empire" spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it. The empire existed as a concept in the early 17th century and lasted, as a factor in world affairs, to the second half of the 20th century.
Yet it changed so much in that time that it is difficult to trace any continuities or consistent characteristics it may have possessed. This diversity makes it easy for historians to write what they like about empire, but that doesn't mean that certain facts can, or should, be obscured. It is to the credit of Jeremy Paxman that his sane, rather detached view of empire understands these truths. This hole-picking is a rather futile game; any first-year undergraduate can play it.
Ian Fleming's Commandos by Nicholas Rankin – review. Special forces … commandos in AU30 on a training exercise. Photograph: Imperial War Museum In the last year of Ian Fleming's life – 1964 – he often watched Sussex play cricket at Hove in the company of Alan Ross, editor of London Magazine. In Ross's wonderful memoir, Coastwise Lights, he has this to say about the creator of James Bond: "Ian's idea of giving up smoking on doctor's orders was to cut down from sixty a day to thirty … and on instruction he reduced his intake of Vodka Martini from three lethal doses to one.
He was very shaky, his normally brick-red complexion the dry mauve of a paper flower. " Fleming was 56 and indifferent about living longer. Where did this implicit death wish come from? It's hard to explain this taedium vitae when it seems that most of life's injustices, hassles and difficulties – large and small – have been erased by wealth. Nicholas Rankin's fascinating book is an account of the 30AU's progress through the war. Snuff by Terry Pratchett. Endlessly inventive storytelling: Terry Pratchett.
Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe/The Guardian Snuff has pleasant and innocent connotations – as an old-fashioned stimulant to be kept in elegant boxes and snorted gracefully in society. It also means arbitrary and unpleasant deaths, as in snuff movies. Terry Pratchett's new novel turns on the connection between the two. Commander Vimes, the Duke of Ankh, is persuaded, or forced, to go on a holiday to the immense country mansion of his wife, Lady Sybil. Here he uncovers a smuggling ring run by the local aristocrats, who are indeed the law itself, as they are also the local magistrates. Pratchett has written several stories set on the Discworld in which ill-treated, unconsidered species are described and explained and admitted to society. Elsewhere Vimes is persecuted by a green imp inside a "dis-organiser", a gift from his wife, and by a meticulous accountant called AE Pessimal, sent by the Patrician to order his papers.
Goya's unflinching eye | Art and design. Francesco de Goya y Lucientes was the first modern artist and the last old master. He died 175 years ago and yet his work speaks with an urgency that no other painter of his time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible times, Goya looking in on a world worse than his own. We have made him a modernist ancestor. His influence, the inspiration of his presence, the pressing need to reckon with him, lie behind a surprising number of careers: much of Manet, for instance, depends on Goya, just as much of the film imagery of Luis Buñuel does; and you can't easily imagine Picasso or Beckmann without him.
Some aspects of Goya are remote from our ironised culture. To get the measure of Goya's originality, consider a painting from his late middle age. On May 2, 1808, in the heart of Madrid, a crowd of citizens attacked a detachment of Mameluke (Moorish) cavalry led by a French general. The surface is ragged: no smooth finish. A thoroughly modern Goya. BBC Four Documentaries - The Shock of the New Episode Guide. How the Two Ivans Quarrelled by Nikolai Gogol.
Pre-revolutionary Russian literature might not resound with comedy (War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, anyone?) But this collection of "Russian comic stories" is not an oxymoron. Any story that starts: "Once upon a time there were two generals. They were both nitwits, and so, in no time at all, by a wave of some magic wand, they found themselves on a desert island," as Mikhail Saltykov's "Two Generals" does, gets this reviewer's vote for irreverence, not to mention surreal scene-setting. As with the best comedy, the stories are fuelled with strife. The two Ivans of Gogol's title story called "The Squabble" in Gogol's native Ukraine are neighbours and inseparable friends until one Ivan takes a fancy to the other's shotgun, "a fine little thing".
When the other Ivan won't swap the gun for a brown sow, battle commences and if they had had leylandii hedges, by heavens they would be 200ft tall by now.