IN A NEW BOOK, PSYCHOLOGIST Leanne ten Brinke REVEALS HOW TO RECOGNISE A SNAKE IN THE GRASS – AND WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET BITTEN

LETTERS

There’s no telling what will make a nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the late Erich von Däniken’s junk archaeology about “ancient astronauts” both seem implausible

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

During my adult life I must have read – strictly for pleasure – hundreds and hundreds of crime novels that were written during the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ (1920s-50s). That’s no exaggeration. And not on

A biography is a daunting task for any writer. How can you summarise a life? Can you realistically cover all of the source material? If the subject is well known, there are probably rival biographies.