This is not a cookbook, but eating is quite important. The first meal in the book is fish heads, not human ones. One tip for sucking fish eyes is to spit out the clear, thin case that surrounds them and the white marble of the eyeball. Nor is this book really a love story, though the union between a clever Bostonian intellectual and a rural Maori Adonis with whom she [...]

Descent Into Chaos: How the War Against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia

Ahmed Rashid

Allen Lane, 544pp, £25

This is not a catalogue of doom as its title suggests. Nor does central Asia, or more particularly the former Soviet republics, play a central part in this story. It is, rather, the most graphic, detailed and worrying indictment of US and Nato policy [...]

The apotheosis of Benazir Bhutto the martyr has begun. Her grave in the arid soil of Sind Pro vince on her family's feudal estate has become a shrine. Pilgrims visit it every day. Soon there will be reports of miracles. Her gender, her youthfulness, her sense of victimhood, her bravery and the violent manner of her death made this inevitable. Beyond Sind, in other provinces and the rest of the [...]

Remember Omai? Remember when, last year, Joshua Reynolds's grand full-length portrait of this Polynesian wide boy and 18th-century hitch-hiker from Raiatea island was "saved" for the nation by the generosity of a nameless benefactor who handed over £12.5m to the Tate? Remember the swooning, the breathless wonder, when it arrived at Sotheby's three years ago. The art world said it was not just old Sploshua's greatest portrait, but the perfect [...]