It's an easy title - In the Footsteps of . . . - and many famous writers have suffered the treatment. The only way to upstage a young pretender seeking to write in your footsteps is to do it yourself. So, rather than leave the field to "opportunistic punks", Paul Theroux retraces his own steps, first taken more than 30 years ago in The Great Railway Bazaar, the travel book [...]

As hemlines follow fashion, so books follow the political cycle. When new Labour came to power, readers, publishers and newspaper-serial hunters all wanted to know more about these unknown people who now ran the country. What makes Tony tick? Is Peter Mandelson the full, 100-kopek Rasputin? And just who, precisely, is Gordon Brown? The last question has yet to be answered satisfactorily, despite a small avalanche of biographies and whodunnits.

Time was when the Strangers' Bar at Westminster was known as "the Kremlin" because so many of its regulars were Labour MPs with a strong trade union background. Many of them were "sponsored" by their union, put there to represent the working class from which they sprung.

New Labour changed all that, as so much else. The umbilical cash cord that enabled unions to sponsor individual candidates and MPs with [...]

It is always a pleasure to break in a Gay Hussar virgin. On this occasion let us call him "M", because as a back-bench Labour MP with some residual hopes of preferment, he may not wish to be publicly identified with your reviewer. He had the bean soup and beef medaillons. I forget what I ate, but I recall that the Balaton Furmint was on good form, and the Hungarian [...]

Now it can be told, as the old Fleet Street saying has it. Donald Bruce, parliamentary private secretary to Nye Bevan in the Attlee government, who died during the election campaign aged 92, took to his grave the secret of his hero's sensational conversion to the wisdom of Britain's nuclear deterrent.

Bevan shocked his friends and gratified his enemies in the Labour establishment in 1957, when he warned the annual [...]

Craig Murray, our troublesome former man in Tashkent, is at a loss to understand why he has not been charged under the Official Secrets Act. After all, he has disclosed secret diplomatic despatches from his time in the Uzbek capital, exposing torture and human rights abuses under the regime of President Islam Karimov - abuses that the Foreign Office ignored. And he's still spilling the beans: for good measure, the [...]

Alan Johnson is rueful about rumours at Westminster that he is being groomed as the Anybody But Brown candidate for the Labour leadership when Tony Blair steps down. "Don't put money on it," he advises. "It's science fiction - but nice science fiction." Less convincingly, he adds: "I got rid of my leadership tendencies in the Communication Workers Union. I've got it out of my system. I wanted to get [...]

The cruel truth about instant political biography is that it must either make the news, or succumb to the news. Publishers have become greedy for the "killer fact" that will command a high serialisation price from the newspapers, or spin off a television documentary. Unfortunately, as the latest book about Gordon Brown demonstrates, there are very few killer facts still to be revealed about new Labour. Fortunately for Tom Bower, [...]

He has a limited knowledge of the labour movement, and only titular membership of the Transport and General Workers' Union, but Tony Blair has a vested interest in seeing off a revival of confidence and co-operation among union leaders. In particular, the Labour leader has set his sights on destabilising the "Gang of Four" which has recently emerged: Dave Prentis of Unison, Derek Simpson of Amicus, Tony Woodley of the [...]

Roly-poly Lord Rennard of Abacus is human, after all. In the double by-election battle, the much-vaunted Lib Dem strategy genius panicked in the last week and pulled his troops out of Birmingham Hodge Hill to Leicester South. By that time, Jim Marshall's old Leicester seat was in the bag for the Lib Dems, but Brum was still ripe for the taking. "If they had stayed put, they would almost certainly [...]