This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in the last ten years, and I've watched between 300 and 400 in that time. It's a bit slow getting off the ground, but ends up being moving and life-affirming, a beautiful testament to the richness of human experience. I think it says something that straight after watching it I bought two Rodriguez albums. Great music, thrillingly put into context and brought back to life... from not quite beyond the grave.

This book reminds me of Bill Bryson: humorous travelogue, with some history and social observations woven in. At times it's very funny, at times a poignant elegy for a great British past (and a pretty grim picture of the present). It's not laugh-a-minute stuff, and I found the chapters a shade overlong, but it is well written. It's a personal journey, so, as previous reviewers have indicated, there are gags that won't be to everyone's taste. But I found it enjoyable and grim and then enjoyable again.

First of all, the positives: this is a highly original film, set in an environment that few films managing to get this coverage would ever look at, and with a very striking central performance by Quvenzhané Wallis, who was presumably seven or eight when the film was made and has been nominated (at the time of writing) for the Best Actress Oscar.

However, the storytelling isn't especially gripping, and the story itself is fundamentally weak. The director has conjured some beautiful moments, but even though the film is pretty short at around an hour and a half it doesn't feel disciplined. It rambles, lapses at times into weird and not very well-rendered hallucination/surrealism, and at times is simply boring.

It is undeniably distinctive, but its eccentricity means it won't be everyone's cup of tea. File under "arthouse".

This novel is good is capturing the textures of relationships and contains some very elegant writing. But there is also a strand of pretentious, English-grad prose, with polyglot references and a knowing sort of literariness. The narrative jumps around in ways that I found disorientating rather than interestingly unpredictable.

The bits about horse racing and race fixing are a strength, in being quite unusual and well-informed. However, the central character never really comes to life, and there are certain recurrent images that don't seem to signify anything but become quite irritating when they're repeated - details about doorways, for instance, with a lot about fanlights and the facades of houses, the character of various anonymous and third-rate restaurants, the behaviour of the main character's dog, the sound rain makes ('pittering' is Szalay's word for this).

In sum, a novel that tries a bit self-consciously to be clever and cool and savvy but rarely feels original and leans towards archness.

I found this an undeniably positive but rather bland book, offering tips that were a mix of common sense, the pretty obvious and the utterly banal - e.g. "Play to your strengths", "Choose to be positive", "Your mind is beautiful thing. But, oh boy, it's also very complex".

I didn't think it offered anything new, and the design suggests it is a children's book (which it is not), especially the illustrations.

Some examples of the sort of thing found inside:

- An invitation to write down twenty things you want to do before you die
- Inspirational quotations (Mark Twain saying "the best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up", an anonymous source claiming that "the average child laughs about 400 times per day, the average adult laughs only 15 times per day. What happened to the other 385 laughs?')
- Instructions for how to create a "happy button" on your hand that you can press in an emotional emergency
- A story about a performing elephant that won't run away from the circus because it is suffering from "learned helplessness" (a good phrase, but not the authors'; they take it from Martin Seligman, as they readily acknowledge)
- Advice to go on a favourite walk and notice ten things you haven't noticed before.

Undoubtedly some of this could be useful in focusing the mind on more positive thoughts, and the tone of the book is genial and inoffensive, so it is hard to dislike, but it's not likely to make anyone "brilliant" and I dispute the claim on the cover that "humour and wisdom drip from every page". It strikes me as a sane, sensible book but in no way revelatory.

This is a fun look at lost and obscure words, which Forsyth has found in old dictionaries. It ingeniously structures the material by taking the reader through the day from getting up to late at night, moving nimbly from one bit of strange vocabulary to the next - in the same jaunty but erudite style that Forsyth used for his previous book, the Etymologicon.

However, I didn't feel I really learned much from the book. It was a pleasantly diverting read, even if Forsyth's sense of humour is at times a bit heavy-handed (there are also times when it's razor-sharp, I should say). But at the end of it I couldn't say I'd come by anything more than a selection of trivia, of exactly the sort I'm likely to forget almost immediately. In short, a fun stocking filler rather than an informative examination of obsolete words.

David Thomson writes well about film. That's a given for anyone familiar with his large body of writing on the subject. But this sizable new book, which has been dubbed a love letter to the movies, is not so very different from his fairly recent history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation.

Plenty of film buffs will agree with Thomson that the recent story of cinema is one of decline. The atmosphere of this book is one mainly of nostalgia. My own view is that this line of thinking is invalidated by any familiarity with recent films that have been made in languages other than English. Thomson shows he knows a lot about previous ages of foreign language filmmaking, but this book shows little awareness of current developments in that area.

Another cavil is that Thomson's tendency in his film writing is to be biographical, to write about the personalities within the film industry more than about their product. There's a gossipy, personal quality about this, which is certainly engaging, but I left this book, as with several of Thomson's previous books that I'd read, thinking that he is more interested in characters than in film as a form of art.

In short, this is a book that movie-lovers will find stimulating, as it always bubbles with ideas, but the subtitle "The story of the movies and what they did to us" strikes me as inaccurate. I don't think Thomson has a sufficiently wide-ranging sense of the social impact of cinema.

This is a ruggedly constructed torch, suitable for home and outdoor use, that certainly feels durable and has good battery life (batteries are provided, too). There are two light settings - full power, 120 lumens according to the manufacturer, and a power-save mode with a much lower level of lumens (19). It's satisfyingly chunky in the hand, nicely styled and easy to get out of its packaging.

I have two small complaints: the first is that the batteries rattle a little in the compartment; the second is that the on/off switch is on the tail, which means that if you grip the torch like a baton rather than holding it by the end you have to change your hand position to switch it off. For most practical purposes neither of these is much of a problem, but I can imagine circumstances in which they would be somewhat inconvenient.

This is a ruggedly constructed torch, suitable for home and outdoor use, that certainly feels durable and has good battery life (batteries are provided, too). There are two light settings - full power, 120 lumens according to the manufacturer, and a power-save mode with a much lower level of lumens (19). It's satisfyingly chunky in the hand, nicely styled and easy to get out of its packaging.

I have two small complaints: the first is that the batteries rattle a little in the compartment; the second is that the on/off switch is on the tail, which means that if you grip the torch like a baton rather than holding it by the end you have to change your hand position to switch it off. For most practical purposes neither of these is much of a problem, but I can imagine circumstances in which they would be somewhat inconvenient.

This is a short, poetically written but completely accessible novel about war and the way combat alters the people who take part in it. It's the Iraq War novel I've been waiting for - timely, urgent, intelligent, truthful. I devoured it in two sittings and was put in mind of he very best writing about war, such as Hemingway, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Michael Herr.