You might think me eccentric for feeding my cat the highest-quality pet food, made with free-run chicken and turkey, freshwater fish and cage-free eggs. But I should not be considered the weird one. It is bizarre that in a supposedly animal-loving country, where half of all households have a pet, so many feed them on other animals that have lived miserable lives in factory farms. Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find... read more

What are we searching for when we turn our backs to the world and look inwards? Nat Segnit’s first non-fiction book attempts to answer this question. Retreat is an investigation into the quest for solitude and silence across time periods, cultures and religions – and it is a sharp and lively one at that. It explores the undertaking in its various guises – as a spiritual practice with philosophical or religious underpinnings and in the context of secular... read more

This year, Tate is hosting four exhibitions devoted to women artists: Paula Rego, Lubaina Himid, Yayoi Kusama and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (a further show devoted to Magdalena Abakanowicz is in the pipeline). Opening on 15 July at Tate Modern, the exhibition ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction’ comes with an excellent catalogue, which includes sixteen essays that survey her remarkable range. This Swiss artist, born in Davos in 1889, created textiles, beadwork bags and ... read more

Does the world need another history of the Watergate scandal? If it’s this good, yes. Michael Dobbs’s tense facto-thriller covers the first hundred days of Richard Nixon’s second administration, from the triumph of re-election to the moment when things ‘fell apart’ in mid-1973. Dobbs stalks the president around the White House, watching and listening – much like the taping system Nixon installed to... read more

Despite its unappealing, formulaic title (the even more hackneyed Your Brain on Plants had already been taken), Michael Pollan’s intertwining of reportage, citizen science and historical scholarship is a delightful and informative read. A censored version of the first section of the book, devoted to opium, appeared in Harper’s Magazine in April 1997, at the height of the US government’s ‘war on drugs’... read more

Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel, Box Hill, was a devilishly unsettling sex comedy narrated by Colin, a train driver who looks back to how, on turning eighteen in 1975, he stumbled into a submissive relationship with Ray, an older man whose domination of Colin seems – at least to the reader – indistinguishable from abuse. Colin, for his part, recalls the affair fondly. The energy of the novel lies in how it dares us to dismiss his chatty testimony in a manner akin... read more