True crime is one of the most resolutely unlikeable of genres: lurid and garish where it could be analytic and sympathetic, and usually more interested in the psychology of the killer than the life of the victim. No surprise when its originating model is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which detailed the murder of a family of Kansas farmers by a pair of paroled ex-convicts, but couldn't escape the author's fascination with the killers.

I read this book when it was first published in 2004. It was amusing, chatty, bursting with flavour and zesty as an energy drink, but, as a study, neither illuminating nor convincing. Fox is a leading anthropologist who seems to have decided that her subject is just too dreary and needs to lighten up. She metaphorically burnt her blue stockings, donned cocktail dresses and heels and wrote a populist, skittish tract. She has not sobered up in the new, updated edition.

Why do we go to war? Why, through the centuries, is our story littered with terrible carnage and suffering?

My favourite writer is Philip Roth. We were both born in Newark, New Jersey, both Jewish, both fell in love with shiksas. He is a generation older but the sad truth is, no one of my generation speaks to me the way Roth does.

In the 1999 Tour de France, the Frenchman Jacky Durand won the award for the 'most combative rider', presented to the man who had ridden the race in the most aggressive, attacking style. A man with the panache that cycling fans crave.

The thing about being the voice of a generation is that every generation grows up. Few authors will be more acutely aware of this than Irvine Welsh, whose explosive entry to the literary scene with 1993's Trainspotting and its subsequent screen adaptation by Danny Boyle into the stylish (strangely so, given its subject is heroin abuse in the housing schemes of 1980s Edinburgh) movie companion to the Britpop era has given him a mountain to climb in terms of sustained career impetus.

The fickle, herd instinct-dominated media world needs constant reminders of greater, more lasting achievements, so it is good to have one such in the form of the selected short stories of Jane Gardam. The volume brings together 30 pieces, culled mostly from six of her seven collections published between 1980 and 2007, and also includes a few she has written for magazines, most famously "Old Filth", the story for The Oldie that became the starting point for her extraordinary trilogy, Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends.