Last year, the Telegraph ran an interview with Lee Child, a former British television executive who had been laid off by Grenada in 1995, at which time he wrote a thriller, inventing a hero named Jack Reacher.  As of a year and a half ago Mr. Child had published 11 Reacher novels, and achieved startling success:  in 2007, it has been asserted, not a minute passed without someone on the planet buying a copy of one of them.  Mr. Child has just published Nothing To Lose, his 12th.  What is Jack Reacher like? And what has now become of him?

Suddenly, the robots are coming-and not just to summer blockbusters. Last month, an Israeli company demonstrated a robotic exoskeleton called ReWalk. It literally allows the wheelchair-bound to walk again. Earlier this year, alongside the release of Iron Man, news agencies were given a preview of technology developed for the US Army by Raytheon in Utah. Their robot suits give soldiers superhuman levels of strength and endurance.

Many critics who write about television for the high end of the market believe The Wire is the best American television program ever made, and even people normally skeptical about the aesthetic judgment of TV critics tend agree.  Why is The Wire so extraordinary?

(The Wire is an HBO dramatic series that realistically depicts, among other sorts of people, urban drug dealers, policemen, politicians, schoolteachers and journalists. It concluded its fifth and final season a few months ago in the US. and its final season has just arrived in the UK.)

Fredric Smoler teaches history and literature at Sarah Lawrence College

Like all of its predecessors, The Spies of Warsaw (Random House, U.S. publication date June 3, 2008), Alan Furst’s tenth novel in the genre he calls “historical espionage” is set on the Continent either on the eve of, or in the early days of, the Second World War.

The Spies of Warsaw
Alan Furst; Orion, Hardback, 288 pp, £16.99