Alec Ash

Recycling is more than just a blue and green bin in your pantry, says journalist Adam Minter – it’s a global trade with centuries of history that stretches from American scrapyards to Chinese e-waste recycling villages

Writer and journalist Peter Hessler selects five books, from Haight Ashbury to a fifth grade classroom, which show how nonfiction can bring true stories to life through literary techniques. He chooses the best of narrative nonfiction.

William Wordsworth probably did not get his greatest creative impetus from solitude, but from his extremely close relationship with his sister, suggests Oxford scholar Lucy Newlyn

The Soviet writer bore witness to the horrors of Russia’s World War Two and the Shoah — and deserves a place in literary history, says scholar Maxim D Shrayer. He recommends the best books by and about Vasily Grossman.

The writer and historian Ian Buruma selects five Western perspectives of the East, including a novel of colonial India, a travelogue of disappearing Japan, and the collection of essays that lifted the veil on Mao’s China.

Most British prime ministers would probably have made the same decision as Tony Blair and followed George W. Bush into war in Iraq in 2003, says the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator.

Sport is central to American culture but there are surprisingly few great novels devoted to it. Chad Harbach, author of the bestselling novel, The Art of Fielding, picks his favourite ‘novels with sporting themes.’

To learn how to live well we must look to the past, says social philosopher Roman Krznaric. He recommends five books, from Thoreau to Orwell, that inspire us to live more adventurously.

The adventures of Tintin are some of the bestselling books of all time, translated from French into languages across the globe, and still in bookshops nearly a century since they first started being published. Their stories, their humour, their characters continue to delight. Here, Tintinologist Michael Farr explains why the Tintin books have such enduring appeal and how their creator, Hergé, came to write them.

Queen Victoria was anything but Victorian and Lord Byron was more vulnerable than we think, says writer Jonathan Keates – who considers emails a poor substitute for a hand-written correspondence.