Zoe Williams explores the greatest mystery of modern politics: Liz Truss’ self belief (1m15s), and Charlotte Edwardes delves into the extraordinary inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history (5m53s)

Former Tory chair turned political biographer and publisher is behind books that have put former PM and Labour’s deputy in the spotlights

If this week’s tetchy exchanges between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak at prime minister’s questions proved one thing, it was the ability of the veteran businessman, donor and publisher Michael Ashcroft to set the political agenda.

While Starmer revelled in the publication of 10 Years to Save the West, which was written by the former prime minister Liz Truss and published this week by Ashcroft’s Biteback Publishing, Sunak wanted to focus on another Biteback book – Ashcroft’s own Red Queen?, a biography of Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner.

Central European tourists have been descending on Achill ever since Heinrich Böll wrote effusively about its inhabitants’ customs and idiosyncrasies

In 1954, the German writer Heinrich Böll landed in Ireland for the first time, headed west and kept going till he reached the Atlantic ocean. He was seeking a refuge from the brash materialism of postwar Germany, and found it on Achill island, where waves crashed against cliffs, sheep foraged in fields and villagers went about their business of fishing, farming and storytelling.

The following year he returned with his family and began to observe and chronicle the customs, idiosyncrasies, sorrows and joys of its inhabitants. So began a literary love affair between Germany and a windswept corner of County Mayo that endures 70 years after the Nobel laureate’s first visit.

Of Cattle and Men by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, is set in a slaughterhouse in an isolated corner of Brazil

Charco Press’s Of Cattle and Men by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, has won the Republic of Consciousness prize, which recognises books from small publishers.

The 99-page book, described as a “gut-punch of a novel” by the judge Sana Goyal, is set in a slaughterhouse in an isolated corner of Brazil where cows begin to disappear, seemingly by suicide.

£65,000 gift will not restore the full, 10-day occasion but organisers say it will make pop-up events possible

Aye Write, the Glasgow literary festival that was cancelled last month after its funding application was turned down by Creative Scotland has announced that it will present a slimmed programme after an “unexpected, but very welcome” £65,000 donation.

The donation, from a foundation set up by the late lottery winner Colin Weir, will help fund a series of pop-up events throughout 2024, featuring authors including David Nicholls, Val McDermid and Lionel Shriver.

An exclusive extract from Orlando Whitfield’s explosive book about the $80m art fraudster

• ‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’ – read an interview with Orlando Whitfield

To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative. The mere ability to spot a trend or an artist is not enough. You have to know how to get what you want from the situation, to buy early and hold your nerve. That I never had this instinct can be evidenced by the fact that when I went to the British street artist Banksy ’s Christmas pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto, in December 2004, I bought two prints for £100 each. I took them home, stuck one on my wall with drawing pins in the full glare of a south-facing window, and the other I promptly lost to the murky gods of the underbed. Today, in good condition, those prints would be worth upwards of £150,000. Each.

When I told Inigo [Philbrick] this story he almost fell off his chair laughing. The art world at the time cared little for Banksy and I suspect the feeling was mutual. Inigo, however, sensed opportunity. One afternoon in the autumn of 2007, he emailed me an image of a pair of metal doors. The email contained no text but the subject line read, “Call me when you’ve seen this.” At first I was confused. The doors looked ordinary, grubby. The photo was blurry but when I zoomed in I noticed at the bottom of the door on the left what appeared to be a Banksy rat wearing a baseball cap and holding a beatbox on its shoulder.

A magical scientific exploration of volcanoes, and how they’ve shaped both nature and human destiny

Volcanoes are the homes of gods, language tells us – across most of Europe, people who may never have laid eyes on one call them after the smoking forge of Vulcan, Roman god of fire and smithery. (In the tectonic hotspot of Iceland, where people live cheek-by-jowl with 130-odd volcanoes, they are simply “fire mountains”.) Even in our unenchanted modern age, they are capable of inspiring a kind of divine madness in devotees such as the French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in an eruption on Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. In recent documentaries by Werner Herzog and Sara Dosa , the Kraffts appear astronaut-like in eerie silver fire-proximity suits, silhouetted against glowing torrents of the Earth’s molten innards. “If I could eat rocks, I’d stay in the volcanoes and never come down,” Maurice proclaims.

Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.

The former PM’s account of her time in office is unstoppably self-serving, petulant, and politically jejune

“They didn’t seem to understand,” writes Liz Truss on page 250 of this unstoppably self-serving reworking of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, “that the UK was heading towards an economic cliff and that I was seeking to conduct a handbrake turn to avoid driving off the edge.” The scene is Birmingham, 30 September 2022, just before the self-described Brian Clough of prime ministers gave her keynote address to what turned out to be a divertingly catastrophic Conservative party conference.

The then prime minister is livid about how a cabal of Cinos (pronounced “Chinos” – Conservatives in name only) and other blob-adjacent political invertebrates were trying to nobble the week-old mini-budget she devised with her chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. By means of this reform, a new globally competitive post-Brexit Britain would emerge. This “unchained Britannia” would be unconstrained by planning regulations, free to frack as never before and able to explore the North Sea for oil despite the ululations of virtue-signalling eco-zealots and the rest of the anti-growth wokerati. This would be a Britain where the super-rich were less hamstrung by corporation or inheritance taxes, and in which the 45p income tax rate (what she calls here the “anti-success tax”) would be little more than a bad memory.

A history of our obsession with the end of days – and the culture it has inspired

Why do we obsess about the end of the world as we know it? The answer may seem obvious: it’s happening. Covid-19 has killed millions of us, and is still spreading. Month by month, the climate emergency accelerates at terrifying speed. Wars and political instability on every continent threaten our fragile civilisation. Even the greatest technological advances of our time come with built-in existential dread. The unleashing of ever more powerful artificial intelligence, we’re told, runs a non-negligible risk of producing some kind of extinction-level catastrophe – the machines might run amok. No wonder young people are depressed about the state of the planet. Most of the time it can seem like we’re all just helpless bystanders, doomscrolling our way to oblivion.

Yet, as Dorian Lynskey argues in his clever and voluminous new book, there’s more to it than that. Yes, we live in perilous times. But the world has always been in a terrible state. What’s different is that we keep increasing our exposure to far-flung horrors. Both the sheer amount of (mainly bad) news that now washes daily over us and the incredible frequency with which we consume it are unprecedented. Every time you refresh your phone, it’s there.