‘I’ve healed. I don’t want to be the badass’ – Noomi Rapace on beating her Dragon Tattoo trauma

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo brought her global fame but trapped her in ‘pain and sadness’. The actor reveals how starring in weird new thriller Lamb made her feel alive again

Lydia Davis: ‘I write it the way I want to write it’

The author on flash fiction, translation as a route to creativity, and why we need to prioritise the climate crisis over ‘business as usual with writing’

Author Preti Taneja on realising she had taught the Fishmongers’ Hall attacker: ‘We were all unsafe’

It was the day after the London Bridge atrocity that the writer discovered she knew the man responsible. Two years later, she reflects on that time and the fallout that followed

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon: ‘I needed Scotsmen because of the kilt factor’

She secretly wrote the first of her time-travelling novels while her husband slept. Now she’s published the ninth in the smash hit series. She talks explosive sex scenes – and where George RR Martin went wrong

The Appeal writer Janice Hallett: ‘I wrote about bubble bath for 15 years’

The author of the bestselling whodunnit on co-writing a 2011 film about a pandemic, her love of suspense, and what Dickens has in common with Jackie Collins

‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attack

A new book, Betrayal, dissects the final, authoritarian spasm of the Trump presidency, and Karl warns: ‘We came close to losing it all’

Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to him

Barbara Taylor Bradford: ‘My mother told me: “Keep your head down and don’t flirt at work”

The author, aged 88, on her first job working with Keith Waterhouse, giving advice to Sean Connery and her 56-year marriage

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: ‘How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?’

As Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart begins, the documentary-makers and old friends discuss conspiracy theories, the problem of ‘activist journalists’ and what happened to Ceaușescu’s socks

Christos Tsiolkas on retreating from the outrage cycle: ‘I’ve felt as if I was disappointing people’

Lockdown forced the Australian author to contemplate both his interior life and the big picture. The result is 7½, a work of autofiction that ‘just poured out’

Tom Ford: ‘I paid $90,000 for my own dress. The clothes we make are not meant to be thrown away’

From fashion with va-va-voom to veganism – ahead of the release of his new book, America’s starriest designer takes a moment to reflect

Sally Hepworth on Amy Poehler, Liane Moriarty and her six-times-a-day writing regime

The Melbourne writer discusses her failures and her craft – and why she shuns the housewife-author stereotype

Mary Gaitskill: ‘I have a nuanced mind, for better and worse’

The novelist and essayist on the disturbing power of Lolita, her regard for John Cheever, and her aversion to simplistic arguments

‘The Every is about an all-powerful monopoly that seeks to eliminate competition’: why Dave Eggers won’t sell his new hardback on US Amazon

The author on returning to the dystopian world of big tech in his sequel to The Circle, and how he’s taking a stand against Bezos’s empire

What does tech take from us? Meet the writer who has counted 100 big losses

We have never been more reliant on the internet – yet Pamela Paul still gets DVDs in the post and buys CD players. Why? Because we have lost more to the digital era than we realise, she says