Guns and girls
Chris Petit is intrigued by Kevin Myers's personal history of the Troubles, Watching the Door
Dream warrior
Award-winning Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright tells Stephen Moss about fighting 'white resistance', why her success is a ray of light for her people, and why Australia's new PM was right to apologise to them
Into the heart of his darkness
Patrick French's brilliant and candid The World Is What It Is lays bare the demons that drove one of our greatest - and most controversial - writers, says Hilary Spurling
On the road with Dylan, Morrissey and Eeyore
Simon Armitage's Gig takes a chaotic, often charming trawl through his life as a music fan, says Adam Mars-Jones
The odd couple’s special relationship
The extraordinary 50-year partnership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is to life brought to life in Carole Seymour-Jones's A Dangerous Liason, says Elizabeth Day
When rock chicks ruled
Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us is gossipy celebration of three female singer-songwriters, says Sean O'Hagan
Faust lost in translation?
James Fenton on Coleridge's lost version of Goethe's classic drama
View from the street
Roofs at night, tattoo-and-shave parlours and exuberant shopgirls - reportage of the everyday dominated early 20th-century American art. The urgency of city life was captured in an explosion of prints, writes Robert Hughes
Local heroes
Toby Litt tries to follow Simon Armitage's journey to the foothills of stardom in Gig
Last night’s TV: Arena: The Strange Luck of VS Naipaul
VS Naipaul is so poisonous and slippery, I wouldn't be surprised if his tongue was forked
Inside the writers’ block
Marc Norman's What Happens Next is a flawed history of the movie industry's screenwriting 'slaves', says Philip French
The last cigarette is just the start…
In the third and possibly final instalment of his Smoking Diaries, The Last Cigarette, Simon Gray is as funny, honest and idiosyncratic as ever, says Euan Ferguson
Sophie Curly and the downward spiral
Celia Robertson's sensitive portrait of poet Joan Adeney Easdale, Who Was Sophie?, charts her descent into madness, says Francesca Segal
Art of darkness
Arts: Harland Miller has always been fascinated by the sinister tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He sent the stories to fellow artists - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst and more - to see how they would respond
The people’s playwright
A life in theatre: For 50 years, writer and director Peter Gill has both railed against and devoted his life to the theatre. He is now returning to London with his 1976 masterpiece Small Change