Audrey Hepburn – everybody’s dream girl
It is a complex heritage that we take from Audrey Hepburn: glamour with a hint of sadness. No wonder she still resonates strongly with modern women, writes Rachel Moseley.
All you need is status
What others think of us is a matter of life and death, writes Alain de Botton.
Connection revealed between erotic writers and artists
Britain's first "literary erogenous zone" is about to bring a new type of tourist to a quiet corner of the east Midlands, thanks to a £110,000 project to research the background of the artist and poet William Blake.
I’ve learnt my lesson
When Francis Gilbert left teacher training college in the late Eighties, he was a radical and an idealist. But then he got into the classroom... In an astonishing new memoir, extracted here, he offers a picture of our education system that you won't find in any school prospectus.
Free the world from coursebook English
Not all English teachers are native speakers, says Luke Meddings - so by encouraging conversation-driven teaching, we can allow other models of the language to thrive.
‘National treasure’ archive up for sale
Battle to keep outstanding 19th-century archive in UK.
Cold comfort
Ali Smith is awed by Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, Rebecca Brown's unflinching look at bereavement
Who’s crying Wolf?
Naomi Wolf's decision to accuse Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of sexual assault 20 years after the alleged event at Yale has triggered a furious row, with Camille Paglia branding it a witchhunt. Was Wolf right to speak out?
An artificial paradise
AS Byatt on Baudelaire in Chains, Frank Hilton's study of the poet that focuses on his opium addiction
Blessed Bess
Geoffrey Moorhouse is intrigued by The Life of Lady Ralegh, Anna Beer's biography of a woman who, unlike her husband, never lost her head
French intellectuals attack ‘war on intelligence’
More than 20,000 French artists, thinkers, film-makers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics have signed a petition accusing the centre-right government of 'waging war on intelligence' and instituting 'a new state anti-intellectualism'.
Ghouls for schools
Joanna Carey on the winners of our competition to find the perfect ghost story.
Book targets Manchester’s ‘corporate’ vice-chancellor
Australian academic accuses Professor Alan Gilbert of leaving Melbourne University a 'quasi-privatised institution'
The age of Kant
According to Monty Python's philosophers' drinking song, Immanuel Kant was "a real piss ant, who was very rarely stable", a joke that worked when Kant was seen as an upright man.
Luminous moments
Peter Nichols revels in The Longshoreman, the memoirs of marine biologist Richard Shelton