Evolution loses a key populariser

Stephen Jay Gould, one of the world's best-known scientists and a witty prolific author who influenced the debate on evolution died of cancer at his home in New York city yesterday.

Dedicated follower of passions

Orwell's biographers have rarely been kind to his wife. As Christopher Hitchens tries to rescue George from his admirers, Hilary Spurling puts the case for Sonia's defence

Can you hear Marx tittering in Highgate?

If only socialists had studied Marx properly, they would have known all along that capitalism would triumph. Meghnad Desai gets behind the slogans in Marx's Revenge

Who made Marion?

There was more to William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies than Citizen Kane suggested, as biographies from David Nasaw and Louis Pizzitola show

A matter of life and death

A banker's daughter who trained at the Slade, she is a flamboyant figure whose portraits of such contrasting figures as Max Wall and AJP Taylor brought success. But recent works dealing with the last days of her father and her lover, Henrietta Moraes, are the most remarkable yet. Lucinda Bredin reports

Reluctant crusader

Forty years ago, Rachel Carson became the unlikely founder of the radical ecology movement when she published Silent Spring. Poet John Burnside writes that her message is even more powerful today

Jésus Díaz

Cuban intellectual stirring controversy at home and in exile.