Wild at art

Raised in respectable Middle America, his first love was painting but he found fame as the 'Tsar of the Bizarre', directing offbeat films which suggested something disturbing behind the picket fences and tranquil lawns of the US heartland. John O'Mahony reports

You’re the top

Veronica Horwell serenades the men behind Broadway's classic musicals in Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles | Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers | Cole | Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber

The last word on Ancestors

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule - WS Gilbert

A walk to plunder riches from the river’s ancient banks

Thames-side history

Love at close quarters

Frances Wilson on Byron's tortured romantic triangle in David Crane's The Kindness of Sisters

The lost father

Mario Fortunato on Senior Service, the story of the family tragedy of publishing sensation Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, written by his son Carlo Feltrinelli

The importance of not being earnest

Marxist don or would-be Wilde? Blake Morrison relishes Terry Eagleton's sly anti-memoir, The Gatekeeper

History shall be your judge

One of our greatest essayists on... why genius cannot speak its name

Filthy Britten

'O arsehole, scrotum, penis, bless ye the Lord.' Valentine Cunningham reveals what the Latin bits in The Turn of the Screw really mean

Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw's second volume of his acclaimed biography of Adolf Hitler recently won the British Academy's first annual book prize. This excerpt from the first chapter includes the 'Nazi Olympics' of 1936, Germany's involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the perceived threat from Bolshevism.

Death of a poet

In November 2000, Andrew Waterhouse won one of the most prestigious prizes in British poetry. Less than a year later, he killed himself. Libby Brooks reports.

The perfect couple?

Women can have everything - including children - argues Susan Maushart in this extract from her controversial new book. All you have to do is take men out of the picture.

The virtual visionary

A young geek, he went to university at 14. He dropped out to work as a musician but made his name as a pioneer of virtual reality. A key philosopher of the computer age, he also sounds a warning note about the limits of technology. Oliver Burkeman reports