When less means more

The son of Jewish immigrants, he worked as a plumber and New York cab driver to fund his music studies. Now one of the most influential - and controversial - contemporary composers, he is seen as the founding father of minimalism. John O'Mahony reports

Available for parties

Italy's proposal to hire out some of its cultural treasures has met a storm of protest - even talk of a 'privatisation Taliban'. James Walston reports

Continental shifts

Joseph Harker welcomes George Alagiah's A Passage to Africa, a bold, honest and new perspective on the continent

Passion play

Stephen Romer on the explosive energies of the larger than life Gustave Flaubert in Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life

Katharine Moore

Her prodigious writings championed women, delighted children and explored God.

Surviving Picasso

John Richardson lunched with Picasso and met his lovers. His biography of the artist has turned him into a literary celebrity. But at 77, with 50 years of someone else's life still to write, what keeps him going, asks Jonathan Jones.

I’m not all right, Jack

She thought she was ugly and she craved privacy. So why did Jackie marry JFK? Barbara Leaming examines the paradoxes of power and celebrity in Mrs Kennedy

My father, the literary bomber

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published Pasternak, threw hoops with Castro and mysteriously died on a sabotage mission. His son, Carlo Feltrinelli, tells his story in Senior Service

A question of pace

Geoffrey Wall's brisk biography of Gustave Flaubert is out of sympathy with his sluggish subject

Rough trade

Andy Beckett applauds John R MacArthur's The Selling of 'Free Trade': Nafta, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy - a book of unpatriotic questions at a time of conformity

Prick up your ears

Can a CD full of silence or the noise of a ticking clock really be as rewarding as a Beethoven symphony? Continuing our series on 'difficult' art forms, Steven Poole loses himself in the world of the sound artist