Another fine mess
Bob Monkhouse is a self-confessed Laurel and Hardy obsessive, but can he have too much of Simon Louvish's Stan and Ollie?
Once a Whig…
John Charmley reads Roy Jenkins's instinctive biography of Churchill and explains why the Tory party never understood him
Pass the remote control
What is video art? Is it any different from simply watching telly? Continuing our series on 'difficult' art forms, Claire Armitstead turns on, tunes in - and finds herself in the middle of a baseball pitch
Negative energy
He is the artist who outraged America with Piss Christ. But has Andres Serrano run out of ideas? Adrian Searle on an incomplete retrospective.
Mae’s dark secret
Jill Watts's biography of Mae West puts a surprisingly different complexion on a screen legend
All passion spent
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan lack the brilliance of his criticism, but they are compelling, harrowing reading
A spliff, a glass and Bob’s your uncle
Lee Server's style veers between the lofty and the tabloid in his biography of Robert Mitchum
‘Modern architecture, including the brand new house I live in, largely sucks… ‘
Readers reply to last week's article on modern architecture by Stephen Moss
The flying doctor
Robin Denselow on a sure-fire vision of hell on earth - Jonathan Kaplan's account of his life in the war zone: The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Odyssey
Reviver of souls
Frances Wilson reads Jane Jordan's biography of Josephine Butler, and discovers a woman who kept a houseful of prostitutes - but not for the reasons you might think
It’s a stitch-up
Laurens van der Post may have fudged the truth, says Christopher Hope, but he deserves better than JDF Jones's po-faced biography, Storyteller
Sing-along-a-Wittgenstein
Why would anyone want to set one of the world's most daunting philosophical tracts to music? By Harry Eyres.
Homer’s odyssey takes Simpsons into the theological textbooks
The Simpsons, Matt Groening's series about the dysfunctional family of middle Americans, is being embraced by churches, writes Stephen Bates.
A mystic’s great mistakes
Storyteller, JDF Jones's biography of Prince Charles's guru, Laurens van der Post, brings to light an unpleasant truth: he lied and lied
The culture of conflict
The attacks in America may cause a change of heart in Hollywood, but what of the other arts? And what will be the effect on the creative scene in Britain? From dance to pop, Guardian critics assess the likely impact