Too good for this world
Jazz excited devotion like no other kind of music - and that's its big problem. Jonathan Jones continues our series on 'difficult' art forms
Who really knew Iris?
Obsessive, merciless, an intellectual in love with erotic danger, Iris Murdoch remains mysterious in a tactful new biography by Peter J Conradi
The indignity of labour
Naomi Wolf attacks a hi-tech birth industry in Misconceptions, but is on less sure ground once baby gets home
Blowback chronicles
Giles Foden on the murky deals that fuelled international terrorism
Surfaces and depths
As a child refugee from the Nazis, he had one ambition - to be an artist. From his first show in 1949 to this week's opening at the Royal Academy, he has built a reputation as one of our finest painters. A turbulent personal life has never deterred him from his single obsession, work. But is his focus too narrow? John O'Mahony reports
Culture clash
Hywel Williams acclaims Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, a sublime and timely parable of east and west
The walls are alive
Nicholas Royle investigates the art of graffiti in Nancy Macdonald's study, The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York
Boy wonder
Why Nicholas Lezard loves Tintin and why he is less in love with Michael Farr's Complete Companion
I’m sorry, I don’t speak surrealist
In the second part in our series on 'difficult' art forms, John Sutherland explains how he - and the rest of Britain - finally got to grips with floppy clocks, lobster telephones and private parts that look like cellos
Louis Chevalier
A historian of outstanding intelligence, with interests in geography, demography and sociology.
Julian Pitt-Rivers
Scholar who opened a new chapter in social anthropology.
A word to the wise
Linda and Roger Flavell explain the provenance of common expressions in The Chronology of Words and Phrases: A Thousand Years in the History of English
Shakespeare first folio takes stage at Globe
One of the most perfect surviving copies of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, which could fetch up to £2.1m when auctioned in New York, made a brief appearance on stage at the Globe Theatre in London yesterday.