Go wild in the country
A farmer hanging from a tree, a burnt-out car, anti-fur protesters... Elisabeth Mahoney is intrigued by John Goto's satires on the rural idyll.
Death of a girl next door
Nick Hopkins on the Dando trial
The genius of small things
Has any other artist garnered so much critical acclaim on such a slim output as Vermeer? George Steiner takes a look at Vermeer and the Delft School by Walter Liedtke and Vermeer and Painting in Delft by Axel Ruger
Three into one doesn’t go far enough
James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn find parallels with contemporary politics in their reassessment of the Roosevelt dynasty, The Three Roosevelts, but lose themselves in a need to mythologise.
In league with Iago and Satan
Priapic heroes and Barthes all come alike to Frank Kermode in his collection of essays, Pleasing Myself.
Let it all stand
Nicholas Lezard wishes he was older and born to idleness after reading Diana Athill's charmingly skittish autobiography, Stet
Quixote at the wicket
Matthew Engel is bowled a googly by Farrukh Dhondy's biography of CLR James - Marxist, cricketer and lover of Shakespeare
Divided city
Ewen MacAskill on Anton La Guardia's account of two histories competing for the legitimacy that will bring land, Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians
What does green mean?
We talk about eco-friendly architecture - but is it just so much hot air? By Jonathan Glancey
‘All woman and half a man’
She was a renowned sculptor then Fiore de Henriquez withdrew from the public eye to conceal an extraordinary secret: she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Jan Marsh on art and androgyny
Everything to play for
Can music breach the gap between Arabs and Israelis? Daniel Barenboim hopes so. Martin Kettle sits in on his Middle Eastern workshops
Whole Earth visionary
A former soldier, he joined the Merry Pranksters and learned business skills from hippie drug dealers. He gave away profits from his successful publishing venture, moved into computers and is currently raising funds to catalogue every species on the planet. Andrew Brown on an influential, highly idiosyncratic American thinker
Naipaul derides novels of Forster, ‘a nasty homosexual’
According to Sir Vidia (VS) Naipaul, novelist and mischievous chronicler of the Caribbean colonial experience, EM Forster was a sexual predator more interested in seducing garden boys than revealing the truth about India.