In defence of reason
Pankaj Mishra applauds Amartya Sen's cosmopolitan view of India's cultural and political history in The Argumentative Indian.
Fox on the loose
Peter Conradi finds Elias Canetti's recollections of Iris Murdoch in Party in the Blitz awash with bile, backstabbing and envy.
Philip Hobsbaum
Obituary: Poet and professor with a passion for new writing.
News Corp considers sale of TES
The publisher of the Times Educational Supplement yesterday confirmed that the 91-year-old title and its sister publication the Times Literary Supplement could be sold by their owner, News International, in a deal worth up to £280m.
Deperately funny
Graham Sharpe's The Man Who Was Screaming Lord Sutch casts light on the demons of the man who made general elections enjoyable, says Simon Callow.
The Guardian University Guide 2006
Thinking of taking a degree, but not sure what subject to study, or where to study? Need help making the big decisions about higher education in the UK? The Guardian University Guide 2006, now fully revised and updated is packed with no nonsense advice and unique subject rankings, it contains everything you need to help you make the right choices.
A dream perverted
Fifty years ago, Nobel prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka formed a university society with his friends. This month, in a report for Channel 4 News, he returned to Nigeria to find his alma mater being exorcised - part of a national clampdown on the copycat 'cults' blamed for a series of campus atrocities. How has this come to pass?
The original Lord Gnome
Blake Morrison enjoys Richard Ingrams's The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett, a lifelong radical who might even have inspired a 19th-century Private Eye.
A Norman Jeffares
Obituary: An outstanding Yeats scholar, the founder of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature, the journal Ariel and the York Notes series, and a poet in his own right, A Norman Jeffares has died, aged 84.
Crazy like a fox
Emmanuel Carrère examines Philip K Dick in I Am Alive and You Are Dead. Michael Moorcock on one of science fiction's strangest sons.