Common sense has much to learn from moonshine
Philip Pullman: It's time English teachers got back to basics - less grammar, more play.
Buried masterpieces
Leader: While scientists and others were mesmerised at the weekend by pictures taken of Saturn's moon after the Huygens spaceprobe's two billion mile journey, an Oxford conference was discussing something more down to earth.
The perfect lie
This year's Guardian/Piccadilly Press competition for teenage writers is introduced by DBC Pierre, who has contributed his own take on the title theme of lies and lying in a brand new short story.
The Creole with the teacup
The lady with the lamp's rival, Mary Seacole, is beginning to receive proper recognition. If only Jane Robinson had delved a little deeper, says Kathryn Hughes.
Long live couch potatoes!
A new book claims that laziness is the key to a lengthy and happy life. But not everyone is convinced, says Ian Sample.
Great expectations
Four new biographies suggest that the more we write about Alexander the Great, the less we understand him, says Rory Stewart.
Mob rule
Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies and Henry Hill and Gus Russo's Gangsters and Goodfellas shed new light on the FBI and the criminals they chase, says Clare Longrigg.
Buttered toast, but then you die
Jad Adams praises Bevis Hillier's life of John Betjeman - not just a poet of the English middle classes.
For the love of thought
Susan Sontag, the writer and cultural commentator, died on Tuesday. Here, fellow critics and academics remember a woman who was as warm in person as she was intellectually fierce in print.
Susan Sontag dies aged 71
Cultural critic called herself a 'zealot of seriousness'.
Susan Sontag obituary
The Dark Lady of American intellectual life, an aesthete who reorientated its cultural horizons.
Iraq’s library struggles to rise from the ashes
Remains of national history are slowly pieced together.
The world in 0s and 1s
Leader: The great library of Alexandria, it is said, came to be one of the world's greatest stores of learning by requiring visitors to the city to hand over books in their possession to be copied. Now Google is borrowing the trick.