The 100 best nonfiction books: No 42 – Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)

Brittain’s study of her experience of the first world war as a nurse and then victim of loss remains a powerful anti-war and feminist statement

The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes – review

A sympathetic biography of the Edwardian diplomat Sir Mark Sykes can’t disguise his bumbling role in carving up the Arab world

World mourns the death of Leonard Cohen – as it happened

Leonard Cohen has died aged 82. Here we round up tributes and reaction as they flood in for Canada’s cultural icon

Blots and all: Gustave Flaubert’s travel diary among rare books at historic sale

Handwritten book full of crossings-out and comments reveals Madame Bovary author’s literary struggles

Rasputin review – how myth and murder created a Russian legend

Douglas Smith’s biography presents a fascinating, if far less sensational, portrait of Russia’s ‘mad monk’

Human Acts review – a bloody exercise in understanding the past

South Korean writer Han Kang confronts her country’s brutal history of state violence

It’s all for love as Spain’s Barbara Cartland finally gets a chance to woo British readers

Corín Tellado is famed throughout the Spanish-speaking world for her light romance novellas

Hitchcock experts rush to defend director over Tippi Hedren’s claims of sexual harassment

Actress says she repelled advances on The Birds set but film crew dispute story

Birds are more like ‘feathered apes’ than ‘bird brains’

For centuries scientists dismissed birds as dumb based on physical differences in their brains. How wrong we were.

Coming Out by Jeffrey Weeks review – classic history of gay emancipation in the UK

A new edition of Weeks’s sweeping work is a story of brutal laws, radical prophets, ‘gay-ins’ and a swelling sense of pride

Israeli writer apologises for sexual harassment of journalist

Trump scandals inspired Danielle Berrin to write a column about her encounter with interview subject Ari Shavit

Ice Cube to star as Fagin in new Oliver Twist film

NWA rapper will play Fagin in new musical adaptation of the Dickens story, with Tony-winning director of Broadway hit Hamilton behind the camera

Poem of the Week: And by Shuntarō Tanikawa, translated by William I Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

An illuminating offering from one of the world’s ‘active poetic volcanoes’ uses haiku influences to reflect on death’s proximity

‘We might abolish the death penalty in 20 years’: He Jiahong on justice in China

Born into China’s cultural revolution, He Jiahong spent years working in the fields before studying law to win over his girlfriend’s parents. Now he is a leading authority on miscarriages of justice, and a writer of hit detective novels to boot

Colin Firth to float into Mary Poppins sequel

Actor would join Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Mary Poppins Returns, set 25 years after events of original