The Guardian view on MI5 archives: secrets of surveillance

Editorial: The latest releases from the National Archives show how hard it is to know your enemy

MI5 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal

Newly released and redacted British intelligence files refer to author from early 1940s to long after her break from communist party in 1956

Malcolm X’s autobiography didn’t change me, it saved me

Aged 17, I felt like an outsider. This book opened the door to reading – and to discovering my identity

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet reveals something rotten in the state of theatre

Usually I’m glad if Shakespeare is hot news. But the mania over the shifting of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech is just depressing

Half of a Yellow Sun shocked me into a sense of my own expatriate identity

At last I had found a novel that challenged the stories I had been told, growing up as an insider-outsider in Nigeria

The Once and Future King launched my Arthurian quest to make a better world

I don’t put my activism down to one thing, but TH White’s Arthurian story helped me think about civil rights, and what sort of person I wanted to be

Five books on the legacy of the 1953 coup in Iran

On anniversary of Mossadegh’s downfall, neither Iranian, American nor British authors can agree on its significance, says Gareth Smyth

Queen Nefertiti dazzles the modern imagination – but why?

Author Michelle Moran brought the famous Egyptian queen to life in thebook Nefertiti - and is thrilled by what the possible discovery of hertomb could yield

Roots – a graphic depiction of slavery that shocked and empowered

Alex Haley’s 1976 novel encouraged the children of immigrants to take pride in their heritage and paved the way for the next generation of storytellers

Mia Couto: ‘I am white and African. I like to unite contradictory worlds’

The novelist discusses his hopes for conservation after the death of Cecil the lion, and his memories of Mozambique’s bloody civil war

‘Hitler was an Anglo-American stooge’: the tall tales in a Moscow bookshop

Conspiracies abound in the Dom Knigi store’s non-fiction section, but what is truly unknown is the extent to which Russians believe what is written

The memoir that allowed me to believe I too could be a writer

I felt I met myself – a white, bookish, Scot – in the young, bookish Maya Angelou

Salman Rushdie cheers release of Mazen Darwish from jail in Syria

Author pays tribute to writer imprisoned for championing free expression, and to the PEN campaign to free him

Russian publisher prints books about Putin under names of western authors

Writers consider legal action against Moscow publishing house after discovering series about Russian president circulated in their names. The Moscow Times reports

Irina Ionesco: the grande dame, her ‘Lolita’ pictures, and a true Paris scandal

A four-decade feud between French-Romanian photographer Irina Ionesco, 84, and her daughter Eva returns to the courtroom