A Most Wanted Man review – Philip Seymour Hoffman’s superb swansong

Peter Bradshaw: In his final leading role as a disillusioned spymaster, Philip Seymour Hoffman resembles a hungover panda, but the power and intelligence of his performance are the perfect epitaph

The best books on Thailand: start your reading here

Pushpinder Khaneka: Our Thai tour starts with an epic royal saga and ends with a wide-ranging look at the forces that shaped the modern nation

Michael Stipe: ‘Are we that warlike, that childish, that afraid?’

The former REM frontman on Douglas Coupland’s 9/11-inspired artwork and the images that still haunt the US

Japan: Hirohito warned attack on Pearl Harbor would be ‘self-destructive’

Official 12,000-page biography reveals emperor's thinking but fails to settle debate over his role in decisions leading to Hiroshima

Charlie Hunnam reveals pain over turning down Fifty Shades of Grey

Actor says he was forced to step down from the role of Christian Grey thanks to overwork – in a period of his life he describes as a ‘nervous breakdown’

The Zone of Interest review – Martin Amis’s impressive holocaust novel

Martin Amis's new novel, an attempt to grapple with the horrors of the concentration camps, may be his best in a quarter century, writes Alex Preston

Kubrick ‘did not deserve’ Oscar for 2001 says FX master Douglas Trumbull

Director acknowledges Kubrick’s genius, but says the maverick’s only Oscar was for special effects he did not originate, reports Ben Child

Fay Weldon’s Lives and Loves of a She-Devil taught me how to connect with my inner anti-heroine

Paris Lees: No one could fail to be seduced by its humour. But at 13, what I loved was the potential for transformation the book represented

Mafia memoir triggers row after winning Sicilian literary prize

Controversy as Giuseppe Grassonelli's Malerba wins Sciascia-Racalmare prize, named after writer who challenged Cosa Nostra

When I read Rimbaud’s verse I heard the call at the bottom of the sea

George Szirtes: I had already decided to be a poet, but this was a revolutionary understanding of what that meant at the most visceral level

Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2014 – as it happened

We tracked debate, ideas and controversy at the sixth annual Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House – catch up with the conversation

Forget Orwell and Huxley – Dave Eggers has seen the future

If you want an up-to-the-minute literary vision of where mass surveillance might take us, look no further than your local bookshop, writes John Naughton

He That Plays the King turned me on to theatre criticism’s intoxicating pleasure

Michael Billington: Kenneth Tynan’s precocious work not only nourished my love of the stage, it informed my choice of career

Doris Lessing’s last gift: 3,000 books donated to public library in Zimbabwe

Books from collection owned by celebrated author, who died last year, to go to country where she lived for quarter of century