The Booker prize’s US amendment was a long time coming

Robert McCrum: The self-styled 'most important literary prize in the English-speaking world' has finally ironed out the disabling anomaly that threatened to undermine its global significance

Samantha Geimer on Roman Polanski: ‘We email a little bit’

In 1977, Samantha Geimer was 13 when she was raped by the film director. So why would he email her now? She talks to Emma Brockes

Getting shot over a philosophical argument? You Kant be serious

Peter Thompson: You wouldn't expect the rationalist Immanuel Kant to spark a shooting. Maybe Nietzsche was involved?

How Marshall Berman reclaimed modernity for Marxists

Owen Hatherley: The Bronx-born writer who died last week saw the danger of leaving decisions about public spaces to the technocrats

Why dry academic journals are not the only source on development

David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and Michael Woolcock: Films, books and other popular representations of development widen discussions with different views and multiple voices

Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction

Novelists such as Colm Tóibín and Naomi Alderman are breathing new life into the gospels

Catastrophe by Max Hastings; 100 Days to Victory by Saul David; Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden – review

Amid a slew of books to mark the centenary of the first world war's outbreak, Max Hastings has no doubt as to who was to blame for it, writes Ben Shephard

My grandmother’s secret marriage to an American GI

Nuala Calvi recently found out that her grandfather was a troubled American GI. Why had her grandmother kept him a secret for so many years?

Baratunde Thurston: ‘Comedy is my weapon for the soul’

We talk to the comedian who brought us How to Be Black: 'People are wonderful. People are also the worst – and that goes with the territory'

The Great War by Joe Sacco – review

Joe Sacco's meticulous depiction of the first day's fighting in the Battle of the Somme is all the more powerful for being wordless, says Rachel Cooke