Britain’s top 300 intellectuals

John Naughton's suggested list of public figures leading our cultural discourse, broken down by profession

Lines of fire: Dante’s vision of hell still has an afterlife

Jonathan Jones: The brilliant, terrifying Divine Comedy has always provoked artists to respond to its hardline moral absolutism

The Social Animal and the science of human nature

Madeleine Bunting: David Brooks's new book makes bold claims that the 'scientific revolution' will humanise our culture. I'm not so sure

India needs to know the real Gandhi

Ramesh Rao: A biography of Gandhi has been banned in Gujarat – but India should know the moral ambiguity of a man revered as a saint

Paul Allen: ‘I think Bill Gates was surprised by my book. He’ll want an intense discussion about it’

The Microsoft co-founder and multi-billionaire talks about his autobiography in which describes his bizarre working relationship with Bill Gates – and how it was he, not Gates, who had the visionary ideas

Greek court rules that adoptive son is Kazantzakis heir

Feud over the rights to the work of Zorba the Greek's author Nikos Kazantzakis intensifies despite ruling

Superman threatens to renounce US citizenship

Conservative commentators and bloggers react with disgust to the DC Comics superhero's decision

Argentina considers paying writers a pension

Authors who have published five books or invested 20 years in 'literary creation' would get £565 a month under the plan

Chile mourns for Gonzalo Rojas

Catalina May: Chile's much-loved 'coalminer's son' has died aged 93. Gonzalo Rojas won many awards, but he was more than just a poet to us

Karl Marx, part 4: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’

Peter Thompson: The main point of the Communist Manifesto is that capitalism creates the conditions for its own downfall

A brief guide to dictator lit

When not tyrannising their people, it seems despots such as Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein like to turn their hand to writing books

Xinran: Once upon a life

Separated from her mother by the Cultural Revolution, the author Xinran grew up with her grandparents and considered herself an orphan. Years later, with her own child, she found herself making the same mistakes

The US swallowed these cups of tea to justify its imperial aims

Madeleine Bunting: Greg Mortenson's wild Pakistan tale exposes more than one fantasist – it reveals Americans' delusion about their 'civilising' mission