Nigeria: The happiest place on earth

Nigeria is beset by poverty, corruption and violence – but a poll says it is the world's most optimistic nation. Bim Adewunmi explains why

Tennyson’s In Memoriam: a farewell to religious certainty

AN Wilson: The lyrics teach that the false certainties of evangelical Christianity are as arid as shrill, negative materialism

Other lives: Leading academic in the former German Democratic Republic who spent most of the second world war exiled in Britain

Resistance hero Stéphane Hessel stuns publishing world with 30-page work that calls on readers to be outraged about society

WikiLeaks founder says he had to sell rights to autobiography to cover legal costs and keep website afloat

Observer writers and experts chart the concepts, trends and buzz words that defined the past 12 months and are likely to shape the next one

Nina Martyris: Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns helps to reframe the debate about the relationship between race and caste

Jane Williams: The history of how Genesis was created and passed down through the ages reminds us that we have the book for a reason

The latest issue of Index on Censorship highlights the global plight of writers imprisoned for their views, writes Robert McCrum

As Armistead Maupin revisits the world of Tales of the City, he tells Eva Wiseman why the pope is the enemy of all he holds dear

Novelists from Le Carré to Amis have an obsession with Russia. Small wonder: it's fertile territory for fiction, says AD Miller

Scorsese favourites Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel also tipped to star in story of hitman Frank 'The Irishman' Sheeran

Harvard and Google have developed a tool they say can identify cultural changes over the past 200 years

Jane Williams: Genesis looks at what the culture around it believes about the nature of the material world, and disagrees with it profoundly

Julian Glover: A comparison of their literary efforts suggests Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are more alike than they dare to admit