The Book of Genesis, part 2: In the beginning
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
Writers in prison: when having an opinion becomes a crime
The latest issue of Index on Censorship highlights the global plight of writers imprisoned for their views, writes Robert McCrum
Armistead Maupin: Barbary Lane, barbarism and the Vatican
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
Why western authors are in love with Mother Russia
Novelists from Le Carré to Amis have an obsession with Russia. Small wonder: it's fertile territory for fiction, says AD Miller
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro gang up for new mafia film
Scorsese favourites Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel also tipped to star in story of hitman Frank 'The Irishman' Sheeran
Google creates a tool to probe ‘genome’ of English words for cultural trends
Harvard and Google have developed a tool they say can identify cultural changes over the past 200 years
The Book of Genesis, part 1: God created
Jane Williams: Genesis looks at what the culture around it believes about the nature of the material world, and disagrees with it profoundly
Blair v Brown: a battle of books, and overwhelming egos
Julian Glover: A comparison of their literary efforts suggests Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are more alike than they dare to admit
Richard Olney: the quiet American who found his soul in Provence
The author of the French Menu Cookbook spent more than 30 years in a Provence village. Tim Adams visits the home that is now a shrine to the great food writer
Bated breath as Norwegian Wood film opens in Japan
Movie premieres in Japan, 23 years after Haruki Murakami's novel published
The hobbit race row raises a big question: can a one-legged man play Tarzan?
Sam Leith: Does it make one a recruiting sergeant for the BNP to have supposed that Tolkien probably thought of hobbits as white?
WikiLeaks cables: Solzhenitsyn praise for Vladimir Putin
Nobel prize-winning writer claimed just before his death that leader was helping nation rediscover what it was to be Russian
Christopher Hitchens: my hero of 2010
Richard Dawkins: Heroes and villains of 2010: A gentleman and a truly formidable debater, Christopher Hitchens is a giant of the mind and a model of courage
William James, part 7: Agnosticism and the will to believe
Mark Vernon: James observes that the idea you can will belief in God is 'simply silly', as the nature of real assent consists of many strands
Afghan schoolbooks teach their students little of value or relevance
Nushin Arbabzadah: The books reflect the education ministry's intellectual poverty and cultural parochialism, and are an insult to Afghan literature