A nine-year-old pick-up artist?

Mary Richert: Alec Greven's book on how to talk to girls contains some good advice, but the boy still has much to learn about women

12 months that changed the world

From the meteoric rise of Barack Obama to the financial crash, this was the year the world turned on its head. And Guardian writers (and readers) were there to record it all ...

Belafonte in row over sale of King papers

Family of Martin Luther King claims documents put up for auction had been 'wrongly acquired' by singer

This review of my Indian poetry book is full of patronising cliches

Response: An overheated 19th-century imagination misses the point of my contemporary collection, says Jeet Thayil

Call me Bush

Stephen Kinzer: Moby Dick is an eerily prophetic allegory of 21st-century America. It should be named as the nation's epic novel

Forrest J Ackerman

Obituary: The man who coined 'sci-fi' and whose magazine, Famous Monsters, was his crowning glory

Sunny von Bulow dies after years in coma

After almost three decades in a coma, the wife of British society figure Claus von Bulow has died aged 76

Hollywood studios fight over Watchmen movie

Much-anticipated Hollywood version of best-selling graphic novel at centre of legal dispute

Gay Bible angers Christians

American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

‘I don’t know why I reveal these things’

Alison Bechdel hoped that Fun Home, her very personal graphic memoir, would heal her family's wounds. Instead it led to terrible upset, she tells Emma Brockes