Renewed solidarity
Brian Brivati: Christopher Hitchens portrayed a brilliant picture of Kurdistan in a recent Vanity Fair article, raising the question: who should we identify with in Iraq right now?
Finally, butch lesbians get their own cookbook
Julie Bindel: Food is a difficult issue for lesbians. The assumption that we are all vegetarian, or even macrobiotic, can lead to some awful meals cooked for us by heterosexuals.
Iraq veteran wins blog prize as US military cuts web access
Former US soldier Colby Buzzell has won the Lulu Blooker prize, just as the Pentagon is clamping down on blogs. By Ed Pilkington.
Boardroom bards – Japan’s salarymen bare their souls in poetry
Poems on pension worries, nagging wives and heated toilet seats are among the winners in this year's competition.
From Oddball Osip to an ogre
Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin tells the story of the Soviet monster's life as a daring gangster in pre-revolutionary Russia, says Peter Conrad.
Desperately seeking Wagner
Was Wagner a demon? A hero? Both? Neither? The world at last has a definitive history of the German composer's work on stage. Its author tells Stephen Moss why it took 40 years to write.
Hooray for Bollywood
Shobhaa De says her bestselling bonkbusters lay bare the underbelly of Bollywood. But is she more seduced by the glamour than she lets on, asks Urmee Khan.
My night of jihad
Jon Ronson: It was in a Scout hut near Crawley that Omar Khyam, the now convicted 'ringleader' of the fertiliser bomb plot, was first radicalised.
Sacred texts that reveal a common heritage
For the first time, surviving texts of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths have gone on display side by side at the British Library.
Why I just can’t go on living, by victim of neo-Nazis
11 years after a racist attack in Germany left him paralysed, this Briton wants to take his life.
Super Mario
He is a literary giant, supporter of the Iraq war and hippo enthusiast. Just don't ask Mario Vargas Llosa why he punched Gabriel García Márquez, warns Susanna Rustin.
Can a killer’s literary efforts tell us anything about his motives?
Blake Morrison: Cho Seung-Hui's literary experiments neither caused his psychosis nor purged him of it. Psychoanalysing them for clues to his behaviour is a pointless distraction from the underlying cause of the massacre: American gun law.
Ulfat Idilbi
Obituary: Renowned Syrian fiction writer, lecturer and feminist.
Gordon Brown’s new book teaches us, if nothing else, that we are to have another pious Christian for PM
Catherine Bennett: What else should we learn from the chancellor's book, when it appears in June? Why, in the first place, that, in this largely secular and sceptical country, we are to have another pious Christian for a prime minister.
Book shows Pope is not infallible
Pope Benedict XVI's new book sold more than 50,000 copies on its first day on sale.