Dario Fo: ‘Tony Blair has nothing to do with the left’

Dario Fo, playwright, Nobel laureate and - at 79 - still the most subversive man in Italy, is running for mayor of Milan. But why? And what will he do if he wins? Well, for a start, he’ll sort out the traffic, he tells John Hooper.

In praise of… the A38

Leader: Many writers have attempted to chart the lives of people; far fewer, though a growing number, prefer to write the biographies of roads.

Fares face long wait as cabbie gets paid to read

A Madrid taxi driver has won a competition to be paid to read Miguel de Cervantes' literary masterpiece, Don Quixote. Taxi driver Javier Carretero successfully applied for a grant of €642 (£438) to take time off from driving his Skoda Octavia in order to read Spain's classic text.

Thatcher ‘threatened to nuke Argentina’

Margaret Thatcher forced François Mitterrand to give her the codes to disable Argentina’s deadly French-made missiles during the Falklands war by threatening to launch a nuclear warhead against Buenos Aires, according to a book.

Leonora Hornblow

Obituary: The tobacco heiress and novelist Leonora Hornblow, who has died at 85, was addicted to New York. Marriage took her from Manhattan to Hollywood, and her split-coast life that inspired her two seethingly noirish cult novels, Memory and Desire and The Love Seekers.

Pro-Franco history tops bestseller list

A revisionist history book praising the former Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco has shot to the top of the bestseller list in Spain on the 30th anniversary of his death.

Defiant Meyer takes on critics and refuses to resign from PCC job

Sir Christopher Meyer insisted yesterday he had no intention of resigning from his role as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, despite coming under sustained attack from the foreign secretary, other politicians and former colleagues. By Tania Branigan.

Charles Smith

Obituary: Gypsy activist, poet, and film-maker, he once ran a successful antiques business.