Birt’s very, very simple plan for solving everything

Catherine Bennett: Not since he came first in the Formby Show's handwriting prize ("among hundreds of entries"), aged seven, can there have been such excitement about a piece of John Birt's creative work.

The ugly side of beauty

Breast implants for 18-year-olds? Hymen reconstructions? Rape-themed fashion collections? Don't tell Sheila Jeffreys these are signs of female liberation. The radical feminist talks to Julie Bindel.

Shelby Foote

Obituary: American writer whose romantic view of the civil war transfixed the US public.

That golden stream still rolls in

Forget Dan Brown: Hitler was the bestselling author of the century. He died stinking rich on his royalties, writes John Sutherland.

East German past of iron lady unveiled

Biography tells of Merkel family's links to communists.

€40m brings Don Quixote’s misadventures to life

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, the provincial government is investing in a network of "ecological tourism routes" that trace the knight errant's misadventures in La Mancha.

America’s neo-conservative world supremacists will fail

Eric Hobsbawm: Current US megalomania is rooted in the Puritan colonists' certainties.

‘Disease X is still snatching away lives’

Pulitzer prize-winner George Weller was the first western reporter to reach Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bomb. US censors suppressed his dispatches but, 60 years later, his son has unearthed copies of those original reports. Here we print some edited extracts.

Juan José Saer

Obituary: Argentinian writer who lectured in literature in France.

The Left Bank’s well of ideas runs dry

A century after Sartre's birth, there is a lack of real intellectuals in French culture.