Fidel Castro launches memoirs in Havana
Former Cuban president makes rare appearance to present 1,000-page book, Guerrilla of Time, charting his rise to powerFidel Castro has made a rare public appearance to launch his memoirs.The increasingly reclusive former Cuban president spent six hours...
Gandhi clan scours India’s largest state for votes among Muslims and outcast
The Congress party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi is accused of sacrificing free speech to make a comeback in India's most populous stateYou can find the Islamic Centre of India in the Aishbagh neighbourhood of the north-eastern city of Lucknow, flanked by...
How a bearded Virginia Woolf and her band of ‘jolly savages’ hoaxed the navy
Letter to go on sale revealing how Bloomsbury group duped an admiral – but feared fake beards would give them awayOne of the most famous practical jokes in British military history has returned to haunt the Royal Navy – more than a century later.A ...
Bridget Jones’s Baby due date pushed back
Working Title still expected to deliver third instalment in series despite concerns over the scriptThe third instalment in the Bridget Jones series, Bridget Jones's Baby, has run into script problems resulting in a delay to the start of production, acc...
Paul Auster hits back at Turkish PM
After Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the novelist 'ignorant', Auster reiterates protest against country's free speech prohibitionsAmerican novelist Paul Auster has hit back after the Turkish prime minister described him as "an ignorant man".Auster, author...
James Patterson dominates library lending, with 2.3m loans in 2011
Author takes five places on PLR's top 10 most-borrowed books, with remainder also thrillers and mysteriesWith book lovers up and down the country branding library closures criminal, perhaps the stranglehold crime fiction continues to hold on borrowers'...
Library lending figures: what’s the top book?
Which books do people borrow? Which authors are the most popular? Find out• Get the data• Top authors• Top books• Last year's dataWhat was the most popular book borrowed from libraries last year? We have the top 250 books according to book lend...
National Library Day: a year on
Campaigners have saved some libraries from closure, and an inquiry begins next week – but councils are now under greater financial pressure than ever to cut servicesIn the 12 months since a surge of public protest against proposed library closures wa...
Dorothea Tanning, surrealist artist, dies aged 101
Tanning was the last living member of the surrealist movement, wife of Max Ernst and published her first novel at the age of 94The artist Dorothea Tanning has died in New York aged 101. She was the last living member of the surrealist movement, whose c...
Turkish PM criticises US writer Paul Auster over human rights comments
Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacks Auster, who said he would not visit Turkey in protest at its jailing of journalistsTurkey's prime minister has hit back at American writer Paul Auster, who was quoted as saying that he would not visit the country in protest...
Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Mozart of poetry’, dies aged 88
Polish president joins tributes to Nobel prize-winner, calling her the country's 'guardian spirit'Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.Des...
Real-life Charles Dickens characters traced
Historian finds many of literature's best-known names in the London streets of Dickens's teenage yearsBill Sikes and Scrooge are among the most well-known characters in English literature but rather than being figments of Charles Dickens's imagination,...
