Gay superheroes soar into comic book battle
Marvel plans same-sex marriage while DC comics says established character is to come outComic book crime-fighters the X-Men are taking a break from saving the day in order to attend the first same-sex marriage in the superhero world, set for June.Publi...
Heist of the century: university corruption and the financial crisis
Why was the response from US academic experts to the global financial crisis so muted? In the second extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that corruption in universities is deeply entrenchedMany people who saw my documentary Inside...
John Donne, priest and poet, part 1: love, conscience and martyrdom | Roz Kaveney
John Donne thought too much - about love and death and his rejection of the choices of his family to rise up the church's ranksLike many of us, he thought too much about everything.It was always the complaint against John Donne's love poetry, during th...
Land grabbers: Africa’s hidden revolution
Vast swaths of Africa are being bought up by oligarchs, sheikhs and agribusiness corporations. But, as this extract from The Land Grabbers explains, centuries of history are being destroyedOmot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbu...
Heist of the century: Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis
Wall Street bankers could have averted the global financial crisis, so why didn't they? In this exclusive extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that they should be prosecutedBernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, ...
Fred Pearce on land grabbing
The science and environment author discusses a growing global threat• Read an extract from Fred Pearce's new book The Land GrabbersWhat inspired you to write The Land Grabbers?Over the last few years, I became aware of this hidden revolution taking p...
Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity by Michael Munn
A ludicrous study of Hitler recasts the Führer as a precursor of Simon CowellMichael Munn has spent his life – at least as he implausibly tells it – schmoozing with the beautiful and the damned. He bonded with Steve McQueen while riding pillion on...
Why I want all our children to read the King James Bible
The good book should be read as a great work of literature – but it is not a guide to morality, as the education secretary Michael Gove would have us believeFor some reason the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) was not approached...
The battle of the book reviews | Lionel Shriver
Professional critics are no more reliable than Amazon ratings, a study shows. So do we really need them?Is the professional book reviewer an anachronism? In a recent Harvard Business School study of nonfiction reviews, assessments in mainstream media o...
Cannes film festival set to honour the bookworm
Coveted Palme d'Or likely to go to a screen adaptation, with many of this year's entrants borrowing from literatureThe Cannes festival is, famously, the keeper of the flame of the auteur tradition. The ritual of honouring the overarching vision of a si...
Promised land
This week, on a visit to the UK, Marilynne Robinson came along to the Guardian Review Book Club to talk to Professor John Mullan about her novel Gilead. Set in rural Iowa, it is the letter of aging congregationalist minister John Ames to hisyoung son f...
Afghanistan has poetry in its soul | Reza Mohammadi