He was the shellshocked genius who channelled his anarchic brilliance into The Goon Show. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman explain why they’ve written a play about Spike Milligan – while comedians remember a legend

From a row at a zoo to the tale of a Holocaust survivor – the promise of these short stories is deadened by detail

The writer’s latest short story collection is adept at pulling the rug from under your feet

A hotel on the Moray Firth estuary; an adrenaline-filled auction room in west London; an ad man’s office in Manhattan on DVD … AL Kennedy, William Boyd and others celebrate their cultural hideouts

‘Raconteur of difficulty’ AL Kennedy brings pleasure from pain, but Fi Glover and Jane Garvey struggle with a flawed podcast format

In her first book for children, AL Kennedy conjures up a vividly imagined world with delightful prose

Jonathan Franzen claimed he won’t write about race because of limited ‘firsthand experience’, while Lionel Shriver hopes objection to ‘cultural appropriation is a passing fad’. So should there be boundaries on what a novelist can write about?

Feeding thousands of books into a computer to find new meaning in literature sounds intriguing, but does cultural analytics actually tell us anything about the books we read?

The Man Booker longlisted author on working in the chaos of a new house, making ends meet and the rare joy of writing in a first-class carriage