Comic novelist, columnist, playwright, Russian translator - he's been entertaining us one way or another for 40 years. But as his current stage hit and forthcoming novel demonstrate, there is a philosopher and art historian in there too. Nicholas Wroe reports

Anita Desai has taken to stealing across the border from the US, where she teaches, into Mexico, where she rents a hideaway in the mountain village of Tepotzlan. "It's such an Indian culture, it's the closest I can get to India when I'm in America," she says, her enthusiasm masking traces of homesickness.

John McGahern's first novel The Barracks is a little masterpiece. The words are strange and beautiful; emotion passes through the sentences like clear water. There is more grace in these quiet pages than on the whole of War and Peace. You watch a few lives going on - and going on, and going - and you can feel involved in the wonder of all that. Nothing happens, and yet everything does.

The tower block was once seen as the answer to our prayers: cheap and stylish living for all. Andrew O'Hagan wonders where it all went wrong.