This metafictional quest in search of an unjustly forgotten African author explores literary history and the impact of colonialism

So often defying the conventions of their age, these inspiring figures are also dependable boons for nephews and nieces in books by authors from Jane Austen to JK Rowling

The dividing line between capitalism and communism which descended across Europe after the second world war inspired spy writers and historians, polemicists and memoirists

Writers from Alexandre Dumas to Jack Kerouac and Colson Whitehead have written fiction worth bonding with about these sometimes uneasy alliances

Writers from David Mitchell to Graham Greene and Rachel Kushner tell stories that seek out interconnectedness, testing and pulling at the idea of nationhood

Decades of economic imperialism and conditional aid have inspired authors from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Graham Greene to explore insidious western control

From George Orwell to Daphne du Maurier, the books that made a decade span village detectives, Edwardian butlers and Bright Young Things

The row over a new biography of Philip Roth has exposed the way agents and estates restrict access and manage archives to maintain a writer’s posthumous good name

A new biography, by Richard Greene, insists there was more to the author than ‘sex, books and depression’

The television presenter and author on Graham Greene, Germaine Greer and reading poetry during chemotherapy

This account of the cultural dimension of capitalism v communism offers a reminder that literature can unsettle the powerful