Point of view A personal opinion from the world of books and ideas
From Richard III to Captain Ahab: what literature reveals about how we treat disabilities Disability is everywhere in literature, across all periods and genres – which can show us the way to go beyond stereotypes today
Gruel, gin and mystery meat: Dickens’s Victorian meals in the age of ‘clean eating’ Many of Charles Dickens’s characters struggle to put food on the table – they certainly wouldn’t turn their noses up at a bit of mould on their adulterated brea
Will Self: memories of the artist as a young addict ‘To purge our dirty brains, we had to write out our sins on ruled paper, in Biro’ … 30 years on, the writer recalls his time at a recovery centre in Weston-super-Mare
Show us the money! Why are novelists reluctant to write about hard cash? EM Forster and Jane Austen told us exactly how much their characters were worth, but today’s writers are much more squeamish about specifying wealth
No punctuation and noisy neighbours – translating Proust’s letters The international Man Booker winner Lydia Davis on the pleasurable challenges of Marcel’s mail
Colm Tóibín: ‘Why shouldn’t Catalonia be an independent state within Europe?’ The author, who has observed Catalan politics for 40 years, calls for Madrid to soften its stance
How Joseph Conrad foresaw the dark heart of Brexit Britain From financial crises to the threat of terrorism, the works of the Polish-British author display remarkable insight into an era, like ours, of elemental change in a globalised world
From the vapours to sad face: a history of emotion In the 18th century, relaxation was seen as harmful; now we fret about stress. Historian Rachel Hewitt on translating feelings from the past to the present
Colm Tóibín: ‘Catalonia is a region in the process of reimagining itself’ Although the polls say the independence side would not win a referendum, Catalans, watching Brexit, have seen how easy it is for polls to be wrong
What Richard Dawkins could learn from Goldilocks and the Three Bears The author of How I Live Now on why the government is wrong to be sceptical of storytelling. And how Einstein agrees with her
Why we have to cut off the head of fascism again and again From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in 1930s London to the recent violence in Charlottesville, the cult of hatred lives on
Daniel Tammet: why autism is no bar to becoming a bestselling author He thought and felt in numbers before embracing words, and now Tammet has become proof that as a writer with autism he has more than one book in him
After Charlottesville: can fiction make sense of the age of protest? An anthology of stories about people power is timely in a year of worldwide demonstrations
When breaks go bad: why a holiday is the perfect setting for a fictional emotional crisis The anxious mother, the doomed cruise, the angry swarm of jellyfish … all rich pickings for novelists and short story writers
Tainted love: why women still pay for adultery Women might not be killed for their desires in novels any more, but infidelity remains a potent theme in fiction
Bravo the BBC for its U-turn on axing Saturday Review Blake Morrison Radio 4’s discussion programme has been reprieved. The arts need professional critics more than ever in the age of Twitter
Sarah Dunant: ‘The answers history gives us depend on the questions we ask it’ A new radio podcast will look at present-day anxieties through the prism of the past
Amanda Craig: ‘Devon is a heaven of beauty and a hell of dullness’ Blood-red soil and magical place names have inspired writers from Agatha Christie to JK Rowling
Grenfell one month on – a lingering sense of collusion and shame Hisham Matar What is at stake here is human life and the dream of an honest government
Anita Desai: ‘Every once in a while, a short story pursues you’ As the writer turns 80, she reflects on how tales briefly told are in the habit of returning
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