How we made Viz: ‘We printed 150 copies for £42.52’

‘We had touched on something: genuine schoolboy humour had never been put on paper before’

Maureen Dowd: Aliens, show yourself. Beam down! Time to serve man

With an intelligence report imminent, not since the 1950s has the capital been so riveted by the possibility of aliens hovering

Salman Rushdie: ‘I am stupidly optimistic – it got me through those bad years’

The novelist on strong women, ‘moral censorship’ and the ‘great wound’ of his life

Words made flesh: Why author events are the new hot tickets

The growth of spoken-word festivals reflects our hunger for real-life experiences

Tragedy, magical thinking, and the lasting impact of grief

One day, when Geraldine de Brit was just seven years old, her mother and brother left the house and never came back. This is her story of the following days, weeks, months and years

2019 cultural highlights: You’ll laugh, you’ll picnic, you’ll plough

The best music, theatre, comedy, film and spoken word in the coming year

Lords and Ladles: An appetising idea, an indigestible TV show

The culinary history programme has great ingredients, but they are rarely well served

Ian McEwan: adapting books for movies is ‘technically challenging’

‘On Chesil Beach is about a young, sexually inexperienced couple on a miserable honeymoon

Hors-série sorcery – An Irishman’s Diary about Myles na gCopaleen, Julian Barnes, and limited-edition books

‘If you’re from a family of writers, everything is fair game’

Nina Raine should know. Her father, a critic, once told her: `Your business is not to be worrying about people’s feelings. Because otherwise you will never write'

Video

The Sense of an Ending review: A smart piece of translation

Julian Barnes’s dryly comic Booker winner is nimbly adapted to suit the demands of mainstream cinema

Irish publishers left on the shelf by Man Booker Prize

The awards preserve a system in which Irish work has to be passed on to a UK press

Auction is single largest sale of first edition books in Ireland

Auctioned collection included signed copy of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of Salesman’

Patrick deWitt: ‘I am oftentimes drawn to unfashionable things’

The Man Booker shortlist author on the joys of Portland, writing modern fairytales, his next project, and why he felt he had no choice but to bin a 300-page novel he had finished