New novels from Milan Kundera, Paul Murray and Nuala Ní Chonchúir are among the season's highlights

Doping records casts dark shadow of doubt over successful Russian athletes

The band want to bring back the fine art of loafing, along with a few more serious concerns

‘I’m grateful to the authors of shorter books, because my concentration is shot from the internet and all the coffee’

‘The Iraqi Christ’, which presents Iraq as a surrealist inferno, has yet to be published in its original Arabic

Ivan Klíma was clearly a dissident. But then the Czech writer was too cautious to sign Charter 77, and now he is oddly accepting of Václav Havel