Spanish police say a small bomb exploded outside the home of a businessman in the Basque region but no one was injured.

From rural saga to cruel slaughter

A car bomb exploded outside a regional television station in northern Spain yesterday following a warning call from the armed separatist group Eta. No one was injured.

A Basque separatist car bomb wrecked a television station in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao today.

Christmas is when the Southbank Centre rediscovers its raison d'être: this year, the foyer features a giant "melting igloo" in which films about Arctic explorers are screened, while the stage of the Festival Hall is festooned with instruments of a sort never seen there before: giant marimbas and xylophones of wood, plastic, glass; oil cans, rubbish bins and builders' chutes; bellows, thunder-machines, and every kind of drum. Three old-style Hoovers sit centre-stage.

Atxaga's magisterial novel explores the life of David Imaz, a Basque immigrant, now dying on a ranch in California. Growing up a generation after the Spanish Civil War, he divides his time between his uncle's farm and the village, where he practises the accordion on the insistence of his authoritarian father.

The suspected military leader of Basque separatist rebel group ETA has been arrested in south western France, the French interior ministry said today, the biggest blow to the organisation in months.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, European flagship for the US cultural foundation, is reported to have paid well over the odds for art to fill Frank Gehry's swooping titanium masterpiece.

The 'Pride of Bilbao' may take 36 hours to reach Spain, says Simon Calder, but it's worth it

There is more to Hemingway's favourite state than the humble potato – as Simon Calder discovered in the dramatic gorges, towering ski hills and rushing falls of America's greatest outdoors

Lucy Wadham's fascination with southern Europe has lent her fiction an exotic edge. Her first two novels, set in Corsica and the Basque country, captured an over-heated world of small time crooks and Maquis-style terrorism. Greater Love relates the history of a pair of Portuguese siblings, and their accidental involvement with a group of Islamic fundamentalists.

A bomb exploded in a Basque seaside resort in northern Spain early yesterday morning, slightly injuring three people, an official said.

The history of the English language is the history of our place in the world

Spain's cultural world is reeling with shock and dismay after the announcement that Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum is suing its finance director for embezzling €500,000 (£400,000).