In the title story of Etgar Keret's fifth collection, a writer is confronted by a series of guests: all armed, each wanting to hear a story. As he tries to satisfy their demands, a gun against his head, the narrator ruefully reflects, "I bet things like this never happen to Amos Oz or David Grossman". It's a slyly comic aside that also serves as a point of differentiation. Keret may have glowing testimonies from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel and Oz himself, but is yet to achieve the huge international status afforded his fellow Israelis. While Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is unlikely to raise Keret to such a rarefied field, it remains a maddening, abruptly moving and effortlessly funny collection.

On his latest album, rapper Dubbledge uses fragments of the cartoon series The Boondocks - which satirises African-American cultural and lifestyle pretentions - as skits linking his own, more serious tracks: the Flavor Flav to his Chuck D, as it were.

During a week in which sport has searched its soul to understand the secret pressures placed on its heroes, Bobby Fischer: Genius and Madman (BBC4, Wednesday) showed how fame can destroy the most brilliant of talents. It's not just that a chess player has more possible moves to make in a single game than there are atoms in the solar system (that's 10 to the power of 45, in case you were wondering), which takes a certain type of mind in the first place. In fact it's the insatiable power of such talent which perhaps makes it more vulnerable. But Fischer was under far greater strain than a mere maths test.

Greatness is notoriously difficult to define, but it's easy to demonstrate.

The life of US chess superstar Bobby Fischer divides quite neatly into three acts: Fame, then Obscurity, then Notoriety.

The Sun reneged on a deal to market a “Page 3” board game and claimed that the product, which offered players the chance to win a glamour model photo shoot at the newspaper, was “bordering on the pornographic”, a court heard today.

In the mid-1960s, at a time of extreme Soviet chess domination, the "Great Dane" Bent Larsen was, along with Bobby Fischer, one of the only two western players whom the Soviets truly respected and sometimes feared.

A paternity suit against the late chess legend Bobby Fischer has come to a close after DNA tests revealed a nine-year-old girl from the Philippines was fathered by someone else.

There aren't many story arcs which begin with Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88", cruise through a succession of plot developments as brilliant as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Etta James, Dale Hawkins, Sonny Boy Williamson and, yes, Rotary Connection, and then conclude exactly 100 episodes later with "My Ding-a-Ling".

As you while away those long afternoons with the family over the festive period with bored, sorry, board games, the chances are you opted for Scrabble rather than a chess tournament. It's almost as intellectually challenging but not quite as daunting, and you can watch 'Star Wars' at the same time. And these days it's just as significant, prominent, momentous. The word game's popularity has exploded, detonated, fulminated, with 150 million sets sold worldwide in 31 languages, and Imagine: Scrabble – A Night on the Tiles (BBC1, Tuesday) showed that it is taken equally as seriously as its rather snobbish relative. After all, no less than the Beeb's doyen of the arts, Alan Yentob, was scrabbling around in his sack, occasionally lost for words.

He has glowered across a chessboard at the savants of six different generations. In 1953 he played a grandmaster, Grigory Levenfish, who was born in 1889; more recent opponents include the current world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, born in 1990.