Roger Garaudy, who died in Paris on 13 June at the age of 98, was a long-time Communist who fought in the French resistance in the Second World War but became a Holocaust denier in old age.

So I had left Istanbul with its colourful chaos and ended up in a place in America where the wind blew hot as a hair dryer, huge thorny cacti greeted newcomers and Spanish was the official language. What was I doing in Tucson, Arizona? Teaching, writing a new novel... The part of me that couldn't settle down, always a nomad, an outsider, East and West, and yet precisely because of that at home everywhere, that stubborn part was holding the reins. It was as if I had taken a plastic globe, given it a real good spin, and randomly put my finger on a spot.

Underneath the arches, a rendezvous for the realist, the artist and his muse

The Mariinsky's corps de ballet rush on, stamping red-heeled slippers and swishing flounced skirts – a different pattern for every girl. Don Quixote is set in Ballet Spain, a world where everybody hurls away their glass after drinking, before plunging into more bouncy dancing.

"When is he going to die?" enquires one mariachi owl, part of a chorus of owls, to another. "Soon compadre, soon," is the deadpan reply.

Shakespeare with a stylish Spanish twist

The American fantasy author George R R Martin has sold millions of books worldwide, and his fame has heightened with Game of Thrones, the glossy US TV series starring Sean Bean, based on his mythical creations.

It may seem strange to choose an anthology of mainly British literature beginning with Chaucer's 'Parlement of Foules' and ending with HG Wells's 'The History of Mr Polly' as my book of a lifetime. But Hugh Kingsmill's 'The High Hill of the Muses', posthumously published in 1955 (he had died six years earlier), became my guide to literature at the age of 20. What I absorbed then has influenced me for the rest of my life.

From Aristophanes, who attacked Euripedes in his play The Frogs (Euripedes was safely dead by that point), to the critic Harold Bloom, who recently consigned Harry Potter to the "vast concourse of works that cram the dustbins of the ages", Gary Dexter's book compiles pithy put-downs and waspish jibes from writers.

In the annals of silver-screen catastrophes there can be few productions unluckier than Terry Gilliam's endeavours to make a film about Don Quixote.

Russian star rises in tales of the east

Author of The Shadow of the Wind, the most-read Spanish novel since Don Quixote, Carlos Ruiz Zafó*began his writing career eight years before with the first of four stories aimed at teenage readers. The opening volume, The Prince of Mist, now appears in an English edition, fluently translated by Lucia Graves, with the others following in the next three years. It won the prestigious Edebé Prize for Young Adult Fiction on publication in 1993, and with its companion novels has sold over three million copies. So does this first effort promise to be yet another sensation outside Spain along with Zafón's The Angel's Game, which is currently selling in shed-loads all over Europe?

The festival season is upon us. But there's plenty besides dancing in a field to get excited about this summer: a new Mark Rylance spectacular, 'Toy Story 3', the return of Carlos Acosta, the National Gallery's forgeries...

It's a good idea, from time to time, to forget what art is. We vaguely know what it's meant to be. But imagine you didn't know, and then you came across it, and tried to work out from scratch what role it might have in our lives. There's something that lies on the floor by the entrance. It's a small object. It has the form of a plastic inflatable, with ridged seams, roughly the shape of a biscuit tin, or a small cushion, but not firmly inflated, so that its form is rather squashy. But clearly it isn't literally squashy. It is black, and polished, and solid. It must have been cast in some hard medium – hard rubber, in fact. Doorstopper is its name. Nairy Baghramian made it.