Never in (clear and present) danger of raising the bar for the genre, but a solid shooter regardless.

Michael Haneke is now a firm favourite to join the illustrious list of two-time Palme d’Or winners thanks to this heart-breaking tale about the dying weeks in the relationship of an octogenarian couple.

'Scholars have yet to discover a subject he cannot write about'

Despot comedy is no laughing matter

Alain de Botton has addressed love, happiness and religion. Now he wants to investigate pornography in the belief it can be turned into a moral and noble industry.

With increasing lack of trust in politicians and church leaders, sports stars have filled the vacuum

Just when you had assumed that the Breivik trial couldn't get any worse – with Thursday's revelation that its subject had wanted to decapitate a former Norwegian prime minister – it plunged into a yet more subterranean depth. Even to watch the fragments of Breivik's testimony come through on text services was bad enough – the self-proclaimed "nice" man who had deliberately hardened his heart to commit mass murder. God knows what the impact of this must have been in a mesmerised courtroom.

Usually, when a team player strikes out on a solo project, it's a fair bet that the project, volitionally or not, will reveal more of the player's inner workings, allow a glimpse of their soul or spirit.

There are plenty of books that make the case for atheism, but Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality isn't one of them. The American philosopher maintains that religious belief is immune to rational objection. There's little point, argues Rosenberg, in preaching to the unconverted. His aim is to enlighten the converted by arguing for what an atheist should believe, since there's more to atheism than simply "there is no God". He begins by rebranding atheism as "scientism" so as to better describe what atheists "do believe". First, an atheist has to understand the science, then accept its "irrefutably correct answers to the persistent questions". What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

Acolytes of Charles Dickens were a little miffed when the Cultural Olympics committee announced that the chosen poster boy for British culture was to be William Shakespeare – a calculated rebuff for Dickens, we felt, on his 200th birthday. But Dickens would have been the first person to acknowledge the supremacy of Shakespeare, who, in the brief but ceaselessly productive 25 years of his writing career, gave as complete and as sublimely expressed an account of what it is to be human as anyone who ever wrote. How or why this should be is the subject of more thought, research, speculation and sheer fantasy than surrounds any other writer. But what has never been in doubt is the power, beauty and depth of the work.

A few of the lovely people we nowadays call trolls took exception to my column on Tuesday, in which I reported the despair felt by Greek people at the austerity being inflicted on them by bigger, richer countries in Western Europe. In saying Athenians want their economic sovereignty returned from Paris and Berlin, I was apparently being Eurosceptic. It's long overdue we interrogated that now-cliched term.

Dear Ryan, please can I have my youthful fantasies back?

Health Secretary attempts to hang on to his job

It often takes around 20 years for a forgotten author to be rediscovered. With the Scandinavian crime boom still rolling on, it's good to see attention returning to the first Stieg Larsson. Per Wahloo was a Swedish crime writer born in 1926 who worked as a journalist and editor of a left-wing literary magazine before turning to unusual thrillers. Sound familiar?