Some of Britain's top comics are putting away their one-liners to perform in straight dramas at the Edinburgh Festival

In a profession renowned for its individualists, the publisher Barney Rosset was an eccentric among eccentrics, a man of strong passions who seldom listened to others – and never, if they wished to persuade him to change his course of action. In 1951 he bought a defunct New York publishing company, Grove Press, and devoted his energies to turning it into the most prestigious and adventurous literary publishing company in America. Professor Wallace Fowlie, of the New School University in Greenwich Village, gave him tips about current French literature and Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare and Company, told him about a talented Irish writer in Paris called Samuel Beckett. In 1954 Rosset published the first US edition of Waiting for Godot and Beckett remained his most faithful author.

Where are you now and what can you see?

The birth of Schubert’s Winterreise song-cycle was suitably poignant. Wilhelm Muller humbly declared that his poems needed music to infuse them with life, but died unaware that Schubert was turning them into a libretto.

David Leddy is a Fringe institution, a writer and director who magics audiences to faraway places in his shows. Last year, he took them on a macabre midnight journey through an old Masonic lodge.

Though nominally an opera, this collaboration between Feldman and Samuel Beckett features neither setting nor characters, and a mere 16 lines of text, which makes it more of a cantata.

Samuel Beckett was once asked why he quit his job as a university lecturer teaching the cream of Irish society. Indeed, the rich and the thick, was his riposte. The Tory minister, David Willetts, was forced into an embarrassing climbdown before the House of Commons yesterday after suggestions that he wanted to introduce a two-tier system in English universities which would apparently favour those with money over those with academic ability.

Tortured trio left in limbo on the Liffey

My parents were... My dad was my headmaster and my mother also taught me at school. I did a whole show about whether it psychologically scarred me, but when I look back, I think all the bad things about me were already in existence. I was in a fortunate position where I had a very solid family – my parents have been together since they were 13. It's almost hard to live up to that!

Riflemaker, London

I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal," said Nathaniel Hawthorne in his New-England Magazine sketch "The Canal Boat", from 1835. It's insightful writing, in which he describes the canal wending its way through each town as "the most fertilizing of all fluids" and feeding their "masses of brick and stone, their churches and theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement, their gay dames and polished citizens – to spring up, till, in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings, through one thronged street."

The movie star was famed for playing ditzy blondes on screen, but a new book of her writings reveals her passion for James Joyce, Walt Whitman and Samuel Beckett

The director David Leveaux has worked with Beckett and Pinter. But it's Simon Gray who deserves equal billing

Clegg and Cameron have power because there aren’t enough people educationally equipped to seize it from them