In north London, book-lovers have put David Cameron's Big Society into practice. And nationwide the issue has struck a chord

Do go through, Fräulein Knightley – the doctor will undress you now

Lucian Freud's unflinching paintings reveal everything about their sitters' flesh and little of their personalities – indeed, are they portraiture at all?

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley / Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer

Jane McAdam Freud's imposing sculpture of her father helped her cope with his death, she tells Charlotte Cripps

Lucian Freud's sculptor daughter, Jane McAdam Freud, has made a gigantic earthstone triptych sculpture of her late father's head, to help "keep him alive". Made in terracotta and measuring 3ft x 3ft x 1ft, the giant relief only came out of the kiln last week. "I can't put in words how it helped me with the grieving process," she says. "I was keeping him alive in a metaphorical sense – he was there the whole time I was making it."

Romantic hero, sex addict, troubled intellectual, IRA hunger striker. He can play the lot, and more. And an astonishing run of performances has taken him from obscurity to the brink of the Oscars

If you could put money on a word combo coming up empty on Google, one of the best bets would surely be "Dire Straits" and "hate crime". But apparently the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has just amended a 15-year-old ruling that the Straits' "Money For Nothing" was unfit for broadcasting, due to three uses of the word "faggot".

The gods knew, Odin knew, that the time of the wolf would come." AS Byatt's statement goes to the heart of what makes Norse myth so compelling. Its gods, are not immortals, but have precisely specifiable beginnings and a prescribed, and unavoidable, ending. For all the terrors they wreak and inspire, their power is ultimately finite.

Cronenberg is the latest director to give Freud the movie treatment

Mike Mills tells the story of an older man revealing his true sexuality with a pleasing mix of melancholia and whimsy, aided by Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor

Rather than challenging the status quo, Blue Labour responds with a paranoid hankering for a time when women didn't leave the kitchen

Living in London during the summer is something like living in the souks but with none of the exotic, spicy charm. About seven million of us crammed in higgledy-piggledy, in such close proximity to one another that no man's dinner remains unique, thanks to the person frying garlic on the ground floor. Even the rice pudding tastes of it.

Margaux Fragoso's new memoir tells of a childhood shattered by a sexual predator. It's a shocking read, says Arifa Akbar, but part of a rich literary tradition