Many know about the death by drowning of WS Gilbert; others are aware that in 1933 Ernest Hemingway, incensed by a review, trashed the Paris bookshop in which he read it. Few could point to these incidents' one degree of separation. Such surprises regularly punctuate the soberly engrossing chronicle which Robert Fraser has created around the life of a poet whose modest fame has burned steadily, almost brightly, since his Thirties emergence as a teenage prodigy.

Shot on a shoestring, and barely released at cinemas last year, Black Pond nonetheless earnt its young writer-directors a Bafta nomination – and quite right, too.

A leading light in British comedy and one of the most-proven funnymen on the planet, Paul Merton is back with his first UK solo tour since 1999, but Out Of My Head is far from the quality you might expect, being weak virtually from start to finish.

This long-awaited second volume of William Burroughs's letters spans 15 years, from the publication of Naked Lunch in Paris, to his mid-Seventies departure from London for a New York radically different to the one he knew in the 1940s. How strange it must have been to settle into a transformation that you, in part, had affected. For this is really what this volume of letters is about. The first, published in 1993 when Burroughs was still alive, covered 1945-1959. Junky aside, he was a largely unpublished but influential mentor to Kerouac, Ginsberg and co as the Beat generation assumed its shape – an entity as synthetic and modern as Beyer Pharmaceutical's heroin, a longtime companion in Burroughs's life.

It might seem that everything is crashing down around us in Austerity Britain, but judging by the bumper sales figures disclosed by one London auction house, now could be the perfect time to cash in on those artistic masterpieces gathering dust in your attic.

It might seem like everything is crashing down around us in Austerity Britain, but judging by the bumper-billion-pound sales figures disclosed by one London auction house, it appears now is the perfect time to cash in on those artistic masterpieces you've left gathering dust in your attic.

As a film chronicles Freud and Jung's battle of wits, Phil Boucher puts 10 artistic moments on the couch

The Czech film director, Jan Svankmajer discusses a troubled childhood and the inspiration for his new film.

Graham Greene's religious faith was often fragile. When in one of his periodic moments of doubt he suggested to Evelyn Waugh that he was considering resigning from the Catholic novelist coterie to which the two belonged, Waugh was outraged and insisted Greene carry on writing novels with a religious basis, however uncertain his belief had become.

A new collection of works by David Shillinglaw will bring together a selection of art hoping to reflect 'the constant search for and consumption of that which makes us complete'

The playful, cartoon-like paintings of Joan Miró are instantly recognisable. Bright in colour and childlike in form, the Catalan artist flirted with both abstract expressionism and surrealism to create his vivid celebrations of the Catalan landscape.

An outdoor installation of Salvador Dali's 'Alice in Wonderland' sculpture, previously unseen in the UK, opened today at the Moor House Gallery.