Kate Whitehead

Chinese novelist Chan Koonchung says he writes for “his Beijing friends” though they can’t buy his books. Here, he discusses censorship, Tibet and his new work.

Not only has the German used military ‘dazzle camouflage’ for leather-goods brand MCM’s shop, he’s also used it in the product designs. And for good measure the display includes teapots, a pig, a skull and a severed arm. ‘It’s … about what a shape is, what a product is,’ he explains to Kate Whitehead

Charlotte Merritt, bookseller-at-large for store where Nancy Mitford wrote two novels, sees a bright future for it in Hong Kong, with its ‘very well-educated and culturally engaged audience

Sedaris, an author and long-time contributor to The New Yorker, says he is trying to avoid becoming a cranky old man who always complains David Sedaris sounds as though he’s got the post-holiday blues – or perhaps it’s just the dry, laconic tone in which he speaks. His house in the south of England has…

British journalist Isambard Wilkinson, inspired by his Indian grandmother’s tales of life before partition, visited Pakistan as a teenager and fell in love with a complex place, a love he shares in his book Travels in a Dervish Cloak

Physicist Michael Johnson is drumming up support and funding for his project, to launch tiny spacecraft into space and to the moon