Music 

Lykke Li sets her sights on Britain

It took time and a fair number of hard knocks, but Lykke Li is about to go mega. Pete Paphides met her in Stockholm

Can Scarlett Johansson sing?

Pete Paphides reviews the Hollywood actress's first album and discovers a bleat that only a deaf mother could love

Jason Pierce's Songs in A&E

Jason Pierce’s whole life, not just his new album, has been guided by accident and emergency, he tells Will Hodgkinson

Music, food of Hove

Ginny Dougary on the pleasures of writing dirty songs for the Brighton City Singers, to be performed at the Fringe Festival

Film 

What’s up with Woody?

He keeps making them, but the films of Woody Allen no longer captivate even the great man himself, James Mottram hears

Revenge is a dish best eaten until we’re sick

We may not endorse it publicly, but something primal in us roots for the righteous avenger when we see him or her on screen

Up close and personal with the Dalai Lama

Joshua Dugdale wanted to find out the truth about the Dalai Lama. He ended up filming his every move for three years

Some Came Running

Re-released as part of a Frank Sinatra season, this melodrama is shot in Technicolor at its most strident. It’s great fun

TV & Radio 

Alien knitting patterns undo Dr Who fan

The BBC has threatened to take a woman to court because she gave away her knitting patterns of programme's aliens online

Duchess invites Hull estate family to visit

Family in drug-death inquiry have become firm friends with Duchess of York, whom they met while making a TV show

Gladiators are go

Fake tan, rhinestones, blood, sweat and tears. Kate Spicer hails the return of the cult Nineties show, Gladiators

Slow boat to China

Rural China with its ancient ways of life and rich wildlife has remained a mystery to the West. Until now

Visual arts 

Painterly pair on top of world art market

Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud were friends for more than half a century. Now they have conquered the global art world

Virtual gallery for the artist

After falling out last year with the art dealer who helped to make him rich, Jack Vettriano has set up a website to sell his work

Marianne's nipples, faithfully reproduced

In the Seventies the sculptor Clive Barker made abstract bronzes of his secret lover, the pop diva Marianne Faithfull

Dreamgirls for a white man's world

Careful grooming helped to turn the Supremes into the acceptable face of black music as a new show at the V&A reveals

Times Literary Supplement 

Josef Fritzl's fictive forebears

Austrian politicians want to distance their country from the Fritzl case: literary historians find it harder

Fighting for peace in the twentieth century

Michael Howard's reflections on hope, fear and history

The philosophy of physiognomy

Hairy thighs, thick feet and other ways in which the Greeks judged character

How to read Cicero's gobbets

A new study shows both the good and the bad side of the discipline of ancient history

Books 

VS Naipaul biography tipped for top award

A shocking biography by Patrick French that exposes the cruelty of Nobel laureate may take the Sameul Johnson prize

Interview with David Fickling, saviour of the great British comic

For those of a certain age, comics are but a fond childhood memory, irrelevant to today's generation - until now. Tom Gatti meets the man behind the movement

iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield

The Sunday Times review by Raymond Tallis: do galloping technological advances and social changes threaten to ‘bend our brains'?

The Gruffalo's unhappy child

Author Julia Donaldson talks frankly about her son Hamish's suicide

Stage 

The Likely Lads back from Tinseltown

With Hollywood at their feet, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are reviving their much-missed sitcom for the stage

Polly Stenham: the new Face of theatre

At 21, Polly Stenham already has the grandees of theatre falling at her young feet. If only her father could see her now

Ruthie Henshall returns to the West End

Does the new role in the musical Marguerite reveal a hint of sadness for the bubbly actress and singer? Matt Wolf met her

Peter Hall on Michelle Dockery

As Peter Hall’s latest find arrives in Pygmalion, we assess his unfailing eye for the next big thing