The money's gone, so it is time to save Valentine's Day from false cupids with 'for sale' signs, and reclaim love as the proper basis for all that we do.

In 1907 a woman from San Francisco named Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris. She was going to meet a fellow American living there already. She was excited because she’d heard a lot about Gertrude Stein.

Interviewing your favourite author is always a challenge, but even more so when he or she has been dead for years.

The surprise film success of the year is about gay mums. Have we finally arrived at a time when lesbians are no longer weird.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

For half a century, a crowded bookshop on the Left Bank has offered food and a bed to penniless authors - the only rule is that they read a book a day. Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.

Poetry is not merely a luxury for the middle classes — it offers a tough language for those with hard lives. As a TS Eliot festival opens in London, Jeanette Winterson remembers how his poems helped her through her troubled teenage years.

We think of it as an irresistible force – yet we are so in thrall to it that we have ceased to respect it. Jeanette Winterson looks at the power of desire.