With an economy in crisis and political turmoil looming, the nation appears to be sliding into chaos
By Chris McGreal
Among the many signs of a country sliding into chaos, one has gone largely unnoticed: Zimbabwe's morgues are filling up. It's not only that more people are dying, but also that the families of those who are cannot afford to pay their medical bills any longer. To escape them, relatives are registering the sick under false names. When they die, the bodies cannot be claimed.

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Renowned scientist James Lovelock believes that Planet Earth will take revenge on humanity for centuries of abuse, but that mankind may just be adaptable enough to survive
By Stuart Jeffries
If Britons already believe that their island is intolerably crowded today, they might well want to brace themselves -- because the country is going to become much, much more densely populated over the course of this century as millions of people flee the uninhabitable desert that ma inland Europe is doomed to turn into.

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The venerable motorbike company is looking to blend rebellion and style in a new bike to appeal to a younger generation
By Phil Patton
It is almost exactly 402km in a straight line from New Hampton, Iowa, where Rich Christoph grew up, east to Milwaukee, home of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, where he now works. But Christoph, 27, designer of the Harley XL 1200N Nightster, did not get there by following a straight line.

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The evidence stacked against convicted murderer Carlton Gary seems irrefutable until David Rose reveals the role of race in the court's guilty decision
By Gaby Wood
Fifteen pages before the end of Violation, David Rose tells us that he has been asked "innumerable times" whether he believes the death row protagonist of his book is innocent. "It is," he writes, "the wrong question to ask." We should consider instead whether Carlton Gary received a fair trial, he suggests; we should wonder if there is enough evidence not to prove his innocence but to introduce a reasonable measure of doubt as to his guilt. Rose's answers to these questions are unequivocal — the story is about a miscarriage of justice — and yet, as he must know, by this point his reader has grappled with "the wrong question" for some time.

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As a victim of East European bureaucracy, Kundera despises the clerical strictures of ‘literary bureaucrats,’ and celebrates the audacity of the modern novel
By Peter Conrad
The novel came into being with nothing but novelty to recommend it. Classical precedents were lacking: it disparaged epic swagger, and democratized the haughty seriousness of tragedy. It even flirted with the demolition of literature, since novels could be written by characters who — like Defoe's Crusoe keeping his diary or Richardson's Pamela scribbling her correspondence — were not writers at all. From the first, novelists had to double as theorists, defining and justifying their heterodox form. Cervantes in Don Quixote examines the glories and fallacies of chivalric romance, and Fielding in Tom Jones interrupts the story with essays that explain the mock heroic procedures of his storytelling.

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