Author and journalist Valerie Grove pays tribute to the novelist and biographer who died this week

The historical novelist celebrates the 200th anniversary of a writer who held her own among the greats of her day

Under lifelong pressure from the Stalinist state, being a coward was the only sensible choice

Lord Weidenfeld, who died this week aged 96, hired author Lady Antonia Fraser when she first started writing. She remembers him introducing her to Wagner and for his perfect chat-up line: “Have you ever thought of writing a book?”

Capote’s literary masterpiece about a real killing spree in a small Kansas community paved the way for the non-fiction novel and remains a tense and unsettling read

In his graceful writing, McIlvanney captured the beauty and dignity of ordinary men and women faced with the challenges of life

It’s 100 years since Einstein completed his theory of relativity, transforming our understanding of the universe

For great artists time is unfixed, and they can tune into the essences of other eras. I came to see John as a kind of Edwardian type – he’s the Melancholy Dandy

He was the happiest, most awake middle-aged man I’ve ever met

The astronomer royal pays tribute to polymath Lisa Jardine, who died this week

‘Her novels transformed the way I think,’ says this year’s Man Booker winner

The Swedish crime writer was a complex figure who lived an extraordinary life. His novels featuring detective Kurt Wallander critiqued politics and big business and explored the human condition

The Forward prizewinner’s portrait of racism in the US is not just realistic, it captures a poetic truth beyond facts

Highsmith’s thrillers produce an almost queasy feeling – the desire to look away – while being too fascinating and compelling to put down

An aviator, author and racehorse trainer, Markham was too bold, ambitious and unwilling to be curbed by the constraints of her class or gender

The magnetic US poet’s observations of ordinary people touched readers from all walks of life

If there was a Great American Novel it would be Doctorow’s Ragtime, that melting pot of historical presences and common people

I never had the chance to see Buckley perform but his matchless gift remains an inspiration and a medicine – when I feel estranged, the sureness of his voice in “What Will You Say” is what I return to

Salter’s gift as a writer was his way of conveying the ecstasy and transience of life in language that was simple and crystalline

Jim Crace is a genius. I have read Harvest, which has just won the Impac prize, three times – and I still don’t know how he does it

From the 1920s to the 1940s, the ‘Queen of the Bowery’ spent her nights walking alone in New York City handing out change to the homeless and helping the downtrodden

It’s fitting that such a generous and open novelist, and such a champion of other writers, should win this year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction

This year’s Man Booker International prize winner on waiting eight years for his first novel to be translated – ‘my publishers were in deep despair’

A 1960s activist who set up the first radical feminist groups in New York, her book The Dialectic of Sex is back in print for the first time in 45 years

A friend writes about the artist whose remarkable book about her husband dying of a brain tumour, The Iceberg, has won the Wellcome prize