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Etta JamesObituaryEtta James obituaryBlues and soul singer with a raw, emotional vocal styleEtta James, who has died aged 73 after suffering from leukaemia, was among the most critically acclaimed and influential female singers of the past 50 years, even if she never achieved huge popular success. From her first R&B hit, in 1955, the risqué Roll With Me Henry – cut when she was only 15 – through a series of classic 1960s soul sides (the lush ballad At Last, the raucous house rocker Tell Mama and the emotional agony of I'd Rather Go Blind), then a series of critically acclaimed 1970s and 1980s albums that won her a broad rock audience, to more recent albums of jazz vocals, James proved capable of developing and changing as an artist. [Read More]

FictionReviewThe story of a boy's day-to-day struggle to survive in the wilderness captures the brutal conditions of the Ice AgeModern kids have it easy. Thirty thousand years ago, your average adolescent would have had a child or two, killed a few of animals and survived several winters on not much more than a handful of mouldy nuts. Loon, the hero of Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, has to endure more than most: an orphan, he has been chosen as his tribe's shaman. [Read More]

CultureObituarySharon SheeleySongwriter of Poor Little FoolThe first song of the Los Angeles-born songwriter Sharon Sheeley, who has died of complications following a cerebral haemorrhage aged 62, was Poor Little Fool. It became a million-selling number one for Ricky Nelson in 1957 and the same year she co-wrote the hip-hitting Somethin' Else, which became a 1959 hit for Eddie Cochran. Sheeley had been under rock 'n' roll's influence since she was 16. [Read More]

The 10 best real-life spies – in pictures Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email From Melita Norwood and Klaus Fuchs to Francis Walsingham and Harold 'Kim' Philby• Red Joan, Jennie Rooney's novel inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, is published by Chatto & Windus and available from the Guardian bookshop Jennie Rooney Sat 13 Apr 2013 16. [Read More]

Top 10sBooksWe don’t need crash-bang confrontations in moral black and white. These novels tell more subtle stories, where the line between human and other blurs Say the words “alien invasion” and the stories most people think of are those told in movies like Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), in which the battle lines between good and evil are cleanly divided. HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds. [Read More]

Willis Pyle (seated), with Lee Morehouse, working on sketches for Bambi. Photograph: DisneyWillis Pyle (seated), with Lee Morehouse, working on sketches for Bambi. Photograph: DisneyAnimation in filmObituaryWillis Pyle obituaryAnimator and painter who drew Bambi and Pinocchio for Walt Disney studios During a golden age of film animation, Willis Pyle, who has died aged 101, played a leading role in shaping some of the Walt Disney studio’s best-known characters. As an assistant animator, he cut his teeth on the 1940 musical fantasy Pinocchio. [Read More]

FilmObituaryChristopher Tucker obituaryMakeup artist who created John Hurt’s prosthetics for The Elephant Man and Michael Crawford’s mask in The Phantom of the Opera Christopher Tucker, who has died aged 81, was a pioneering special makeup effects artist for screen and stage who designed the face masks for John Hurt in the film version of The Elephant Man and Michael Crawford in the West End musical The Phantom of the Opera. [Read More]

ThrillersReviewA courageous, masterful evocation of physical and psychological squalor – but, in a genre that lives by its plot twists and shock, this thriller lacks the killer instinct“If you’d seen me back then,” the eponymous narrator says, “with a barrette in my hair, my mousy gray wool coat, you’d have expected me to be just a minor character in this saga … I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. [Read More]

From the Guardian archiveMusicalsFrom the archive, 12 September 1968: Nudity in Hair only brief, says directorThe rock musical's depiction of hippy counter-culture, with its irreverence towards the establishment and attitude towards drugs and sexuality, causes much controversy"Hair," the Broadway musical about hippies and other young creatures, is now in rehearsal in London, where it will open at the Shaftesbury Theatre on September 27. The American director, Mr Tom O'Horgan, is patient with reporters but a bit sick of explaining why some of the cast take off all their clothes at the end of act one. [Read More]

ObituaryRafael AlbertiMember of the 'Generation of 27' who moved on from painting to reinvigorate Spanish poetryWith the death of Rafael Alberti at the age of 96, Spain has lost the last representative of the outstanding poets of the "Generation of 27", who renewed the spirit and forms of Spanish poetry, and included such figures as Federico Garcia Lorca, the Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre and Luis Cernuda. Rafael Alberti was born in the Andalucian port of Puerto de Santa Maria near Cadiz. [Read More]