There are far few braver - and funnier - people who have lived in the latter part of the twentieth century.  You hear it said all the time, of the comedian who lived 'on the edge', but to call Bill Hicks a comedian is like calling David Bowie a guitarist.

It would be easy to dismiss Hicks as belligerent, cocky, cold and bitter but to do so is to miss the point.  A liberal, outspoken protestor against the right-wing governments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the banality of the common American collective consciousness (on the Waco Siege: "What do you think the daily schedule of the compound is now?  I heard they had Bible Studies and Ammunition Studies back-to-back?  They have Reloading Classes for the children?" "Just like every home in America."), and the disbelief that he lived in a country where John Lennon can be shot dead but where Barry Manilow can continue to put out albums ("I'll drive you to Kenny Rogers' house!").  While Hicks spoke his anger and disgust at the apathy of the nation, on stage he was casual and relaxed.  You felt that he was holding court while chatting with friends.

In June 1993, at the age of 31, Hicks was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer.  While receiving weekly chemotherapy, he continued to tour, record a comedy album as well as film a pilot show for Channel 4.  He died the following February.

A dozen books have been written on Hicks, each of them penned by fans with more than a hint of sadness tainted throughout, but a recent documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story, manages to take this extraordinary life and give it the humour that ran through it. Using cut-and-paste animation among still images and original video recording, this is the deserved document of a Very Entertaining Man.

American: The Bill Hicks Story is distributed in the UK by 2entertain.

Not everything we learn at school do we learn for life.  For many of us, maths is a particular unpopular subject - if not bottom of the list.  Maths was simple when it was adding up apples and bananas but as the scale increases at an ever-increasing speed during the course of our school career, up to the point where we have long run out of fingers to help us make sense of what we are calculating, the teacher suddenly allows us to use - who will later become our true friend for life - the calculator.  Beware this deceitful trick!  How to use a calculator when all you have is 'x'?  Or take exponents; how big is, say, ten to the power of twenty-four?

Best known for their world-changing design, Charles and Ray Eames show just that in their awe-inspiring short film Powers of Ten.  Produced in 1968 for IBM, the clip starts off by showing a couple having a picnic near the lakeside in Chicago.  The camera is installed to show a one-metre-square at a distance of one metre (bear with me).  Every ten seconds the camera zooms out ten times further away, so that the square becomes ten times wider with each zoom.  10 x 10 x 10 x 10…and so on; up until one hundred million light years or 10 to the power of 24.  In reverse, using the picnic as starting point, the camera zooms inside the hand of the picnicker, thus the square now decreasing to ten times smaller every ten seconds. What we end up with when the camera stops at 10 to the power of -17 is a bewildering similar-looking picture as that of the view at a hundred million light years.

This is maths in one of its most entertaining forms, compiled in a little spectacle during this nine-minute clip.

Dora Mentzel

Because if a good anthology is worth its weight in gold then this is freshly-mined bullion.  The fourth in a series of four, The Paris Review this year made available for free online every interview they have ever published and it only goes to reinforce how desirable the book as a form can be.

With an introduction by Salman Rushdie (who himself is interviewed in the compilation The Paris Review Interviews III), this selection features interviews with luminaries including Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Auster, Orhan Pamuk and Haruki Murakami, among the literary heavyweights presented here.  It would be fruitless of me to heap more praise on The Paris Review Interviews than has already been done, all that really needs repeating is that it has been said that if you want to get to acquainted with a writer then you should read one of their books but if you want to really get to know a writer, then you should read their Paris Review interview.

Comprising fiction, poetry, letters, essays, art and photography in addition to the legendary interviews, The Paris Review is one of the pre-eminent literary journals in operation today, taking a right of place among The New Yorker, The London and New York Review of Books or Harper's, but The Paris Review is more than just a window into the minds of writers (take a look at the Kerouac and Naipaul interviews for just how much an insight you can get into the psychologies of these people), it is also an archetype for the art form that is the interview technique.  Sharp, incisive and yet handled with diplomacy and grace, the interviewers are the thread that the reader pulls and across these few thousand words the fabric of the writer slowly unravels.  This is a hefty compendium, reaching almost five hundred pages, but is second only to sitting in a coffee house with Johnson, Boswell and Hawkesworth.

To paraphrase a quote from Steve Martin, in reference to the short stories of his that appear in The New Yorker, those are the after-dinner mints to the big meal of literature.  Well if that's the case, these would be the starters - and they are delicious.

The Paris Review Interviews, IV, edited by Philip Gourevitch, (2009) is published in the UK by Canongate Books Ltd.