London News

With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun Babbo This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection Bright Star Although the first half of Kwei-Armah's production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops ...

Origin of the specious ... William Chubb and Ronan Vibert in Gilbert Is Dead. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Robin French made his mark five years ago with a short Royal Court play, Bear Hug, about a couple who greet their son's transformation into a bear with perverse optimism.

ORPHAN : If you can get past the icky notion of demonizing orphans -- and that's a big if -- you'll discover a genuinely terrifying chiller about a 9-year-old monster -child whose adoptive parents rue the day they brought her home from the orphanage.

What makes a British cultural institution? Style? Sophistication? In the case of comic magazine Viz, the ingredients are swearing, toilet humor, and biting satire.

Sir Stanley Spencer was a British painter . Spencer studied at the Slade in London, but he spent most of his life in the village of his birth, Cookham in Berkshire.

London has a lot of theatres. Generally, that's where you go to see plays. Sometimes though, a production runs away from the theatre, gets lost, and ends up somewhere a little different.

Ronnie Corbett, comedian: 'I claim not to like chardonnay, but curiously my current favourite white is just that, the ripe, buttery and smooth 2007 Christophe Cordier Vire-Clesse Vieilles Vignes ' Photo: GRAHAM JEPSON James Wilby, actor: 'I dont even try to drink anything other than bordeaux.

"The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" by Peter Ackroyd; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday British author Peter Ackroyd, a one-man encyclopedia of British history, language and culture, has written 31 books of fiction, biography, cultural criticism and poetry, many of them prizewinners.

Archivists and rare-book librarians have a unique view into the world of literary mysteries.A After all, they work with the clues every day.A Sometimes their collections unlock untold treasures, sometimes they hold the key to long-kept secrets, and sometimes they point the way toward a new life.

Ten lucky readers of The Local can now win tickets to watch the critically acclaimed Armando Iannucci satire In the Loop.

A restored silent movie from 1928 about the London Tube seems comfortably familiar and intriguingly strange at the same time Geoff Brown Two rows of passengers sit facing each other across the Tube carriage.

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The Good Charlotte rockers will be the star guests at the launch of the new Blackberry Curve on October 27 / File Joel and Benji Madden headed to Sydney Will attend launch of new Blackberry Curve New music, music news, music reviews SYDNEY tattoo artists are rubbing their hands together and Nicole Richie has her Twitter at the ready with word that ...

HARRY CONNICK, JR. is happy he spoke out against a controversial Australian TV talent show skit - insisting his outburst was "appropriate". SACHA BARON COHEN and his fiancee ISLA FISHER have been hailed as heroes after rescuing a lost dog and returning the pup to its owner.

"It is fleshy and voracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and for drink; it consumes and it excretes, maintained within a continual state of greed and desire." This is how Peter Ackroyd, impassioned scholar of London, describes the greatest city in the world.

At the finale of the last "Hamlet" to be seen in New York , Fortinbras called for a hero's cannonade to honor the slain Prince of Denmark - "Go, bid the soldiers shoot" - only to have his lieutenant whip out a pistol and shoot Horatio.

WHERE else would you watch in the space of four days films from around the globe with subjects including a foot fetish murderer, freedom fighters in El Salvador and a funeral-crashing confidence trickster played by Sir Derek Jacobi? Yes, the Iris Prize Festival shimmied into town for its third outing and brought another hugely diverse selection of ...

October 07, 2009, 6:58 AM / The daily dish... a spicy serving of celebrity news She's available Gina Gershon, opening on Broadway in "Bye Bye Birdie," soared like an eagle in the New York Post, talking about life and love.

If readers didn't know that Victor Frankenstein was a fictional character in an 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, it would seem absolutely natural to believe that Victor Frankenstein had been a fellow college student and close friend with Mary Shelley's future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The film is beautifully shot and there are dreamy sequences that convey the fantastical, creative quality of Darwin's mind Creation Theatre Henry Hitchings The production is entertaining but in the end a little too elaborately packaged.