Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

What more can there possibly be to say about Shakespeare?

This was the ignoble thought I carried into the British Museum’s much-hyped autumn blockbuster, Shakespeare: staging …

James Bond: Trash or Art?

Indulge me in a little exercise. Open a new tab on your browser, enter Amazon.co.uk and type ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ into the search …

Theatreland’s celebrity ladder

TThe moment Stephen Fry utters his first lugubrious syllable in Tim Carroll’s Twelfth Night at The Globe, a frisson runs through the assembled crowd. …

Writers’ rooms

Why do I have such an enduring fascination with seeing the places that writers write? Forget overblown S&M; Fifty Shades …

Why happy amateurs win

“I got up at 7.30 and wrote for an hour before I got on my train. I wrote on the train for two and a …

The Tricycle’s new wheels

Becoming the artistic director of any well-known theatre is always a tough gig. With Josie Rourke only one season into her tenure at the …

Classical cool

Who would have thought it? Who would have suspected that, amongst all the industrial hobbits, pogoing punks and (sometimes barely) resuscitated musical icons offered by …

The Hollow Crown @ The BBC

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more. Only this time bring us proper screen stars. Poirot; The Pope; Loki; that lawyer lass off …

Britain’s forgotten horsewoman

This summer, the British Museum offers us the opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the bravest, boldest and most important horsewomen that …

Fashion’s new wild child

With the Paris autumn/winter 2012 couture collections still fresh in our minds, fashion has rarely looked so, well, civilized. From Raf Simon’s debut at …

The cult of creativity

This article is published in Pages Of, a new culture and urbanism magazine created by Crystal Bennes and Cecilia Lindgren. You can buy a …

The luxury of a one-gulp read

Last Friday, I spent eight hours reading The Great Gatsby – in Soho, in the dark, along with six hundred or so other skiving bibliophiles. This extraordinary …

“Create gaps”

Last night I went hear Mark Haddon talk on the Southbank as part of the London Literature Festival (my first event so far; …

Breaking the ‘you loop’

The novelist Hari Kunzru has a concern. And no, it isn’t about the death of publishing. Or piracy, or plagiarism, or even the thought …

Is gender dividing the digital publishing industry?

Last Friday morning, an eager audience of aspiring authors, editors, agents and publishers sat gripping cups of strong coffee and gazing upon a veritable smorgasbord …