Margaret Atwood - Life Without Certainty
Margaret Atwood is one of the most important and influential writers alive today. Her fiction explores and reflects the current cultural…
The Hunger Games
According to the Romans, ‘bread and circuses’ were the key to keeping a population content. As long as their immediate physical…
A Vogue for Vincent
Vincent Van Gogh is now a solid fixture in our cultural vocabulary. I need only mention sunflowers or a bandaged ear to conjure up his life…
The Grey
I watched The Grey the other night, and thought it was disturbing, haunting, devoid of hope and the best film I'd seen in a long time. The…
War Horse
How do you begin to tell stories about a war which claimed more than fifteen million lives? For children's author Michael Morpurgo, the…
The Iron Lady
An old lady in a headscarf is buying a pint of milk in a local shop. She’s surprised by the price of the milk, and disturbed by the…
Sherlock Holmes
A review of the recent Sherlock Holmes films and BBC TV series.
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The colour red suffuses We Need to Talk About Kevin. Red paint is smeared across walls and car window screens, red jam oozes out of…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: a discussion guide
The second of the two films adapted from J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter novel begins at the place where the first left us hanging:…