Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

When F Scott Fitzgerald fell in love with Zelda Sayre in the late 1910s, he was as impressed by her courage on the high diving board as by her flesh-coloured silk swimming costume. Her fearlessness ...

On the evening of 13 December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, a combat team from the US 4th Infantry Division arrived at a small farmhouse by the River Tigris, north of Baghdad. Soldiers ...

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes ...

In the closing scene of the film Valkyrie, Hitler’s would-be assassin Count Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, is about to be shot by a firing squad when his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, suddenly ...

At the time of writing, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has a lead of more than twenty points over the Conservatives. All the available evidence points towards a Labour victory, potentially one of the ...

In the run-up to the 2019 election, an extremely irate man appeared on Question Time attacking Labour’s plans to increase taxes on those who, like him, earned over £80,000 – in other words, the top 5 ...

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first ...