“Am I allowed to swear?” Estelle is back in London after a European tour, and the deafening Indigo2 soundsystem is determined to help her mark out her territory from the off. She is decked out in an eye-watering sequinned dress (which wor[…]

With Rubicon and Persian Fire, Tom Holland proved himself a master of narrative history with a sizeable weakness for relating the ancient world to the modern. His third history blockbuster, Millennium, dials back the parallels but finds its narrative[…]

I’m sure there’ll be a lot about Woolies on various blogs today: time here simply to note its role in the early 00s pop boom. For some value of “boom”: the singles market in the time just before downloads was a) tiny and b) do[…]

In which the somewhat feeble journalist, coasting on past “not exactly glories”, goes undercover on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing. Unfortunately not being au fait with the current scandal on Strictly he does not realise that pr[…]

There are two great, if not stone cold classic, aspects to Oliver Stone’s W. Put aside the fact that Stone has somehow managed to wander back from the wilderness of his own self-indulgence and succeed in making entertaining a film no-one really wan[…]

Henri Bergson, in his 1901 essay Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, says that all comedy can be boiled down to noticing mechanical behavior in something living. Laughter is an acknowledgement and reminder to ourselves (and others) to be […]

I’d never watched any of the ‘ultimate fighting’ stuff, bar a little in a pub once. It looked very boring to me. I’m a big WWE fan – as silly as it is, I am hugely entertained by that. At the weekend I saw an ad for the […]

Marc Bolan was never one of the great dead pop stars when I was a kid. T-Rex were not on my pop radar, seemingly out of fashion from the late seventies until a Bolan track was used to sell jeans in the late eighties. I really don’t remember hearing[…]

So Hasbro have tapped up Ridley Scott to make a film based on Monopoly. Ridley has responded by saying it will most closely resemble Blade Runner, a futuristic city scape where giant ships, cars and scottie dogs speed around snapping up property. Th[…]

OK. Her out of the Cranberries is not dead so this featured website will not be doing a portrait of her soon. But it is a lovingly curated site of what dead celebrities would look like as the undead: called “Portrait As Living Dead”. They[…]