There may be hope for civilisation after all if a dictionary can rise – as this one has done – to the commanding heights of the non-fiction best sellers’ list. The popularity of Collins Dictionary of ...

When he returned to France from England in 1728, Voltaire joined a consortium to buy the French government’s lottery, which made him serious money. He used some of it to restore a chateau belonging to ...

There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

There is no doubt that we need to think more carefully about where our food comes from. Food has a staggering impact on the planet: the systems involved in its production account for over a third of ...

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 ...

Shehan Karunatilaka’s freewheeling debut, Chinaman, won a clutch of awards in 2010. In it, a cynical, drink-soaked narrator tries to track down a possibly dead cricketer in a Sri Lanka riven by civil ...

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 ...

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 ...

It has been argued that the history of the world would have been very different had Napoleon Bonaparte not underestimated the power and accuracy of British naval ...

The last time I cried at the cinema was when Louis Armstrong welled up on the soundtrack of Good Morning, Vietnam, singing ‘What A Wonderful World’ in that black croon-drawl of his as scores of raw ...