SOME DAYS IT SEEMS WE LIVE IN A HORRID WORLD where most humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 65-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for an

ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,

IN AN EARLY SCENE IN LYNNE Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a b

THE BEST FILMS, BOOKS AND GREAT DAYS OUT TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS

Not many successful breakaways involve almost 5,000m of climbing over 324km, but that’s exactly what Napoleon Bonaparte pulled off in just six days in the spring of 1815. After escaping from exile on

For anyone who came of age in the glow of a Noughties laptop screen, Kaya Scodelario defined our teenage years. As Effy Stonem in Skins, she had main character energy long before the term existed; the