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I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating. Like so many of us, I’m nodding off to the sound of an audiobook. Crime novels work well, as long as they are not overly gruesome or suspenseful I was already enamoured of Richard E. Grant who’d, on other late nights, read me Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. The plot unfolds at a gentle

Each time I return to Hamburg (about once a year, on average) I pay a sentimental visit to my grandmother’s magnificent old house, where she spent her cosseted, idyllic youth, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It’s a robust Teutonic villa, a bombastic relic of the Gründerzeit – that flamboyant building boom which followed Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany. It’s on one of Hamburg’s smarter streets, a leafy avenue called Heimhuderstrasse – but it’s not the ornate architecture that draws me there, or even the snob value of the neighbourhood. What brings me back year after year are the stories that cling to this house like ivy – stories from the

After spending over $10 billion, screwing over corporate partners, hiring and firing talent and a decade of work trying to develop a flagship product for a new, massive market, Apple has killed what could have been its most ambitious product yet: an electric car. The failure of the electric vehicle project singularly reflects the culture and hubris of Apple Its death comes with no announcement, for Apple never officially acknowledged ‘Project Titan’ existed, but Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported last week that its 2,000-person team had been shifted to other projects. Its demise is surprising because Apple rarely gives up on big projects, and because of just how much time and money had

Marvel is at death’s door. What’s next? Some say we can track an incoming recession by the length of women’s skirts, others by the popularity of dance music. Film, as the composite of a million images, comes out as a more sophisticated forecaster – and not just of the economy, but of lifestyles and mentalities. Styles rise and fall with the times. They’ve been doing so since the early days of commercial cinema. A cowboy craze has already spread to TV Take the original shift from film noir to Western. Noir, which peaked in popularity in the latter half of the 1940s, dealt with the leftover anxieties of world war