Barry Cryer, defiantly old-fashioned in a dinner suit and red-velvet waistcoat, sits in a director’s chair and addresses his audience as if they are devoted friends. Most of them are: every joke he tells is met with affectionate laughter of a kind given only to national treasures. Butterfly Brain, which is currently touring, is structured
While the Kindle continues to solve storage problems for the bibliophile on the go, it is the iPad that is actually changing what books are and stretching our definitions of reading. Here is my selection of the ten best iBooks released for it this year: The Waste Land To anyone unconvinced about the appeal of
The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books
In the factory where my grandfather worked for decades, there was one item more important than any piece of machinery or safety apparatus: the swear jar. Whenever someone uttered a curse word, he was bound to pay sixpence into it and, at the end of the month, the coins were collected and used to buy
The recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is now available for home viewing in three plush editions, in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD series. The recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is now available for home viewing in three plush editions, in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD series. Metropolis is the foundation of all subsequent
I’m often told I should go on Mastermind. Although this isn’t a compliment (it’s actually a very polite, and very British, way of asking, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’), I still take it as one. Whenever someone mentions to me that I ought to audition for a spot in The Black Chair it
When I was 14, and wearing one of my father’s old shirts back to front in one of those secondary school Art lessons that facilitate conversation more than they facilitate artistic endeavour, I was in the middle of a monologue, when a friend interrupted me. ‘Scott,’ he said. ‘You sound just like Hugh Grant.’ I