We in the UK are often told that GCSE's are too easy and that standards are slipping. Quoted in the Daily Mail, the nerve centre of decent, honest rep...

In cultural terms the tiresome doom-and-gloom connotations stem from misguided interpretations of the calendar. It never meant, 'the end of the world', moreover, 'the end of the world as we know it.'

This Movember, why not use your charity fundraising moustache to mimic some of the greatest cultural figures from history? If it sounds like a tall...

So what of Richard? Is he the monster that we have all been told about, or is he merely a misunderstood king who has fallen victim to decades of unfair character assassination? In reality the truth is probably somewhere in between.

If the name David Frum is at all familiar to British ears, it is generally closely accompanied by "the man who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil'". This may be enough for some readers to dismiss anything he has to say as the work of a crypto-fascist, imperialist running dog, but they do so at their peril.

There's a touching moment in the French classic film Amélie where the heroine, as a little girl, reflects the sunlight off her mirror from her window overlooking Paris, hoping someone out there sees her light. From a window across the city, another lonely child--the boy who will grow up to be the man she'll one day fall in love with--is doing the same reflector trick, waiting for a response with the hope that he's not alone.

In 1918, Kafka wrote about the early kibbutzim in Palestine, arguing there should be no legal courts - "Palestine needs earth (...) but it does not need lawyers". Until Israel realizes world Jewry and their cultural assets are not automatically property of the Jewish state, and removes its lawyers from this sorry tale - the world will continue to be starved of a true literary great's work.

Churning out inspirational quotes about writing has been a favourite past time of authors and poets throughout the ages. Like many creative types, ...

Does your favourite novel mean more because of the environment in which it was created? Scholars of great writers point to the historical context ...

Last night Christopher Hitchens was memorialised with a special award by the Orwell Prize committee. The author, speaker and journalist, famous for...

The winners of The 2012 Orwell Prize has been announced, marking the culmination of a search for the best political writing of the past 12 months. ...

The first voice you hear, should you pause at the headphone points dotted around the British Library’s new exhibition Writing Britain: Wasteland...