The director and screenwriter discusses his new film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel. His screen credits include Venus, The Mother, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies and Notting Hill.
Join the Australian Children’s Laureate to learn how to draw three of his crazy but lovable characters: Mr Chicken, Old Tom and Horrible Harriet. He will also teach budding young artists how to create their very own characters.
On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all gunned down in a blaze of bullets. On the centenary of these brutal murders, historian Helen Rappaport set out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them.
Jorge Edwards, writer, literary critic, journalist and Chilean diplomat, and well-deserved recipient of the Premio Cervantes, discusses his latest novel, El descubrimiento de la pintura (Lumen), with the Peruvian writer, Fernando Iwasaki.
Sariolghalam is Professor of International Relations at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University and is one of Iran’s best-selling authors. For 26 years he has taught and conducted research on contemporary history and Iran’s relations with the outside world. His acknowledged skill has been to find ways to navigate Iran’s red lines in public discourse, and to avoid being targeted for being outspoken in print. The political establishment not only tolerated his writings, it has also been influenced by them. And Iran’s next generation views them as having helped to frame the 2015 nuclear agreement and expectations for the future.
The 2013 Booker Prize-winner brings to Hay her richly evocative, mid-19th century world of shipping, banking and gold-rush boom and bust. A network of fates and fortunes, it is also a ghost story and a gripping mystery.
The sensationally successful historical novelist tells the tale of the game of thrones that were the Wars of the Roses. Ravenspur is the latest in the series that includes Stormbird, Trinity and Bloodline.
In the context of the Governor of the Bank of England's recent warnings about the financial risks from climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, the economics journalist Paul Mason and head of media for Greenpeace, Ben Stewart talk to Prospect Magazine's Serena Kutchinsky and previews the UN Climate Change Summit in Paris.
Herefordshire in 1913 was an old-fashioned shire under the benevolent rule of the Church and the gentry. Its bishop was opposed to war and his successor was opposed to women’s suffrage. Many of its farmers refused to plough on a Sunday: many more regarded women as being incapable of farm work. By 1919 the shire was in mourning for more than 4,000 men, had employed 4,000-plus women in munitions factories and another 2,500 on farms. It had deprived more children of a proper education than any other English county.
Who were these Supreme Court judges who might thwart ‘the will of the people’? What were their backgrounds, their politics? In response, there came a reassuring message: the job of judges is simply to apply the law made by our elected Parliament. But this reassurance is based on an understanding of judging that is at best only half true; it does sometimes matter who our judges are. Rackley is Professor of Law at University of Birmingham.
The actress and winner of Celebrity MasterChef in 2014 discusses her first book for children. A wonderfully inventive story of a boy who finds he can talk to animals, Zoo Boy takes a fresh and funny look at animals and how we treat them.
Genealogist Catriona Crowe demonstrates how to use the 1901 and 1911 censuses to trace your ancestry.
Junk won the prestigious Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Book Prize in 1996. It was criticised for depicting young drug-users. Twenty years on, author Melvin Burgess discusses the book and the controversy that has surrounded it with Julia Eccleshare.
The novelist presents an evening of ancient and modern stories to meet the chill of a winter’s night. Winterson’s most recent novel was The Gap of Time, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Her new festive book is Christmas Days, 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days from which she will be reading.
In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch’s seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian cosmonaut was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? Like a non-magical version of the wizards of J K Rowling’s world, they lived secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Aaronovitch revisited his own memories of belief and action. He found himself studying the old secret service files, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal.