People
Livingstone defends Beijing trip
Former London mayor Ken Livingstone has been living it up at the Beijing Olympics, courtesy of the Chinese, according to a report in the London Evening Standard. He was flown out business class and stayed in a £1,000-a-night-plus hotel, according to the paper. Livingstone is reportedly unrepentant about accepting the... [continued]
Saakashvili’s goons turf out Western diners
If the President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, wants to keep his friends in the West, he has a funny way of going about it. There was a bizarre scene on Wednesday night at
the Kopala Restaurant in central Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, when his security guards turned up and ordered... [continued]
Shaun Walker's account of South Ossetia in The First Post 
Tarantino upsets Germans with Brad Pitt Nazi film
The film director Quentin Tarantino has upset Germans with plans for his next film, about the Second World War, that will reportedly show Nazi soldiers having their brains smashed out with a baseball bat by an American soldier. Even by his standards, the new film, given the... [continued]
Kafka biog slammed over porn claims
Claims that Franz Kafka had a penchant for hardcore porn have stirred up a hornet’s nest in literary circles. Oxford academic James Hawes reveals in a new book, Excavating Kafka, published this week, that the novelist subscribed to up-market pornographic material when he was in his twenties. Hawes, who... [continued]
How Simon Gray and Pinter patched it up
Harold Pinter and his wife Lady Antonia Fraser led proceedings at the funeral of the hard-living playwright Simon Gray in Notting Hill on Friday.
The service, with a large turn-out from the theatrical profession, was planned by the Pinters who live close by. But it might not... [continued]
Playwright and smoker Simon Gray dies
Elena Roger wins rave reviews for Edith Piaf musical
A star is reborn. The diminutive Argentinian actress Elena Roger has London at her feet after winning encore after encore and stunning reviews for playing the tragic French singer
Edith Piaf at London's Donmar Warehouse. "She has folded herself into Edith Piaf so perfectly you cannot see... [continued]
Video: La Vie en Rose
No luvvie lost between Glenda and Dirk
Glenda Jackson, the actress-turned-politician, and her fellow British screen star Dirk Bogarde, were not, perhaps, the close friends they once professed to be. In a letter to another friend, just published in a collection of his private correspondence, Bogarde described Jackson as "a plain girl, with feet... [continued]
In brief: Paxman attacks Robbie Burns
BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman is in trouble with the Scots after describing the work of Robbie Burns, Scotland's national poet, as "sentimental doggerel" in the foreword to the latest Chambers Dictionary. Paxman, who once complained that Britain was run by "a sort of Scottish Raj", has said that he... [continued]
