At one time, every parent and child knew all about Nativity plays. Many will have memories and photographs of tea-towel-adorned shepherds,…

The most recent strain of Brontemania, at large throughout 2011, included major film versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the…

Margaret Atwood is one of the most important and influential writers alive today. Her fiction explores and reflects the current cultural…

According to the Romans, ‘bread and circuses’ were the key to keeping a population content. As long as their immediate physical…

Vincent Van Gogh is now a solid fixture in our cultural vocabulary. I need only mention sunflowers or a bandaged ear to conjure up his life…

The sun rises over the townships of South Africa on 10th May 1994. And the question at the back of everybody's mind is posed aloud by the…

‘You can live your life without limitations and become anyone you want to be.’ Disease and injury, ageing and ugliness, death…

The statistics are every bit as mind-boggling as the spectacle. A reported budget of $280,000,000 makes James Cameron’s Avatar one of…

Mark Meynell is disoriented by the reality-probing of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. There are three deaths. The first is when…