Maurice and Josephine's boy is on course to be the British Mark Zuckerberg but just for now, he tells Rosamund Urwin, he has a more pressing objective: Barack Obama's re-election... more
I operate according to the Veblen principle," Martin Ellis Jones tells me as soon as we've sat down. When I confess to not knowing what that means, he tells me the American economist Thorstein Veblen - author of the Theory of the Leisure Classes - came up with the idea of conspicuous consumption when he realised that for something to be covetable, it simply needed a high price... more
Middle age holds no fears for me: I have just seen the fabulous Catherine Deneuve in the equally fabulous French comedy film Potiche - a screen offering to make us all look forward to our early dotage... more
This paper's series of reports this week on illiteracy in London showed that the problem comes at a heavy personal cost: illiterates are disruptive at school and humiliated by their failures. But it has other results... more
Who match-made Madonna, got Kate Moss on stage with Pink Floyd and filled the capital with multicoloured elephants? Olivia Cole meets the London alchemists who make the impossible possible... more
Here we go again. The very week a nude photograph of actress Brooke Shields aged 10 has been removed from a Tate Modern exhibition, on police advice, we have Anna Friel appearing naked on the West End stage... more
Language "caught alive" is an intoxicating experience in all poetry - the sound is "the gold in the ore", said Robert Frost - and most particularly so with the poems of TS Eliot... more
The Mayor of Tower Hamlets defeated Labour to be elected. Livingstone not only backed him but some of Ken's key players are now at the heart of running the council. Stephen Robinson reports
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