Film

If you happen to be passing through King’s Cross and can spare 10 minutes, drop by the British Library to see Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction, a small but perfectly formed exhibition about crime writing. The exhibits range from first editions of famous classics, such as a copy of Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors that has been loved a little too well or the crispy pages of a 1926 issue of The Sketch magazine, the first to feature Miss Marple; to brief thematic studies on subjects like the development of the female detective over 150 years or the true crime sub-genre; to memorabilia such as private photographs of

Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway, and see what you think. (You might want to keep hold of the receipt.) The thought concerns something in The Ghost by Robert Harris. The book is as gripping as any of his works, and as if that wasn’t praise enough it also gave us, via a truly woeful film version, the comedic delights of Ewan McGregor’s London accent. Next to that performance Dick van Dyke becomes Ray Winstone. At one point in the novel the unnamed ghostwriter penning the

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with

Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down (2006). Harold Macmillan and the Conservative party were driven from office. Yevgeny Ivanov was recalled to Russia. Stephen Ward was hounded to death. And poor Christine Keeler… In that mesmerising scene in the film Scandal (1989), where Mandy (played by Bridget Fonda) and Christine (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, as she then was) are getting dressed, to the

I think it was a Frenchman — it usually is — who observed that the English love their animals more than their children. At first glance, General Jack Seely’s Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse — originally published as My Horse Warrior in 1934 — is striking proof of this. In an entire book devoted to the exploits of his horse, the author’s final mention of his son Frank is stunning in its brevity: We had a last gallop together along the sands, Warrior and [Frank’s charger] Akbar racing each other; then I drove him in a motor-car to rejoin his regiment .… He asked me to

I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking old man.’ She said this the way only a Welsh Baptist matron could: grimly, and because she was secure in the knowledge that she was not likely to meet either in chapel or on the streets of Carmarthen. Richard Burton, once of Port Talbot, later of the Dorchester Hotel, was cat-nip to women. He had a face ravaged by acne and his feet smelt, but he managed to sleep with the most beautiful leading ladies of his time, something his