The Arctic Monkeys and Take That were the big winners at the Brit Awards.
The Sheffield band won the coveted Best British Group award. They also walked away with the Best British Album award for Favourite Worst Nightmare.
Take That won Best British Live Act and Best British Single for Shine, voted for by commercial radio listeners […]

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Is she a sorceress?
That question, asked of a character in Edna O’Brien’s latest play, could as well be asked of the author.
With 24 books to her name, O’Brien has been almost supernaturally prolific.
Like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett before her, O’Brien is an Irish exile. Their photographs sit on the mantelpiece in her […]

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THE Liverpool Culture Company has begun a search for some of the hottest bands to play at this year’s urban youth festival.
HUB, the biggest free festival of its kind, is held every year at Otterspool Promenade.
This year, 20,000 people are expected over the weekend of May 17 and 18, when there will be BMX […]

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DURING the 1970s, I often spent time in the music room of the L.A. Central Library. One other regular was an elegant, if seedy, older gentleman, always dressed in the same threadbare suit and tie and loath to remove his jacket, even in the summer. He was, I later learned, a famed Hungarian pianist who […]

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Thailand’s parliament has chosen as its new prime minister a pugnacious celebrity chef and self-confessed “front man” for his ousted predecessor Thaksin Shinawatra.

Samak Sundaravej, 72, is a veteran political operative who was openly standing as a proxy for Mr Thaksin, who remains in self-imposed exile after being removed in a bloodless coup 16 months […]

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Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists. We need to dispense with the blinkered view that his A Dance to the Music of Time is a novel sequence that can be enjoyed only by English “toffs” or readers of the Daily Telegraph. It’s a prejudice that has dogged Powell for far too […]

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Tina Turner and Madonna have been doing it for years; now add wacky chanteuse Britney Spears to the list. Two weeks ago, in yet another confrontation with paparazzi, she suddenly started speaking (screaming, actually) like My Fair Lady’s Eliza Doolittle.
Perhaps it’s the influence of her latest beau, a British paparazzo named Adnan Ghalib, who […]

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PITTSBURGH (AP) — Celebrity pathologist Cyril Wecht used government employees as secretaries, gofers and chauffeurs for himself and his private business while working as Allegheny County’s medical examiner and coroner, prosecutors said Monday at the start of Wecht’s trial.
Wecht, 76, is charged with 41 counts, including wire fraud, mail fraud and theft. He has denied […]

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By Jon Loomer

So I dedicated significant ribbing to Bill Simmons’ acquisition of Yi Jianlian last week, suggesting that the karma gods would not approve of his transaction. Yi may have blown up in his face (a mere 48.16 fantasy points in five games), but the gods were indeed smiling on the top four last […]

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The presidential candidates and how many members of Congress, which includes the Senate and the House of Representatives, endorsed them.Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.: 82 including Wisconsin Rep. Tammy BaldwinSen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.: 52 including Massachusetts senators John Kerry and Ted KennedyFormer Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R): 40 including Wisconsin Rep. Tom PetriSen. John McCain, […]

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