London News

Colin Firth joined by Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, Timothy Spall and Derek Jacobi in biopic about reluctant wartime monarch George VI With the people ... George VI and Queen Elizabeth meeting air raid victims in London's East End in April 1941.

Alan Bennett has a lot on his mind in his latest play, "The Habit of Art," including creativity, aging, fame, anonymity and sex, and it hangs together because of his gift for language and fine stagecraft, and some splendid performances.

If Alan Bennett had written a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten we would probably have welcomed it and slipped easily into suspending disbelief, into relishing his version of the great men.

Alan Bennett is that peculiarly British thing, a writer who is both barbed and beloved, contrary and cuddly.

"It is fleshy and voracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and for drink; it consumes and it excretes, maintained within a continual state of greed and desire." This is how Peter Ackroyd, impassioned scholar of London, describes the greatest city in the world.

Grace Brothers, the TV department store where sitcom Are You Being Served? was set, is to reopen its doors one final time - to sell off items owned by its most famous star.

Interview: Paul Giamatti - 'It would be nice to just be the funny guy. Or the calm guya ' To read this article in full you must have registered and have a Premium Content Subscription with the The Scotsman site.

From The Vicar of Dibley to Father Ted , the calling of the cloth has produced comedy gold.

It's like playing darts, but you miss the bull's-eye over and over again. You can't help but wonder: Will I ever hit it? I've had some good luck lately, landing a role in the new Garry Marshall film, " Valentine's Day ." In the movie I have a few great scenes with Jessica Biel.

With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun Babbo This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection Bright Star Although the first half of Kwei-Armah's production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops ...

Origin of the specious ... William Chubb and Ronan Vibert in Gilbert Is Dead. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Robin French made his mark five years ago with a short Royal Court play, Bear Hug, about a couple who greet their son's transformation into a bear with perverse optimism.

ORPHAN : If you can get past the icky notion of demonizing orphans -- and that's a big if -- you'll discover a genuinely terrifying chiller about a 9-year-old monster -child whose adoptive parents rue the day they brought her home from the orphanage.

What makes a British cultural institution? Style? Sophistication? In the case of comic magazine Viz, the ingredients are swearing, toilet humor, and biting satire.

Sir Stanley Spencer was a British painter . Spencer studied at the Slade in London, but he spent most of his life in the village of his birth, Cookham in Berkshire.

London has a lot of theatres. Generally, that's where you go to see plays. Sometimes though, a production runs away from the theatre, gets lost, and ends up somewhere a little different.

Ronnie Corbett, comedian: 'I claim not to like chardonnay, but curiously my current favourite white is just that, the ripe, buttery and smooth 2007 Christophe Cordier Vire-Clesse Vieilles Vignes ' Photo: GRAHAM JEPSON James Wilby, actor: 'I dont even try to drink anything other than bordeaux.

"The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" by Peter Ackroyd; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday British author Peter Ackroyd, a one-man encyclopedia of British history, language and culture, has written 31 books of fiction, biography, cultural criticism and poetry, many of them prizewinners.

Archivists and rare-book librarians have a unique view into the world of literary mysteries.A After all, they work with the clues every day.A Sometimes their collections unlock untold treasures, sometimes they hold the key to long-kept secrets, and sometimes they point the way toward a new life.

Ten lucky readers of The Local can now win tickets to watch the critically acclaimed Armando Iannucci satire In the Loop.

A restored silent movie from 1928 about the London Tube seems comfortably familiar and intriguingly strange at the same time Geoff Brown Two rows of passengers sit facing each other across the Tube carriage.