The 23rd novel by the Irish writer John Banville feels like the literary equivalent of Winston Churchill’s description of Russia.

Elmore Leonard’s slang-slung writing style was ?celebrated for "leaving out the bits that readers skip".

The 28th work of fiction from Scotland’s most successful crime writer turns on five ominous disappearances.

<em>The Fear Index</em>, a financial what-if, takes place entirely on the day that the Blair-Brown years officially ended: May 6 2010, election day.

The death of Lucien Freud highlights a specific crisis in the art of the ­traditional portrait.

Is this a good time for factual film-making? It depends on your definitions of fact and film.

Instead of disguising himself in time-honoured fugitive tradition, this terrorist enjoyed provoking his enemies by distributing images of his face.

From the facetious British foreign office memo writers to prophetic novelists, the pope and Catholicism have become the evil force of choice.

Bad times call for upbeat slogans, producers seem to think, no matter what the film is really about, writes Mark Lawson.

Until this week, the stand-out detail about the director Kenny Ortega was his habit of fining cast and crew a dollar for yawning on his sets.

Knowing that writing is a profession with no retirement date, publishers and readers are reluctant to let go.

Since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964 his estate has authorised 32 novels about James Bond by other authors.

The late Norman Mailer was the pioneer and prophet of a culture in which fact and imagination overlapped, writes Mark Lawson.

To the pleasure of their readers, great crime writers, those dedicated makers of early graves, tend themselves towards longevity. Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon both reached…