Please forgive us for our fascination with the looming train wreck facing the Pasco County School District and the Florida class-size amendment. It is so mesmerizing because it is playing out seemingly according to a script written by masters of irony, s

Imagine a South American telenovela, written by Jerry Seinfeld and Franz Kafka, tracking four young urban adults at the turn of the millennium. Imagine it unfolding before you on a rotating turntable set divided into four rooms. And imagine this mundane/

The literature of Jewish disaffection is now itself a part of Jewish tradition, its gestures of rebellion recuperated as insignia of belonging. Isaac Babel, who wrote about the impotence of the Jewish intellectual, is now a hero to Jewish intellectuals;

Joseph Roth is one of our greatest 20th-century rediscoveries. Is he as great as his near-contemporary Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka? Their intentions are worlds apart, but in Roth’s marvellously well-sprung, memorable novels of the last days of Austria-H

One morning, when Retro Remote woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin: he realised that he hated short films. Perhaps it was the delayed after-effects of enforced undergraduate film project screenings, p

Capaldi reveals that this happens a lot. He says: "People come up to me all the time and ask me to swear at them. So I say, 'f*** off', and they love it. That's what they're after." Such is the price of fame! You will be very relieved to hear that in per