The sunbaked Cannes Film Festival got under way with Wes Anderson's “Moonrise Kingdom,” whose carefully composed whimsy stood in stark contrast to the zoo-like atmosphere at the annual French Riviera extravaganza.

Ian Irvine looks back at how some of the arts' most prolific journal keepers used to spend the turn of the year...eating lark and making love

If you ask me... never machine-wash a giant woolly vagina

The latest addition to Reaktion's animal series – surely one of the most successful publishing ventures of recent years – reveals the donkey, "generally considered beneath notice", to be a creature of the utmost fascination.

Desert dissection's worth a closer look

"I hear you make wine in England now, what's it like?" You get used to the sardonic nudge and wink from foreigners as this question is lobbed like a hand grenade. How to respond without waving the flag like a demented chauvinist? Easy, actually. Just mention our burgeoning sparkling wine industry and how, because of England's cool maritime climate and chalky soils, our green and pleasant land actually is the new Jerusalem for fizz.

Film directors may be auteurs in the eyes of the critics, but they all depend upon collaborators.

Overseas visitors to the outback are often delighted to see kangaroos hopping across the sunburnt plains. But what on earth, they wonder, are camels doing in the depths of the Australian interior?

Whereas Ruck and Maul took the trouble four weeks ago to find something out about rugby union in Abu Dhabi, the television coverage of last Sunday's Anglo-Welsh Cup tie in the Gulf left us little the wiser.