As a reader I define a book as "great" if I'm still thinking about it long after I've finished it. As a writer, I'm tougher. A great book is one that makes me re-evaluate what I'm doing, dig deeper, try harder, raise my own bar. But James Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' was something else entirely, far more than just a great book. It changed my life.

After many bit-part roles in big movies, Rose Byrne tells James Mottram what it's like in the spotlight

Hollywood actor Josh Hartnett accepted £20,000 libel damages today over newspaper allegations that he indulged in "steamy shenanigans" with a mystery woman at a London hotel and that they were caught on CCTV.

Political leaders tend not to speak about the arts. I'm not sure why. Perhaps they fear it looks a little "soft" or peripheral to the "big issues". Whatever the reason, they certainly give the subject a wide berth. We've been bombarded with Barack Obama's collected speeches and philosophy, but I defy anyone to give me chapter and verse on his cultural policy. I'm not sure that I know where Gordon Brown stands on cultural issues either.

Charities accuse companies of exploiting young women's fears about weight

Barely two months after Sir Terry Wogan claimed the BBC was no longer the world's best broadcaster, the corporation is facing what amounts to a vote of no confidence from one of the most respected voices in its news department.

You'd get a poor idea of the possibilities of theatre as an art form from the movie star Josh Hartnett's dull, undistinguished performance. It's his co-star, Adam Godley, who shows you what real acting is in this production, slickly and skilfully directed by Terry Johnson.

The Big Picture

The Faculty (15)

YOU CAN see why Conor Lovett has been compared to the likes of Eddie Izzard and Ardal O'Hanlon, as well as great Samuel Beckett (below) interpreters such as Patrick McGee and Barry McGovern. Lovett delivers extracts from the 1951 novel Molloy with a beautiful haziness which perfectly accommodates the absurd one-liners, the coarse gallows humour and speculative riddling of this lost soul, hobbling his way to his old ma, "whose charity kept me dying".

TAMASHA THEATRE'S 14 Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral is a bold attempt by the company to provide a small-scale staging of the 1994 Bollywood blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, a film so popular it played for a year in London. It's the all-smiles performances from the fresh-faced cast, lipsynching to saccharine anglicised tracks, which keep you engaged with the soapy, matrimony-fixated action.

THE BLACK DAHLIA DERBY PLAYHOUSE

Awards committees do sometimes get it right. A cheer went up at Barclays Theatre Awards last week when Bryony Lavery's astonish- ingly powerful and deeply moving Frozen won Best Play. Similar pleasure was induced by the Best Actor, Kevin Spacey, whose witty acceptance speech for his towering performance in The Iceman Cometh was filmed (appropriately enough) in a bar.

Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later 18