'Art is really about life, and about challenging the establishment...'

The surprisingly large number of English people who heartily dislike their own country are in for a trying few days. The cricket season has started. Two bank holiday weekends in the spring sunshine will encourage families to celebrate the joys of the English countryside and seaside. Politically, the likelihood that the Scottish National Party will soon enjoy majority rule in its own country will put the question of nationalism centre-stage.

Two members of a murderous gun gang were jailed for life today for the murder of an innocent 16-year-old girl shot dead when a tit-for-tat revenge hit went wrong.

Martin Amis's new novel will deliver a withering attack on British society – but it is no parting shot, he tells Andrew Johnson

In the last few months, I've watched The Warriors as the sun set over London Fields, Blade Runner: The Director's Cut in a pub (complete with interval for buying drinks), Sweet Smell of Success at a film-school speakeasy and Casablanca on a friend's big screen. In fact, the last film for which I made a pilgrimage to the bright lights of Leicester Square was Sex and the City 2 – and the less said about that, the better. I'm not alone, either. Multiplexes, move over: these days discerning film fans are looking for more from their cinema experience than an enormous screen and overpriced popcorn.

Reports of the death of film have been greatly exaggerated. It's not the movies we've gone off, just traditional movie-houses. In their place, finds Alice Jones, are screens at festivals, in fields, car parks and sheds, and themed nights at secret locations and in private clubs

Six members of a bicycle gang who murdered innocent schoolboy Shaquille Smith in a park were jailed for life today.

A gang of six youths were found guilty at the Old Bailey today of murdering an innocent 14-year-old schoolboy stabbed in a park.

The first edition of The Independent on Sunday Review, on 28 January 1990, was a generous launching pad for keen young book reviewers. Alongside Anita Brookner and Germaine Greer the books pages carried an essay by Alan Bennett ("Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room was not my mother's way of thinking," he wrote. "'Books untidy a room' more like or, as she would have said, 'Books upset'") and a column by some chap called Sebastian Faulks. His first column for The Sunday Review was a literary ramble about driving a Sinclair C5 and was much like this one in tone, but with better hair. He left the paper not long afterwards to "concentrate on his writing". Nobody knows what has happened to him since.

Two more people have been arrested over the murder of Shaquille Smith in London on Saturday, Scotland Yard said today.

The mother of a teenager who was stabbed in an apparent gang feud spoke yesterday of how she found him bleeding to death from a single stab wound to his stomach outside their house.

A 14-year-old boy died in hospital yesterday after being stabbed during a fight in east London the previous evening. He was the 25th teenager to be murdered in the capital this year, and the 20th victim of a knife attack.

For those of a certain literary vintage, the idea of a pub in London Fields will bring to mind hideous images of Keith Talent playing darts in the Black Cross, in Martin Amis's 1989 novel London Fields. The Black Cross would not make a round-up of fictional Star Bars – unless it was a highly specialised list of sticky-carpeted hell holes in which to plan your own murder – but fortunately in this case the truth is much nicer than fiction.

Literary feuds are rare. But when they happen, they can last a lifetime. The pen is always nastier than the sword.