This slender volume explores Genesis, the most potent part of the Old Testament. Even in her first pages, Armstrong reveals much about this ostensibly familiar work. We learn that a writer known as P wrote the opening around 6BC. But God's beneficent creation goes to hell in chapter 2, where a second author J contradicts P "in several respects".

We television critics are used to being lambasted as worthless specimens of humanity. And actors, producers, directors and screenwriters have now been joined by bloggers, tweeters and message-boarders in telling us that we know nothing, the implication being that they know a whole lot more.

Film-maker causes furore with magazine allegations about secret FBI 'investigation'

The leader of Liverpool City Council has written to the Prime Minister informing him that the authority is pulling out of the Government's Big Society plans.

Director Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell, his composer of choice, go hand in hand. Mansell has scored the director's latest, Black Swan, which uses arrangements from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The working relationship goes back to 1996, when the director asked Mansell, then wrapping up his role as frontman in the punk-pop band Pop Will Eat Itself, to score his first film, Pi. It was Mansell's first film composition, and since he has penned the music to almost every Aronofsky film. Perhaps his most famous soundtrack is Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, its haunting and urgent string-fuelled music combining his electronic beginnings with orchestration.

After a confusing year, marked by uncertainty about both the financial and creative futures of their industry, Hollywood’s great and good must choose between the forces of tradition and modernity when they sit down to cast their votes for next month’s Academy Awards.

Natalie Portman is worried people will get bored of her face because she is in so many new movies.