"Hangman hangman, hang me a man, any old man will do," Luke Haines maintains on "A Badger Called Nick Love" from the 45-year-old's characteristically eccentric (and menacing) new concept record, Rock and Roll Animals.

When he first encountered them as a child, the porous texture of aubergines put Bill Granger off.  Now, it's precisely that meltingly smooth quality that has finally won him over

The ordinariness of life inside Britain's busiest criminal law firm was as startling as the dedication to wrongdoing shared by so many of its clients. In one scene a brief calmly talked to a 21-year-old as a financial adviser might a customer thinking about opening an ISA: "If you brandish an axe in a public place, that would contravene conditions of your Asbo."

Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

As headlines go, “Sliced bread is made here” is perhaps not the most compelling in newspaper history. Still, those five words, splashed across the front page of Missouri’s Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune in 1928, marked the moment the world discovered the greatest thing since, well, ever.

Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

It's the undead with subtitles. Only they don't explain why zombies like pasta so much

According to a new survey, people from the North aren't very keen on Londoners

Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

The vogue for cutesy widdle phwases on the back of products, as pioneered by Innocent Smoothies, isn’t going away. It’s known as ‘wackaging’ – and it’s driving Will Coldwell mad

He served in the German navy during the war, which he ended with shrapnel ‘in my entire body’

Few thirtysomethings get taken for 17-year-olds, but it's not just appearances that hold the clues to youth

When she was young, a tomboyish Griffiths longed to do everything her brothers did.

The Prime Minister's authoritarian streak extends to dealing with street cats