Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.He kept files of self-portraits, which he took by setting the timer on his camera, and was even cataloguing photographs of the many empty rooms in which he had ever lived. An ardent letter-writer, he made carbon copies of Read more ...

Another year, another animated film which plonks us down into the ruins of civilisation. After WALL-E , it's the turn of 9, but this time the causes of the apocalypse are not ecological; it's the fault of big bad machines which, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, have turned against us and reduced our cities to rubble.The flesh-and-blood folk are all dead - there are a few glimpses of corpses which are discreet if slightly unnerving. The idea that mankind didn't make it casts an interesting pall over proceedings, but flashbacks show a scientist-cum-inventor trying to Read more ...

If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.From the same pen as When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron, come the stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the diplomat’s wife who brought French cooking back to America, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a frustrated government worker who starts a blog where she records cooking her way through all 524 recipes in Read more ...