What happens when an “International Children’s Charity” funded by multi-billion pound hedge fund speculators, wants to a build new academy school in some of London’s poorest boroughs?

Well maybe you get a situation like that in London's North Brent, where teachers, parents, trade unionists and local residents have come together to occupy the Wembley Park Sports Ground – the proposed site of the contentious Wembley Academy.

In March 2007, [...]

It is unlikely that George Soros, Japanese anarchists and William Shatner have much in common - except, perhaps, for their shared study of Esperanto, the "international auxiliary language" now more than 120 years old and being heavily promoted by activists in Hokkaido, Japan in advance of this summer's G8 summit.

Invented in 1887 by Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, Esperanto is a constructed language with Romanic and Germanic roots, Belarussian phonology, [...]

A giant in the world of African arts, Werewere Liking is a painter, playwright, writer and film-maker known for a postmodern style of labyrinthine prose often reminiscent of surrealist automatism. In this, her fifth novel, Cameroon is unnamed but easily recognisable as the setting for an elderly woman’s celebration of female strength.

Aged 75, Halla Njockè embarks upon an epic personal journey of reconstructing memories, from childhood traumas involving a [...]

Beefsteak tartare, bugs and Beethoven. Nadine Gordimer’s new selection of 13 short stories provides a tour through the butterfly-effect consequences of the past, the twinnings of fate and happenstance, and the trappings of identity and heredity.

Amid backdrops of sweeping social change – apartheid, the Holocaust – Gordimer’s stories explore the subjectivity of experience, imagining alternative pasts and alternative endings. Susan Sontag and Edward Said share a meal at a [...]

Students at New York's Columbia University stopped eating on Thursday 8 November 2007, and within 24 hours the news had reached my warehouse flat in North London.

I called Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, wrote statements of support and solidarity, and signed online petitions.

Everyday during their 10-day hunger strike (which ended at 9pm on 16 November) I logged onto the internet [...]

The social superstar in your Spanish class suddenly seems to live and breathe Red Bull and offers you a can after an all-night study session. But is this empathy, or is she being paid by the company?

An established marketing strategy in the US, viral marketing as it is called, is now being used in the UK by brands such as Red Bull, Apple and Jack Daniels, which recruit [...]

Zombies and Brains: The un-dead and the well-read

The living dead are back in cinemas across the UK, bringing a new onslaught of films about flesh-eating zombies and the unintended consequences of scientific experimentation.

First, zombies terrorise a small town in Texas after an experimental biological weapon is accidentally released from a remote US military base in Planet Terror, released in the UK tonight, on 9 November.

The Emo Diaries: The Digital Generation and How They Express Themselves

Zach Braff’s would-be mistress in The Last Kiss first seduces him with the bittersweet truth that: "The world is moving so fast now that we start freaking long before our parents did because we don't ever stop to breathe anymore."

Mid-life crises make for less trendy material, and so it’s the quarter-life crises of hipster working professionals that [...]

Brick Lane hits the Big Screen

Monica Ali’s controversial novel Brick Lane hits the big screen today (Friday, 26 October) with a gala screening at the Times BFI London Film Festival", three weeks in advance of the national release (Friday, 16 November).

With Sarah Gavron directing, the screen adaptation of Brick Lane stars Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik and Christopher Simpson. About London’s East End Asian community, Ali’s [...]