The 24-hour news cycle and the televised leadership debates have reduced politics to numbers and soundbites. You'll learn more about Britain today from the BBC's new sitcom

Stephen Poliakoff is the only remaining dramatist exploring the recent British past. We need work like his to help us examine ourselves and our country

Although it had its moments, much of the BBC's poetry season was a lesson in why celebrities shouldn't "do" literature

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, the second volume of the letters of one of the 20th century's great intellectuals makes strange reading: in turn troubling, exasperating, two-faced,...

1) Drama-doc: the old chestnut The big thing wrong with last week's BBC2 docudrama (Margaret) is the usual problem: neither fish nor fowl. With the inevitable weasel words at the beginning (based...

Michael Ignatieff, the telegenic intellectual and writer, has had three separate careers in three different countries. Now the former presenter of the Late Show is tipped to become the next prime...

On 29 January, in a previous blog post on Gaza, I wrote: "Reuters UK today published an interesting online report, 'Hamas accused of torture death of Gaza critic'. " I went on to note that the...

1. David James seems a nice guy but one terrible error was discouraging. Green did well. 2. Ashley Cole was - again - all over the place. How may times in the second haf did Sean Wright-Phillips...

The first programme in Series two of Mad Men was a huge disappointment. There are two kinds of TV drama series: those which are good enough to sustain a second series and those that aren't. Mad Men...

We are still in early February, and Scolari is now the eighth Premiership manager to have resigned or been fired this season. It's not hard to see why Big Phil should have filled the headlines, but...