Do you like nature, and art? If so, you might like something called On Vanishing Land, produced by British "sound artists and theorists" Mark Fisher and Justin Barton. What they've produced, which is in an art gallery in London called The Showroom from February 6, is "a new form of...

It's almost every day. On Tuesday, it was the nurse who phoned the wrong family five times to tell them that their mother, who was sitting up in her hospital bed, had died. On Sunday, it was the survey which showed that fewer than 10 per cent of nurses thought...

Minnie Driver must be cold. It's freezing outside. There's snow outside. I'm in a woolly dress, and scarf, and boots, and have just tried to defrost my fingers with the hand dryer at Carluccio's, and I'm cold. Really cold. So Minnie Driver, who isn't in a woolly dress, and scarf,...

"Now I come to look at love," says Sharon Olds, "in a new way, now that I know I'm not/ standing in its light." She says this in her poem "Unspeakable," in her collection Stag's Leap, which last week won the T S Eliot prize for poetry. It's just one...

Only his daughter yawned. When the 44th President of the United States of America stood, in the bitter cold, in front of 900,000 people, and told them what he wanted to do for their nation, only his youngest daughter yawned. She was cold, and tired, and 11 years old, and...

On Saturday, my mother fell down the stairs. She got off the stairlift, put her foot on the second-to-last stair, and slipped. She didn't call an ambulance, because my mother thinks breaking an ankle so badly that it needs to have plates put in it is no reason to call...

"Who is it," says a character called Cissy in Quartet, "who said 'old age is not for sissies'?" The character, played by Pauline Collins in Dustin Hoffman's first film as a director, can't remember.

But then she can't remember quite a lot of things. In this, she is like many...

On Sunday, I gave away my mince pies. I had got to the point where I didn't really like a cup of tea without one, and when you drink as much tea as I do that adds up to an awful lot. I had, it's true, just had a three-course...

Everyone smiled. The woman who greeted me on the door smiled and the woman who told me where to register smiled and so did the woman who gave me a badge. Perhaps these women always smile, or perhaps they thought they had to. Perhaps they thought that if you were...

It doesn't happen all that often. It really doesn't happen all that often that something you've been hoping for is announced on the morning news. You could, I suppose, have sung a little song as you leapt out of bed because a bundle of cells would one day be a...

"I've got to start," says Daniel Radcliffe, "by saying my mum sent me a column you wrote." For a moment, I'm thrown. I've got half an hour to interview one of the most famous young men in the world, which is less time than I've ever been given to interview...

Age takes its toll. If, for example, you're a rock star who became very, very famous 30 years ago for taking traditional Irish music and giving it a wild, punk twist, and you also liked a drink, then you might not look quite as sprightly as you used to. And...

He's the "guru of gurus." He's a "master of the form and a servant of the craft." He's "legendary," according to the Washington Post, and "brilliant," according to Newsday, and "empowering," according to Movieline. He is, in fact, Hollywood's "most wanted screenwriting teacher," and has been for 30 years. "Everything...

Illness, said Susan Sontag, "is not a metaphor." It isn't, in other words, a battle you can fight, or a war you can win. Cancer, she said, and she had it at the time she said it, isn't a curse, or a punishment, or an embarrassment. Cancer, she said, in...

She doesn't look well. The woman with the pale face, and wispy hair, who's gripping a handkerchief as if it were a lifeline, really doesn't look all that well. "He asked me," she tells the woman who's interviewing her, on what should have been Newsnight, but was Panorama,...

Alice Cooper is telling me about a goat. At the Bloodstock festival, which he has just been to, everyone, he says, was talking about a goat. "The story," he says, with a smile that shows his big, white, even teeth, "is that someone's sacrificed a goat in their dressing room....

The low point seemed to be the plastic doll. The low point of this discussion, which has been going on for the past 10 days, and also for years, seemed, at the time, to be a little plastic doll. The plastic doll, which was fished out of a pocket by...

In fiction, as in anything else, it's hard to do anything new. It's hard to break rules that have never been broken. It's hard to find new styles, and new rhythms, and new ways of structuring a narrative that keeps the reader engaged, and the reading experience fresh. It's hard...

He cried in court. The man who has been charged with kidnapping and murdering April Jones, and also hiding her body, cried on Monday in court.

He didn't explain his tears. He didn't say, for example, whether he was crying because he'd done a terrible thing, or whether he was...

It almost makes you laugh. The idea that Western society is facing "the end of men" almost makes you titter a bit hysterically. It almost makes you want to sit down with a cup of coffee, and perhaps a cake, but definitely not a cupcake, and ask the American journalist...