Forty years after Alien was released, Suzanne Harrington pays tribute to Lieutenant Ellen Ripley — one of the greatest female protagonists in cinema history.

Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig adhered to the dictum that ‘every age gets the diseases it deserves’ as translator Will Stone tells JP O’Malley.

There are, putting it mildly, plenty of people who would like to see Mel Gibson thrown into a hellhole of a Mexican prison and the key thrown away, given his increasingly deranged anti-Semitic rants.