Culture

As a self-taught actor with no drama school training, Idris Elba has managed to make it from Hackney to Hollywood A-list. Now he’s backing a campaign by Project Literacy to help illiterate adults learn to read and write.

In the aftermath of the Grenfell fire the architect Richard Rogers believes we need to radically alter the way we live in our cities. Now comes his memoir – ‘A Place for all People’. At 84 still one of the world’s leading architects, he has proved a revolutionary with the Pompidou Centre in Paris and…

The new face of the cosmetic giant L’Oréal – a transgender model – has been sacked after making comments on social media about race. Munroe Bergdorf had been set to star in a new campaign before her post was reported on.

Robert Webb is one of the most recognisable faces of British comedy – a star of Channel 4’s longest-running sitcom, Peep Show. But now he’s written an autobiography called How Not To Be A Boy. It reveals the troubles and doubts of growing up through grief and family strife – and tackles the reality of…

The actor Vera Chok, casting director Sasha Robertson, and Akua Gyamfi, from The British Blacklist, a database of British black talent, discuss Ed Skerin’s decision to turn down a role in Hellboy.

The actor Ed Skrein has stepped down from a role in the latest remake of the Hellboy cult comic series after he found out the character was originally of mixed Asian heritage.

At times like this we all need cheering up. At least, according to the American actor Clarke Peters, who’s back on the London stage with a new production of his hit musical Five Guys Named Moe. He’s not so cheerful about the 45th President of the United States.

PVRIS front woman Lynn Gunn says she came out to her parents at 18 – and she’s opened up about depression too – talking about going to therapy to overcome what she called “dark times”. We spoke to her about the personal, the political – and being gay in Trump’s America.

The abrupt retirement of anarchic electronic band The KLF in 1994 was described as the “most heroic act of public self-destruction in the history of pop”. Signing off with a stunt in which they set fire to one million pounds, they deleted their back catalogue but promised to return after 23 years. That time is…

It was a network of safe houses that helped slaves in America escape the brutality of the south, but in the author Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, the underground railroad takes on physical form: a steam train delivering runaways through secret tunnels to the safety of the north. His magical realist take on one girl’s struggle…

A time when America was riven by racial violence, when civic abuse of the black community boiled over into riots, when the army was deployed to a city where the fires of rebellion burned in the streets. Not today, but Detroit in 1967. Fifty years later the Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow has made a new…

We wondered how the idea of ‘sharenting’ plays with the people who are regularly featured in their parent’s photos – the children themselves. So earlier we invited five children into the studio to ask their thoughts on over sharing.

The term ‘sharenting’ has been used to describe parents who feel the need to share almost every step of their child’s life on social media, without asking them. Some do it for money, some to reach out to friends and family, some are showing-off. The end result may be a generation of children growing up…

There were an average of 171 hate crimes every day in England and Wales last year. The incidents range from threats and attacks on people, to attacks on places of worship, spiking first after Brexit and again after the terror attacks. What’s more, the numbers could well be an underestimate. So where does this leave…

Dolly Parton said he had one of the greatest voices of all time. It’s just one of thousands of tributes paid to the Country singer Glen Campbell who has died at the age of 81. Famed as a self-taught prodigy he released over 70 albums and sold 45 million records.