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Justine Jordan admires an ambitious debut novel with a razor-sharp vision of teenage lifeThis astonishing debut novel from young New Zealander Eleanor Catton is a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original. Though its impulses and methods can only be called experimental, the prose is so arresting, the storytelling so seductive, that wherever the book falls open it's near-impossible to put down.Through two different time schemes, in fragmentary scenes shuffled together like a pack of playing cards, Catton juxtaposes the aftershocks of an affair between a high-school student and her music teacher with the local drama school's appropriation of the scandal for a theatre project. As well as darting about chronologically, the narrative makes surprising leaps in register and tone, so that characters speak in a mixture of world-weary teenspeak, pitch-perfect realism, and mannered theatricality, sometimes w

Welcome to BroadwayWorld TV's new weekly video series, BroadwayBeat's Priceless Spotlight. Sponsored by WORLD MasterCard, the program presents special moments by some of theatre's past, present, and future greats!

Comrades, Bill Douglas's epic 1987 film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, is being reissued to mark the 175th anniversary of their trial. Sheila Rowbotham hails a poetic and painterly work which was also a vigorous challenge to ThatcherismA massive surge of trade union militancy; fears about the state of the economy; a government under pressure from employers; harsh sentences delivered using archaic legislation in an effort to intimidate workers.This may sound like the 1970s, but it also applies to a period of revolt and repression that occurred long before, in 1834, when six agricultural labourers, three of whom were Methodist lay preachers, were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Every year they are commemorated by the Trade Union Congress, at a festival in Tolpuddle in Dorset, as the founders of the trade union movement. Yesterday, to mark the 175th anniversary of their trial, the festival screened Bill Douglas's epic, long-lost and finally rediscovered film Comrades: A Lanternist

Karly Ashworth is evicted from Channel 4's Big Brother house, while five new housemates, including Karly's boyfriend, enter.

A bill of nearly £1,600 for an 'executive Christmas dinner' held by the BBC's creative director Alan Yentob was among the claims in the latest list of expenses published by the broadcaster.Former BBC former drama chief Jane Tranter, who quit as the BBC head of fiction last year to take up a new US role with the corporation's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, claimed more than £3,000 for flowers over a three-year period, most of them as gifts for BBC stars.The new figures follow the publication last month of more than £360,000-worth of expense claims made by 13 members of the BBC's executive board. The latest statistics relate to the BBC's 30 most senior managers outside of the board, including the controllers of all its TV and radio stations, and other senior executives.Unlike the publication of MPs' expenses, the data was not heavily redacted and shone further light into the internal - and occasionally unlikely - workings of the BBC. Some of the more eye-catching claims included:. C

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, whose authoritative delivery of news events from the John F. Kennedy assassination to the Apollo moon landing and Vietnam War, made him 'the most trusted man in America,' died on Friday at age 92.

10 Comics to Watch: Not 'Unpronouncable' for long -- New Yorkers familiar with local standup have surely encountered Kumail Nanjiani, because the 31-year-old Pakistan native performs every night of the week

10 Comics to Watch: 'Mad TV' star moves on -- Matt Braunger is an accidental comic. Growing up in Portland, Ore., he was the class clown. But when he went to Manhattanville College, N.Y., it was to study acting, and his trips to New York City were to see theater. 'Standup wasn't on my mind,' he says.

Take a look at star Jake Gyllenhaal in this video game adaptation.

10 Comics to Watch: 'Mad TV' star moves on -- Matt Braunger is an accidental comic. Growing up in Portland, Ore., he was the class clown. But when he went to Manhattanville College, N.Y., it was to study acting, and his trips to New York City were to see theater. 'Standup wasn't on my mind,' he says.