He pitched slave-ship dramas to Ingmar Bergman, cast Marlon Brando as a bisexual man and wrote a Malcolm X screenplay that horrified the FBI. Why was this cinephile spurned by Hollywood?It’s fair to say James Baldwin wasn’t a fan of The Exorcist. “It has absolutely nothing going for it,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir-meets-criticism collection The Devil...

Report commissioned by HarperCollins shows that uptake in YA fiction in older readers is due to behavioural changes described as ‘emerging adulthood’ or delaying ‘adult’ lifeYoung adult fiction such as The Hunger Games, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and the Heartstopper graphic novels might be aimed at teenagers – but new research has shown that more...

Robert Muchamore’s series of novels about young undercover intelligence operatives with troubled lives shook up the sanitised world of early noughties YA literatureAs a keen teenage reader in the noughties, I was a devout fan of Anthony Horowitz’s spy series Alex Rider. “What if James Bond was a teenager?” proved a compelling premise and even the truly...

Lauren Child brings a light touch to big issues, Elle McNicoll explores autism – and a secret society is at work in Paris’s sewersThe inimitable Lauren Child revived her longest-serving character, Clarice Bean (7m sales, 25 years in print) in 2021. Smile (HarperCollins), her latest title, takes on big themes – ecosystem collapse, at home and beyond...

This entertaining study of our obsession with Armageddon and its energising impact on the arts shows that every generation believes it will witness the world’s endThroughout the 500-plus pages of Dorian Lynskey’s overview of the art and literature of the end of the world, terrible things are done to the Earth. It is frozen, boiled, irradiated and desiccated....

Live music venues, clubs and bars feed creativity and drive social change. But they’re increasingly in dangerA few weeks ago, I decided to walk from London Bridge, up through Soho, to Marylebone, to catch a train home to the West Midlands. It was late-ish on a Friday afternoon, early spring was in the air, and I had time to kill. I was expecting the...