Family News Home

Trying to persuade older children to join a family trip? Joanna Symons suggests 10 breaks that teenagers won’t sneer at.
Parents are not ideal travelling companions as far as older teenagers are concerned, but if you want to keep family holidays going there are certain options that will still pull them in.
Remote cottages or serious culture [...]

The real excitement took place a few miles away, a few hours earlier, in a sports arena at Washington’s American University. Before a young, multi-racial and delirious crowd, Barack Obama was being anointed as the new John F Kennedy. JFK was no saint, but a link to the legend can add lustre to any Democratic [...]

A Mills %26 Boon paperback is sold in a UK bookshop on average every 6.6 seconds. Compare this to our domestic market for literary fiction, where some critically acclaimed novels sell so few copies that the author might well have been better to bypass the publishers and knock them off on a photocopier. As it [...]

So well done More4 for scheduling the first showing of No End in Sight, written, produced and directed by Charles Ferguson, which aired last Tuesday, the day it had been nominated for a best documentary feature Oscar.This was two of hours of riveting, epic viewing that rejected the opportunity to be obviously filmic (there was, [...]

Trouble was, as Laurence Bergreen points out in this enthralling revivification of the man, the Venetian merchant’s memoirs did feature shameless embellishments and untruths. But he was no liar, just a bombastic braggart, dictating his recollections to a man who could spin a tale, Rustichello of Pisa, a prolific writer of popular Arthurian romances. The [...]

In 1990 Durcan won the Whitbread Award for Daddy, Daddy, a searing collection in which he explored his troubled, touching relationship with his father, Judge John Durcan, “the President of the Circuit Court / Of the Republic of Ireland, / Appointed by the party of the Fine Gael”. Eighteen years later, in The Laughter of [...]

Thus far, almost every single mainstream Hollywood movie about politics or the war on terror, however notionally critical or satirical, has been defanged and auto-castrated at the outset by its own terror of being thought unpatriotic. Whatever its faults, that certainly doesn’t apply to Haggis’s film, which finishes with a boldly challenging and even blasphemous [...]

Spilt Milk is an example of what is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon: it’s a bona fide Overlooked Classic, a Great Lost Album. If we are going to get pedantic, it lacks some of the allegedly quintessential qualities of other Lost Albums. Nobody involved in its creation has - up to the time of writing, [...]