A dream perverted

Fifty years ago, Nobel prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka formed a university society with his friends. This month, in a report for Channel 4 News, he returned to Nigeria to find his alma mater being exorcised - part of a national clampdown on the copycat 'cults' blamed for a series of campus atrocities. How has this come to pass?

Lights, camera, armed police: film students fall foul of law

When members of SO19, Scotland Yard's firearms unit, swooped on the gangsters after an hour of surveillance, they found eight petrified A-level students filming their Media Studies coursework with three toy guns bought from a sweet shop.

The Fonda syndrome

Jane Fonda charts her transformation from blonde sex-bomb to Californian dreamer in My Life So Far. Natasha Walter reflects on the many incarnations of a Hollywood star.

The concept of Cary

Chris Petit finds Wu Ming's fiction has more truth than Marc Eliot's fact when it comes to Cary Grant and Hollywood.

Burton letters donated to Swansea

A private collection of diaries, letters and books belonging to the actor Richard Burton was today donated to Swansea University, which will house the collection in a special research centre across the bay from Burton's Port Talbot home.

The minds boggle

The year's most unexpected indie hit in American cinemas - a film about quantum physics - is about to open here. But how are ordinary mortals to judge its assertions about the nature of matter, mind, and the universe? We asked some of Britain's best scientific brains to give us their verdicts.

A life’s work

Michael Coveney enjoys Jack Rosenthal's everyday stories of abnormality in his reflexive screenplay autobiography, By Jack Rosenthal.

That’s entertainment?

Jay Parini enjoys James B Stewart's DisneyWar, a rollicking tale of the ups, downs and dramas of the Disney studio.

Touch of genius

Clinton Heylin examines the studio politics that tied down a genius in Despite the System. Orson Welles still exerts a powerful influence, says Chris Petit.