Hamish Macbain

4/5 The fight scenes are visceral, in-your-face affairs that play out like ballets with endlessly gruesome deaths

Few things in life are as daunting as the doorstop novel that comes complete with a glossary of the characters featured within. Over the 650 pages of Andrew O’Hagan’s latest, it warns us, we will have 59 different people to keep track of, ranging from gang members and drill rappers and actors and fashionistas to aged Tory peers and people traffickers and teachers and newspaper editors and a sitting tenant from hell.

Before we even get to the deep moral and ethical problems, Back to Black is, on the most basic of levels, a poor, poor piece of filmmaking.

Beyond the moral problems, this take on the life of the tragic London singer is a poor, poor piece of filmmaking

Actor Jack O’Connell defends his sympathetic portrayal of the late, legendary singer’s former husband Blake Fielder-Civil in the much-discussed new biopic – no one would want to be held to account for what they did in their twenties, he tells Hamish MacBain

Hamish MacBain · 7-min read Sitting opposite me on a sofa in the Corinthia hotel, dressed all in off-white, Jack O'Connell

· 6-min read In this article: Nigel Waymouth The stories, really, are as numerous as they are individually notable.

Granny Takes A Trip, the epicentre of Swinging London, is being reinvented in unexpected ways — we go inside the new Hackney HQ

The capital’s cobbled back streets, historic buildings and exquisite parks have long attracted the world’s best filmmakers

As the show starring James Corden and Ruth Jones prepares to bow out, our writers pick telly’s most gripping send-offs