Books

First we have a fun-filled adventure, How I Became a Dog Called Midnight by the bestselling author and actor Ben Miller. This body-swap story follows George as one night there’s a magical mix-up and he swaps places with his lovable hound Midnight! Can the two friends save the day before the clock …

Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs (Image: Getty) Great train robber Ronnie Biggs was relaxing in his trunks and thinking of the £35,000 fee a newspaper interview had just netted him, when he heard the knock at the door he had been dreading for nearly a decade. Biggs instantly recognised the …

Today Belinda is a registered mental health nurse and director at the Care Quality Commission (Image: Getty) When mental health nurse Belinda Black arrived at work one day in the early 1990s she was perturbed to see one of her long-term patients lining up to board the hospital minibus. Josephine …

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Image: Getty) Peering through a magnifying glass beneath his signature deerstalker hat, sucking on a blackened clay pipe, Sherlock Holmes remains the world’s greatest literary detective, immortalised in more than a century of books, films and television. The Baker Street sleuth’s preternatural powers of observation and …

Author Steve Cavanagh (Image: ) Before you seek revenge, dig two graves, including one for yourself. Or so warns the ancient proverb commonly attributed to Confucius. It’s a cautionary message author Steve Cavanagh pondered while writing his new book: how far can a person go to avenge themselves before becoming …

The Rolling Stones’ singer Mick Jagger (Image: Getty) What is it with pop stars and ageing? Roger Daltrey sang the immortal line from The Who’s hit My Generation – “Hope I die before I get old” – in October 1965. Pete Townshend wrote that when he was 20. Lennon and …

It’s been 12 years since George RR Martin last published a novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Since then the Game of Thrones TV show has come and gone, with its creators having had to rely on plot outlines for the last two books that are …

Teun Toebes with care home resident and ‘housemate’ Murielle (Image: Marijke Krekels) In Teun Toebes’s small bedroom is a pub-style peanut dispenser, coffee machine, and well-stocked bar. In the wide corridor outside are fake plants and the sound of blaring televisions. It could be any well-appointed student digs, but for …

Crime writer M W Craven (Image: PA) When Mike Craven sent the draft of his novel The Botanist to a scientist friend, the response wasn’t quite what he had anticipated. “He got straight back and told me I could face ten years in prison for revealing the recipe for ricin,” …

Barrister-turned-broadcaster Rob Rinder thinks his friend Benedict Cumberbatch would be the ideal choice to star in a TV adaptation of his debut thriller The Trial. He recalls how Cumberbatch, who he met at Manchester University, deterred him from pursuing a career in acting. “I’d been to the National Youth Theatre …