Leïla Slimani: ‘Salman Rushdie’s books made me feel I could become a writer’
The Lullaby author on identifying with Jo in Little Women, being terrified of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and why we’re still in debt to Steinbeck
October 2023
Doctor Jekyll review – Eddie Izzard in gender-flipped reboot of Hammer horror
Casting Izzard as billionaire scientist Nina, a new incarnation for the classic story’s tormented hero, proves less intriguing than it sounds
Europe’s oldest student newspaper saved from closure
More than £3,000 raised to keep the Student – founded in 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson at Edinburgh University – going
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde review – menace on Edinburgh’s mean streets
Hope Dickson Leach’s atmospheric adaptation of the classic thriller looks good but in rewriting the story, adds an unnecessary element of distraction
July 2023
Jekyll and Hyde review – Shakespearean style shows another side to Stevenson thriller
Bard in the Botanics stages Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic novella as a tense three-way struggle that asks big questions about human nature
April 2023
Brief letters
Brought to tears by the birds’ beautiful warning
Brief letters: An avian alert | Serge Gainsbourg’s best song | Longer John Silver | Voter ID | Woke Windsor
Kidnapped review – tantalising glimpses of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife
Older, American and previously divorced, Frances Stevenson frames the National Theatre of Scotland’s pantomime-inspired recasting of the novelist’s adventure classic
Kidnapped review – razzle-dazzling Robert Louis Stevenson
There’s an optimal mix of irreverence and affection in this bracing adaptation of the swashbuckling classic
December 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 books about hellraisers
The full facts about debauched lives do not make happy reading, but authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Hunter S Thompson offer thrilling reading without concealing the cost
October 2022
Jekyll and Hyde review – Stevenson’s shocker rewired as a riveting solo
Jekyll and Hyde review – #MeToo transformation explores monstrous masculinity
March 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 mirrored lives in fiction
From Oscar Wilde to Daisy Johnson, parallel lives – and what they say about choices and circumstance – have long been a source of fascination and inspiration for novelists
February 2022
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde review – theatre-film hybrid is an unwieldy beast
‘Audiences want an event’: inside the groundbreaking new version of Jekyll and Hyde
October 2020
'Lost' letters reveal JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson's mutual affection
Newly examined correspondence shows deep respect between Peter Pan and Treasure Island authors, who never met
April 2020
Lockdown culture
'Thank goodness they made Jim Hawkins a lady!' Patsy Ferran on Treasure Island
As the National Theatre’s 2014 staging of the classic adventure is streamed online, its star remembers her breakthrough year
February 2020
Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: Bright is the Ring of Words by Robert Louis Stevenson
I was surprised how much impact this Victorian classic holds. An untarnished golden oldie? I think so
July 2019
William Gray obituary
Literary critic whose multidisciplinary perspective revealed the existential depth of fairytales and fantasy
April 2019
Jekyll & Hyde review – this teenage riot is furious and fearless
Evan Placey transforms the lead characters into women in a provocative version embraced by a brilliant young cast
March 2019
Gloucester church with literary links reopens after £2.1m restoration
Banker James Wood, buried in the church, may have inspired Charles Dickens’s Scrooge
