It was the mother of a primary school classmate – a woman of uncommon good looks – who gave me my first inkling of the kind of power female beauty can command: […]

The scene is to be filmed in a diner in Los Angeles, but the story is set in Manhattan. Solution? Place neon signs outside the eatery and drizzle down artificial rain, so […]

“A rope is made up of a huge number of fibres, but not a single fibre goes through its entire length. It’s the way the fibres overlap that creates the rope’s strength,” […]

“A writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him,’  The New Yorker editorial writer E. B. White once counseled.  I lack the nerve to knowingly […]

It was only after My Fair Lady was showing in the cinemas that its set designer Cecil Beaton noticed a mistake he had overlooked: towards the end of the film, in the […]