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Asnorting bull mounts a busty blonde, who pleasures another bull with her hands while gripping a Big Mac in her teeth. Bull semen splashes up and forms itself into the [...]

Writers persecuted by oppressive regimes know they can count on help from at least one quarter. Since 1921, England's literary lions have fought the oppression of their less fortunate peers [...]

The clocks have gone back. The nights are drawing in. Dank November beckons, and a deepening chill clutches at the nation's heart. This year, winter holds terrors beyond Christmas shopping, [...]

TV executives, brought up on written culture, lack faith in the capacity of a visual medium to make sense of the news. Yet 'ordinary people' constantly urge their betters to [...]

Every one of central London's 3,515 coach parking spaces has been booked. Over 30 charter trains are being provided. Half a million car stickers and a quarter of a million [...]

Rioting in the streets may have seen off the community charge, but an even more regressive poll tax continues to flourish. Margaret Thatcher's ill-fated local taxation scheme required only a [...]

Sir: As is clear from the last paragraph of your leading article (7 April), the ability of Tony Blair to rewrite history (or persuade others to do so) obviously remains [...]

Who cares whether Baroness Jay or Gavyn Davies is the new corporation chairman? We should just get rid of the governors Nowadays, a new chairman of the BBC board of [...]

Digital has come to a halt; steam telly is enjoying a resurgence. A good time, suggests David Cox, to force the BBC to rethink its grandiose plans It is just [...]

It doesn't matter who the proprietor of a broadcasting station is: all you need is a strong regulator. The new Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, has been quick [...]

Coal, oil and gas are just the residues of plants that once lived above ground. So why not burn plants on the surface? Why not resolve the British countryside crisis [...]

If foot-and-mouth is beaten, why are many footpaths still closed? David Cox investigates The virus has been vanquished. Time, then, to take your ease amid the springtime bluebells. But wait, [...]

Farming subsidies have already done the countryside harm, argues David Cox. Government plans for conservation subsidies would finish it off As the smoke from the pyres begins to fade, a [...]

The foot and mouth cull should have animal rights activists out in droves. Where are they? It's an animal holocaust. More than two million creatures wholly dependent on our guardianship [...]

Has the BBC changed under its genial new director general? Hardly at all is the surprising answer. It is a year ago that the BBC celebrated the demise of the [...]

A white paper is set to reflect the view of ministers and wonks that they can do nothing to stop the likes of Murdoch. They are wrong. The coming communications [...]

CITIZEN GREG: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF GREG DYKE AND HOW HE CAPTURED THE BBC Chris Horrie and Steve Clarke Simon & Schuster, 290pp, £20 £16 at www.newstatesman.ce.uk (+15% p&p) Few [...]

David Cox doubts that ministers can resist the huge potential windfall from selling off the TV airwaves Sometimes the gods smile even on Labour governments. Perhaps, somewhere Up There, Someone [...]

The BBC's new director general seems determined to introduce themed channels. It is a move he might live to regret. Six months into his term in office, it is time [...]

Television is losing its unquestioned command of the cultural landscape. Unless it tries harder, it faces a bleak future. It has been our main source of information and our favourite [...]

Who cares whether Granada or Canton wins? The real question is whether ITV can survive at all. As Britain's media giants battle for domination of ITV, the excitement can be [...]

As you would expect, Britain's biggest journalistic institution, the BBC, has made much use of the Freedom of Information Act. Its website lists 69 stories that it says it broke [...]

With 1.3 million new dwellings planned there, the south-east of England is the region set to be changed most by the government's huge housebuilding programme. And that is where the [...]

Looking back on the festivities, do you perhaps feel Santa let you down? Maybe your son's £90 Roboraptor is already lying abandoned, its state-of-the-art animatronics no match for the comforting, [...]

Have you managed to catch British Isles, BBC1's new natural history blockbuster? If so, were you enthralled? Or not? The series is presented not by a natural historian, but by [...]

If victory over al-Qaeda is proving elusive, a triumph is being claimed over another set of urban terrorists. Roof-nesting seagulls may sound less scary than Islamic jihadists, but their clamorous [...]

These days, you don't hear much about radical plans to make public services work, crime rates fall or trains run on time. At the fag end of a disillusioning second [...]

In the otherwise disputatious world of broadcasting, there is no real argument about who is best fitted to be the next director general of the BBC. Channel 4's tall and [...]

Recruitment of a new BBC chairman is under way; the search for a new director general is about to begin. But at Broadcasting House, it is the occupancy of quite [...]

Greg Dyke's troops may no longer be blocking the traffic in Portland Place, but peace has not returned to the BBC. On the contrary, as the world's gaze turns away, [...]

After barely a month on the job, Ofcom, the new communications super-regulator, has already impressed with its dynamism, cutting-edge techniques and eye-popping salary packages. But is it delivering the goods? [...]

The BBC is the world's biggest news broadcaster, employing more than 2,000 journalists at 57 bases. In times of crisis, the nation still turns automatically to its output. During the [...]

Well, there's a thing. Invited to propose a new parliamentary bill in a phone and e-mail poll, the audience of Radio 4's Today programme opt by a substantial margin for [...]

Age: 50. Health: subject to mysterious and incapacitating ailments. Performance in previous employment: showed early promise, but subsequently disappointed. Reason for leaving: lost the confidence of colleagues; or, perhaps, just [...]

The ITV merger waved through on 7 October comes hut on the heels of a Communications Act that exposes the new 4.5bn £ giant to the threat of foreign takeover. [...]

Iraq is about to present Tony Blair with another headache. The Mesopotamian marshes drained by Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s were not just the ancestral home of the rebellious [...]

Just as our hospitals cut waiting lists by selecting easily treatable patients, TV channels hit current affairs quotas with dumbed-down news. A new approach to public service broadcasting is needed. [...]

Earlier this year, TV Licensing, the agency that hunts down licence-fee evaders, applied psychological profiling to its quarry. It identified seven types of impost-dodger, from the too-busy-to-pay 'work-hard, play-hards', to [...]

Britain's press can often seem consumed by triviality, hysteria, partisanship and braggadocio. There is, however, an exception. The pink pages of the Financial Times harbour only truth, reason, civility and [...]

Expect to find him at any supposedly A-list gathering of London's cultural glitterati. If he's not there--black-browed and bronzed, designer-suited but intense-you probably shouldn't be either. An attentive throng will [...]

You believe in accountability? Then you could hardly demand more than that the people's leaders should be grilled at length by professional interrogators on the issues of the day, in [...]

Suddenly, British television seems set to be transformed. Licences for an over-the-air digital service, to replace ITV Digital, will be allocated on 4 July. They were expected to go to [...]

The BBC's review of its political coverage is fast becoming mired in the preening ambitions and burning jealousies of its vast bureaucracy. In the past, the corporation's political reporting has [...]

As director general of the BBC, John Birt became the most detested public figure of his generation. Relaunched as Baron Birt of Liverpool, he must have hoped that in semi-retirement [...]

The confessional interview has become the most sacred ritual of our contemporary secular religion, celebrity. At unpredictable intervals, totemic figures sanctified by fame, however acquired, bare their souls for our [...]

The very idea of English nationalism sounds oxymoronic. Until recently, a distaste for displays of nationhood was one of the few indisputable constituents of the English national character. Flag-waving was [...]

None of our failings disappoints our Prime Minister as much as our cynicism. It is this vice, he feels, that enables mere spin and sleaze to distract us from his [...]

Though the boundary between public and private provision has become the epicentre of our politics, its course has remained strangely unchallenged. Labour shrinks from renationalising the railways; the Tories dare [...]