Walking along Charing Cross Road of a summer's evening, Londonist was startled to find this telephone kiosk, and its inhabitant, in a refreshingly horizontal attitude. Time to resurrect the old caption competition, wethinks. Image by M@......

It's late and you're somewhere near Leicester Square. You want to sit down and rest those dance-weary feet - or like Londonist, you are a glutton and you're looking for some dessert. Head to Café Ciao with its range of gelati displayed and giant plastic ice cream outside. Their dessert menu is full of concoctions like these pictured but if sweet treats aren't your thing, there's a menu of savouries though we haven't visited......

Every now and again we try and bring you the finer things in life. Sure, there's loads of indie, goth, electro and Viking death metal to talk about but what about music on the more classical end of the spectrum? Portico Quartet are currently touring their "inimitable" sound with Basquiat Strings and will headline a gig at the Union Chapel this Friday. We'll be there but we're not sure what to expect. They have......

Last full week before Christmas, we expect your bank account's feeling the strain. All that Christmas shopping and partying taking its toll? If you want to make the most of being out and about before Christmas cabin fever and complete exhaustion set in then we're here to help. Monday: Keep the braincells going through silly season. Go to the free lecture at Gresham College about why our society rewards celebrities, fads and fashions and......

When Westminster City Council took on the free newspapers London Lite and The London Paper, Londonist was fully supportive. Tired of the masses of papers scattered around the city at the end of each day, the Council asked that Associated Newspapers (owners of London Lite) and Rupert Murdoch's News International (owners of The London Paper) take responsibility for the amount of rubbish they were creating and install 150 newspaper recycling bins around Westminster and......

If you played video games in the 90s, chances are that you also read Digitiser, Channel 4's Teletext games magazine. It was renowned not only for its incisive, honest gaming news, but also for the surreal humour of lead writer Mr. Biffo, which was responsible for breaking the brains of teenagers all over the land. Snakes in hoodies would "cuss each other bad" alongside the letters page, Insincere Dave analysed the day's news, and......

Fresh this Week: Penned in the Margins presents a diverse line-up tonight, featuring poet and and former snooker pro Jane Holland, Stuart Taylor, Amy Prior and Joe Dunthorne. Free at 7pm, The Whitechapel Gallery, 80-82 Whitechapel Road, E17QX. Givin’ ‘em away: To celebrate the shortlist for the 26th Mind Book of the Year Award, which celebrates writing that contributes to public understanding of mental health issues, judge Michele Roberts will attend a preview featuring......

Fresh Next Week John Lanchester's third novel Family Romance is the story of an extraordinary family - from his grandparents’ beginnings in rural Ireland and colonial Rhodesia, through his father’s wartime separation from his parents and his mother’s tragic first love, her decision to become a nun and her adoption of a new identity. Next Wednesday, 7pm, £6, The London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, WC1A 2JL, 020 7269 9030. Givin’ ‘em away: Tomorrow......

Just out the Van: Alan Lee, best known as co-lead artist on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but also the conceptual designer on the films Legend, Erik the Viking and King Kong and the television miniseries Merlin will be signing The Children Of Húrin tonight. Get your geek on at 6pm, Forbidden Planet Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H 8JR. In Next Week: The Society of Young Publishers presents a reading by......

In the first of a new strand, the editor of Litro takes a look at an unusual book event. This Friday sees January’s dose of Tales of the DeCongested (Foyles bookshop), and if previous events are anything to go by it’s certainly worth curtailing your after-work drinks for, whether or not you are a writer. Before the advent of Jade Goody et al., people amused themselves of an evening by sitting around drinking wine and......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways 21. Cecil Court Where? Short pedestrian route between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. What? In the heart of glitzy, neon tourist-town, it's heartening to find such a contrasting bastion of antiquity. The shop fronts have not, we're told, been altered in more than a century. All of which made this the perfect location for filming recent period piece 'Miss Potter'. The Victorian frontages belie......

We love assassins at Londonist. Well, maybe not ones who kill with actual weapons - that's rude, and downright unBritish - strictly the non-violent kind, of course. So when we heard about the Cruel 2 B Kind game via the B3ta newsletter, we squealed with joy. In a dignified and measured manner, of course. The point of the game is to slay with sweetness, to murder with mildness, to terminate with tolerance, to assassinate......

Niiiice! beatdrifter's snap of the Ray's Jazz signage (simply titled Jazzz) is a nice reminder of London's independent spirit. When rent hikes meant Ray's had to relocate, Foyles made some space for the store up on its first floor (it also offered a haven for Silver Moon) and with the inclusion of a great little coffee shop provided one of the most interesting nooks on Charing Cross Road. Best of all you can sit......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Tonight Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award way back in 2003, discusses his writing and latest book A Spot of Bother. £8.50 at the Royal Festival Hall, 7:45 pm in the Purcell Room, find out more. Kevin McCloud......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Wednesday Based on his columns for McSweeny's, Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree seems rather a lazy excuse for a "meta" book. Hornby (pictured) explores books - what he buys, what he reads and what he doesn't. Oh well, the man's gotta eat - join the polysyllabic discussion tonight as he continues to wax......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. It's a busy old week, so let's get on: Tonight May Contain Graphic Content poses the question "Are graphic novels a complex and creative new literary form – or just glorified comic strips?" and they have some interesting speakers to debate the topic including Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, publisher of Ghost World, Jimmy......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Wednesday To eat or not to eat? Professor of Ethics Peter Singer, author of “Animal Liberation” and “How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest” gives us food for thought in his new book Eating, in which he discusses the effects of the diet choices we make (to ourselves and the......

Tom Conti has had over 15 years to learn his lines, so why does he continue to fluff them? Cues were fumbled, lines were missed, the delivery was messy and key swearwords were dropped in favour of more reserved language; not at all what one expects from a play about one of Old Soho’s most colourful characters getting locked in his favourite pub overnight. Perhaps these faults were intended to add a sense of......

Poor old Richard Bacon's been in a spot of bother in London this week, suffering an unprovoked attack from two men in the toilets of the Garrick Arms on Charing Cross Road on Monday night. "The CCTV shows some men following me down to the toilets and one of them waiting outside, presumably to make sure no-one came down while I was being attacked," Mr Bacon said. He's taking the news that he'll need......

Two days to go and eight games to play in the group stages of the world cup and only Brazil and Spain are going into them sure of their places in the knockout phase. Much of today's attention will centre on the clash between the USA and Ghana at 3pm where a win would see Ghana through, as might a draw, but even a victory might not be enough for the States if the......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Londinstani has stirred up more talk than any other book this year, and on Thursday, you'll have a chance to see the author -- Gautam Malkani -- for yourself and decide if the whole thing is worth all the fuss. In addition, ppearances by Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, and Will Self, among others, make......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. There's a wide range of events to choose from this week, with something on offer nearly every night of the week. We also have new releases from, among others, Douglas Coupland (pictured), Peter Carey, Monica Ali, Will Self, and A.M. Homes... Events Around London: Tonight, Turkish author Elif Safak celebrates the English translation of......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Tuesdays are all the rage these days in Literary London. And why not? What else is Tuesday good for... Events Around London: Tonight, authors Toby Litt, Hilary Mantel, and Patrick McGrath join forces to discuss the ghosts in their stories, and venture to explain why it is that we are all so fascinated by......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. It seems to us that the only literary reading series that ultimately survive are the ones that encourage a fair amount of alcohol consumption. With that in mind, the new series Through a Glass Darkly (this Thursday, also pictured to the right) has done one better by hosting a reading in a pub, on......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. It's a good week -- Macmillan is pledging to publish unknown authors, Peter Akroyd is making an appearance (even though he's presumably the sidekick in this particular show), we've got a new Victorian novel (and you can never have enough of those), some Welsh poetry (which actually scares us a little bit), and a......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Should we bother copyrighting our work in the age of the internet? Can a Booker Prize-winning novelist be wild? Are George W. Bush's abuses limited to the present, or do they affect the past as well? Is all of our complaining responsible for the current surge in literary events? And if so, does that......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. The Londonist Literary List has only one Christmas wish, and that is for all of its readers to buy books as gifts this holiday season, and for those books to be bought at independent bookstores, so that Waterstone's and Borders don't take over the world. The indie stores are making this easy for you......

Disturbing news from The Times Sport's 'Insider', Ashling O' Connor, who reports today that Charing Cross Road bookseller Sportspages has gone into administration . The shop, founded by Kiwi John Gaustad in 1985, is a mecca for all sports fans that contains more than 10,000 titles on all sports bright and beautiful and all games great and small. Its loss would be a great trauma, especially to those Londoners who knew exactly where to......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Yeah, it's now officially Holiday Season, which means we shouldn'y expect much from the literary world for the next month or two. With that in mind, this week is a pleasant surprise. We're about to have a slew of "Best of 2005" lists to plough through: The New York Times is way ahead of......

I'm finding it rather hard to imagine a perfect Sunday right now. This is because today has been a rather imperfect Sunday, with the majority of it being spent on a stuffy National Express coach travelling from Leeds back down to London. I arrived home, only to find that the bunker in which the computer resides is experiencing below-zero temperatures, because someone who shall go unnamed forgot to leave the heating on. Honestly, you......