If you're a highly recognisable global statesman, whose successor's pathetic performance is making the country remember why they fell in love with you in the first place, it can be tempting to think that you're above the laws of the land. That's the only explanation we can find for the damning news that Tony Blair was apprehended by a ticket inspector as he travelled on the Heathrow Express on Wednesday. Upon asked for a......

….you’re just pootling along the high street, minding your (or everybody else’s, if you’re a Londonist) business, when what do you espy? A piano. Just perched there on the pavement. You rub your eyes, and make a vow to cut back a bit on the old Lambrusco/JD/what you will. It cannot be. Ah, you think, it’s a practical joke: there’s a hidden camera somewhere…. Well, this slightly Python-esque scene is likely to be played......

Fresh Next Week: This years T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture is titled Lachrymae rerum: writing about loss. Dannie Abse reads both from Running Late, his latest collection of poetry, and from The Presence, a journal he has been keeping since his wife’s death in the summer of 2005. Alan Jenkins, Deputy Editor of the TLS, reads from his collection A Shorter Life, which includes poems about his mother’s illness and death that have been described......

Just when you thought London might be a city safe from domination by Americans getting paid heaps of cash to do absolutely nothing … … enter former CIA employee (in movies they always say "The CIA's like the mafia; you never leave" - but that's probably just movies) Bob Kiley. Kiley joined the CIA in 1963 after involvement in the anti-communist National Student Association. Bob came to the UK in January 2001 – within......

This was not a very happy week for the -ist network as one of our own, Phillyist co-editor Star C. Foster, passed away early in the week. Her wit, intelligence, and good nature shone through the site, making Phillyist an immensely fun read. She was loved by many and will be missed by all. Phillyist paid tribute to her this week with a heartfelt letter to her and an obituary. And now, the awkward......

As much as we love blaming stuff on George W Bush even we can't quite accept that as part of the war on terror he's handing out stabbing implements to London's construction workers: A Southfields thug slashed a man across the face with a knife he bizzarely claimed was a gift from US President George Bush. Construction worker Everton Reid, 27, from Keevil Drive, was jailed for four and a half years for the......

You know when you have to go to a conference or exhibition with work and it's so boring that you can't even remember what you saw during the day? If you're lucky, the conference is an overnighter with a party or two thrown in as compensation for wasting precious hours of your life listening to some management drone read something off a load of PowerPoint slides in between showing you some indecipherable graphs and......

What we do is war! Jean Louis insisted during practice, and I passed that off as him just being French and dramatic and paranoid. But in a way, isn't he right? We are waging war on perceptions of reality, with our physical Socratic method. We are losing money, health, safety all that to give the gift of confusion to thirty or forty people a night. In confusion, all the pieces of what you think......

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez made quite a splash in London over the weekend: Around a thousand people packed into Camden Town Hall to witness a mixture of a Latin American populist rally, an evangelical meeting and a football match... And yesterday in the People's Republic of Camden the villains remained very much President George W Bush, his acolyte Tony Blair, big business and the forces of reaction. Ken was in his element playing host......

Everyone's favourite stereotypical Tory, Boris Johnson, has fallen off his bike. The Henley-on-Thames MP was sent flying whilst trying to avoid a gaggle of tourists at a crossing near the Palace of Westminster. He was treated for a badly sprained wrist at St. Thomas' Hospital, just across the water from parliament. Johnson said of this incident: "I would like to say it was all my fault but it was not. There was a bunch......

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......

A US Senate report claims that George Galloway and former French minister Charles Pasqua were granted potentially lucrative oil allocations by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Galloway has already won one libel suit against the Telegraph over similar claims, although the US is quick to point out that the new allegations "have no relation" to those discussed in the earlier suit. Galloway never one to shy from taking the offensive claims that "These are the same......

So yesterday we reported on the fact that Liam (or was it Noel?) Gallagher was sick of London (too overcrowded, too many queues) and was going to "up sticks and move out". And now today we have yet another story of a 'major Hollywood star' who's decided that London is actually the place for him. Cross-dressing, diminutive, idiot-savant Dustin Hoffman has "become disillusioned with America under President George W Bush," reports The Times today,......