A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...

Plus, Juliana Hatfield has moved to Western Mass., where she recorded her new album

Pedro Sánchez says his country must defend the democratic freedom ‘wrenched from us for so many years’ Spain has marked the 50th anniversary of Francisco Franco’s death with an absence of official events but with a call from the prime minister to heed the lessons of the dictatorship and defend the democratic freedom “wrenched from us for so many years”. Franco, whose military coup against the elected republican government in 1936 triggered a civil war and brought about four decades of dictatorship, died in Madrid on 20 November 1975. Continue reading...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff were on the guest list.