Samina Malik, the Southall resident convicted last November after being found guilty of owning terror manuals, today had her sentence quashed. The Court of Appeal ruled that her conviction was unsafe, and that there was "a very real danger that the jury had became confused" in passing a guilty verdict. The Crown Prosecution Service will not seek a retrial. Malik's case became infamous for two reasons: she was the first woman convicted under Section......

Rejoice or recoil: It looks as though the long-rumoured film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields is viable again. Originally announced in 2001 with David Cronenberg directing, the project had been shelved as of 2006. But now, with Hallam Foe’s David Mackenzie slated as the new director, the possibility of the film seeing the light of day is once again alive. The script for the film has long since been completed by Amis and......

Blogophobia: an irrational fear, intolerance of, or aversion to the blogosphere. Martin Amis has been accused of far worse, but after hearing him talk at RADA yesterday evening, this was the only accusation we felt it safe to lodge against him. The offending remark came early in the evening when, during his reading from the recently published The Second Plane, Amis effectively dissed Londonist and its ilk as “semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere”. Gauntlet,......

Even on its quietest weeks, London is something of a happy haven for bibliophiles such as ourselves, though we may be doing nothing more than perusing one of the city’s many lovely bookshops. This week, however, we’re in a veritable book geek heaven, as the London literary scene goes all glittery, playing host to some major names and fantastic events, leaving us tongue-tied and weak at the knees. Do we gush? Very well then,......

We've already told you about the whole Get London Reading thing, but we just wanted to remind you as because even though many of the events have been and gone you can still vote for your favourite London book. Up until March 1st you can visit LondonBooks.co.uk and choose from a shortlist of nine classic London novels: Absolute Beginners - Colin Macinnes End of the Affair - Graham Greene Great Expectations - Charles Dickens......

With exactly one month to go until the Internal Olympic Committee makes its decision as to which city is to host the 2012 games, it looks like London's chances are improving all the time. Yesterday's Observer devoted an above-the-fold front page slot to a story stating that London had addressed most of its serious problems and was closing the gap with the favourite, Paris, fast. Insiders say the long-awaited report from the IOC's evaluation......

If you've got access to BBC4, don't forget that the serialisation of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy starts tomorrow at 9:50pm. Hamilton's book is one of those definitive London novels (Nick Hornby once said of it: "it's as if they've finally finished the stretch of motorway running from Dickens to Martin Amis"), if only for its depiction of the capital's seedier hostilieries. Did you know, for example, that you could......

It's happening: the TV series of the book of the blog of the oldest profession. Channel Four is to dramatise Belle De Jour. Belle, the purported London call girl, thus becomes holder of a unique title: while many bloggers and webmasters have parlayed their efforts into books, she is the first to wrangle a small-screen deal. All this because she stumbled across the unique marketing tactic that writing about sex might be popular. So,......

There are a lot of reasons to like Harold Pinter. He's no fan of the Bush administration and thinks Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for taking the UK forces into Iraq but the main one is that he isn't Andrew Motion. Londonist would, however, like to see the two of them face off in a poetry slam , 8 MILE-style, with Guardian readers bouncing up and down in front of the stage to the......