A list of London's most popular attractions in the last year have been named. The British Museum took first place with almost 5.5 million visitors thanks to the help of a motionless army. Museum heads attributed the 12% spike in visitors to the First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, the British Museum's most popular attraction since King Tut's goods were on display in 1972. If you want to go toe-to-toe with an army that won't......

The book grocer’s coffers are chockfull of goodies this week, so let’s jump right in and get shopping... Monday: Crikey. Take a look at author and critic George Steiner’s publishing credits and you have to wonder whether the man has actually slept in the past fifty years. Yet the premise of the prolific writer’s most recent work, My Unwritten Books, is that there are actually some subjects that Steiner has purposely left unexplored. Join......

No, Helen Mirren's academy award hasn't been thrown overboard, but London's favourite battleship, HMS Belfast, has lost Oscar - one of its two cats. We're keeping our hopes alive that the ginger moggy hasn't drowned as he apparently tried in vain to find the other ship's cat, 'Kilo'. History is on Oscar's side. During World War II, the German warship Bismark sank to the ocean floor and took almost 2,000 men with it. But......

The British Library is a great place to hang out. Even if you have no cause to go into the reading rooms to request any book ever published, there are an array of good talks and exhibitions to see, a fine gift shop that sell natty oystercard holders and we once saw Jeremy Paxman in the cafe. (We, of course, cannot guarantee that you'll see a member of the Newsnight team, we don't know......

They're here! It's taken 2 years of planning, 46 crates, 2 days on the road from Xian to Beijing, 4 inter-continental air freight batches and a lot of extremely careful unpacking to bring 120 marvellous objects, including 12 warriors, other life-sized figures and even 2 horses, from the Museum of the Terracotta Army to London. If you want to gawp in awe at them you'd better get your skates on. The British Museum has already......

Huge hangover? Spent all of your money? Yep, us too. So we can't go and watch Barbara Streisand (though we don't think we'll ever be that rich) and we can't go and see Elling. But, here's a few things you can do this week to make things a little easier on your pocket. Monday: Been a while since you've seen a good film? Then the Canary Wharf Summer Series at Canada Square park should......

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) has to be one of our favourite arts venues in London. We have turned up on its rather grandiose steps several times now and had all our expectations blown away - in good and bad ways. Continuing its legacy of eternally forward-facing theatre, a new festival of experimental theatre and music is launching today. It's called Burst. And it didn't come about over night... First, there was The British Festival......

The British military have launched a new satellite: The British spacecraft is the first in what will eventually be a three-satellite constellation designed to allow the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to pass much more data, faster between command centres. "Skynet's going to provide five times the capacity that the previous system provided, and allow the military to do things they just haven't been able to do in the past," Mr Woods explained. Isn't......

This Day In London’s History 1759: The British Museum in Bloomsbury opens its doors to the public for the first time. Some may feel that the British Museum these days is little more than a massive boast, bragging about how many cool things the British Empire has stolen from the rest of the world. But regardless of whether this criticism is fair or not, it’s hard to deny that the museum is still one......

This year is the 250th birthday of poet / illustrator / philosopher William Blake. Blake was born 28 November,1757 at 28a Broad Street, Golden Square, London. The British Library, to celebrate the anniversary, have put on display one of Blake's notebooks in which he wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Tyger". You know the one: "Tyger, tyger burning bright In the forests of the night I spelled it wrong. Tough crap for......

Ticket from Toronto: £299. Getting your song chosen for a Mastercard ad: Priceless. Last Thursday Findlay Brown, whose song Come Home is currently playing to millions of TV viewers daily in the Christmas Mastercard advert, joined a folksy line-up of four artists in the space of three hours at the awe-inspiring Union Chapel in Islington. With a half-hour slot at the start of the evening, Brown had to contend with latecomers and lots of......

A Guardian journalist explores life inside the BNP. A rare recording of a Christmas carol has been found in The British Library. Two men have been jailed for robbing and spray-painting another man. Does London have too many musicals? And finally, Monica Lewinsky has stayed away from London's social scene and graduated from LSE. Photo taken from Nick Gray's photostream.......

Bloomsbury might become the place to relax after a heavy shopping session in town, if new proposals go ahead. Plans are being put forward to Camden Council to pedestrianise the Bloomsbury area and evoke its old free-roaming Bohemian spirit. The constant sound of drilling, and building works isn't conducive to a gentle autumnal ramble and academic chatter. And for most non-student Londoners who are coming into the West End on a bus, the area......

This Day In London’s History 1970: The first ever public gay protest in Britain is held at Highbury Fields. Following the arrest (and alleged entrapment) of Louis Eaks for cottaging, the Gay Liberation Front (a name that always makes us think of The Life Of Brian) gathered on 27th November 1970 for a torchlight procession through Highbury Fields in protest. Reports differ as to how many protesters attended the procession, but it was clear......

Here's something you won't want to miss: A life-size woolly mammoth will visit Trafalgar Square on Wednesday 15 November to warn us that Britain may soon be set to suffer a peculiar and very savage climate change. According to Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum, within the next 50 years we may have to adjust not only to baking summers from global warning but also to mortally freezing......

The British al Qaida terrorist who planned to blow up the tube has been jailed for a whopping 40 years. Kate Moss is at the forefront of a new National Portrait Gallery exhibition.. The Faces of Fashion exhibition will run from June next year. Meanwhile Kate's waster of a boyfriend was at court again today to be fined for attacking a Radio 1 newsreader he attacked when leaving the same court earlier in the......

Sincerest apologies, dear readers. The author of this column (Column? Post?) has had a particularly trying week, what with almost getting fired from his high-pressure media sales job and also being asked to vacate the sofa near Highbury Corner he had been staying on since July. Now, we know, this is no excuse. Two posts in a fortnight is almost unforgivable. How much more trouble can he get in, do you wonder? Well, two......

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......

Following our visit to St Pancras Old Church, the next destination in our exploration of St Pancras was The British Library. Retracing our steps back through the seemingly deserted Somers Town, we walked into the spick-and-span building of the UK’s national library. The building’s contemporary design almost seemed to be intended to obscure much of its history, which was quite a contrast after the much-less-spoilt church that we had just visited. Still, we suppose......

As of tomorrow The British Library will be showing off its most recent acquistion: a collection of work by William Fox Talbot. This historic photographic archive was previously held by the National Trust above the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock in Wiltshire, and access was very limited. But the Talbot family wanted the public and researchers alike to get at the images, which include some of the first photographs ever taken, so they turned......

The British National Party are the epitome of what is wrong with British politics today. Just watching their skin-headed, xeno/homo/everything-phobic candidates standing at the vote count in their little Union Flag waistcoats makes Londonist's resident Politico, Nick, want to hang up his rosette in disgust. Londonist feels that the BNP deserves to be ignored by the media, thus depriving the party of oxygen to fuel their intolerant fire. However, we just can't resist the......

After getting thoroughly soaked this morning on the way to work (TV Troll's tolerance for H2O is somewhere around the level of the Wicked Witch of the West's) , we are in need of a nice night at home in front of the telly - and what a night it will be, oh yes. The problem is going to be deciding which channel to watch. For those who fancy a lot of back-slapping, a......

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......

Breakfast in London and lunch in Sydney isn't quite just around the corner yet, but plans are afoot to get us to the other side of the world in the time that it takes for a round trip on the Northern line. It's all about the scramjet. A scramjet - or supersonic combustion ramjet - is mechanically very simple. It has no moving parts and takes all of the oxygen it needs to burn......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Along with a wealth of events this week, new books by Margaret Atwood and Jay McInerney (pictured) are also of particular interest... Events Around London: Tonight, David Runciman discusses his new book, The Politics of Good Intentions, which claims that Blair and Bush have abused history in order to further their goals for the......

The British film industry has been a load of old pants for as far back as we can remember. "The British are coming!" Colin Welland once declared after being given a small statuette for a film about men running faster than other men and boy did we go. Any actor with enough money for airfare relocated to LA. America meanwhile responded by creating Bruce Willis and since then it's been all down hill until......

To mark the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth, two halves of one of his manuscripts have finally been re-united after spending the last 170 years apart. The British museum, which has been in possession of the lower half since 1953, has finally purchased the top half from a private collector. The theory as to why the manuscript was cut in half in the first place is that after Mozart’s untimely death in......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. This will go down as the week when troubled child writers everywhere lost credibility forever. Pretty amazing that the famous male writer JT Leroy ("pictured") not only isn't a male, but isn't actually a person either -- he's just as fictional as his novels! And doubly amazing that while we were still tryig to......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the week Brighten your day in the Light Lounge at the Dana Centre There is a school of thought that credits our climate with putting the ‘Great’ into Great Britain. All those long, miserable days have, over the centuries, paid dividends to our national creative output. Forced......

We're only three days into 2006 and we've already had our first 'London woman marries dolphin story' or as Israel's YNet News had it Brit Jew marries dolphin as reported in their singles section - where else? We're not suggesting that this story is any reflection at all on the current pickings in the London singles scene, that dolphins are better listeners than men or even that rich people are bonkers. We simply wanted......