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......

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......

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......

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.......

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 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. 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 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......

Here's evidence that not all of the city's institutions of learning are as progressive or as forward thinking as the interactive bits in the science museum: The British Library is to extend a ban on pens to all its reading rooms to protect its precious collections. From January, the home of the Magna Carta and Lindisfarne Gospels will only allow pencils. Not very wiki is it? They were probably worried that a hoard of......