The Latest Breaking News from JRR Tolkien

Giorgia Meloni’s involvement highlights government’s growing interest in shaping output of Italy’s cultural institutions

Giorgia Meloni and the hard right are celebrating JRR Tolkien’s saga – while taking over Italy’s key cultural institutions, says Florence-based author Jamie Mackay

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a celebration of words and word-people: authors, editors, publishers, linguists, lexicographers, philologists, obsessives, pedants. Its author, Sarah Ogilvie, was formerly an Oxford English Dictionary editor and wrote the 2013 book Words of the World: A Global History…

In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.