The Latest Breaking News from JRR Tolkien

Spitting Image puppets and Barbara Hepworth works also donated via Acceptance in Lieu and Cultural Gifts schemes

Demetrious Polychron ordered to destroy all copies of The Fellowship of the King after claiming Amazon prequel infringed his copyright

Author Demetrious Polychron wanted $250 million for infringement of his book The Fellowship of the King.

Viggo Mortensen once warned that our country would be viewed as Saruman, not welcome saviors

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and I have precious little in common. But one important thing we share is The Lord of the Rings. Both she and I regard the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy as a personal “sacred text” which has profoundly shaped our values and our political commitments.

Fifteen questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?

Yes, Aragorn is missing his pants, but Ralph Bakshi's animated epic still rules.

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”.