A University of Manchester academic was charged with assaulting a police officer last week. The arrest was made during the third national day of action against the planned cuts to higher education and the proposed rise in tuition fees.

Up to 500 students and activists marched in Manchester against the government’s proposed rise in tuition fees last Wednesday. The march took place on the eve of the House of Commons vote, which saw an increase in fees by a majority of 21 votes.

1) City of Angels – Nicolas Cage plays an angel who falls in love with Meg Ryan. It actually sounds a bit comical. Trust me, it isn’t. The bicycle scene, combined with Sara McLachlan’s ‘In the Arms an Angel’ is the most depressing thing that you’ll ever see. Or hear. 2) Beauty and the Beast – A tale as old as time, a song as old a rhyme – it gets me every time.

The original 1930s King Kong is an hour and a half, and even that feels like it’s dragging in some places. It’s a very thin concept; a giant monkey on an island. You certainly wouldn’t have thought that it needs to be three hours. Apparently Peter ‘I’m not going to edit any of my films’ Jackson thought otherwise.

Michael Bay spent so long working on the optical madness that is Transformers 2 that he forgot to develop his storyline or characters. The end result is CGI on steroids and very little else. It’s always a bad sign when you feel genuinely embarrassed for the actors in the film for having their names permanently besmirched by such an atrocity. The cast and crew behind this film would probably be happy if there was a nuclear holocaust, something to wipe out civilization, as this would finally erase their shame.

Zuckerberg came up with the notion at Harvard and launched the primitive website from his dorm room. Weird to think; that something that has become a scarily large part of everyday life for 500 million people, was started in what a lot of first years are experiencing now: a room where old beer cans used as ashtrays are literally heavy with cigarette butts, where old orange skins cling to the bottom of waste paper baskets and where blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter stick to an unwashed bowl on your desk. Maybe it’s different at Harvard, but it’s still a fairly novel (if disgusting) notion.

George Robinson, Boarding master and head of house reviews David Cameron’s half term progress

To add to the stress of a human-vampire relationship and the perils that befall it, there is a murderer on the loose and his pattern is “fang-bangers”

Features Editor Nick Renaud-Komiya meets a University of Manchester student and former Royal Marine to talk prejudice, politics and parenthood.

An introduction to the theatre scene in Manchester

Challenge your perception of reality at the Abandon Normal Devices Festival.

Exclusive interview with the new Chair for the Drama Society 2010-2011

The Edinburgh Fringe – what it is, who it’s for, and one Manchester University student’s experience of it.

Terry Pratchett is a man of many thousands of words, hundreds of which are wittily twisted into the nonsensical phrases that make up the fictional Discworld series, and fifty-plus other collaborations that span across a 30 year career as a novelist.

Kiran Desai’s 2006 award winning novel The Inheritance of Loss

Manchester band Doves are the second live band to headline the Warehouse Project this year.  The band, who recently released their greatest hits album, have been a favourite in the city since they were formed here in the early ‘90s. Doves said in a recent interview for The Daily Record that they plan to take […]