Nadia Khomami Arts and Culture Correspondent

The director has appointed the acclaimed Olivier, Tony, Bafta and Oscar winning talents to be the screenwriters for The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event

The award-winning British writers Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne will pen Sam Mendes’ four Beatles films, it has been reported.

The four biopics, focusing on each member of the fab four, will be released in cinemas in April 2028 – with Paul Mescal playing Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon, Barry Keoghan playing Ringo Star, and Joseph Quinn playing George Harrison.

Actor returns to York theatre where he started out 46 years ago, after cementing status as one of UK’s greatest actors

It’s been 46 years since Gary Oldman made his professional stage debut at York’s Theatre Royal. Returning to the venue last week for Samuel Beckett’s one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape, the 67-year-old English actor is a world removed from the young upstart once advised by Rada to do something else for a living.

New work says novelist, who was a censor during second world war, may been employed to look for coded messages

It is an irony that she herself would have revelled in: Barbara Pym, the author who punctured the social strictures of 20th-century Britain, worked as a censor during the second world war.

But research suggests that rather than just poring over the private letters that must have helped hone her talent, she may have also been working for MI5.