The official site of the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

They're going to open a Dickens theme park in Kent next month. Definitely a stop I need to add for the inaugural London trip I've been trying to plan for years. Now if the exchange rate could just get reasonable!

Quoted: Sandwiched between a cinema multiplex and a factory outlet, and housed in a hangar the size of four football pitches, Dickens World is a theme park based on the Victorian answer to Mickey Mouse. Opening in Kent at the end of next month, it's a day out for the family that brings to life the 15 novels by Charles Dickens; actually make that 13 - they haven't managed to squeeze in Barnaby Rudge or Bleak House. Never mind that the books tackle child exploitation, poverty, murder and domestic violence; the indoor attraction is based on designs by the creator of Santa World in Sweden so the emphasis is firmly on fun, fun, fun.

Henry Porter at the Guardian pining for a writer or two to step up and serve as opposition to a Labour Party he feels has dulled the community into silence.

Quoted: This may seem harsh, but where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are exposés of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger?