Lenin used the skills of a modern advertising executive to sell his ideas after the Russian Revolution, a new exhibition reveals. By Dan Carrier

SEX sells. The first rule of any advert is make it beautiful, make it bold and make it bright: throw in good looking people and the public will snap up whatever it is you are flogging.
And the same rule applies to selling politics as it does cars, vacuum cleaners and beer.
And although advertising in the Soviet Union was not about selling consumer goods, it borrowed the tricks advertisers in capitalist countries were well versed in – but instead of washing machines, cars and fridges, they used it sell the idea of a Communist state.
And now, an exhibition in Islington Chambers Gallery examines the power of the advert in the Soviet Union.

Author Deborah Moggach had great fun adapting Jane Austen, she tells Jane Wright

DEBORAH Moggach is caught between the pull of film in one direction and the cloistered life of the novelist in the other.
At the moment, her focus is on writing for the big screen. In September a film version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Donald Sutherland and Keira Knightley, is released.
Although the book is frequently voted the nation’s favourite novel Deborah has still had the temerity to write the screenplay.
She has also just completed the first draft of a film adaptation of her own latest novel, These Foolish Things, published last year, which imagined the out-sourcing of a British old people’s home to India.