The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: What you need to know

A literary phenomenon that has created one of the the great female anti-heroes, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo deserves your attention. If you are not already in love with Lisbeth Salander, believe me, you soon will be.

For the as yet uninitiated still wondering what all the fuss is about, here’s a simple blaggers’ guide to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to ensure you won’t be caught short at the water fountain not knowing your Blomkvists from your Bergers. We’re good like that.

· Blomkvist is our male protagonist, a womanising, chain-smoking caffeine fiend – wrongly accused of slander and fighting the good fight to clear his name

· Lisbeth Salander is our female protagonist, a womanising, chain-smoking caffeine fiend – wrongly accused of being mentally incapable. The similarities end there…

· Lisbeth Salander is a hacker of extraordinary skill and ability – she’s a Mac, not a PC

· Millenium is a hard hitting, bad guy exposing magazine feared by soulless money grabbing corporations the world over – and co-owned by Blomkvist

· Henrik Vanger is the aging patriarch of the famous and rich Vanger family who has been haunted for the last 14 years by the mysterious disappearance of his niece – Harriet Vanger. He employs Blomkivist to discover and document his family’s many dark secrets

· Middle aged traditional journo Blomkvist and wild child hacker Salander team up personally and professionally to solve the great Vanger mystery. Opposites really do attract!

· The Vanger Family is a tangled web of Nazi supporters, sadists and emotionally stunted aristocrats. Christmas is a blast…

· Lisbeth is under legal guardianship after being declared mentally incompetent and spending a good proportion of her teenage years in a metal asylum. She DOES NOT like authority

· The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first in a three part trilogy – oh yes, there’s more

· The millennium trilogy has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. The book’s author died under mysterious circumstances and never lived to see the phenomenon his work would become

· Hell hath no fury like a Lisbeth Salander scorned

· The millennium trilogy has been known to cause extreme insomnia, eye strain, paranoia and the desire to thoroughly kick someone’s ass. You have been warned.

Check out the novel on Ciao!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits UK cinemas on 12 March.

Simon Cowell confirms engagement

It seems Simon Cowell, a man sometimes so scary he can make X Factor contestants cry, has fallen head over heels in love and has even asked his lady to marry him. Who’d have thought it?

The TV judge appeared on US chat show The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and blushed when asked if the rumours about being engaged to girlfriend Mezhgan Hussainy were true. He answered carefully, saying: "Are they true? Well, I do have somebody in my life now, Jay, yes. And I kinda made a decision this year to make somebody happy."

The music mogul also said he bought the ring for Mezhgan in ring in the UK. "It’s quite a big one, yes… No, look, I bought her the ring in London.". The make-up artist has been spotted wearing the huge rock on her left hand recently.

Well, he’s certainly not denying the rumours of an impending wedding, and he even claimed he would like to get married in the “next 10 years”. He also talked about the possibility of having kids: "I’m kind of torn because I’m a bit too old to have kids, but then again I think it would be important to have a lot of me’s around in the future."

Aww! Simon and Mezhgan, sitting in a tree…

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