Artists say firm with murky ethical record is stealing their designs
Vanessa Bowman paints the world around her: the 19th-century village church, her back garden, the leaves on the trees in the fields where she walks her dog.
Once she has chosen a scene from her rural Dorset idyll, she puts brush to canvas, sometimes poring over the details for days in her studio.
Continue reading...At 80, Britain’s queen of cookery has written a surprising new book about spirituality that was turned down by six publishers. She talks about meditation, MasterChef and her beloved Norwich FC
Why is it so exciting – and so nerve-racking – to be meeting Delia Smith? Down the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of famous and important people (and three prime ministers), and yet I can’t remember any of them having induced this combination of extreme eagerness and mortal fear. Is it because when I was a teenager, she was one of the very few truly successful women then in public life? I suppose it must be. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was up there with the Queen, Mrs Thatcher and Madonna – and just like them, her word was The Law. For my 21st birthday, my parents gave me a cheque and a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, and for all that I was still in my radical feminist stage, I hardly batted an eyelid. Simone de Beauvoir was all very well, but did she have any advice on roasting times or how to make sure your yorkshire puddings rise? No, she did not.
Anyway, one result of this desperate, anxious state was that I stupidly decided to bake a cake for her – my God, even to write such words – and when I arrive at her cottage, the conservatory of which I recognise from the TV shows she once presented there, the very first thing I do is hand it over. “It’s a bit … flat,” I say, mournfully (for those who are interested, it’s Nigella’s ordinarily easy-peasy cardamon and marzipan loaf). But it seems that I’m worrying unnecessarily. Delia looks completely delighted by my foil-wrapped house brick, cradling it in her arms as if it was a newborn baby. “You used good ingredients,” she says, kindly. “It will still taste nice.” Cooking isn’t about perfection, she tells me; it’s about achievability. “I once went to a Women’s Institute thing, and I remember thinking: I’m not at all sure my jam would pass muster here.”
Continue reading...Exhibited artists cover up their work in protest after piece portraying ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is removed
Four overlapping black and white rectangles make up Israeli artist David Reeb’s painting Jerusalem. On two, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is portrayed praying at the Western Wall – known also as the Wailing Wall – from two different angles, his hands pressed against the stone. Opposite the images, thick brushstrokes spell out phrases in Hebrew: “Jerusalem of gold”, the title of a nationalistic song – and “Jerusalem of shit”.
The work was among several explicitly political, daring pieces featured in an exhibition that opened in December at the newly renovated Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art near Tel Aviv.
Continue reading...What’s going on in our theatres? A recent spate of rowdy behaviour – notably at jukebox musicals – raises the question: have audiences simply forgotten how to behave?
A drunk woman in the seat next to me is softly caressing my hair as though stroking the ears of a particularly mild-mannered spaniel. It’s a strange sensation, but I can’t really complain because I’m at the theatre. You’re not meant to talk. Just as I rouse myself to say something, she stumbles to her feet and lurches her way to the exit. “Finally!” mutters the woman in front, who made the mistake of asking her to be quiet a few minutes earlier (when my neighbour was dancing in her seat and yelling “That’s right!” after lines she particularly enjoyed), resulting in a whispered row. Order is restored, and we settle down once more to watch Frozen, a moving family show about sisterhood and redemption.
But your average West End audience is not always one big happy family. Especially not right now, when complaints about drunken, chaotic and argumentative audience behaviour have been reaching fever pitch. “It feels like every bloody day there’s a new debate coming up on Twitter about theatre etiquette,” says one theatre usher. “And I hate to stereotype, but the worst incidents seem to happen at jukebox musicals.”
Continue reading...It is hailed as one of the greatest action movies ever, but making Mad Max: Fury Road was far from easy. Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, director George Miller and a huge cast of creatives recall what went down in the Namib desert
Plenty of movies claim to be mad and filled with fury, taking it to the max. Very few make good on that promise. Like everyone else at the time, my gob got smacked and stayed smacked by George Miller’s deranged post-apocalyptic convoy-chase action spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road. It was so over the top that the top was a distant memory, far beneath my feet.
This was a 2015 revival of Miller’s 70s/80s punk-western franchise Mad Max, taking it to a new level of strangeness and delirium. Tom Hardy plays Max Rockatansky, survivor of a global catastrophe that has made oil and water rare commodities: he does battle with a hateful warlord called Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and makes common cause with a one-armed warrior bearing the gloriously Latinate name of Imperator Furiosa – an amazing performance from Charlize Theron. Monstrous 18-wheeler rigs scream across the scrub, with guitarists aboard playing thrash metal.
Continue reading...The author of the Neapolitan quartet and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist discuss identity, ambition, truth – and the ‘convulsive’ urge to write
Thank you for all of your work. I am a huge fan, and I have read all your books, and by reading them I was able to take new risks with my own work. So thank you for that as well. In this new book you go deep, deep into the things that matter for readers and writers alike. I am very glad to be in a conversation with you about it.
“And your novel?”
“Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”
“That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”
“Yes, I’m 20 people.”
Continue reading...The artist was in court for a dispute with two musicians who claim Shape Of You plagiarises parts of their song
Ed Sheeran has been accused of being a “magpie” who allegedly “borrows” ideas from other artists for his songs on the first day of a three-week copyright trial over his hit single Shape Of You.
Sheeran, 31, appeared at the high court on Friday for the dispute with two musicians who claim Shape Of You – the UK’s bestselling song of 2017 and the most streamed song in Spotify’s history – plagiarises parts of their earlier song Oh Why.
Continue reading...Pop star challenges perceptions of pregnancy by wearing black negligee to Dior show at Paris fashion week
It was a moment of pure joy at a Paris fashion week sobered by the shadow of war. Rihanna sailed into the Dior show like a galleon in full sail, pregnancy bump lightly veiled in a sheer black negligee of lace-trimmed dotted Swiss tulle. The veteran fashion critic Tim Blanks, who quizzed the pop star backstage as to whether she was expecting a boy or a girl – she wasn’t telling – described her as “the most radiant expectant mother … a real ray of light on a dark day.”
In the month since the unofficial new “Queen of Barbados” announced her pregnancy by posing for the paparazzi photographer Miles Diggs on a snowy New York street with a vintage Chanel pink coat unbuttoned to reveal a naked bump crowned with a cascade of gold and gemstone jewellery, Rihanna has done more than push the boundaries of maternity wear. In characteristic form, she is challenging expectations of how women in the public eye should look and behave.
Rihanna, who wore a fluffy lavender coat over a black latex crop top at Gucci and a peach leather mini dress for the Off-White show, has not been the only expectant mother in the spotlight at this month of fashion shows. At the young designer Nensi Dojaka’s London fashion week show, the tissue-thin sequined slip worn by the model Maggie Maurer celebrated her four-month pregnant shape. “I think it’s quite shocking – in a good way,” Maurer told Vogue. “Women’s bodies are like superpowers.”
In the age of optics, announcing a pregnancy via the medium of fashion has established itself as a power move. A timeline shift toward ever more daring takes on bump-dressing can be tracked via the maternity fashion of a thought leader in this field, Beyoncé. When Beyoncé revealed her first pregnancy in 2011 at the MTV Video Music Awards during her performance of Love on Top – by unbuttoning her sequined blazer and turning to give the audience a profile view – the bump was demurely covered-up in a white shirt and high-waisted trousers.
By the time Beyoncé was pregnant with twins in 2017, the rules of engagement had altered. This time around, Beyoncé made the reveal wearing only a bra and satin knickers, cradling her bump in front of a flower arbour with a veil falling over her shoulders as softly as the hair of Botticelli’s Venus, in an image that set a new record for Instagram likes.
Continue reading...As the raunchy TV show about a time-travelling nurse and an ageing highland warrior returns, its stars open up about the vibrant love lives of the over-70s – and respond to criticism of the show’s troubling use of sexual violence
Outlander isn’t a show that can be described in a nutshell. Is it a period drama? Sci-fi? Action? Romance? Caitríona Balfe, who has been the show’s star for eight years, still doesn’t know. “God, yeah,” she puffs. “It sort of defies definition, but that’s part of the appeal.” One thing agreed upon among fans is that, against a dedicated attention to historical detail and endless panoramic shots of Scotland, Balfe’s raunchy relationship with co-star Sam Heughan is the beating heart of the story. Heughan, however, insists it’s not just constant shagging: “When it’s written off as a ‘bodice-ripping drama’ I think, ‘But there’s so much more to it.’”
The adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s novel series follows the story of second world war nurse Claire, played by Balfe, who is honeymooning with her husband, Frank, when she touches a stone in the Highlands and falls back in time to 18th-century Scotland. There, she falls in love with clansman Jamie, played by Heughan. He affectionately calls her “sassenach” – gaelic for “English outlander”. Together, they travel around the world, encountering and often disrupting historical events, moving back and forth between centuries (only Claire has the gift of time travel), going into battle, saving lives, dealing with witchcraft trials, becoming a power couple and having a lot of sex.
Continue reading...The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist on the depiction of Vietnamese people, the fun in Voltaire’s Candide and memorable masturbation scenes
My earliest reading memory
The first books I remember reading were from the public library in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where my family came as refugees from Vietnam in 1975. I vividly recall Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which I read at six years of age, but unlike most children, I didn’t like it. The story of a boy who flees home on a boat and finds himself among foreign creatures was too dark for me. Perhaps it was too close to reality.
My favourite book growing up
The Tintin series by Hergé. The books were so beautifully drawn and told, with memorable characters and adventures in exotic lands. The stories were captivating.I loved the exoticism but didn’t notice the racism and colonialism. I’ve given the books to my eight-year-old son and he loves them, too, but I make sure we discuss the problems.
As the festival returns from Covid-enforced hiatus, over half of the acts announced so far feature women
Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Olivia Rodrigo have been announced as among the stars performing at this summer’s Glastonbury festival.
Out of the 89 names announced so far, 48 are women or acts that include female artists, meeting festival co-organiser Emily Eavis’s previously stated intention for Glastonbury to achieve gender parity on its bill. “Our future has to be 50/50,” she told the BBC in 2020.
Continue reading...To celebrate the release of The Batman, Guardian writers have written about their all-time favorite Caped Crusader films from Adam West to Ben Affleck
Of all the superheroes, DC Comics’ Batman is now endowed with the most Dostoyevskian seriousness. It wasn’t always like this. And, in my heart, my favourite Batman is the first movie version, from 1966, which grew out of the wacky TV show in the era of Get Smart and I Dream Of Jeannie and Mad magazine. As kids, we watched the program religiously on TV, which is where I caught up with the film about Batman and Robin taking on Joker, Penguin, Catwoman and Riddler – never dreaming that it was anything other than deadly serious. I watched it in the same spirit as I now watch Michael Mann films. I was thrilled by the (genuinely) propulsive and exciting “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner” theme tune (how I resented the vulgar playground joke about what Batman’s mum shouts out of the window to get him in at mealtimes) and quivered at the brilliant, psychedelically conceived title-cards for fights: BAM! I also fanatically pored over the novelisation tie-in – Batman vs The Fearsome Foursome.
The show-stopper was the famous, entertainingly tense sequence where Batman can’t find anywhere to dispose of a smoking bomb, something that surely inspired the later Zucker/Abrahams comedies. Adam West played the sonorous Bruce Wayne and Batman and Burt Ward was Robin (confusingly, his alter ego Dick Grayson was often described as Wayne’s “ward”). Their costumes, with luxuriant silk capes, were gorgeous. Brilliant acting talent lined up for the villains: Latin lover Cesar Romero was the Joker; veteran Hollywood character turn Burgess Meredith was Penguin, Lee Meriwether fused glamour and comedy as Catwoman (replacing TV’s Julie Newmar) and impressionist and night-club comic Frank Gorshin was Riddler. Much is said about the campiness of this show – and yes, there is a case for retrospectively re-interpreting this Batman and Robin as a covert queer statement. (In fact, it was Cesar Romero who kept the press guessing about his sexuality.) But in a way, it was more about goofiness as part of the Sixties Zeitgeist: being silly, even at this level, was countercultural seriousness. I suspect that every single Batman director, from Joel Schumacher to Christopher Nolan, measures their work against the addictive Day-Glo potency of the ’66 Batman. Pow! Peter Bradshaw
As they reboot the classic Buffalo Stance, the friends talk sisterhood, being Swedish and fighting the system
As two of pop’s most innovative stars convene on Zoom – Neneh Cherry in bed in London, Robyn at home in Stockholm – it’s telling that they spend most of their conversation celebrating their collaborators and creative communities.
Thirty-three years since Cherry emerged from the punk underground into the pop mainstream with Buffalo Stance, Robyn (alongside the producer Dev Hynes and the Swedish rapper Mapei) has covered that timelessly bolshie hit for a new covers collection celebrating Cherry’s first three albums. What may appear to be a pop year zero, says Cherry, was simply a threshold in an ongoing continuity that started in her native Sweden’s collectivist spirit, grew through New York City’s burgeoning rap scene and London punk and street style, and, ultimately, swept a preteen Robyn into its orbit.
Continue reading...Website reportedly available at only 17% of normal levels in Russia, hours after broadcaster revives radio technology to reach Ukraine and parts of Russia
Access to BBC websites has been restricted in Russia, hours after the corporation brought back its shortwave radio service in Ukraine and Russia to ensure civilians in both countries can access news during the invasion.
State communications watchdog Roskomnadzor restricted access to BBC Russia’s online presence, as well as Radio Liberty and the Meduza media outlet, the state-owned Russian RIA news agency reported on Friday.
Continue reading...From a failed attempt to dress as Hermione Granger to a Hungry Caterpillar who truly committed to the role, parents and former students on the mad dash to put together a literary outfit
A few years ago my son’s school organised a World Book Day in which pupils were asked to turn up in costume. Two kids turned up wearing full Viking outfits, complete with plastic axes and horned helmets. They looked brilliant. Only trouble was their parents had got the day wrong: they turned up in costume the day before the actual event, and as they had been dropped off by taxi, they had to spend the first part of the day in costume while their fellow pupils were in normal school uniform.
Phil Jones, Surrey
The singer and style icon answers your questions on becoming ‘Blondie’, a lifetime cheating death – and the secret to a good cover version
Hey, Debbie, in Face It [Harry’s memoir], you discussed the creation of the Blondie persona. How intentional were your choices in character curation, and why did you choose to adopt a persona in the first place? ChloSchmo
I think we’re all seeing images or performances that we like and absorbing and amalgamating them. As a kid, the beautiful women on the silver screen were fairytale versions of what life is for a woman, because when I was coming up there was no such thing as women’s lib. A persona gave me freedom, a world of my own. You pick a character that you love and then it becomes you.
Continue reading...The Australian soap has kept me hooked since 1986, becoming a major part of my daily existence – even when I didn’t have a TV signal. Ramsay Street, you will be missed
• Beloved soap Neighbours to end after 37 years on air
From the upbeat opening bars of its theme tune and the declaration that “Everybody needs good neighbours”, Neighbours was like a blast of fresh air blowing across British TV screens in 1986. Here was a show that was on BBC One twice a day; lunchtime and a repeat in the late afternoon. This was when Netflix was but a twinkle in Reed Hastings’s eye and a “streaming service” was probably a water-feature option offered by landscape gardeners. You watched Neighbours or you missed it.
Centred on Ramsay Street, the Lassiters hotel complex, and the lives of the Ramsays and the Robinsons (think Jim Robinson and mother-in-law Helen Daniels), it was soon a must-watch for students in the UK because – despite being watched “ironically”, however one does that – it had young people at its heart. This is the show that brought us Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Guy Pearce and Panda from The Masked Singer, Natalie Imbruglia. Talk about a hit factory. But, wandering the banks of Lassiters lake, we were also in the company of Harold and Madge, Dr Karl and Susan Kennedy, “Toadfish” Rebecchi and more. But now, the curtain falls. After almost 9,000 episodes, Neighbours is to come to an end.
Continue reading...To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, we run the rule over the stars who have played the virgin-crazed, bloodsucking aristocrat
Also known as Lust at First Bite and Love at First Gulp respectively, these films from the golden age of adult cinema exist in softcore and hardcore versions. Taking his cue from Bela Lugosi, Gillis nails the brooding bloodsucker persona, as well as his co-stars.
Continue reading...Renaissance works transported for first time since the artist installed them in churches 600 years ago
A collection of bronzes sculpted by Renaissance master Donatello have been moved for the first time from the Italian churches where he installed them 600 years ago so that they can be displayed at a ground-breaking exhibition in Florence
Three of the four pieces, a relief, a statue and two bronze doors, from Siena Cathedral and San Lorenzo baptistery in Florence, are also being restored to their former glory using techniques ranging from chiselling with porcupine needles to thermographing to discover structural weaknesses.
Continue reading...The actor talks about joining the MCU, his friendships with BTS’s V and the rest of the ‘Wooga Squad’, and the social and economic issues behind his TV hits Itaewon Class and Fight for My Way
In an early scene of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a brief conversation between rich student Min-hyuk and his friend Ki-woo proves a crucial moment in the multi-Oscar winning film. “Tutor a rich kid. It pays well,” the scooter-riding Min-hyuk tells the impoverished Ki-woo, who lives in a semi-basement home with his family. And when Min-hyuk offers Ki-woo the opportunity to take over his job as a tutor for the rich Park family, he acts as a bridge between the two worlds, and sets the plot of the film in motion.
Min-hyuk is played by Park Seo-joon, and despite the brevity of Park’s appearance in Parasite, it will have been the first time most international audiences will have got a good look at him. Park is a big name in South Korea however, thanks to a string of successful domestic TV series – mostly romantic comedies such as She Was Pretty and Fight for My Way – and the Netflix hit Itaewon Class. Now his international profile is about to be raised, after it was confirmed he will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Captain Marvel 2: The Marvels, appearing alongside Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Zawe Ashton, making him the third South Korean actor to join the MCU.
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