Prehistoric sites, dramatic scenery and sandy beaches earn the island the top spot for visitors, with Shetland coming second
The ancient standing stones and neolithic settlements of Orkney have earned it the title of best Scottish island, according to a survey from Which?
Readers were asked to rate 14 of the biggest of the hundreds of islands in Scotland’s waters, with 10 of them receiving an impressive visitor score of 80% or more.
Continue reading...After a decade in Hollywood, French actor Omar Sy returned home to star in Netflix’s much-loved hit, Lupin. He talks about playing the charming thief, growing up with Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and his battle with racism
Actors, obliged to exhaustively market their wares, will pose for hours in front of posters of their latest film or TV show. They’ll hop between city premieres, sit on dreary festival panels, tell rehearsed comic stories on night-time talkshows, then get up early to be on breakfast radio. Before meeting Omar Sy, a 43-year-old Frenchman who stars in the massively popular Netflix drama Lupin, I’d never heard of an actor picking up a bucket and brush to spend a day gluing up their own billboard posters on the Paris metro. Sy, who is 6ft 2in, born in a working-class Parisian suburb to West African parents, explains the thinking behind this unusual marketing stunt that took place just before the first series of Lupin debuted earlier this year.
“A lot of people know me in Paris,” begins Sy, who worked as a comedian in France through his 20s before becoming a film star there in his early 30s. “Because people in France have watched me in stuff for years, I’m used to meeting strangers who recognise me and who already have smiles on their faces.” In Lupin, lightly adapted from the classic heist books by Maurice Leblanc, Sy plays a French-Senegalese man called Assane Diop, an anonymous Parisian who is used to being ignored and overlooked in his home town, but who is willing to use that to his advantage while robbing the city’s jet-set blind. “The show is entertainment and we want to have fun with it,” he says, “but at the same time we’re talking about something very serious: that some people in France are simply not seen.”
Continue reading...The author’s new novel centres around an elderly couple bound in a suicide pact. Watching her parents age, the subject of dying with dignity is never far from her mind
For those of us with elderly parents, countless news broadcasts of bewildered residents cruelly exiled in care homes during this pandemic have been especially raw. Even so, I can’t be the only one who’s thought reflexively: “That will never be me.”
My friend Jolanta in Brooklyn has made that vow official. Put through quite the medical ringer herself, she tended to a difficult mother through a drawn-out decline. Not long ago, she declared to me fiercely that she’d no interest in living beyond the age of 80. Dead smart and not given to whimsy, Jolanta was already about 60, the very point at which old age starts to seem like something that might actually happen. I couldn’t help but wonder, should she indeed turn 80, will she take matters into her own hands – or not?
Continue reading...Dixie Lewis, 19, was in a car that was travelling on State Route 89 in California when it crossed into the path of an oncoming truck
Dixie Lewis, the 19-year-old daughter of the writer Michael Lewis and former MTV correspondent Tabitha Soren, has been killed in a highway crash in northern California.
Lewis was a passenger in a car driven by her friend and former Berkeley High School classmate, Ross Schultz, 20, who also died in accident on Tuesday afternoon, according to her family and authorities.
Continue reading...The Hideous Kinky author on her childhood dyslexia, the frenzy around being a perfect mother, and why there are so few great female artists
Esther Freud is the author of nine novels, including Hideous Kinky, her semi-autobiographical debut, which tells of her unconventional childhood in Morocco. The daughter of Lucien Freud and Bernardine Coverley, she trained as an actor before becoming a novelist. Freud has three children with the actor David Morrissey, from whom she recently separated. I Couldn’t Love You More is the story of three generations of Irish women: Rosaleen, a heroic, headstrong teenager in the early 1960s who begins an affair with an older man; Aoife, her mother, who recounts her life to her dying husband and wonders what became of her flighty daughter; and Kate, in London, married to the useless Matt, trying to make it as an artist while looking after their daughter, Freya. The three lives intertwine and overlap over the course of the novel.
You say in the acknowledgments that I Couldn’t Love You More was inspired by your own mother, bringing up children unmarried and without the support of her family.
I didn’t start the book with the intention of telling that story. I was thinking how much I’d like to write a book where love was the main theme. So I started with a real rush of energy, writing about it from different points of view, three women from different generations. I began really playfully and freely, writing these short chapters. After a while I realised I needed a story and some kind of plot, and it was then that it occurred to me to think more about my mother and how extraordinary it was that she managed to have two children without her parents knowing, and what it was like to be in such an unsupported world.
A sombre week as BBC presenters pondered war reporting ethics, George Floyd’s death, and a decade of conflict in Syria
Sunday Feature: Regarding the Pain of Others (BBC Radio 3) | BBC Sounds
1Xtra Talks With Richie Brave (BBC 1Xtra) | BBC Sounds
Assignment (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds
Today, on Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, the vastly experienced journalist Allan Little considers Susan Sontag’s 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others. In the essay, Sontag wonders about the ethics of war journalism, particularly photography. Do pictures of the horrors of war engage the viewer or make us turn away?
Continue reading...CEO calls on Scottish ministers to replace 2-metre rule with 1 metre to secure future of world’s largest arts festival
The survival of the Edinburgh festival fringe is at stake unless social distancing rules for venues are relaxed within a fortnight, its organiser has said.
Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, called on ministers to replace the 2-metre rule with the 1-metre distance used in hospitality in order to help secure the future of the world’s largest arts festival.
Continue reading...After a life marked by abuse, fame, scandal and struggle, the Irish singer-songwriter says she never lost faith
Sinéad O’Connor has been pretty much invisible for the past few years. There’s a good reason, though, she tells me with her usual disregard for social niceties. “I’ve spent most of the time in the nuthouse. I’ve been practically living there for six years.” She pauses, takes an intense drag on her fag, and warns me off being similarly politically incorrect. “We alone get to call it the nuthouse – the patients.”
O’Connor is a music great – her 1990 version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U is one of the most transcendent five minutes in pop history, the solitary tear falling from her eye in the accompanying video one of its most beautiful images. The single topped the charts worldwide, as did the album it was taken from, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Astonishingly, in the 31 years that have passed, she has never had another UK Top 10 hit single and only one Top 10 album. And yet she remains a household name.
Continue reading...Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonnig anatomises an agency that has never truly lived up to its steely professional image
At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”
Related: Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims
Continue reading...Viewers say scenes featuring Lady Gaga, boyband BTS and Justin Bieber are missing from Chinese version
For many Chinese millennials, the US sitcom Friends was a window to the American way of life. Teachers would use the show to help students learn English. Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai have Friends-themed Central Perk cafes. So when news that the original cast were to hold a reunion special nearly 20 years after the show was first introduced into China, diehard fans were excited, and some of China’s biggest online streaming platforms bought the rights to broadcast the show.
But eagle-eyed viewers complained on Thursday that some of the much-talked-about scenes in the original 104-minute runtime were missing.
Continue reading...The young star of Peter Murimi’s intimate documentary is as poor, religious and conservative as his peers – and fearful of a violent backlash, he says
Samuel Asilikwa grew up in rural Kenya. There was a strict template for masculinity, informed by centuries of tradition – and intolerance. In a new documentary about his life, we see his father, a pastor, question Asilikwa about why he is yet to find a wife. We then watch as he relocates to Nairobi in search of work and adventure. He finds community, friendship and intense romance with a man called Alex.
Peter Murimi’s film I Am Samuel, shot verité-style over the course of five years, is at its most powerful contrasting city and countryside. Kenya’s farmland, clay roads, shrubbery and corn fields are evidence of a still, yet cyclical, pattern of life compared with the infinite noise and claustrophobia of Nairobi. But it is also a film about a shifting political landscape, where “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” is punishable by 14 years’ imprisonment.
Continue reading...Trees communicate with each other, store memories and respond to attacks. They have a profoundly positive effect on our emotions … but can we know how they feel about us?
Why can’t we communicate with trees the same way we communicate with, say, elephants? Both live in social groups and look after not only their young but also their elders. That famous elephant memory is also found in trees, and both communicate in languages that we didn’t even recognise at first. Trees communicate through their interconnected root systems, and elephants communicate using low-frequency rumbling below the range at which we can hear. We get a feeling of wellbeing when we run our fingers over the rough skin of both creatures, and what we would love above all is to get a reaction from them.
Is such communication possible between people and trees? First we have to take a closer look at what we mean by “communicate”. It is not enough that we consciously or subconsciously eavesdrop, so to speak, on the scents trees use to communicate among themselves. We have a physical reaction when we breathe them in, but for communication to happen, the trees also need to react to our signals.
Continue reading...The star of Peaky Blinders on his late colleague, how he convinced the producers to cast him rather than Jason Statham as Tommy Shelby – and returning to the monster-movie genre in A Quiet Place Part II
Cillian Murphy, star of the new horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II, is something to behold: X-ray eyes at once penetrating and ethereally blue, cheekbones so pronounced you could stretch out and go to sleep on them. Unfortunately, the beholding will have to wait. We have barely exchanged greetings over Zoom when his voice breaks up, the screen freezes and the room falls silent. A quiet place, indeed.
We switch to phones. We can do this, I tell him. “I have faith,” he replies, in a soothing Cork accent that compensates for the lack of visuals. Murphy’s gift for intensity has made him a natural fit for characters damaged (Dunkirk, The Edge of Love) or outright villainous (Batman Begins, Red Eye), but today he is quick to laugh and keen to talk. He is speaking from a flat in Manchester, where he is staying while he shoots the sixth and final series of Peaky Blinders. That stylish crime drama, which rocketed from BBC Two cult success to global phenomenon, revolves around a 1920s Birmingham gang led by Murphy as the vicious Tommy Shelby. With his eyes, looks could kill – although he keeps razor blades in the brim of his cap, just in case.
Continue reading...Caped Crusader battles villains across the globe in Batman: the World – but he’s in Spain to relax
Given his 82 long years of rooftop vigilantism, the dank, lonely surroundings of his home office – not to mention the tickly throat irritation caused by all those growled threats – few would begrudge Batman some sun, a nice paella and a cheeky mid-morning pint. Or five.
Benidorm, fortunately, is only too happy to oblige. The eastern Spanish resort is among the exotic locations that feature in Batman: the World, a new global anthology to be published by DC Comics in September.
Continue reading...The band have released only one album since 1991 classic Loveless, yet their influence remains undimmed. Their frontman discusses destroying buildings with noise, losing his mojo – and preparing new music
In early 1988, My Bloody Valentine decided that they were, as their de facto leader, Kevin Shields, puts it today, “finished”. You can see how they might have come to that conclusion. They had started life in the early 80s as a Dublin post-punk band, relocated to Berlin at the suggestion of the Virgin Prunes’ Gavin Friday and become a gothy proposition inspired by the Birthday Party and the Cramps, then moved to London and transformed into what Shields calls “a conceptual band”, their childlike record sleeves concealing songs about necrophilia and incest.
The problem was, no one had got the joke; the general consensus, as Shields sighs today, was “that we were this shit Jesus and Mary Chain copyist band”. Following the departure of their lead singer, Dave Conway, they had adopted a jangly 12-string guitar style, to negligible response.
Continue reading...The Hobbit actor, who is back on TV in the sitcom Breeders, recalls sharp dressing on a budget, discovering Public Enemy and how Michael Caine got him into film
The first music I latched on to was British punk – the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Jam. I just loved the power, the rawness and the rudeness. You had to turn it down when your dad came in the room; your parents were supposed to hate it. Bob Marley and the Wailers and Linton Kwesi Johnson became a religion alongside the Catholicism I was taught in school. From 17, I was a little hip-hop head, mad on Jungle Brothers, Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy. I was obsessed with politics in that way you are as a teenager – when you actually know nothing.
I’m not a particularly knowledgable fan of the Fall, but I loved hearing their early stuff via my older brothers (I’m the youngest of five). I thought this bored Manc with this slightly aggressive snarl was great. I like hearing accents in music. I remember hearing Ian Dury for the first time and thinking: “Jesus Christ!” Not everyone can sound like Rod Stewart. I’m not sure there has to be a template for what a rock’n’roll singer sounds like anyway. You’d want Mark E Smith to like you even though he would really hate you. I have often thought that about John Lydon. I would love to say hello to him, but he’d hate me, just on principle.
Authors from Julia Donaldson to Cressida Cowell pay tribute to the beloved author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, who has died aged 91
The late Eric Carle has been hailed by fellow children’s writers for creating generations of readers as voracious as his best-loved creation, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Carle, who died on Sunday at the age of 91, left behind titles including his worldwide bestselling board book – about a caterpillar who eats his way through a week’s worth of food before turning into a butterfly – as well as The Very Busy Spider, The Mixed-Up Chameleon and Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me.
Continue reading...This month, the Irish singer turned 60 – and her popularity belies how radical her Celtic futurism really is
With the plinking, clipped synths and infernally moreish chorus, Orinoco Flow is the Enya song that everyone knows, yet it is arguably the least interesting moment on her breakthrough album, Watermark. Indeed, for years it seemed that its ubiquity obscured the stranger treasures in her discography.
Continue reading...Decision comes after criticism by Jolie of decision not to let children testify in court
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been awarded joint custody following a protracted court battle.
The former couple have been in dispute for five years over access to their six children and hired a private judge, John Ouderkirk, to oversee the case.
Continue reading...Sales of items from celebrities such as Janet Jackson and K-poppers BTS are trending – and reframing what goes under the hammer
Is celebrity merchandise the new Monet? Auction houses are in flux, with more and more pop culture items being sold under the hammer for six and seven-figure sums.
Last month, Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills hosted a three-day auction of Janet Jackson’s personal belongings, including some of her most iconic stage outfits. Buyers included Kim Kardashian, who snagged Jackson’s outfit from the music video for her 1993 classic If for $25,000 (£18,000) and, on Instagram, said she was “such a fan” of the singer.
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