Category Archives: Culture

Five thousand years of mystical magnificence: Epic Iran at the V&A – review

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V&A, London
Persepolis and Isfahan are dazzlingly brought to life in a blockbuster show that explores five jaw-dropping millennia of cultural history, from soaring domes to charging horses


Typical. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once. That’s what the V&A’s luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.

That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsi’s epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.

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John Cena ‘very sorry’ for saying Taiwan is a country

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Fast & Furious actor and wrestler apologises profusely on social media for offending Chinese fans

Fast & Furious star and wrestler John Cena began learning Mandarin Chinese nearly a decade ago. But this month, by showing off his linguistic skill in Taiwan, he got into trouble in mainland China.

On Tuesday, Cena apologised for calling Taiwan “a country” in an interview he gave to a Taiwanese broadcaster early this month, saying that it was not appropriate.

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No Man’s Land review – well-meaning drama about US-Mexico relations

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This contemporary western about a young Texan fugitive who flees south of the border is handsomely shot but didactic

Just north of the border between the United States and Mexico, the Greer family – patriarch Bill (Frank Grillo), mom Monica (Andie MacDowell), and grown sons Lucas (Alex MacNicoll) and Jackson (Jake Allyn) – work the land as ranchers. They raise cattle, ride horses and, being red-blooded Texan types, play sports – in Jackson’s case well enough that he’s got a chance to go pro as a baseball player. They also spend the odd evening riding the range with a vigilante militia group, rounding up immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally, to “help” the border patrols. On one such night, Jackson joins his dad and big brother, even though they try to keep him out of this sort of thing so he can get out of Dodge and become a sports hero – and what do you know, the dumb lug ends up shooting and killing a boy (Alessio Valentini) just a little younger than himself. In the back no less.

Ashamed, distraught and worried that his father will try to take the rap for him, Jackson confesses to local Texas Ranger Ramirez (venerable character actor George Lopez), but then bolts across the border to Mexico on his trusty horse Sundance. Soon, the fugitive is learning some life lessons and about what Mexico is really like, and he becomes a hired hand for a nice middle-class family. A flirtatious friendship blooms between him and the family’s pretty daughter, Victoria (Esmeralda Pimentel), while he tries not to get caught by the dead kid’s dad Gustavo (Jorge A Jimenez) and a skeevy people-trafficking “coyote” (Andres Delgado), who are out to get him.

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‘You care for birds, and they heal you’: film profiles world of a Black falconer

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A new documentary, The Falconer, follows Rodney Stotts, who found fulfillment in working with raptors and inner-city kids

Falconry is a profession with roots in the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe but one of its practitioners is making some history of his own.

Related: I'm a falconer - and there's nothing like watching a bird you trained in action

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Was the fiddler framed? How Nero may have been a good guy after all

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He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie

Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.

His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.

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The reputation game: how authors try to control their image from beyond the grave

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The row over a new biography of Philip Roth has exposed the way agents and estates restrict access and manage archives to maintain a writer’s posthumous good name

Writers and critics are raising questions over the role that agents and estates play in managing archives and limiting access to biographical material.

Fresh worries have been fuelled by the continuing fiasco over the publication of Philip Roth: The Biography, with accusations that access to the famed US author’s archival material is being unfairly constrained.

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Bob Dylan at 80 – a little Minnesota town celebrates its famous son

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Hibbing, the birthplace of the musician, is paying tribute with a year of special events

Bob Dylan’s debut 1962 single began: “I got mixed-up confusion; man, it’s a-killin’ me”. It hasn’t yet – he turns 80 on Monday, and the pre-eminent custodian of American roots music, with its storytelling and protest traditions, is set to be celebrated by a public avalanche of events, programmes and tributes.

The occasion will be marked in his birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota – where, inspired by the sounds of country and blues music drifting up from the south on AM radio, he wrote in his high-school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard. St Louis county, in which Hibbing sits, has issued a proclamation declaring a “Year of Dylan Celebration”.

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Eurovision 2021: follow all the action from Rotterdam – live

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Good evening, Europe! The song contest is back at last. Join us on a glorious ride through every performance, every vote ... expect pyrotechnics, dry ice, green screen gimmicks and one giant Russian dress

I keep thinking that the pods the artists are sitting in look like the galactic senate from Star Wars: Phantom Menace but I can’t find a picture where we won’t have to pay Lucasfilm a zillion galactic credits to use it so I can prove it to you. So just imagine that I have.

I’m just taking a breather while they do this recap. After this we are going to get – I believe – loads of performances from former winners on the rooftops of Rotterdam, some weird orchestra/DJ mash-up, and also a spectacular dancing countdown. I mean, why not? It’s Eurovision. I’ve honestly loved it, it has been a really strong final this year so far. I just said in the comments, there’s about eight or nine songs that if they won, you’d think, “Yep, sure, it was always on the cards”.

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Mateo García Elizondo: ‘I get a little bored by having to talk about my grandfather’

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The writer – and grandson of Gabriel García Márquez – on Mexican folklore, his early love of horror and learning to live with the family’s literary legacy

Mateo García Elizondo, a 34-year-old writer from Mexico, may come from literary stock – his paternal grandfather is Colombian heavyweight Gabriel García Márquez and his maternal grandfather is Mexican literary giant Salvador Elizondo – but he is carving his own path at the forefront of a burgeoning scene in Spanish language literature. He has published a novel as well as written scripts for films and graphic novels. His writing is also included in Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2, which was published last month. He was born in Mexico City, where he still lives.

How do you see the overall health of literature in Spanish?
I wouldn’t try to compare it with anything before, but Spanish-language literature is doing so well, with so many people doing interesting things, especially here in Mexico but also in South America, Spain, and even in Africa, as we are learning from the Granta selection. I love the literary horror of Mariana Enríquez, I am also a big fan of Fernanda Melchor and the way she uses “dirty” Mexican language and depicts the darker side of Mexico. I’m a big reader of Juan Pablo Villalobos as well and love his use of humour.

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John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel

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Rejected and hidden away since 1930, an early murder mystery by the Nobel-winning author is ‘an incredible find’

Years before becoming one of America’s most celebrated authors, John Steinbeck wrote at least three novels which were never published. Two of them were destroyed by the young writer as he struggled to make his name, but a third – a full-length mystery werewolf story entitled Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.

Now a British academic is calling for the Steinbeck estate to finally allow the publication of the work, written almost a decade before masterpieces such as The Grapes of Wrath, his epic about the Great Depression and the struggles of migrant farm workers.

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Billie Piper: From vulnerable teen pop star to director of an ‘anti-romcom’

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The characters she plays do not match her own life, the actress insists, but it’s hard not to see parallels with her own journey

Billie Piper has occupied a near continual, if shifting, position in the public imagination for almost a quarter of a century. That’s a notable achievement by any reckoning of a performer’s career, but it’s also rather alarming, given that she’s still only 38.

Having started out as 15-year-old chart sensation, she walked away from the pop music treadmill, enjoyed a boozy marriage with the DJ Chris Evans, returned to frontline fame in Doctor Who, struck out on a path of acclaimed dramatic performances on TV and the stage, and has now made her directorial debut with the feature film Rare Beasts.

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Daisy Haggard: ‘I love getting older. I care less about what people think’

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The actor, 43, on hiding from her children in bed, hanging out with Matt LeBlanc and her love of Wotsits

I do all my writing in bed. Not due to decadence, but because it’s the place I can hide from my children most effectively.

My recent Bafta nomination genuinely came as a huge shock. I assumed it was Breeders that had been shortlisted, not me [for female performance in a comedy programme]. When I finally clicked, I blurted out, “Good God!” I don’t think I’ll win, but if by some miracle I did, my kids would immediately steal the trophy and put hats on it.

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Iran stunned by case of couple who drugged and dismembered son

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Parents admit murdering film-maker Babak Khorramdin and to killing daughter and son-in-law years before

An Iranian couple have been arrested for drugging, murdering and dismembering their film-maker son, Babak Khorramdin, 47, and also confessed to killing their daughter and son-in-law in the same way years earlier.

The case has stunned Iran, where it has been splashed across the front pages of newspapers with headlines including “Society in shock” and “Occupants of terror house”.

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Associated Newspapers pays damages for revealing Sand Van Roy as Luc Besson accuser

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MailOnline published actor’s identity as complainant in rape case against French director

Associated Newspapers has paid substantial damages and apologised to actor Sand Van Roy for revealing her identity as a complainant in a rape case against the French film director Luc Besson.

In May 2018, Van Roy filed a complaint with French police alleging that she had been raped by Besson. She expected to remain anonymous, as is her right under French law, but details of her complaint were leaked and reported in the French press, breaching her right to anonymity, the high court heard.

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Resplendence of things past: museum of Paris revels in £50m revamp

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The Carnavalet, devoted to the city’s history, has been shaken out of its dusty and confusing former shape

One of the first cities in Europe to award itself a museum devoted to its own history, Paris will soon have one of the continent’s most modern as the Musée Carnavalet reopens this month following a spectacular five-year, €58m (£50m) renovation.

Opened in 1880 at the suggestion of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who realised 20 years earlier that the mammoth programme of urban renewal he was carrying out would obliterate much of the city’s past, the museum had not been overhauled since.

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Rebel girl: the fierce fashion renaissance of Alice in Wonderland

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From Disney’s blond teenager to Tim Burton’s surreal reimagining and an all-black Pirelli calendar, Lewis Carroll’s character has had many lives and looks. A new V&A exhibition charts them all

A blue dress trimmed with white, plus long hair swept back from the forehead by a ribbon, always means Alice. When Gwen Stefani wears a black satin headband and a blue-sky corset edged with snowy lace in the video for What You Waiting For, she is Alice. No surname required. When the supermodel Natalia Vodianova balances on a marble mantelpiece in Balenciaga ankle boots and a sky-blue mini dress, with a bunny’s tail fashioned from a whisper of Fortuny-pleated white silk plissé on the pages of Vogue, she is Alice. Alice’s look, now 150 years old, is as recognisable as a Batman or Superman costume. She is an icon, a fashion fairytale. Should you so wish – for about £20 – you can be Alice.

But does the 20th century really need another skinny, posh, blond pin-up? Because that – to phrase it as bluntly as our heroine might have – is how we now see Alice. Never mind that the original 1865 illustrations show a scruffy little girl in a boxy pinafore that looks like a Victorian version of dungarees. Disney’s Alice, with her vanilla curls and waist cinched to a handspan by a frilled white apron, broke out of Lewis Carroll’s quirky story and became a star in her own right. Since 1951, Disney’s slender, fair-haired movie-screen Alice has all but obliterated other Alices.

What’s more, the origin story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the 33-year-old author’s choice of a seven-year-old girl as his literary muse – has long been flagged as inappropriate to modern sensibilities. Perhaps, then, it is time to cancel Alice?

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Lady Gaga says rape as teenager left her pregnant and caused ‘psychotic break’

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Speaking on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry show The Me You Can’t See, the singer outlined further details of attack she first disclosed in 2014

Lady Gaga has told new details about sexual assault she suffered when she was 19. Speaking on The Me You Can’t See, Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’s new Apple TV+ series about mental health, she said the rape – that she first disclosed in 2014 – was by a music producer and left her pregnant.

“I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off,’” she said. “And I said no. And I left, and they told me they were going to burn all of my music. And they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop asking me, and I just froze and – I don’t even remember.” She said “the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner”.

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Will you get douze points? Take our fiendish Eurovision quiz

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From Abba to Bucks Fizz, dancing grannies to French diplomacy, our quiz requires some serious song contest chops to get 12 points – or a perfect 20

Vampires, naked apes and free booze! The wildest Eurovision performances ever

After last year’s hiatus, the Eurovision song contest is finally back on Saturday night at 8pm on BBC One, with all the glitz, glamour and camp delight that entails. To get you in the mood, take our fiendish Eurovision quiz. Can you avoid the dreaded nul points? Let us know how you do in the comments below …

Good evening, Europe! This is London calling! Can you spot the winner of the last contest to be held, in 2019? His name was Duncan Laurence

This one?

This one?

This one?

Or this?

Which of these acclaimed international stars has competed in Eurovision? Madonna, Celine Dion, Vanessa Paradis or Kate Bush?

Madonna

Celine Dion

Vanessa Paradis

Kate Bush

When was the very first Eurovision song contest held?

24 May 1956

12 March 1958

29 March 1960

23 November 1963

James Newman is the UK entry in 2021. But what is his song called?

Firefly

Flames

Embers

Dragonfire

For many years Norway was cursed as the only country to have scored the dreaded "nul points" on four separate occasions. But in 2015, another country equalled this dismal record. Who?

United Kingdom

Netherlands

Austria

Germany

Which country sent a bunch of grannies to represent it in 2012?

Russia

Albania

Armenia

Azerbaijan

“Be it a mug, a goblet, a cup, a glass, or flute, raise it and toast the memory of the man who was and always will be the voice of Eurovision … the late great, Sir Terry Wogan." In the UK, during which song is it a tradition to toast Terry?

Third

Fifth

Seventh

Ninth

Waterloo by Abba is arguably Eurovision's most famous winning song. Which year did it win?

1971

1972

1973

1974

In the year that Abba won with Waterloo, the French entry was withdrawn from the contest. Why?

The death of the French president, Georges Pompidou

A dispute with the EBU over the competition being hosted in the UK

French broadcasters were concerned the entry could be seen as propaganda for a referendum campaign taking place

Because the song had been associated with signalling an attempt at a military coup

Bucks Fizz won the contest in 1981 with Making Your Mind Up. How many number one singles did the original Bucks Fizz line-up have in the UK in the 1980s?

None

One

Two

Three

Which original member of Eurovision-winning band Bucks Fizz stood in the 2019 UK general election to be an MP for the Brexit Party?

Jay Aston

Cheryl Baker

Bobby G

Mike Nolan

Verka Serduchka has become a Eurovision icon. But which country did they represent in 2007?

Belarus

Ukraine

Austria

Poland

Which is the most eastern city to have ever hosted the Eurovision final?

Helsinki

Tashkent

Baku

Moscow

In what year did Australia first compete in the Eurovision song contest?

1997

2009

2015

2017

Australia isn't the only country not from Europe to have competed in the contest. Which African nation competed for its one and only time in 1980?

Morocco

Algeria

Egypt

South Africa

Which of these – among Europe's smallest competing countries – has won the Eurovision song contest?

Malta

San Marino

Cyprus

Luxembourg

By the time he represented the UK in 1968 with Congratulations, Cliff Richard had already scored more than forty Top 40 hits in the UK. Where did Congratulations finish in the Eurovision song contest that year?

1st

2nd

3rd

4th

Which country had its entry for this year disqualified?

Belarus

Ukraine

Armenia

Bulgaria

The United Kingdom has hosted the contest in five different cities. Which of these has not had the honour of holding the final?

Brighton

Birmingham

Glasgow

Harrogate

This lot won Eurovision in 2006 for Finland with Hard Rock Hallelujah. What were they called?

Loki

Lordi

Kinda

Kooki

18 and above.

So close to a perfect score, but basically you are Cliff Richard coming 2nd in 1968

20 and above.

"Douze points!" – well, vingt points, but you get the point. Well done.

14 and above.

Excellent Eurovision knowledge – c'est une magnifique victoire

8 and above.

Good effort

0 and above.

"Nul points!" – you are the Norway of this quiz

1 and above.

This is the kind of score that is going to get you relegated to the semi-final for next year

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Cher’s films – ranked!

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She has just turned 75 and there’s a new biopic in the works. What better time to look back at a film CV that’s full of memorable roles?

HBO produced this heavy-handed but affecting anthology film on the topic of abortion, premiering it at the Toronto film festival on the combined star clout of Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and, of course, Cher, who also directed the third (and best) of its segments. It remains her only directorial credit, and she would have done well to keep at it. She shows a sure touch with actors, herself included, uncharacteristically restrained as a benevolent abortion doctor working through a violent anti-choice protest. It is enough to make you wonder whether HBO should have kept her on its books. Surely there could have been a place in The Sopranos for Cher.

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