Category Archives: Culture

Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children at 40: ‘India is no longer the country of this novel’

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Four decades after his Booker-winner was published, Rushdie reflects on the Bombay of his childhood – and his despair at the sectarianism he sees in India today

Longevity is the real prize for which writers strive, and it isn’t awarded by any jury. For a book to stand the test of time, to pass successfully down the generations, is uncommon enough to be worth a small celebration. For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight. This is why we do what we do: to make works of art that, if we are very lucky, will endure.

As a reader, I have always been attracted to capacious, largehearted fictions, books that try to gather up large armfuls of the world. When I started to think about the work that would grow into Midnight’s Children, I looked again at the great Russian novels of the 19th century, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Dead Souls, books of the type that Henry James had called “loose, baggy monsters”, large-scale realist novels – though, in the case of Dead Souls, on the very edge of surrealism. And at the great English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, Tristram Shandy (wildly innovative and by no means realist), Vanity Fair (bristling with sharp knives of satire), Little Dorrit (in which the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose purpose is to do nothing, comes close to magic realism), and Bleak House (in which the interminable court case Jarndyce v Jarndyce comes even closer). And at their great French precursor, Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is completely fabulist.

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From colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the rise of anti-Asian violence

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Anti-Asian racism is on the rise around the world. The Pulitzer-winning author reflects on his own experiences as a Vietnamese American – and the dark history that continues to fuel the current hate

On 16 March eight people were killed in Atlanta, Georgia, by a 21-year-old white man: all but one were women, and six were Asian. The shootings take their place in a much longer story of anti-Asian violence. The Covid pandemic has given us a particular insight into this phenomenon: verbal and physical assaults against Asians have accelerated in the US over the last year, with 3,800 documented incidents involving spitting, knifings, beatings, acid attacks – and murder. The majority of the victims have been women.

Though the Atlanta killings took place in Asian massage parlours, the shooter has said he did not target the women because of their race. Instead, he claimed to be a sex addict bent on “removing temptation”. Regardless of his denial – whether it is a lie or self-deception – it is obvious that he targeted these women because they were Asian. “Racism and sexism intersect,” says Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor. This intersection has been a driving force in western attitudes towards Asia and Asian women, who are routinely hypersexualised and objectified in popular culture.

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How Leslie Jordan made it big: ‘If you want to get sober, try 27 days in county jail’

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After starring in Will & Grace and American Horror Story, his life took a twist in lockdown and he became an Instagram superstar at 65. He discusses fame, fun and sharing a cell with Robert Downey Jr

For a man of such diminutive stature – 4ft 11in in shoes – Leslie Jordan loves a tall tale. A cursory question at the start of our interview about where he is calling from, for example, results in this glorious flight of fancy: “I got on a bus in 1982, from the hills of Tennessee. I had $1,200 sewn into my underpants by my mother and I arrived in LA and found West Hollywood, which is where I currently live.”

Such vivid storytelling – delivered in a honey-thick southern drawl, accentuated perfectly by a knowing campness – is part of the reason for Jordan’s unexpected career boost at 65. A jobbing actor best known for his role in American Horror Story and his Emmy-winning turn as Beverly Leslie, the acid-tongued rival of Megan Mullally’s Karen in Will & Grace, Jordan spent most of 2020 becoming an accidental internet sensation, racking up 5.6 million Instagram followers – including the likes of Rihanna and Lily Allen – thanks to his charmingly chaotic videos.

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The eggs factor: Belgian pop star finds fame again from rural Irish exile

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Philippe Robrecht was living the quiet life with his wife and hens when stardom came calling back

Something odd happened to Philippe Robrecht while hunkered down in lockdown on Inishbofin, a tiny island with just 170 inhabitants off Ireland’s Atlantic coast: he became, again, a pop star.

The 55-year-old musician and singer had not made an album in almost a decade and was all but forgotten in his native Belgium when the Covid-19 pandemic reached Ireland last year.

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Let’s have an answer! Take our fiendish University Challenge quiz

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Ahead of the grand final of the brain-squeezing series next Monday, test your mental mettle with 15 questions set by the show’s quizmasters

The opening scene of which of Shakespeare’s plays comprises just 61 words, the longest of those words being "lightning", "hurlyburly" and "graymalkin"?

Macbeth

Twelfth Night

Timon of Athens

Comedy of Errors

What term for a type of particle accelerator also applies to a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles spiralling in magnetic fields?

Cyclotron

Gamma

Synchrotron

Collider

The works of which Italian artist, born in 1449, include St Jerome in His Study and the frescoes for the Sassetti chapel in Florence? His numerous apprentices included Michelangelo.

Fra Angelico

Domenico Ghirlandaio

Leonardo Da Vinci

Sandro Botticelli

For which film set in Rome did Paolo Sorrentino win the 2014 Academy Award for best foreign language film?

Life Is Beautiful

The Great Beauty

Parasite

The Postman

What bird does the British Trust for Ornithology describe as: "By far the biggest passerine, with a similar wingspan to a buzzard. The bill is strikingly long and heavy"?

Long-tailed tit

Rook

Raven

Tawny owl

In March 1969, the Ussuri River was the scene of armed clashes between which two major powers?

China and the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union and the US

China and the US

The UK and Argentina

In April 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo over which body of water, crossed earlier by Louis Blériot?

The Channel

Atlantic Ocean

Black Sea

Lake Superior

Described as "the little town keeping the lights on in France", Arlit in Niger was until 2021 the site of one of the world’s largest mines of which toxic metal?

Bismuth

Mercury

Lead

Uranium

What colour links the field of the flag of the Basque country, William Morris’s house in Bexleyheath and leading football clubs in Belgrade and Salzburg?

Red

Green

Purple

Blue

Who wrote the Nebula-award-winning novels Doomsday Book and All Clear?

George R R Martin

Neil Gaiman

Connie Willis

Ursula Le Guin

Nenagh, Clonmel and Cashel are towns in which inland Irish county, bordering Galway and Cork?

Kerry

Tipperary

Kildare

Offaly

According to Jeff Bezos, what "has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being"?

Online reviews

Social media

Email

Hunger

In materials science, the ratio of the contractile to the tensile strains is named after which French scientist, born in 1781?

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Charles Friedel

Siméon-Denis Poisson

Louis Pasteur

Which English cathedral is noted for stained-glass rose windows known as the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye?

Lincoln

Durham

Ely

York Minster

Totem and Taboo, and Civilisation and Its Discontents are early 20th-century works by which thinker?

Otto Rank

Frantz Fanon

Carl Jung

Sigmund Freud

15 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

14 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

13 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

12 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

11 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

10 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

9 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

8 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

7 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

6 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

5 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

4 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

3 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

2 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

0 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

1 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

The University Challenge grand final airs Monday 5 April at 8.30pm on BBC Two

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Pandemic 2020 review – a masterly mapping of the Covid outbreak

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The team behind Once Upon a Time in Iraq has compiled a moving and sometimes hopeful three-parter that offers a global perspective on the crisis

Like the virus itself, the programmes about it have moved from localised subjects to a slightly wider field and now have expanded to take in a global view. It hasn’t been a perfectly linear progression, of course, but most of the first documentaries were composed largely of footage recorded by medical professionals themselves, at work and then – exhausted and tearful – at home.

After that came socially distanced films recording the impact on local communities and bereaved families, the experiences of survivors and the long-term consequences for those who do not make a full recovery. Alongside that have come considerations and critiques of the UK response to the crisis and comparisons – not generally favourable – with that of other countries.

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Steve Guttenberg: ‘I learned humility from Laurence Olivier’

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As the ordinary guy in Police Academy and Three Men and a Baby, Guttenberg was one of the 80s unlikeliest stars – then disappeared. He talks about defying audience expectation, partying with Tom Selleck and Ted Danson and his latest role as a foul-mouthed British gangster

“Steve Guttenberg … in a British gangster film!” sounds like a movie pitch by Alan Partridge. Mr Nice of 80s movies – the actor who embodied friendly normality in films such as Short Circuit, Cocoon and Three Men and a Baby – starring in a weird subgenre of film that is now little more than violence porn and misogyny?

And yet, here we are in 2021, with Guttenberg playing an alarmingly bewigged capo in something called – let me check my notes – Original Gangster. It’s not quite as weird as Donald Trump becoming president of the United States, but it’s not far off.

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April Fools’ Day quiz: how easily fooled are you?

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Test your knowledge of famous pranks on one of the most divisive days of the year

There are only two types of people in the world. Those who enjoy media organisations and brands pulling April fool stunts. And joyless monsters. Assuming you are not one of the latter, while you are waiting to see what this year’s selection of hoaxes has to offer, why not take our quiz of famous and “funny” April fool pranks from throughout the years.

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‘They cut the beheading scene’: The Long Good Friday, remembered by Helen Mirren and co-stars

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Prophetic, frenetic and shockingly brutal, the film became a British classic. For its 40th anniversary, Mirren and other cast members relive their roles in the menacing gangland masterpiece

It has been 40 years since the release of The Long Good Friday, a gangster film still revered as one of the best British movies of all time. Shot in London in the late 1970s and starring the late Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, it told the story of an underworld boss trying desperately to stop the IRA from dismantling his empire.

The backdrop for the film was the London Docklands, then mostly undeveloped. With corrupt city planners in his pocket, Hoskins’ character – the pugnacious, barrel-chested Harold Shand – attempts to woo the New York mafia into a partnership to transform the area, selling the idea to them with a speech during a trip up the Thames on his yacht. “Our country is not an island any more,” he snarls. “We’re a leading European state. And I believe this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital … no other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.”

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‘Rehab made me grateful to be alive’: Margaret Cho on sobriety, solitude and Stop Asian Hate

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One of the world’s most outrageous comedians, Cho is helping to lead the battle to end racism against Asian-Americans. She discusses hatred, hope and how humour saved her life

● Warning: this article contains discussion of suicide from the start

The thing about being a standup comedian is that you can never turn off that part of your brain, not even when you are trying to kill yourself. Margaret Cho learned this in 2013 when she attempted suicide in a hotel room, using a shower curtain rail. “It started bending and I was like: Oh shit, I’m too fat to kill myself, so I had to get down,” says Cho. “I thought: I’ll go on a diet and I’ll try again when I reach my goal weight, which means I’m never going to kill myself, because I’ll never reach my goal weight.”

The 52-year-old Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-nominated comedian, author, actor and podcaster lets out a delighted cackle. “That joke … people get really upset. They’re like: ‘You should put in a trigger warning.’ I don’t know how to do a trigger warning!” The point Cho is trying to make is a serious one. “My sense of humour probably saved me from dying,” she says. “You can’t really shut that part of you off, because humour is really hope. Humour and laughter is the intake of breath, which is the preservation of the body for the next moment … at your darkest moments; it’s actually the thing that shines the brightest. I’m really grateful for it and I’m really grateful I got to live.”

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Phil Elverum’s songs of loss gave me a language for that shapeshifter, grief

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After my first boyfriend died, Elverum’s Microphones and Mount Eerie helped me make sense of a bleak world

I first encountered the music of Phil Elverum in August 2010, a month after the death of my first boyfriend. That summer I spent hours sitting numbly in the park with my headphones on, listening to Elverum describe a landscape without colour or movement: “no black or white, no change in the light, no night, no golden sun”. That dissonance between internal and external worlds made sense to me as I watched children play and rollerbladers pass by in the sunshine as if everything was normal.

I listened over and over again to his album The Glow Pt 2, released in 2001 under the name the Microphones, trying to make sense of the previous six months. I met Marc in my first year at university: a pretty, hyperactive French boy who shimmered into my life at a club night in Birmingham. I fell in love with his perfect sweep of sandy blond hair, the way he played piano with the exaggerated melodrama of his beloved symphonic metal and video game soundtracks and his habit of wrapping a USB cable around his neck like a protective amulet.

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The anti-Marie Kondo: Netflix celebrates the clothes we keep

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Worn Stories looks to unravel the tales behind the most treasured items in our wardrobes – but is such meaning and emotion easily conveyed via television?

I am not a minimalist: I don’t want to live with extreme amounts of nothing. I like “things”, and I like my things, which means I have several boxes of clothes, bags and shoes in my possession that have accompanied me through the best part of two decades. One of the boxes is my best and largest suitcase. When I was still travelling fairly regularly, I would have to empty out the contents of the suitcase and pile them somewhere else for my return, a process that feels a bit like uncovering memories and repressing them again, two weeks later, with a zip that goes all the way around.

Given the displacement of a series of house moves in my earlier 20s, the fact that I even still possess the navy corduroy American Apparel hotpants I wore to go clubbing at university (now, for users of the fashion app Depop, a vintage item), or the 70s-era yellow, white and purple-striped T-shirt I was wearing when I had an encounter with the far more colourful Iris Apfel, the interior designer, feels nothing short of miraculous. Today, I can recite what I was wearing to interview various figures in my former role as an editor at a fashion magazine, outfits carefully planned though liable to go awry, like when the zip on my green, chequered skirt broke off while meeting Chloë Sevigny.

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Julian Lloyd Webber: The rich world of African classical music

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Musician Rebeca Omordia has spent years unearthing the classical music of a whole continent, culminating in the hugely successful African Concert Series

While the Wigmore Hall has rightly garnered plaudits for keeping classical music alive during lockdown, another pioneering concert series has also beaten the odds with its series of online live events.

The African Concert Series is the brainchild of my former duo partner, the pianist Rebeca Omordia. She has half-Romanian, half-Nigerian heritage. But while we would often discuss world-renowned Romanian classical musicians such as composer Georges Enescu, pianist Dinu Lipatti and conductor Sergiu Celibidache, when it came to Nigerian classical composers, we drew a blank. “There aren’t any,” said Rebeca. I told her there must be, and challenged her to find them. This was back in 2013, and her subsequent research has uncovered more than 200 composers of African art music, Nigerians among them.

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Ruby Rose on gender, bullying and breaking free: ‘I had a problem with authority’

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After coming out as a lesbian, aged 12, she suffered a horrendous attack at school. Now a successful actor, she is determined to help those wrestling with their identities

Ruby Rose spent much of her childhood travelling around Australia with her mother, an aspiring artist, trying to make ends meet. They were poor, but they were unstoppable, says Rose. Her mother had sold their TV, so there were no dreams of becoming the Hollywood action star she is now, nor the model, presenter, DJ, VJ and campaigner she has been over the years. When Rose was a child, she just wanted to write.

“I wanted to write a book for kids that were my age. I just wanted to have a way to communicate and speak to kids like me, who didn’t have someone,” she says, over Zoom. “I was just this kid who had no friends, who was super unpopular, got bullied and beaten up at school, and was like: ‘I’m going to be a famous writer.’”

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The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

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I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own

The idea for my novel Insatiable emerged from a simple question: where were all the horny women? I knew that we were secretly legion. In fact, I suspected that I was surrounded by women, sitting on buses, standing in queues, staring out of the window and simultaneously entertaining all kinds of filthy daydreams. After all, millions of us had bought and read Fifty Shades of Grey. Even if half the sold copies were bought by people who wanted to mock it, that left millions of genuinely horny women unaccounted for – and buying the sequels.

I was not transported in the way I had hoped; I did not find Christian sexy, I did not relish the BDSM and, most of all, I struggled to connect with the beautiful, blank lead character, Anastasia. She seemed similar to every other sort-of-horny woman I had seen on screen, a sexual object before she was a sexual subject, a person who had to be perfect and prove herself desirable before she was allowed to pursue desires of her own.

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Hypnotic loops and self-soothing sounds: the rise of #OddlySatisfying and visual ASMR

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As a subreddit devoted to strangely satisfying video clips grows into a behemoth, a new wave of digital artists are manufacturing their own

The subreddit r/oddlysatisfying has always had a wholesome mission: it collects small moments of magic in the world – “those little things that are inexplicably satisfying”.

It began in 2013, when people started sharing gifs of high-pressure hoses and industrial pasta cutters on Reddit. Eight years later, it has grown into an entire subsection of the internet: r/oddlysatisfying has 5.6 million members, and there’s a multi-platform “media network” of the same name. It curates content for a combined 3.44 million followers across YouTube and TikTok. Videos with the hashtag #oddlysatisfying have clocked up 25.9bn views on TikTok alone.

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‘A lot of noise, a lot of joy’: Sydney sea shanty club singers raise the roof in raucous reunion

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Redfern bar shakes like the hull of a ship as devoted community comes back together after year apart

Over the past year, various members of the Redfern Shanty Club found different ways to cope. Robert Boddington, with his thespian’s voice and easy stage patter, gathered a few friends and tried to sing in public places, “just turning up in the dead of night and quietly singing away”. Robin Howard says he got “the shakes”. Emma Norton, a train driver with a soaring Celtic voice, says: “I sang to myself a lot, I guess.”

On Monday night, as restrictions in Sydney were almost completely lifted – with relaxed caps on capacity in bars, and no limits on singing – this devoted and joyous community finally returned to their favourite weekly ritual.

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Is pornography to blame for rise in ‘rape culture’?

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Analysis: experts split on whether easy access to porn has fuelled sexual harassment, abuse and assault among young people

The harrowing reports of sexism and assaults in schools detailed on the everyonesinvited.uk website has fuelled concerns of a “rape culture” in educational settings.

The disclosures have raised concerns that easy access to pornography is part of the problem.

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Karol G: ‘Why should I limit how I express myself because I’m a woman?’

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The vastly popular Colombian singer is challenging outdated views of women in Latin pop – but her naive racial politics have sparked controversy

I catch Colombian singer Karol G in a rare moment of calm, while she is in a car on her way to a hotel. She has just landed in New York to film a music video, but home is Miami, she clarifies, the engine humming in the background. “I love it there because there are so many Latinos!”

Born Carolina Giraldo Navarro in Medellín, Karol G, 30, is one of Latin America’s biggest pop stars, an expressive performer who uses beautiful hooks for lyrics that explore female desire and sexual agency – a rarity in the male-dominated Latin music scene, where, she says, women have historically been treated like “products”.

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George RR Martin signs five-year, eight-figure deal for more HBO projects

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Game of Thrones author also has a Netflix film on the way, but there is still no word of his finishing the fantasy series that made his name

After the huge success of HBO’s adaptations of his Game of Thrones books, George RR Martin has signed a deal to develop several television series for the network and its streaming arm, HBO Max.

Related: George RR Martin: ‘Game of Thrones finishing is freeing, I’m at my own pace’

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