Category Archives: Culture

Texts, tweets and posts have replaced letters. Is our history becoming transitory?

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In this remarkable year, our stories are at risk of being locked away on phones and floating, forgotten, in the digital ether

In the process of removing the final vestiges of my things from my parents’ house this year I find a letter from my nana – Big Nana (because she was tall), not Little Nana (who wasn’t) – written in her familiar curly script.

“Last Sunday I went to D’s 80th birthday luncheon – an exciting collection of old has-beens! One old lady said how dreadful she looked these days standing in front of the bathroom mirror (naked). Nearly all of us joined in with tales of horror – including some of the men! Surprising what a few sherrys [sic] can do.”

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New Year honours 2020: citizens awarded for response to pandemic crisis

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Among those honoured are health and social care workers, Covid response volunteers, virus experts and fund-raising centenarians

Hundreds of key workers and community champions who battled the pandemic have been recognised in the New Year honours list for the UK which celebrates people’s extraordinary response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Lewis Hamilton, the Formula One driver, and the cinematographer Roger Deakins are among the celebrities knighted, while the architect David Chipperfield gets the Companion of Honour. The actor Toby Jones and Jed Mercurio, creator of the TV series Line of Duty, are given OBEs for services to drama. On being made a dame for services to drama the actor Sheila Hancock said she feared she was “slightly miscast”.

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Hilaria Baldwin speaks out amid accusations she faked being Spanish

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Baldwin accuses critics of ‘misrepresenting’ her, and addresses her background and that cucumber ‘brain fart’ incident

Hilaria Baldwin has accused critics of “misrepresenting” her amid allegations she spent years faking being Spanish.

Speaking out in a New York Times interview on Wednesday, Baldwin addressed the controversy surrounding her heritage after it emerged she was born in Boston, not Spain, and was originally named Hillary.

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Dawn Wells, Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island, dies of Covid complications at 82

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Actor played the wholesome character in the goofy, good-natured show that became an unlikely but indelible part of pop culture

Dawn Wells, who played the wholesome Mary Ann among a misfit band of shipwrecked castaways on the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, died Wednesday of causes related to Covid-19, her publicist said. She was 82.

Wells died peacefully at a living facility in Los Angeles, publicist Harlan Boll said.

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Boris Johnson stopped me getting fit – but he couldn’t come between me and my guitar

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I’m still no Jimi Hendrix, but after a year’s solid practice I have just about mastered one R&B track

This year, my original new year resolution was to be a two-pronged attack on my unhealthy lifestyle in the form of restrictions on booze and food. Sadly, that was waylaid by the unavoidable catastrophe of coronavirus, paired with the wildly avoidable catastrophe of Boris Johnson being prime minister.

Given that we have been trapped in our homes, I had to rapidly reimagine my ambitions. Without the assistance of chicken so deep fried it practically becomes a sedative, or the sweet embrace of red wine, I suspect I would not have been able to cope with 2020.

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From witchy rituals to sobbing on the floor: how will you spend New Year’s Eve? – open thread

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A terrible year is finally over but are we really in the mood to party? The Guardia Australian team reflect on how they’ll be marking 2020’s demise – please join us in the comments with your own plans and suggestions

In many ways, the end of this terrible year deserves the biggest, loudest and most cathartic party of all time. In a pandemic, of course, that was never going to happen – but it seems to be the last thing many want to do anyway.

When asked how they’d be marking New Year’s Eve – amid Covid restrictions, bad weather and general 2020 exhaustion – many people on Twitter shared the same sentiment: they would not be doing much. One is looking forward to “a quiet night with my dogs”; another a “rousing boardgame”; a third replied: “glass of wine, bed early.”

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Harry and Meghan put son Archie centre stage in first podcast

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Surprise at end of episode featuring Sir Elton John, comedian James Corden and tennis star Naomi Osaka

When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced that they would put guest speakers at centre stage in their new podcast, few would have expected to hear from their toddler Archie.

But Prince Harry and Meghan’s 19-month-old son made a surprise cameo appearance at the end of the first episode, released on Tuesday, revealing a slight American accent as he wished listeners a happy new year.

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Michael Sheen returned OBE to air views on royal family

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The Welsh actor has revealed he gave back his OBE so he could call for the scrapping of the title Prince of Wales

Michael Sheen handed back his OBE, he has revealed, as he called on the royal family to end the centuries-old practice of handing the title of Prince of Wales to the heir apparent to the English throne.

The actor said he relinquished the honour so as to be able to explore the “tortured history” his native Wales shares with the English and British states in his 2017 Raymond Williams lecture without being a hypocrite.

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Mayor review – grappling with reality inside Ramallah city hall

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Ramallah’s leader Musa Hadid navigates diplomatic stresses and day-to-day problems in this love letter to the West Bank

Musa Hadid is the popular Palestinian mayor of Ramallah in the West Bank, and this thoughtful, sympathetic documentary tracks his stressful day-to-day working life – shown suddenly getting a lot more stressful in 2017 when President Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Hadid feels strongly that this move emboldened Israel’s military to be more menacing in Ramallah, with soldiers marching into stores and demanding to see security camera footage on the grounds that there could be images of terrorists – and even doing the same at city hall.

The film lets you appreciate Hadid’s delicate and complex situation. He is often receiving high-profile international visitors and relishes the opportunity to show off the city he loves – the opening and closing sequences of this film, incidentally, almost feel like the introduction to Woody Allen’s Manhattan. One such VIP is Prince William, though some of Hadid’s colleagues are less than happy: “All the problems of our country come from Britain!” says one, referring to the 1923 Mandate.

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Patti Smith: ‘As a writer, you can be a pacifist or a murderer’

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As she prepares to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, the punk poet explains why she’s optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office

Patti Smith talks about her first poetry performance – in 1971 at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she says over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in her early 20s, working at a bookshop and living in the Chelsea Hotel with her then lover, the playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which put her into a deep sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said that since I sang to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” And so she called on the musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretative” noises on guitar while she half-read, half-sang her poems.

The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. The producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested she front a rock band. She eventually took his advice, making the landmark album Horses in 1975, and an icon of American punk was born.

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

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Through gilets jaunes, strikes and Covid, Paris’s 400-year-old book stalls fight to survive

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With passing trade hit hard by the pandemic, the booksellers on the banks of the Seine are struggling

Usually, Sundays are good days for the bouquinistes. Legions of strollers – tourists, out-of-towners, Parisians – throng the banks of the Seine, and the open-air booksellers whose green boxes have lined the quays for 400-odd years do good business.

One recent Sunday, though, Jérôme Callais made €32. And there was a day that week when he made €4: a single paperback, he can’t even recall which. It has not, Callais said, sheltering from driving rain on an all but deserted Quai de Conti, been easy.

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‘Your worries disappear!’ East 17’s Tony Mortimer on discovering reading – as a 50-year-old

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Until lockdown hit the singer – who won an Ivor Novello for songwriting – had never read a full book. Now he has galloped through 70 and is writing his own. He talks about his life-enriching habit

Should the government ever need to hire a reading tsar to raise the country’s literacy skills, then they should look no further than Tony Mortimer. Sure, the former East-17 star had made it until almost 50 years of age without ever reading a novel – perhaps not ideal credentials for the role. But listening to him talk about the wonder of books, and the journey he’s been on since picking up his first one last March, is such a pleasure that I’m convinced he could sweep anyone along.

Mortimer is emblematic of the reading boom brought on by lockdown this year – Bloomsbury reported its best half-year profits in more than a decade – and his social media posts documenting his new hobby made national headlines, with sweet, awestruck tweets that proved to people that you’re never too old to embark upon a new, life-enriching project.

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Game of Thrones video game tycoon dies in suspected poisoning

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Police in China detain colleague of Yoozoo Games founder Lin Qi on suspicion of involvement in death

Shanghai police have detained a man in relation to the suspected poisoning death of the wealthy founder of a video games company.

Lin Qi, 39, died on Christmas Day, eight days after he was taken to hospital with “acute symptoms of illness”, according to his company, Yoozoo Games Co, known for the Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming strategy game and as the producer of a forthcoming Netflix adaptation of the science fiction hit The Three-Body Problem.

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Kiley Reid: ‘The premise that literary fiction has to be a drag is so silly’

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The novelist’s hit debut, a witty spin on race, feminism and sex based on her time as a nanny in New York, has even won fans among her former employers…

This time last year, Kiley Reid was a tantalising rumour, the truth of which was known only to her publishers and to the film company that had optioned her debut novel two years before it was ready to see the light of day. When Such a Fun Age was published – on New Year’s Eve in the US and a week later in the UK – the rumour checked out: here was a smart comedy of manners, which treated interracial relationships of the early 21st century with the sort of needling wit that Jane Austen had applied to class 200 years earlier.

It was the start of a year in which Reid seems to have been travelling in the opposite direction to the rest of the world. By the time the Covid pandemic shut everything down, she had introduced the novel to 19 cities, including London. Reese Witherspoon had picked it for her book club; in July, it was longlisted for the Booker prize.

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Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January

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Looking for a more positive new year resolution? From a Shirley Jackson short story to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 30-minute Ted talk, nourish your mind with our one-a-day selection of literary treats

Our revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here’s a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats – but feeding your brain instead of your face? Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore, but couldn’t find the time, and to others you never knew existed, where you will find strange and wonderful things.

In fact, this calendar very nearly didn’t happen because I kept disappearing down rabbit-holes so deep and fascinating that, had I been the white rabbit himself, someone would have had to drag me out by the ears. Some entries – such as John Huston’s film of Malcolm Lowry’s mescal-fuelled modernist masterpiece Under the Volcano (20 January) – come with the authority of a full year’s leisurely burrowing (it is among the BFI’s list of 100 great films to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime, which was a comfort and joy through lockdown, and is handily still being updated).

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Fearne Cotton: ‘I have found clarity’

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She was the face of popular culture, but then Fearne Cotton reached crisis point. Now she has found her voice again...

Fearne Cotton keeps a pile of notebooks next to her computer, each brimming with plans for projects. Many of us have struggled to focus during the pandemic, but for Cotton, the past nine months have been among the most productive of her professional life. “I’ve found this time really creative,” she says, in that presenter voice of hers, so soothingly familiar. “It’s like when I go on holiday. In moments I’m forced to do nothing, I find this clarity.”

It’s 10am on a grey December morning when we meet over Zoom and her schedule, when she takes me through it, sounds exhausting. Her lockdowns have been busy. She’s written two books since the pandemic started and has kept up her popular wellness podcast, Happy Place, alongside her weekly Radio 2 show. And though the second instalment of her annual summer wellness event, Happy Place Festival, could have become another Covid casualty, Cotton and her team took the programme online. She juggled all this with home schooling her kids.

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