A teenager’s nature diary, the race for a vaccine and the return of Lyra ... books have been vital in getting us through the year. Guardian critics pick 2020’s best fiction, poetry, politics, science and more
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Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene review – addicted to danger
A new biography, by Richard Greene, insists there was more to the author than ‘sex, books and depression’
When Gabriel García Márquez, in the presence of Fidel Castro, asked Graham Greene if it was true that he’d played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver, Greene assured him he had, several times. Castro, one of several world leaders with whom Greene had audiences over the years (Gorbachev, Ho Chi Minh and Pope Paul VI were others), calculated the odds and said he shouldn’t be alive. Greene thought the same. He’d expected to die young (“I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate”) but survived to the age of 86.
The Russian roulette story has been disputed; Greene may have played it with blanks or empty chambers. But Richard Greene (no relation) takes it as the central premise of his biography: the novelist as risk-taker and adventurer, with a history of self-harm and an addiction to danger. An early trip to Liberia, to investigate modern slavery, set the tone. Greene knew there were risks – being shot at by soldiers, bitten by snakes or infected by lassa or yellow fever – but they only spurred him on. He was accompanied by his cousin Dorothy, who found him frightening: “If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.”
Continue reading...Encrypted apps and false names: new Taiwan book club takes no chances
Amid Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, publisher says joining clubs to discuss free speech and democracy has again become an act of resistance
In the early 1950s in Taiwan, 19-year-old Tsai Kun-lin was arrested and jailed after joining a book club. The young man spent more than a decade on Green Island, building the prison that held him as a political enemy of the authoritarian rulers who would hold Taiwan under martial law until 1987.
Decades later, a 90-year-old Tsai is living in Taiwan’s thriving democracy, but says a book club has once again become an act of resistance.
Continue reading...Director Asif Kapadia: ‘Diego and Maradona were two different people’
Film director recalls the long and rocky road to meeting the mercurial subject of his film
Football is a huge part of my life. I was 14 when Diego Maradona scored the two goals against England – the hand of God and the wonder goal. Despite the first goal, I always thought he was the best player in the world. I’ve always been a fan of outsiders, rebels.
Everyone wanted to be Maradona. He was the global phenomenon. The pope wanted to meet him. Fidel Castro would sit and listen to Diego tell a story.
Continue reading...Trump’s furniture fail: that’s not a desk, Donald – it’s a table for TV dinners
The Resolute desk at the White House is made of timbers taken from a Royal Navy ship. It projects pure power. Is that why the defeated US president has switched to an occasional table?
Has Donald Trump conceded the presidency by design? Is his choice of furniture betraying a subconscious admission of defeat? When the outgoing US president gave a speech this week saying he would depart if the electoral college voted for Joe Biden, his words came as less of a shock than the desk he chose to sit at. It was tiny. It sent out a clear signal. And that signal was “loser”.
Jokes about the shrunken size of Trump’s desk – one photograph, taken from low down, captures his legs barely fitting beneath it – are easy. So let’s not. You want to see a real ruler’s desk? The Resolute desk in the Oval Office is the definition of one: a massive fortress of a working space, like an aircraft carrier with legs, sporting the US eagle at the heart of its heavy Victorian carvings. Its timbers are British in origin: they come from a Royal Navy sailing ship, HMS Resolute, that once braved the icy waters of the north pole. And in a final addition of defensive machismo, Franklin D Roosevelt had the front bulwarked so no one could see his leg braces and discover he was disabled.
Continue reading...‘It took me three days to get over the orgy scene’: Muscle star Craig Fairbrass
The Londoner has spent years slogging away in hardman movies, but his latest film is a darkly funny exploration of masculinity. He discusses branching out – and the film’s unsimulated sex
Craig Fairbrass has made a career from giving a certain type of person exactly what they want. His films have titles such as Deranged and Hijacked and St George’s Day. There are gangsters. There are guns. There are posters that look like a recently divorced dad’s experiments with Photoshop.
His characters have nicknames that come in inverted commas, like Freddy “Dead Cert” Frankham and Malcolm “Mental Fists” Wickes. The films are usually released to little fanfare and lapped up by a small but dedicated crowd, unnoticed by the rest of the world.
Fairbrass’s new film, Muscle, is different. It is extraordinary: a black-and-white exploration of toxic masculinity that is as darkly funny as it is outright horrifying. Fairbrass is remarkable in it, playing a hulking personal trainer who sniffs out a lost loner at a squalid gym and immediately sets about exploiting him for everything he is worth. It is an incredible, committed performance that goes to some unthinkably gruesome places. Remember the shock of seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler after his wilderness years? We are in that sort of territory.
From Nurse Ratched to Joker: 10 of the best movie villains
Sadism, demons and disappearing pencils: these are the big-screen baddies whose evil antics have haunted our nightmares
Continue reading...How the Late Late Toy Show became an unlikely Irish TV institution
Annual special – where garish sweaters meet unrestrained children – airs on Friday evening
It is possibly the most anticipated moment in Ireland’s cultural calendar, a television event that draws huge ratings, unites the diaspora and is parsed as a barometer for the mood of the nation.
Expectation builds months in advance, rumours about the theme, leaks about participants, sometimes alarm that the formula may change.
Continue reading...The xx’s Romy: ‘I can now write about loving a woman and not feel afraid’
Her forthcoming solo album is a love letter to formative years of queer clubbing and 00s Euro-dance, as the singer swaps black clothes and bleak moods for Technicolor euphoria
The problem with being an introvert writing dance music is that eventually you will have to dance in front of other people. “I’m definitely quite a shy dancer,” says Romy Madley Croft over a video call from the home she shares with her girlfriend, the photographer Vic Lentaigne, in north London. In lockdown, with no prospect of live shows, this wasn’t a problem, but now she’s starting to nervously ponder how she will perform her upbeat, house-indebted new music. “It’s taken a long time to get to the place where I really enjoy being on stage.”
Fifteen years, in fact. The familiar image of Madley Croft is as bassist and singer with the xx, the band she formed with London schoolfriends in 2005: dressed in black, shielded by her guitar, expression ranging between pensive and troubled. Even performing a sparkling dance track on stage, such as Loud Places by her fellow wallflower and bandmate Jamie xx (“I go to loud places to find someone to be quiet with,” she sings on the chorus), she stayed largely rooted to the spot. Yet on the cover of her debut solo single, Lifetime, in an acid-hued image captured – like the ones accompanying this article – by Lentaigne, she is caught in motion, arms raised high, hair swooshed.
Continue reading...‘People in their 40s were crying’: the sad final days of New York’s coolest record store
Other Music fuelled New York’s 00s indie boom, boasting Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective among its fans. Then it closed. A new documentary tells the story of the store’s tragic demise – and its ‘terrifying’ staff
A lot of skulking went on at Other Music, the celebrated New York record store. It was an odd kind of dance: nervous customers, hiding behind CD racks or LP sleeves, trying to conjure up a question that wouldn’t result in utter humiliation. The staff there had quite a reputation, after all.
The experience is relived in a surprisingly moving new documentary about the shop, also called Other Music. Notable fans Regina Spektor and Jason Schwartzman still sound daunted by Other’s intense atmosphere. “If I’m completely honest, I was never just ‘chill’ in there,” confides Spektor, to camera. “I always got that first-day-of-school feeling, like: OK, just don’t fuck up.”
Continue reading...Viggo Mortensen on Falling star Lance Henriksen: ‘He’s like a wolf who might gobble you up’
In the former’s directorial debut, the pair play a father and son facing up to the older man’s dementia. It offers 80-year-old Henriksen the meatiest role of his astonishing career
Viggo Mortensen first met Lance Henriksen when he shot him dead. Mortensen, the Lord of the Rings star and three-time best actor Oscar nominee, was facing off the older actor – a veteran of more than 200 movies including Aliens and The Terminator – in the 2008 western Appaloosa.
“There were so many bullets flying around; I don’t think any one person can take the credit for killing me,” smiles Henriksen, his voice sandpapery but sweet. As we wait for Mortensen to join our video call, he says he is tip-top today. “I turned 80. But I don’t feel no 80.” Then he switches the subject abruptly. “I can’t tell you how much Falling has changed my life,” he says.
Continue reading...How ‘voodoo’ became a metaphor for evil
'Voodoo' has come to represent something evil when it appears in popular culture. 'Black magic', witchcraft – it's always portrayed as something to be feared. But in reality, Vodou, as it's correctly written, is an official religion practised by millions of people. Why has it been vilified for so long? Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks back over the history of Vodou and its portrayal to find an answer
Melissa McCarthy’s 20 best films – ranked!
With the actor’s new release, Superintelligence, seeing her try to save the world, here’s a look at the films that made her a comedy star
One of Melissa McCarthy’s many early, quirky cameos comes in the final film from the director Alan Parker – a mystery crime drama with a hint of Fritz Lang. Kevin Spacey stars as an anti-capital-punishment campaigner who finds himself on death row after being convicted of murder. McCarthy plays Nico, a goth girl in fishnets and piercings who gives creepy tours of the crime scene.
Continue reading...A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – an impressive but incomplete memoir
Gary Younge on a memoir with vivid detail and captivating pillow talk, but one that leaves out too much to give a clear view of Obama’s first term
“I guess the question for you, Mr President, is: ‘Do you feel lucky?’” In his new autobiography, Barack Obama recalls being asked this by his director of legislative affairs, Phil Schiliro, at a time when his options for passing comprehensive healthcare reform were narrowing.
“I looked at him and smiled. ‘Where are we, Phil?’”
Schiliro paused, assuming a catch. ‘The Oval Office?’
‘And what’s my name?’
‘Barack Obama.’
Obama beamed. ‘Barack Hussein Obama. And I’m here with you in the Oval Office. Brother, I always feel lucky.’
Taylor Swift: The Long Pond Studio Sessions review – cosy campfire confessions
The pop star’s Disney+ movie about quarantine album Folklore reveals the potency of her songwriting, though it’s hazy on any ‘pandemic epiphanies’
Pre-pandemic, few artists were so keenly attuned to the music industry’s calendar as Taylor Swift. She timed her album releases for awards contention and singles to sustain her world tours; the promotional cycle for 1989, released in 2014, seemed to go on for years. With coronavirus, that “circus” – as she puts it on Mirrorball, one of a few songs on her “quarantine album”, Folklore, that address the pandemic directly – was abruptly called off.
Stripped of those structures, “this lockdown could have been a time where I absolutely lost my mind”, Swift says in The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a film that explores the making and meaning of Folklore. Instead, in a matter of months, she created an album as good as any she has ever written. She collaborated remotely with the National’s Aaron Dessner, writing to his musical sketches and self-recording her performances at home.
Continue reading...Two polar bears come sniffing in the Arctic night: Esther Horvath’s best photograph
‘I heard from the ship that two bears were walking directly towards us. I told the scientists to pack up. When they said no, I showed no mercy’
In the autumn of 2019, I joined an expedition to the Arctic. We set sail from Tromsø, Norway, on 20 September, on the Polarstern icebreaker. There were 100 people on board – 60 scientists and 40 crew – but the ship was big enough that it never felt crowded. There were people you didn’t see for days.
The plan was to find the perfect ice floe to anchor to, then drift for one year through the central Arctic Ocean and the six-month long night of the Arctic winter – about which we have almost no scientific data. The study was the first time that this oceanographic, sea ice, atmospheric, ecosystem and biogeochemistry research had ever been done at this scale. On 4 October, the ship turned off its engine in order to become frozen into the sea ice. That was the last day of daylight. The days got shorter very quickly, and the darkness was intense. Mostly it was overcast. You couldn’t see the stars. You couldn’t hear anyone speak, either, because of the constant wind.
Continue reading...British Library apologises for linking Ted Hughes to slave trade
The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence
The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.
Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.
Continue reading...Sacre bleu! France as you’ve never seen her before
They set out to capture the forgotten France, the everyday architecture of emptied towns and overlooked villages – before their uniqueness is lost for ever. Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier talk us through their vast photographic atlas
From the industrial north to the sun-baked south, Eric Tabuchi has spent two decades scouring the landscape of France with an obsessive eye. In 2008, the Danish-Japanese-French photographer created a beguiling series called Alphabet Truck by sneaking up on 26 different articulated lorries on the move and photographing the single giant letter adorning each one’s rear, from A to Z. In 2017, he made Atlas of Forms, a 256-page guide to all the shapes, from pyramid to polygon, the world’s buildings are based on. And in 2017, he joined forces with the painter Nelly Monnier, also his partner, to create the Atlas des Régions Naturelles.
This sprawling, unwieldy multipart portrait of a nation takes as its foundation the 500-odd régions naturelles, or non-administrative areas (a bit like British counties) into which mainland France is divided. Monnier and Tabuchi are slowly making their way around the country, arriving in each area with a minimum of preconceptions. First impressions are key, the idea being to shoot a few characteristic landscapes, then to work their way up through the area’s vernacular architecture, with everything dictated by local conditions.
Continue reading...The Great British Bake Off final review – flawed gems worth celebrating
In a series where being put in a Covid bubble meant a reduction in the talent available, it was the failures that stood out
- This article contains spoilers
This year needed The Great British Bake Off like never before, and The Great British Bake Off delivered. The programme has always been comfort food but, at times this year, it almost transcended television. It felt like a hug. It felt like medicine.
I have a theory about this. The context of this year’s series – with all the participants agreeing to abandon their loved ones and bubble up in a hotel – meant that the talent pool was smaller than usual. And this meant that the contestants weren’t quite as good as usual. And this meant that we got to witness more mistakes than usual. This wasn’t a demonstration of wall-to-wall technical wizardry by any means. Instead, what we got this year was a presentation of well-meaning but flawed humanity. And that’s what we’ve all been crying out for.
Continue reading...Police investigate I’m a Celebrity over fears non-native bugs may be escaping
Rogue creatures from bushtucker trials including ‘ultimate survivor’ cockroaches could threaten Welsh countryside
Police are investigating I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! over concerns non-native wildlife could have escaped into the Welsh countryside during bushtucker trials, the Guardian can reveal.
Rural crime officers from north Wales police are looking into complaints that non-native creatures such as cockroaches, maggots, spiders and worms could threaten wildlife in the 100-hectare (250-acre) estate surrounding Gwrych Castle in north Wales, where the show is being held this year.
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