Statement on author’s official website says his views caused ‘lasting and understandable hurt’
The family of Roald Dahl has apologised for his antisemitism in a statement buried deep in the author’s official website.
Dahl, who died 30 years ago, is described on the site as “the world’s No 1 storyteller”, whose books – including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG – have entranced children since the 1960s.
Continue reading...Singer should have been self-isolating after trip to Egypt when she celebrated birthday at London venue
British singer Rita Ora has apologised after reports emerged that she should have been self-isolating when she celebrated her birthday at a London restaurant last month.
The 30-year-old flew to Egypt in a private jet on 21 November to perform at the five-star W Hotel in Cairo, an appearance for which she was paid a six-figure sum, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Continue reading...Ex-ITN presenter tells how Abba transformed Bonnie Suchet as study reveals most carers are unaware of the benefits of music
When John Suchet discovered the effect that music had on his wife Bonnie’s dementia, it was transformational. “She would close her eyes and love it, beat in time to the music with her hands, tap her feet,” he said.
The former ITN newscaster’s wife had lost her ability to speak. She had been locked inside her head, sitting blankly, apparently unable to make sense of the outside world.
Continue reading...Police and officials maintain presence at mass trespass after bypass approved
More than 100 protesters have staged a trespass at Stonehenge to raise concerns over plans for a two-mile tunnel underneath the world heritage site.
Last month the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, approved the £1.7bn project, which will include eight miles of extended dual carriageway along the A303 in Wiltshire.
Continue reading...The film director, 81, on beauty in the eye of the audience, finishing with The Godfather and the family of humanity
Being able to critique yourself is a good skill. Often when a film has been released I’ll ask: “Did I make mistakes?” When I made The Cotton Club in 1984, people were telling me there were too many black people in it and too much tap dancing. I would say: “But it’s a movie about black people tap dancing.” Years later, I realised I had taken out half of the backstory. It was good to go back and fix that.
Life is a great screenwriter. My daughter, Sofia, got such awful, unjust criticism for her performance in The Godfather Part III. She was 18 and was being told she’d ruined her father’s film. It was a deep wound for the poor kid. They were gunning for me, but she took the bullets. Now she is a more famous movie director than me. She got the last laugh!
Continue reading...The prize-winning author’s life is now an episode of Steve McQueen’s hit series Small Axe. He talks about working on the project and his latest novel, based on a Jamaican slave uprising
Amid the brunchtime clatter of a busy south London cafe, Alex Wheatle is talking about how, lately, he has been considering 1970s pop culture and the way it has shaped and warped his perception of self. “I grew up with Tarzan on TV; Tarzan beating up all the black guys he came across and being able to talk to the animals while the black people couldn’t,” he says. “And I hate to admit it, but when I was 10 or 11, I actually cheered for Tarzan when he was fighting with a so-called ‘savage’. It was only later that I thought: ‘I think I’ve got that wrong.’”
In many ways, Wheatle’s 20-year writing career has been about correcting that wrong. Because if the focus of the author’s extraordinary early years was on mistruths around his heritage – about its history, its value, its implicit inferiority to a loin-clothed white saviour – then the intervening period has been all about creating the depictions of nuanced black heroism he was denied as a child.
Continue reading...For many following the story of the monolith, crucial questions remain unanswered: who made it? What was it for?
In a year of uncertainty and peril, one three-sided mystery metal structure provided a glinting moment of distraction, or even hope – and then it was gone.
Before the public had moved on from the monolith, the monolith had moved on from us.
Continue reading...The superb Puerto Rican vocalist is now the most streamed artist on Spotify globally, but has never had a UK hit – something he’s determined to change
Each December, Spotify announces who has been the world’s most streamed artist that year, and this generally tallies with who has been popular in the UK. Drake, the Canadian rapper who has had six UK No 1 singles, was first in three of the previous five years, with fellow UK chart-toppers Ed Sheeran and Post Malone leading the others.
But in 2020, someone who has never had an album or solo single in the UK Top 100 is the world’s most popular artist: 26-year-old Puerto Rican vocalist Bad Bunny, streamed more than 8.3bn times this year on Spotify alone. Granted, he has featured on one UK Top 10 hit, but that was back in 2018, appearing on it for less than a minute: Cardi B’s I Like It. He appears nowhere in Spotify’s 50 most-played songs in the UK today, with Brits preferring Christmas classics and Gen Z pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Internet Money and 24kGoldn. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s current (and superb) single Dakiti is the most-played in the world at time of writing, earning more than 7m plays each day, 3m more than Ariana Grande’s Positions in second place.
Continue reading...Named the ‘winner of winners’ of the Women’s prize, Bernardine Evaristo, Maggie O’Farrell and others ask the author about the #EndSars protests in Nigeria, writing about Trump, and the culture that got her through 2020
In your Ted Talk in 2009, you warned of the danger of cultural misunderstandings arising from readers hearing only a single story. Do you feel that in the intervening years there has been an improvement in this regard, or are we still clinging to single narratives? Maggie O’Farrell
I think there is definitely some improvement. Among those who read and those who gatekeep what is read, there seems to be an awareness that multiple and different stories matter. But I worry that there is sometimes a bit too much moralising around the idea of multiple stories. We shouldn’t read or publish a diverse range of stories and writers in order to be “good”, we should do so because it is sensible and should really have been the norm a long time ago.
Do you read your reviews, and if not why not? If you do, do they in any way influence your writing and future books? Bernardine Evaristo
I don’t. And I look away (not successfully) from the nice bits that go on the back of books. I think it’s from self-preservation and from an anxiety of influence. The bad ones will infuriate me and the good might mislead me.
The film has topped a poll for the most rewatchable film. Its director, Mike Newell, sees why. So why would Curtis, who wrote the script, rather rewatch Elf?
Richard Curtis rarely rewatches Four Weddings and a Funeral. “There isn’t a natural circumstance where I say: ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do for the next two hours, see one of my films.’” Partly, it is knowing the punchlines. Partly, it is being a bit busy. On the wall of Curtis’s Notting Hill home office (stucco fireplace, neon art, whopping clock), just out of frame of his laptop camera, are six Post-it reminders of pre-Christmas tasks. Wrap presents? Make pud? Nope: rewrite a film, cast an online panto, appoint a new CEO for Comic Relief. Et cetera.
Anyway, for those of us a bit less pressed, things are different. Four Weddings – in which Hugh Grant’s stuttering bachelor, in a series of morning suits, woos Andie MacDowell – was the runaway winner in a new, slightly strange poll to find Britain’s most rewatchable movie. In a list of 50 films co-curated by the British Film Institute and Google Pixel, the tale of Charles and Carrie took 49% of the votes, with Skyfall on 37% and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on 33%.
Continue reading...Tensions arise between a writer and her coterie aboard an ocean liner in Steven Soderbergh’s sweet, unfocused drama
There’s an awful lot going on in this new movie from Steven Soderbergh. The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.
The story is mostly set (and economically filmed, by Soderbergh himself) on a luxury liner, , the Queen Mary 2, crossing from New York to Southampton. Meryl Streep plays Alice Hughes, a renowned novelist whose reputation and sales rely chiefly on a sensational early book about the collapse of a woman’s marriage. Her agent (Gemma Chan) takes her out for lunch and has to charm her cantankerous client into going to London to accept a prestigious award; she is also nervous about the fact that Alice still hasn’t delivered her latest manuscript but excited at the rumours that it could be a sequel to the sensational early book.
Continue reading...Portraits of presidents’ wives have evolved with the role, and although it remains highly gendered, a new exhibition aims to celebrate their contribution and to ‘rectify the absences of women in US history’
Bess Truman, US first lady from 1945 until 1953, has not become the sort of historical figure people quote on Instagram. “A woman’s public role is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight,” she said, even though, behind the scenes, she was nicknamed “the Boss” and wrote many of President Truman’s speeches.
Continue reading...With All I Want for Christmas Is You on the cusp of claiming the UK No 1 for the first time in 26 years, what better time to celebrate one of the great R&B repertoires?
Written and recorded in 2011, but – in Carey’s own words – “left in a holding pattern for a special reason”, this eventually came out this summer, by which time its lyrics, not least the line “we’re all in this together”, sounded weirdly appropriate. Lauryn Hill’s guest appearance turned out to be in sampled form, but never mind: the real power is in Carey’s heartfelt vocal.
Continue reading...A new book explores Ibiza’s halycon days – from open-air superclubs to daytime beach raves. Photographer Dave Swindells talks us through the highs and highs ...
Continue reading...This convention-defying horror has Guillermo del Toro’s vision and David Lynch’s dreamlike logic. But what does it all mean?
Internal affairs takes on new meaning in this distinctively involuted Argentine thriller about a spate of gruesome decapitations in an Andes backwater. Police officer Cruz (Victor Lopez) is already on the case when his lover Francisca (Tania Casciani) becomes the next to have her head apparently chewed off, a mysterious green goo smeared on the stump. Her hollow-eyed husband David (Esteban Bigliardi) is suspect numero uno: he is found naked in the vicinity of the victims and, after later being carted off to an asylum, testifies to a strange voice in his head that whispers: “Murder me, monster.”
Related: My streaming gem: why you should watch The Distinguished Citizen
Continue reading...He was ‘the first black punk in Hull’ and was named one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people. But the singer turned his back on pop stardom. He reveals why he’s returning with a gritty musical about a band called The Blacks
There are no film posters up in Roland Gift’s house in Holloway, London, and the platinum discs are all packed away. It’s a home that gives few clues to the remarkable life story the 59-year-old is about to recount: how the “first black punk in Hull” went on to become an international pop and movie star.
“I’ve always been afraid of getting wrapped up with fame and that glamour world,” is how he puts it today. Indeed, even when Gift’s band, Fine Young Cannibals, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their 1989 second album, The Raw & the Cooked (reissued this month, along with their eponymous 1985 debut), he had an uneasy relationship with stardom.
Continue reading...In a new exhibition, three artists reckon with the history of slavery at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum with a range of challenging pieces
When people think of buildings in Manhattan, chances are they think big and brash, cloud-piercing skyscrapers for tourists to marvel at.
But the borough is also home to the far more modest Dyckman Farmhouse, a white clapboard home built in 1765. It’s the oldest farmhouse in the city, and just off 204th Street in Inwood, once home to Dutch farmer William Dyckman, his family and their slaves.
Continue reading...In a riotously gory inversion of the Christmas story, an older couple plan to channel the ghost of their dead grandson into an unborn child
There’s something deliciously subversive about the backstory to this offbeat horror film, which was made in Canada. Director Justin G Dyck and screenwriter Keith Cooper have collaborated on a long list of treacly, holiday-themed, made-for-TV movies with titles such as A Very Country Christmas, Christmas With a View and A Christmas Village. Anything for Jackson, however, is a riotously gory, impish inversion of all things yuletide, in that it stars sweet-featured elderly character actors Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings as grieving grandparents Audrey and Henry Walsh, who kidnap pregnant Shannon Becker (Konstantina Mantelos) in order to perform a satanic ritual on her. It’s as if Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, the little old couple who lived next door in Rosemary’s Baby, got to be the stars of their own movie.
Audrey and Henry’s goal is to channel the ghost of their dead grandson, Jackson, into Becker’s unborn child; but, wouldn’t you know it, deals with the devil have a way of going wrong – or having nasty consequences in the fine print, such as bringing forth demons and ghosts with murderous instincts of their own. Plus, their main adviser on matters demonological is a bitter “incel”-type (Josh Cruddas) who lives with his mother and is prone to bitching about the leadership at their satanic church, an outfit quietly run out of the local community centre where members bring home-baked goods for breaktime.
Continue reading...‘I gambled on Ali getting a knockout, fastening my camera to the lights way above the ring. And Williams landed flat on his back in a good spot’
Everyone assumes the picture I took of Ali v Liston in 1965 is my favourite – it has even been called the greatest sports photograph of all time. But my favourite photograph I ever took is Ali v Williams, no question about it. It’s the only one of my photographs hanging in my home. I’ve shot everything in my career, from Charles Manson to the pope, but I’ve never taken a better photograph than this.
I shot 35 of Ali’s fights. I was ringside for Sports Illustrated when he won the world title in Miami in 1964 and my photo for that made the cover, so by the time of the Cleveland Williams fight I was pretty well established. Williams was a very promising heavyweight but the underdog; the main thing I remember from that night was how excited I was about how I was going to shoot it. Putting a camera over the ring goes way back, maybe to Joe Louis’ days, certainly Sugar Ray Robinson. But the lights that lit up those fights were always 20-25ft over the ring and there was no lens wide enough to capture the whole scene; photographers used fisheye lenses so the ring never quite looked square.
Continue reading...This based-on-fact story of a teenager who flees war in Somalia to become a crusading activist against FGM is earnest but effective drama
Inspired by real events, this earnest but effective drama depicts how Ifrah Ahmed (played as a teenager by Malaika Herrador, and as an adult by Aja Naomi King) escaped Somalia during a war in 2006, made it to Ireland where she was eventually granted asylum, and then went on to become a crusading activist against female genital mutilation. It’s certainly a remarkable story, one full of tragedy, adventure, suspense and even moments of joy, especially in the latter half when Ahmed finds a community of friends and allies willing to help her quest.
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