Category Archives: Culture

Most diverse Booker prize shortlist ever as Hilary Mantel misses out

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With no room for Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debuts

Hilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.

With four writers of colour among its six authors, the shortlist, announced on Tuesday, is the most diverse line-up in the prize’s history. Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award.

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The night Nirvana played five-a-side with the Chippendales

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From Cobain’s stripper kickabout to Placebo’s run-in with a cake, music promoter David McLean isn’t short of an anecdote. Now he’s turning his career into a film

Scottish music manager and promoter David McLean has staged gigs by Nirvana, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Oasis and hundreds more. Ahead of his first film, Schemers – which tells the story of his early days attempting to book Iron Maiden to play in Dundee – he shares some handy tips for success.

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Trump ‘compromised by the Russians’, says former member of Mueller’s team

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Peter Strzok was removed from Russia investigation and fired by the FBI over text messages critical of Trump

Donald Trump is “compromised by the Russians”, a former member of Robert Mueller’s investigation insisted on Sunday, contending that the president is “incapable of placing the national interest ahead of his own”.

Related: Trump attacks Robert Mueller's 'hit squad' in row over 'wiped' phones

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Trump aides insist Woodward tapes reveal strong leadership on Covid

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The revelation that Donald Trump deliberately downplayed the coronavirus pandemic forced key aides on to desperate defence on Sunday, barely 50 days from the presidential election.

Related: Roger Stone to Donald Trump: bring in martial law if you lose election

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Jo Malone apologises to John Boyega for cutting him out of Chinese ad

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Perfume brand admits reshooting commercial without Star Wars actor was ‘misstep’

Perfume brand Jo Malone has apologised to the actor John Boyega for cutting him out of an advert he conceived, directed and starred in when it was launched in China.

Boyega was replaced by Liu Haoran after the commercial was recast and reshot for the Chinese market. The original advert, London Gent, which was released last year, featured Boyega walking around Peckham, south London, riding a horse, dancing with friends and hanging out with his family. The original cast was multicultural, while the Chinese remake featured no black cast members.

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Dazzling makeover of 90-year-old Spanish lighthouse divides opinion

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Infinite Cantabria by Okuda San Miguel is a riot of colours, geometric shapes and animals

A 90-year-old lighthouse perched on a lush cape in northern Spain is at the centre of a cultural row after a dazzling paint job by a local artist left the tower outshining its lamp – and some critics blanching.

For almost a century, the lighthouse, near the Cantabrian town of Ajo, was a mute, monochrome sentry beaming its light out over the Atlantic.

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Salute Toots Hibbert – a reggae pioneer to rival Bob Marley | Kenan Malik

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The late singer was at the heart of an extraordinary collision of music, culture and politics

I can still remember the first time I heard Pressure Drop. The little drum intro. The bass riff. The rhythm guitars. And then the voice of Toots Hibbert, a voice both soulful and raw, comforting but just a little menacing too.

It was a song to bring joy, to get a roomful of Doc Martens bouncing. It was also a song about revenge and karma. That was the way with Hibbert – the melding of the blissful and the rough, the soothing and the sharp.

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Radio reporters to be axed by BBC and told to reapply for new roles

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Critics fear end of an era because of plans to make audio journalists work across media platforms

BBC radio voices have described and defined modern British history. Live reports from inside a British bomber over Germany during the second world war, or with the British troops invading Iraq in 2003, or more recently from the frontline of the parent boycott of a Birmingham school over LGBT lessons have also shaped the news agenda.

But now the BBC plans to axe all its national radio reporters and ask them to reapply for a smaller number of jobs as television, radio and digital reporters, rather than as dedicated audio journalists. Many fear it is not just the end of their careers but the premature end of an era for the BBC.

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Frances McDormand starrer Nomadland wins the Golden Lion at Venice film festival

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Drama featuring McDormand as a retiree forced on the road after the 2008 recession takes top honours on the Lido, while Vanessa Kirby is named best actress

Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, a recession-era road trip drama starring Frances McDormand, won the Golden Lion for best film on Saturday at a slimmed-down Venice film festival, which was held against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic.

Zhao and McDormand appeared by video from the United States to accept the award, as en virus-related travel restrictions made reaching the Lido in the Italian lagoon city difficult if not impossible for many Hollywood filmmakers and actors.

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Toots Hibbert’s last interview: ‘Don’t take life for granted, be careful, be strong’

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‘My lucky charms are my songs’, the reggae icon told Miranda Sawyer as he promoted his final album, Got to Be Tough

Toots Hibbert brought out his most recent album, Got to Be Tough, in August. What now stands as his final album is a positive listen, with lyrics about overcoming obstacles and needing more love in your heart, and his voice is as soulful as ever. He produced the album himself and it features Ziggy Marley, Sly Dunbar, Cyril Neville and Zak Starkey. He was busy: during lockdown, he was a finalist in the recent Jamaica festival song competition (a big deal on the island), with the upbeat Rise Up Jamaicans. Toots was massively successful in Jamaica: with the Maytals, he had 31 No 1s there, more than any other artist.

I spoke to Toots over the phone (no visuals, sadly). He was in his studio, drinking orange juice and water. Sometimes he chatted to people in the background. Ebullient and charismatic, he laughed a lot during our chat. He was never less than charming, but I noticed he had a knack of avoiding tricky questions by talking in broad terms rather than detail.

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UK move to classify Extinction Rebellion ‘organised crime group’ comes under fire

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Letter signed by 150 public figures hits back at move to scapegoat protesters

Stephen Fry, Mark Rylance and a former Archbishop of Canterbury are among 150 public figures to hit back at government moves to classify the climate protesters of Extinction Rebellion as an “organised crime group”. In a letter to be published in the Observer on Sunday, XR is described as “a group of people who are holding the powerful to account” – who should not become targets of “vitriol and anti-democratic posturing”.

It comes in response to the prime minister and home secretary’s reported move to review how the group is classified in law after it disrupted the distribution of four national newspapers, including the Sun and the Daily Mail, last Saturday.

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Toots Hibbert, pioneering reggae star, dies aged 77

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Frontman of Toots and the Maytals helped make reggae globally famous

Toots Hibbert, whose glorious songcraft as frontman of Toots and the Maytals helped make reggae globally famous, has died aged 77.

A statement from his family on Saturday read: “It is with the heaviest of hearts to announce that Frederick Nathaniel “Toots” Hibbert passed away peacefully tonight, surrounded by his family at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

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Margaret Atwood: ‘If you’re going to speak truth to power, make sure it’s the truth’

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A polarising US election, a global pandemic, the rise of cancel culture: what does the queen of dystopian fiction make of 2020 so far?

Margaret Atwood is smiling, waving a green copy of her book The Testaments at me, while I wave a black one back at her. High-cheekboned, pale-skinned, her curly grey hair like a corona, she’s wearing a jewel-green blouse that makes her eyes glitter. Behind her stretches her large, comfy, slightly darkened sitting room in Toronto, with books and wall hangings and a whirring fan. Atwood gleams out of my screen, bright in all senses.

She is talking about being a grouch. She tells me she turns down a lot of interview requests, “and then I get a reputation as being very grumpy and hard to deal with. But who cares?” Grumpy seems wrong to me. I had been warned that Atwood was scary – super-sharp and impatient – but she’s not like that either. She is unsentimental, clear, sure of her facts and opinions, but she also has a light, mischievous quality. She says my name as though constantly on the verge of teasing me.

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Cuties controversy sparks #CancelNetflix campaign

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French film Mignonnes sparks 200,000 tweets calling for boycott of streaming service over claims the film sexualises its young stars

A call to boycott Netflix on Thursday over the French film Mignonnes – AKA Cuties – has been launched on social media, over claims that its young stars were portrayed in a sexualised way.

The film is directed by French-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré, and started streaming on 9 September. More than 200,000 tweets with the hashtag #CancelNetflix became the top trending topic one day later.

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I’m Covid vulnerable: dare I do my bit to save our cinemas?

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Britain’s beleaguered picture palaces desperately need bums back on seats. But some filmgoers have to consider the risks more than others

Lockdown in the UK cost its cinemas an estimated £111m in lost revenue, and their annual income could be down 60% on last year’s. Abandoned filming means there are few enticing titles in the pipeline, and production safety guidelines are hampering new production. If cinemas are to survive while socialdistancing slashes their capacity, they’ll have to fill as many as they can of their remaining available seats.

Filmgoers will need to show up in force, whatever their age, gender or physical condition. I’m an ardent film fan; unfortunately, I’m also male and medically vulnerable, which makes me low-hanging fruit for Covid’s scythe. An over-75-year-old is 623 times more likely to die from the disease than an under-45-year-old. Men are over twice as much at risk as women, and a dodgy cardiovascular system doesn’t improve your chances.

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Diana Rigg: star with an independent streak to match her glamour

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From kick-ass screen roles to award-winning theatre and TV ones, with a curious sideline in nuns, the Yorkshire-born actor’s class and spirit earned her a magnificent career

When Diana Rigg made her Broadway debut in 1971, the theatre programme Playbill introduced her in terms that established the wide range of work and appeal that still marked her career at her death today, five decades later, at the age of 82.

The then-31-year-old Yorkshirewoman, theatregoers were told, was “a highly established star of the theatre, motion pictures and films in England” who had recently “become popular in the United States as the glamorous Emma Peel in The Avengers television series and as the leading lady in the latest James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.

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Paris museum refuses entry to woman in low-cut dress

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Musée d’Orsay, home to some of world’s most famous nudes, apologises for barring visitor

One of Paris’s biggest museums, whose galleries feature some of the world’s most famous nudes, has been accused of discrimination and sexism after refusing entry to a woman in a low-cut dress.

In a case of life not imitating art, a zealous official told a literature student whose name was given only as Jeanne that “rules are rules” and ordered her to cover her cleavage if she wanted to be allowed into the Musée d’Orsay, a popular tourist attraction and bastion of the beaux arts.

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Diana Rigg, Avengers and Game of Thrones star, dies aged 82

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Actor who played Emma Peel in hit spy series and James Bond’s only wife was diagnosed with cancer in March

The actor Diana Rigg, known for her roles on stage and in film and television – including The Avengers and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – has died at the age of 82.

Rigg, who rose to prominence in the 1960s through her starring role as Emma Peel in The Avengers alongside Patrick Macnee, enjoyed a long and varied career, playing Lady Olenna Tyrell in HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones, a show she admitted in 2019 that she had never watched. She also played Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, or Tracy Bond, James Bond’s first and only wife to date, in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

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Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh: ‘I knew integrity would pull me into the gutter’

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With their 10th album inspired by a near-death ordeal, the alt-rock heroes discuss seeing their peers sell out as they stayed defiantly on the fringes

In 2013, after Kristin Hersh’s 25-year marriage came to an end, she was left broke and without health insurance. The songs she wrote in the aftermath were “about drowning in one way or another”, she says. She means this literally and metaphorically.

Hersh was relaxing by the water in California and – because she was on the prescribed tranquiliser Klonopin – nodded off. The tide came in and she awoke in the water. “I’m a triathlete so I’m a very strong swimmer but this surf just wasn’t moving toward the shore,” she recalls. “I was swimming as hard as I could but the shore wouldn’t get any closer and I started to black out.”

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Disloyal review: Michael Cohen’s mob hit on Trump entertains – but will it shift votes?

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The president’s fixer wanted to be a Goodfella but ended up taking a fall. His revenge is a tawdrily readable tell-all memoir

Michael Cohen is no saint. Aside from the obvious, Donald Trump’s former fixer has never entered into a formal cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors, a fact duly noted by the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York in its sentencing memorandum. Because of that, the “inability to fully vet his criminal history and reliability impact his utility as a witness”.

Related: Michael Cohen book details Trump's racism and toxic family dynamic

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