Pieces of bone were turned into ornaments, and may have been placed on display
Bronze age Britons remembered the dead by keeping and curating bits of their bodies, and even turning them into instruments and ornaments, according to new research on the remains.
Archaeologists found that pieces of bone buried with the dead were often from people who had died decades earlier, suggesting their remains had been kept for future generations, as keepsakes or perhaps for home display.
Continue reading...The singer and actor on her ‘extremely politically correct’ upbringing, the challenges of parenthood and how lockdown forced her to rewrite her new album
There were choirs planned for Paloma Faith’s new album, a swell of voices to fill out the optimistic, celebratory songs. Then the pandemic struck. The album changed dramatically, in just a few weeks. Some of the more upbeat songs were dropped, she says, because in the midst of so much crisis and loss, “it felt like the lyrics could be perceived as a bit patronising”. New songs spilled out of Faith and the other writers, all four singles written in lockdown, then recorded in a studio set up in her basement. The songs sound more solitary now; more suited to the times.
We speak over Zoom, Faith lying on a bed at home in London. Infinite Things is her fifth album; her first was released in 2009, and all have been hugely successful. There have also been big singles, such as Only Love Can Hurt Like This and Picking Up the Pieces. Her latest album is also her most personal, perhaps as a result of this year’s forced intimacy.
Continue reading...Despite fulfilling her brief to bring diversity to the Châtelet Theatre, the veteran director was brusquely dismissed. So what went wrong?
When the British arts supremo Ruth Mackenzie was named artistic director of Paris’s Châtelet theatre she thought everyone knew what they were getting.
Her pitch for the job, approved by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, after a gruelling four interview panels, was to reinvent the historic Paris venue – known as “Broadway sur Seine” after the previous director’s penchant for American musicals – as a more diverse and inclusive people’s theatre.
Continue reading...Singer reigns supreme in awards show filled with calls for social justice and recognition of Covid tragedy
Lady Gaga dominated an unusual year for the MTV Video Music awards, winning five awards in a strange and disconcerting evening.
The singer, who led the evening with nine nominations and wore a variety of masks through the night, accepted awards for artist of the year, song of the year, best cinematography and best collaboration for Rain on Me and the inaugural Tricon award, which recognizes an artist who is highly accomplished across three or more disciplines.
Continue reading...Head of a Bearded Man revealed to be from same wood panel used for Rembrandt’s Andromeda
A tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man (c 1630) which was bequeathed to it in 1951 as a Rembrandt panel. In 1981, it was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist that effectively has a final say on attributions.
Continue reading...Tributes to groundbreaking star come from spheres of film, TV, sport and politics
Chadwick Boseman has been widely praised for breaking down cultural boundaries and inspiring a generation of young black people, following news of his untimely death.
The Black Panther star died at his home in the Los Angeles area aged 43, four years after being diagnosed with colon cancer. He was best known for his role as the regal T’Challa in the Marvel cinematic universe, the franchise’s first high-profile black superhero.
Continue reading...From Chewing Gum to I May Destroy You, the writer and actor has carved out a groove as a true original. Who better to convince us all to shop secondhand?
Michaela Coel could be wearing anything she wanted, right now. As the star and creator of I May Destroy You, the BBC drama that became a water cooler hit even in a summer without water coolers, Coel is the hottest property in town. Any fashion designer would jump at the chance to dress her. But today she is enthusing over a time-pummelled black sweatshirt with faded insignia, sourced not from a Bond Street boutique but from Oxfam’s cavernous warehouse in Batley, North Yorkshire. “I’m here for it,” she murmurs approvingly, pulling it over her head.
She’s here for all of it. She’s here for the pale pink Burberry trenchcoat, another Batley treasure unearthed for our shoot by Oxfam’s senior fashion adviser, Bay Garnett, a nod to Coel’s neon bubblegum bob as Arabella in IMDY. She’s here for the dynamite 80s jeans and matching jacket in toffee-apple faux-leather, a rare Gaultier Jeans find. She’s here for the Fanta-coloured boilersuit (think Ripley in Alien meets Bananarama on Top Of The Pops), for the elegant 70s Jaeger mustard blazer with anchor-stamped gold buttons, and for a knockout pair of Versace high-waisted shorts, illustrated with classic Rita Hayworth film posters.
Continue reading...Groups pitching to perceived desire for alternative output as trust in BBC falls
Rival efforts are under way to launch a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station in Britain to counter the BBC.
One group is promising a news channel “distinctly different from the out-of-touch incumbents” and has already been awarded a licence to broadcast by the media regulator, Ofcom, under the name “GB News”. Its founder has said the BBC is a “disgrace” that “is bad for Britain on so many levels” and “needs to be broken up”.
Continue reading...Author ‘follows my conscience’ after head of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights group says her views are transphobic
JK Rowling is returning the Ripple of Hope award given to her last year by the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) organisation after its president, Kennedy’s daughter, criticised her views on transgender issues.
The award, which is for people who have shown a “commitment to social change”, was presented to Rowling in December for her work with her children’s charity, Lumos. On receiving the award, Rowling called it “one of the highest honours I’ve ever been given” and said “Robert Kennedy embodied everything I most admire in a human being”. Previous winners include Barack Obama, archbishop Desmond Tutu and Joe Biden.
Continue reading...Exclusive: UK artist finances bright pink motor yacht that set sail in secrecy to avoid being intercepted by authorities
The British street artist Banksy has financed a boat to rescue refugees attempting to reach Europe from north Africa, the Guardian can reveal.
The vessel, named Louise Michel after a French feminist anarchist, set off in secrecy on 18 August from the Spanish seaport of Burriana, near Valencia, and is now in the central Mediterranean where on Thursday it rescued 89 people in distress, including 14 women and four children.
Continue reading...Two Laughing Boys by Frans Hals seized in overnight raid at museum
It’s nothing to smile about for lovers of Dutch art. Police have reported that Two Laughing Boyswith a Mug of Beer, by the old master Frans Hals, has been stolen for a third time.
The Golden Age work, painted in 1626-7, was snatched from a small museum in the town of Leerdam, near the city of Utrecht, early on Wednesday morning.
Continue reading...An irresistibly charismatic farm boy, displaced by a housing development on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, is the star of this affecting documentary
The American director Mo Scarpelli makes a miraculous discovery in her new documentary – a 10-year-old Ethiopian farm boy who has been displaced from his home by urbanisation. Scarpelli has said that when she spotted Asalif Tewold on the street in Addis Ababa, she knew instantly that she wanted to make a film about him. You can see why. A charismatic kid with energy and imagination, he’s at that perfect stage of boyhood with an appetite for adventure and make-believe. That said, Scarpelli’s observational film-making style, slow and lingering, is a challenge and likely to be off-putting to all but hardcore lovers of arthouse.
Continue reading...Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster creates a palindromic origami of bizarre physics inside an 007-style thriller. If you’ve seen it, what did you think?
Charged with the twin missions of kickstarting cinemagoing post-lockdown (outside the US, at least) and out-Nolanning every previous Christopher Nolan movie, Tenet carries a lot on its shoulders. The fact that it made it into cinemas is an achievement, but does it deliver? The critical consensus has been a qualified, often confused, “yes”, although opinions have differed widely, even among Guardian and Observer critics. One thing all will agree: as well as a fresh jolt of spectacle to revive the flatlining movie business, Tenet provides plenty to talk about and plenty to think about. Too much? Let’s talk about that.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Thomas Young used cut-up method to treat translation of Egyptian relic as mathematical problem, papers show
Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs when two 19th-century scholars set out to decipher the inscribed texts on the ancient Egyptian Rosetta Stone, one of the British Museum’s most famous treasures.
Now notes have been discovered among one of the scholars’ papers in the British Library that reveal the extent to which the translation was treated as though it was a mathematical problem.
Continue reading...Go with it, and Christopher Nolan’s high-concept action romp will leave you ripping off your face mask for air, even as you wonder what it was all about
Who shall save cinema? Not James Bond apparently. There’s been a brand-new Daniel Craig spectacular ready to go since Easter, arguably just the thing to get punters’ actual bums back on actual seats. But Team 007 is wimping out, unwilling to splurge their product irreversibly into some potential new ruinous lockdown – and Disney has suffered a comparable bottle-loss, dumping its live-action version of the Mulan legend on to streaming services.
So it’s up to the mighty Christopher Nolan to take the heroic, morale-boosting gamble and open his big new film in cinemas. Tenet is a gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller in which a protagonist called The Protagonist battles cosmic incursions from the future while time flows backwards and forwards at the same time. There’s a 747 plane that crashes into a warehouse and then uncrashes back out of it, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
Continue reading...Stephanie Winston Wolkoff reportedly taped the first lady’s ‘harsh comments’ and plans to share them in a book, Melania & Me
Melania Trump will speak at the Republican national convention on Tuesday night, in the shadow of an extraordinary report that she was taped making derogatory comments about her husband’s adult children and even Donald Trump himself.
Related: RNC 2020: a two-hour glimpse into the upside-down world of Trump TV
Continue reading...Hans Sloane ‘pushed off pedestal’ and placed with artefacts putting his work in context of British empire
The British Museum has removed a bust of its founding father, who was a slave owner, and said it wanted to confront its links to colonialism.
Hartwig Fischer, the institution’s director, revealed the likeness of Sir Hans Sloane has been placed in a secure cabinet alongside artefacts explaining his work in the context of the British empire.
Continue reading...Star calls for live music to challenge social distancing rules, but faces fan backlash
Van Morrison has denounced the supposed “pseudoscience” around coronavirus and is attempting to rally musicians in a campaign to restore live music concerts with full capacity audiences.
The 74-year-old Northern Irish singer launched a campaign to “save live music” on his website, saying socially distanced gigs were not economically viable. “I call on my fellow singers, musicians, writers, producers, promoters and others in the industry to fight with me on this. Come forward, stand up, fight the pseudo-science and speak up,” he said.
Continue reading...As the Game of Thrones star returns to screens in Sky’s Two Weeks to Live, she talks on-set scrapes, off-screen battles, and how the television industry could up its game overnight
When Maisie Williams was shooting a fight scene in her latest TV project, Two Weeks to Live, she took a blow to the head. “I got hit a couple of times with a glass bottle,” she says, matter-of-factly over the phone. I can’t see her face but I can almost hear her smiling, a faint giggle detectable between sentences. “I also kicked my co-star in the chin and made his mouth bleed. Other than that, it was pretty scrape-free.”
A kick in the face and multiple rounds of bottling might sound like the opposite of “scrape-free”, but perhaps it is for an actor such as Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. As the noblewoman turned assassin, Williams’s fight scenes included some of the show’s most pivotal, such as the one in the bloody, battle-filled penultimate episode, The Long Night, which Williams trained for a year to film.
Continue reading...Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir and Adelaide’s STCSA are among the main stages pushing ahead. No one expects a profit – and many will take a loss
Sydney Theatre Company has announced it is ready to open the doors of the Roslyn Packer theatre and present its first show since March.
Wonnangatta, a new drama written by the award-winning Melbourne playwright Angus Cerini and featuring the actors Hugo Weaving and Wayne Blair, will play from 21 September to 31 October in a socially distanced production for audiences numbering no more than 147 (the Roslyn Packer can usually seat 880 patrons).
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