Category Archives: Culture

Tom Robbins, comic novelist of US counterculture, dies aged 92

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Author of books including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction, was known for his outlandish tales of sex, drugs and mysticism

Tom Robbins, whose novels read like a hit of literary LSD, filled with fantastical characters, manic metaphors and counterculture whimsy, has died aged 92.

The author of works including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life With Woodpecker, died on Sunday, his wife, Alexa Robbins, wrote on Facebook. The post did not cite a cause.

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Keir Starmer takes public HIV test in push to destigmatise testing for virus

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Prime minister takes home test at No 10 with soul singer Beverley Knight to promote HIV Testing Week

Keir Starmer has taken a public HIV test in an effort to destigmatise testing for the virus and to highlight HIV Testing Week.

The prime minister took a home test at 10 Downing Street alongside the soul singer Beverley Knight. “It’s really important to do it and I’m really pleased to be able to do it. It’s very easy, very quick,” he said.

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Sewer fatberg of ‘grease and rags’ forces Bryan Adams to postpone Perth concert

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Singer was due to perform Sunday night but authorities worried large blockage could cause sewage to back up in venue toilets

An enormous fatberg in central Perth has forced a Bryan Adams concert to be postponed after authorities raised concerns that sewage may back up at the venue’s toilets.

Adams was due to perform at the Western Australian capital’s RAC Arena on Sunday night, but the city’s water corporation said a “large blockage of fat, grease and rags” was causing wastewater overflows at nearby properties, prompting authorities to intervene.

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‘Best of the best’: Robbie Williams buys Eric Morecambe’s glasses for £20,000

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Singer says he cried ‘happy, childlike tears’ after placing winning bid on late comedian’s glasses and pipe at auction

Robbie Williams has said he bought Eric Morecambe’s glasses for £20,000 at auction as the comedian was an “uncle of sorts” whose “spirit has been salve for my soul”.

The singer said he cried “happy, childlike tears” after winning the bidding war last month with a final offer far exceeding the £2,000 to £4,000 estimate.

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Emilia Pérez wins top Spanish film prize amid Karla Sofía Gascón furore

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Best European film at Goya awards goes to musical at centre of storm over past social media posts written by its star

The multi-Oscar-nominated narco-musical Emilia Pérez, whose success has been overshadowed by the emergence of a series of racist and Islamophobic social media posts written by its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, won best European film at Spain’s prestigious Goya awards on Saturday night.

Gascón, the first out transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, stayed away from the ceremony after posts came to light in which she called George Floyd “a drug addict swindler”, denigrated China, and said Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity”.

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‘Stand up for what’s right’: Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports

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Stunned by Donald Trump’s return, Dennis Johnson saw a chance to hit back by publishing official reports into shameful episodes in US history

A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media.

The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel’s summation of his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday

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Rediscovered, a young English novelist’s warning of the Nazi threat

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Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s ‘electrifying masterpiece’ from 1934, to be republished

Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel that is now being hailed as “an electrifying masterpiece”.

Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to walk a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Fuhrer’s aims. A stage adaptation of her story was even censored, shorn of all its “Heil Hitlers”.

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Three-hundred-year-old Stradivarius violin sells for $11m in New York

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Proceeds from sale of 1714 instrument will be used to fund scholarships for violinists at New England Conservatory

A Stradivarius violin crafted in 1714 sold for $11.25m (£9.1m) at a New York auction on Friday, missing the world record for a musical instrument that some predicted it might break, but still securing a solid financial future for a new generation of performers.

The 311-year-old instrument, listed by Sotheby’s of Manhattan as “a masterpiece of sound”, once belonged to the celebrated 19th-century Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, a close friend of the composer Johannes Brahms. It was gifted to the New England Conservatory in 2015 following the death of its most recent owner, a former student, Si-Hon Ma, with the understanding it would one day be sold to fund musical scholarships.

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Aacta awards 2025: Robbie Williams’ Better Man and Boy Swallows Universe dominate Australian film and TV prizes

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Singer biopic wins best film and best actor for motion capture star Jonno Davies, while Trent Dalton adaptation wins in 12 of its 22 nominated categories

The Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestseller Boy Swallows Universe has dominated the annual Aacta (Australian Academy of Cinema, Television and the Arts) awards, winning 12 of its record-breaking 22 nominations.

The Aacta president, Russell Crowe, hosted the awards ceremony at Hota (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast on Friday, which featured a live performance by Robbie Williams, whose musical biopic, Better Man, collected nine awards on the night.

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Mystery behind Viking-age treasure find in Scotland may finally have been solved

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A runic inscription on one of the Galloway hoard’s elaborately decorated arm rings has been deciphered

When the Galloway hoard was discovered in a ploughed field in western Scotland in 2014, it proved to be the richest collection of Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. Now the long-standing mystery of who might have owned it when it was buried more than 1,000 years ago may have been solved.

The spectacular silver and gold treasure had in fact belonged to everybody – “the community” – just as it does today, having been acquired in 2017 by National Museums Scotland (NMS).

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‘I was deeply upset’: Karla Sofía Gascón to miss Spanish ‘Oscars’ as storm over racist tweets continues

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The actor was due to attend the Goya awards on Saturday but has pulled out and has also been dropped by publishers

Karla Sofía Gascón will not attend this weekend’s prestigious Goya awards as the fallout from the Spanish actor’s racist and Islamophobic social media posts continues with her being dropped by her publisher and criticised by prominent politicians.

Gascón – the star of Emilia Pérez and the first transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar – is already understood to have been removed from the film’s campaigning materials by its studio, Netflix. Her comments have been described as “absolutely hateful” by the movie’s director, Jacques Audiard, while Gascón’s co-star, Zoe Saldana, has said the views expressed had saddened and disappointed her.

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Makeup artist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose by mistake on set of The Brutalist

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Actor says nose mistaken for prosthetic by new makeup artists: ‘I said, ‘That doesn’t come off!’

A makeup artist on The Brutalist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose believing it to be a prosthetic, the actor has revealed.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, Brody said that a new makeup artist began “busily working away with a solvent on my nose”.

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BBC and ITV slash big-budget TV spend as US streamers pour money into UK

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Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky also among UK broadcasters making cuts as Netflix, Disney and Amazon pile on pressure

UK broadcasters slashed their spending on big-budget TV shows to the lowest level in almost a decade last year, even as their US rivals Netflix, Disney and Amazon ploughed hundreds of millions more into British-made premium content.

In a sign of the increasing competitive pressures of the streaming era, the amount spent on high-end TV shows costing more than £1m an hour to make by domestic operators such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, plunged by a quarter last year to £598m.

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Emilia Pérez director criticises Karla Sofia Gascón’s ‘inexcusable’ tweets

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Oscar nominee Jacques Audiard has called the social media behaviour of the actor ‘hateful’ in a new interview

The director of Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard, has responded to the controversial unearthed tweets of his Oscar-nominated star Karla Sofía Gascón, branding them “hateful”.

The French film-maker, who is also nominated for the best director Oscar, has expressed disappointment over the social media behaviour of Gascón, who had shown bigoted views towards people of colour, Muslims and increased diversity at the Oscars.

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Killer Mike sues security firm over Grammys arrest, alleging ‘public humiliation’

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Rapper alleges assault, false arrest and more when he was detained shortly after winning three awards at 2024 ceremony

Killer Mike, the hip-hop artist known for his solo work as well as the duo Run the Jewels, has sued a private security company after he was arrested at last year’s Grammys.

The rapper, real name Michael Render, won three awards at the ceremony, for best rap album, best rap song and best rap performance. But shortly after his wins, as he moved backstage towards the red carpet area, he was arrested and detained after an altercation with what Render later described as “an overzealous security guard”.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot in the works with Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to the titular role

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Oscar-winning director – and longtime Buffy fan – Chloé Zhao is onboard to direct, with Dolly Parton as executive producer

A sequel reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is reportedly in the works, with Sarah Michelle Gellar expected to return to the titular role and the Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao to direct the pilot episode.

On Tuesday Deadline reported sources close to the project confirming that the streaming service Hulu is “near a pilot order”, with lifelong Buffy fan Zhao onboard to direct the episode, written by the Poker Face writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman.

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Over the moon: Billie Eilish sports 188-year-old Yorkshire wool brand at Grammys

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The singer paid tribute to her home city wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap crafted by English woollen mill Moon

When Billie Eilish took to the stage at the 67th Grammy awards wearing a hat with the branding of the baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers, few would have noticed the much smaller logo on the side with two tiny union flags and the word “Moon”.

But in a small town in West Yorkshire, Moon is a household name, as one of the last surviving woollen mills in the UK.

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Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar lead Grammy awards in aftermath of LA fires

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An unusual ceremony paid tribute to and raised money for those affected by the California wildfires while giving Beyoncé her first album of the year

Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar ruled the Grammys during a night that also paid tribute to those affected by the California wildfires.

The night’s biggest prize, for album of the year, went to Beyoncé for Cowboy Carter, the first time she has won the award. It was presented by members of the Los Angeles country fire department in one of many of the night’s tributes to those affected by the wildfires. The ceremony took place at the Crypto.com arena in LA.

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Salman Rushdie set to testify as attempted murder trial gets under way

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Hadi Matar, 26, accused of stabbing author 10 times in case likely to draw world’s media to tiny upstate New York town

A man accused of attacking Salman Rushdie as he was being introduced at a literary lecture in New York state in 2022 is going on trial this week in a case likely to create global headlines.

The trial could upend life in the tiny upstate New York village of Mayville, whose population of less than 1,500 is not accustomed to finding itself at the center of a media circus covering the attempted assassination of one of the world’s most famous writers.

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Beethoven and Marie Curie compete with birds to appear on new euro notes

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European Central Bank picks two themes for redesign submissions: ‘iconic personalities’ or rivers and birds

He was a master of notes, and now the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven could be one of the faces of the redesigned euro, the first time the EU currency’s banknotes have been revamped.

In a process that started in 2021 and has already involved a public inquiry and two multidisciplinary advisory groups, the European Central Bank (ECB) has selected two themes for the redesign.

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