Category Archives: Culture

Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Most children caught up in war die early’

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The Nobel prize-winning author on using oral history to convey the horrors of war, her regard for Dostoevsky, and Greta Thunberg’s activism

Svetlana Alexievich gave a lecture last week commemorating the work of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Alexievich’s book Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories was published in June in the UK, more than three decades after it first appeared in the USSR to critical acclaim. It is based on interviews with a Soviet generation that experienced the second world war as children and has lived ever since with trauma. In 2015 Alexievich, now 71, won the Nobel prize for literature. The committee praised “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. She lives in Minsk, Belarus, and is currently writing books about love and death.

Why are you in the UK?
I came because of Anna [Politkovskaya]. I loved and respected her so much. We met in 2005 at a prize ceremony in Oslo. There were many people there but Anna was somehow on her own, separate from the others. She was a person of extreme integrity bordering on fanaticism. We had a coffee, talked. There was one theme that united us: war. She was traumatised, at that point very close to a nervous breakdown, and full of pain and frustration. Anna was unhappy that she couldn’t explain the situation [in Chechnya]. She wasn’t able to make the west understand. She told me about the threats she was receiving. Her assassination [in 2006] came as a complete shock. I knew from our conversations that she was more or less prepared for this to happen. As a writer, I imagine what she was going through when she entered the lift of her apartment and the killer was there. It’s hard to imagine.

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The day I confronted Harvey Weinstein: ‘He said, “You think you can save everyone”’

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Long conference calls and bad-tempered threats: an exclusive extract from Ronan Farrow’s book Catch And Kill

By fall 2017, I had taken my story to the New Yorker. As the investigation moved closer to publication, I called the Weinstein Company for comment. Sounding nervous, an assistant said he’d check if the boss was available. And then there was Weinstein’s husky baritone. “Wow!” he said with mock excitement. “What do I owe this occasion to?” The writing about the man has seldom lingered on this quality: he was pretty funny. But he veered swiftly toward fury. Weinstein hung up on me several times that fall, including on that first day. I told him I wanted to be fair, to include anything he had to say, then asked if he was comfortable with me recording. He seemed to panic, and was gone with a click. The pattern repeated that afternoon. But when I got him to talk for a sustained time, he abandoned his initial caution and got sharply combative.

“How did you identify yourself to all these women?” he demanded. I was caught off balance. I had started reporting the story for NBC, before turning to the New Yorker.

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Jackie Brown star Robert Forster dies aged 78

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Forster was a versatile character actor whose career was unexpectedly rescued by his Oscar-nominated role in Quentin Tarantino’s cult thriller

•Peter Bradshaw on Robert Forster: a coolly charismatic character actor with an intensely sympathetic air

Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died on Friday. He was 78.

Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.

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‘My ties to England have loosened’: John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit

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At 87, le Carré is publishing his 25th novel. He talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy

I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.

Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.

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‘Future relics’: the painter capturing the beauty of council houses

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Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence

From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.

Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.

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‘We good now China?’ South Park creators issue mock apology after ban

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Facetious statement comes after reports that show was banned in China after episode critical of the country

South Park’s creators have responded with a mock apology to reports that China has censored the programme, ridiculing the country and comparing President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.

The “apology” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone comes after reports on Monday that China had scrubbed all episodes, clips and content related to the long-running comedy cartoon from Chinese streaming and social media platforms in response to a recent episode that was critical of the country.

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Robbie Robertson: ‘I didn’t know anybody who didn’t do drugs’

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Guitarist Robbie Robertson helped to change music history with Bob Dylan’s backing group the Band. He remembers how the ‘brotherhood’ ended in heroin addiction and self-destruction

In 1965 Robbie Robertson was living in the room next to Bob Dylan’s at New York’s Chelsea hotel. This was when Dylan was writing Blonde on Blonde. “The television was on. There was music playing. The phone was ringing. There were people coming and going – and he was writing away on his typewriter. I thought, ‘I don’t even understand how somebody can close off the outside world like that and concentrate. This guy is from another planet,’” Robertson says. But for a while he shared that planet, or came as close to sharing it as any musician did at the time.

Robertson was the lead guitarist of the Band (then known as The Hawks), the five-piece group that backed Dylan when he first went electric: essentially, they supplied the noise that the acoustic-loving crowds booed on tour. But while the collaboration changed the course of music history, it had another, quieter and more personal effect on the Band, shifting the dynamics of what Robertson calls their “brotherhood”, the way the five of them related.

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‘Toxic’ Telegraph made me feel ‘nauseous’, says Graham Norton

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BBC chat show presenter explains why he stopped writing advice column

Graham Norton has said he stopped writing for the Daily Telegraph because the newspaper’s recent “toxic” political stances increasingly made him feel “nauseous”.

The BBC One chat show presenter wrote the newspaper’s advice column for 12 years before stepping down without explanation at the end of 2018. Norton has now said he decided to leave the outlet after it defended the likes of US supreme court then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh and published articles by future prime minister Boris Johnson containing falsehoods.

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Ginger Baker, wild and brilliant Cream drummer, dies aged 80

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Drummer who straddled jazz, blues and rock ‘passed away peacefully’

Ginger Baker, one of the most brilliant, versatile and turbulent drummers in the history of British music, has died aged 80.

His family had previously made it public that he was critically ill and asked fans to “please keep him in your prayers”. His Facebook page said he “passed away peacefully” on Sunday morning.

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Helena Bonham Carter sought Princess Margaret’s blessing through psychic

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The actor says she discussed her part in The Crown with the deceased royal herself

Some actors avoid excessive research, but for Helena Bonham Carter to play Princess Margaret in The Crown meant reading all the biographies, talking to friends, ladies-in-waiting and relatives, and consulting an astrologer, a graphologist and a psychic.

The last meeting meant she could talk to the princess herself, the actor told Cheltenham literature festival.

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Glastonbury tickets sell out in 34 minutes

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Record 2.4 million fans tried to secure ticket for festival’s 50th year next June

Tickets for the 50th year of Glastonbury have sold out in 34 minutes, as a record number of fans tried to secure a ticket for the event at Worthy Farm next June.

Emily Eavis confirmed that a record number of people had registered to be eligible for the sale, which started at 9am on Sunday and was finished in little over 30 minutes. A record 2.4 million people signed up to have a chance of securing a ticket.

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My land of make believe: life after The Sims

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Feeling increasingly anxious and lost, Liv Siddall found herself retreating to the comfort and security of video games – often playing for hours at a time. Here, she reveals how she finally escaped back to reality

In 2005, when I was 16, I worked in a busy local café. My job was to make tea and coffee and I churned out hot beverages at high speed, while constantly restocking my cup and saucer area. I found the work hard and boring, which was strange given that at the end of every shift I’d rush home to play Diner Dash, a video game in which you become a waitress in a busy restaurant, taking orders, serving customers, clearing away their cups and plates.

In the great pantheon of PC games, Diner Dash was not among the most realistic, but I enjoyed its simplicity and I was enthralled by the thrill that came with pleasing customers and advancing levels. How many levels were available was never made clear. The game seemed infinite. I’d play it for hours.

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The big picture: boy with balloons in Santiago, Chile

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Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’

David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a boy with balloons on a street in Santiago, Chile, was taken in 1997. It is included in Streetwise, a new collection of pictures from the archives of the Magnum agency. The Magnum name became synonymous with street photography in the 1950s and 1960s under the guiding influence of co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The current volume pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white “decisive moments” and examines the way that that spirit has been taken forward, particularly after advances in digital photography and printing enabled a revolution in colour in the 1980s.

Harvey was elected into the agency – there is a voting process among the membership – in the year that this picture was taken. By then, as a staff photographer for National Geographic, he had been taking pictures for more than three decades. A principle subject was the Hispanic diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic – the “divided soul”, as he terms it, of Latin culture.

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Singer-songwriter Sia reveals she has chronic pain disease

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Australian artist disclosed that she has Ehlers-Danos syndrome, a neurological disease affecting at least 1 in 5,000 people worldwide

The singer-songwriter Sia Furler has disclosed that she has the chronic pain disease Ehlers-Danos syndrome, and told others suffering from pain “you’re not alone”.

In a Tweet late Friday night, Sia said: “Hey, I’m suffering with chronic pain, a neurological disease, ehlers danlos and I just wanted to say to those of you suffering from pain, whether physical or emotional, I love you, keep going. Life is fucking hard. Pain is demoralizing, and you’re not alone.”

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It was gutsy of Hillary Clinton to stand by Bill. But it made political sense too | Barbara Ellen

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After helping make the Clintons into a Democratic super-brand she wanted her turn at power

A woman who has been cheated on has a complex social role to play – she must be devastated, dignified and instantly unforgiving (banishing the sexual miscreant), as though she’s been given Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive to act out in some ghastly, very public round of emotional charades. No one knows this more than Hillary Clinton, who, in some eyes, committed a heinous feminist faux pas by forgiving her husband, Bill, for his multiple infidelities.

Instead of the “Go on now, go – walk out the door!” narrative that is practically the cheatee-national anthem, Hillary “stood by her man”, even as she denied becoming a Tammy Wynette caricature. She has been relentlessly questioned, mocked and distrusted on account of this decision, arguably suffering more for her husband’s betrayals than he ever did. Now, interviewed with her daughter, Chelsea, about their new The Book of Gutsy Women, she cited “the decision to stay in my marriage” as the gutsiest personal thing she ever did. Just the gutsiest, Hillary – or also the smartest, the only outcome that made any kind of sense?

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Monty Python at 50: a half-century of silly walks, edible props and dead parrots

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In this rare glimpse inside the BBC archives, we reveal the exasperated internal memos, the furious letters from wing commanders – and David Frost’s bid to bring them down

In a memo sent in 1969, the BBC head of comedy seems to have lost his sense of humour. “Please will you have a word with the writers?” said Michael Mills. “I haven’t reacted to the funny titles that have appeared on the scripts so far. I hoped that they would cease of their own accord.”

The titles that irritated him included “Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot”, apparently a spoof legal firm, which came to be shortened to Bunwackett. The show, meanwhile, had the working title The Circus. Now, though, Mills had had enough: “The time has come when we must stop having peculiar titles and settle on one overall title … Please would you have words with them and try to produce something palatable?”

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The Climbers review – stirring tribute to China’s mountaineering hero

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Bombastic and unsubtle this paean to Fang Wuzhou may be, but its vertiginous set-pieces put many US blockbusters to shame

Produced by celebrated spectacle-peddler Tsui Hark for co-writer/director Daniel Lee, this is the latest in a run of preposterously patriotic yet enjoyable Chinese event movies. It pays stirring tribute to Fang Wuzhou, a humble, Mallory-worshipping mountaineer who led a successful ascent of Everest in May 1960, declaring “the whole world will remember this day”.

Nobody really does, unfortunately. No doubt this is down to the loss of the expedition’s camera equipment during an avalanche, with the consequent shortfall in photographic evidence prompting some in the climbing community to have their doubts. The film compounds his nightmare by having Fang (Wu Jing) return to base camp to learn his beloved Ying (Zhang Ziyi) is departing to study meteorology in the Soviet Union.

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‘Manhattan of the desert’: civil war puts Yemen’s ancient skyscrapers at risk

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In addition to the conflict’s huge human cost, Yemen’s rich cultural heritage has been ravaged, from the Queen of Sheba’s reputed throne room to the mudbrick high-rises of Shibam

On the edge of the vast Empty Quarter desert that dominates the Arabian peninsula, white and brown towers rise together out of the valley floor like tall sandcastles. Once they welcomed weary caravans traversing the Silk Roads: now they stand as testimony to the ingenuity of a lost civilisation.

This is the ancient walled city of Shibam, nicknamed the “Manhattan of the desert” by the British explorer Freya Stark in the 1930s, in modern-day Yemen, a country also home to an untold number of other archeological treasures. The kingdom of Saba, ruled by the legendary Queen of Sheba, and many other dynasties of the ancient world rose and fell here, their fortunes linked to Yemen’s position at the crossroads of early frankincense and spice trades between Africa and Asia.

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Dr Fred Sai obituary

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Campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world

The harrowing experiences that Fred Sai faced as a young medical officer in Ghana in the 1960s fuelled his concern about the link between frequent childbearing and preventable death and sickness in mothers and children, and turned him into a passionate campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world.

In his early clinical work, Sai, who has died aged 95, came across many children with protein-energy malnutrition, or kwashiorkor, which in the language of the Ga ethnic group to which he belonged means “the disease of the displaced child”. “I realised that fully a third of my child patients had mothers who were pregnant or had a young sibling born very soon after them,” he told the Lancet in 2012. “The abrupt stopping of breastfeeding was making them sick. I thought that one way to help these women was to teach them family planning and the importance of spacing children properly.”

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Joker review – the most disappointing film of the year

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Why so serious? Todd Phillips’ solemn but shallow supervillain origins movie has a strong performance by Joaquin Phoenix but is weighed down by realist detail and tedious material

The year’s biggest disappointment has arrived. It emerges with weirdly grownup self-importance from the tulip fever of festival awards season as an upscale spin on an established pop culture brand. Last year we had Luca Guadagnino’s solemn version of Suspiria, and now it’s Joker, from director and co-writer Todd Phillips: a new origin myth for Batman’s most famous supervillain opponent.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a pathetic loser and loner in Gotham City, some time in the early 1980s. Arthur is a former inpatient at a psychiatric facility but is now allowed to live with his elderly mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in her scuzzy apartment. Poor Arthur has a neurological condition that means he is liable to break into screeching laughter at inopportune moments. He has a crush on his single-mom neighbour Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and pines to be a comedian, hero-worshipping cheesy TV host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But he can only get a job as a clown in grinning makeup and floppy-toed shoes twirling an advertising banner outside a store, where he is bullied and beaten up by young thugs passing by. One day, after the humiliation and despair become too much to bear, Arthur gets hold of a gun and discovers that his talent is not for comedy but violence.

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