John le Carré, who died last December at the age of 89, did not really exist. His name was a “cover” for a former British Intelligence officer called David Cornwell, who monitored the trap-door disappearance of agents in Cold War Germany and ran agents in the shadow of the BerlinContinue Reading
A lan Ruck, best known at the moment for playing the damaged and overlooked eldest sibling Connor Roy in the savagely sharp and universally hyped TV show Succession, is sitting opposite me, cheerily miming pumping breast milk. He’s talking about the pre-Succession era, when he took a career break toContinue Reading
Review at a glance I ’ve yet to meet anyone who dislikes Chloé Zhao’s spartan, Oscar-winning epic, Nomadland. Her new movie will be more divisive. It’s a lavish, ambitious, Marvel superhero movie that starts with the words: “In the beginning… before the six singularities…” Any viewer who reads that andContinue Reading
Artist Nora Al-Badri is using deepfakes for good – to free historical artefacts from museums and reinvent them for the digital ageContinue Reading
H ours before our interview Neil Gaiman, the UK’s leading purveyor of fantasy across comics, novels, TV and cinema, tweets that he’s “about to do something so remarkable and unlikely that I have decided to wear my lucky Batman underpants”. He’s not referring to our chat. “I had my DesertContinue Reading
Pulling disaffected young men back from the bring is complicated, and it’s making academics question their whole approach to extremismContinue Reading
Review at a glance Never mind the shark – in this show about the troubled shoot for classic blockbuster Jaws, it’s Ian Shaw that you need to see. Playing his father, Robert Shaw – aka Quint, the world-weary shark hunter – he gives what is undoubtedly one of the bestContinue Reading
E llen Adams is “medium height, trim with good dress sense” and secretary of state to the President she distrusts. A reckoning with the Trump era will be worn heavily in the next 40 pages: “After the past four years of watching the country flail itself almost to death, sheContinue Reading
Doggy Doggy Yum Yum which was launched in 2020 by Dorset based artisanal ice cream maker Baboo Gelato has been recognised by their peers by making the finals of the prestigious PetQuip and Pet Industry Federation (PFI) Awards. The brand made the finals of Product Innovation (Dog Treats) and BusinessContinue Reading
A few years ago I interviewed an actress, and as part of our conversation, she shared an experience that I’ve found myself thinking about ever since. She was performing in a play while pregnant, which meant that she needed to leave the job early. It ended up being an uncomfortableContinue Reading
