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Royal Academy, London Turbulent, fervent and mostly unseen in his lifetime, the late paintings of John Constable are at once figurative, abstract and staggering to behold A hard rain falls on a glittering grey sea. Wind harries sullen clouds across low-lying horizons. Overcast skies shed a pale glare on the churned earth below. Thunder and gloom, turbid brown rivers, corn standing solid as a wall at the field’s edge beneath squalls of paint, thick as mortar. This is summer in John Constable’s England. Or, to be more precise, it is the season of late Constable (1776-1837), painted in the grief of bereavement. The Royal Academy’s stupendous new show may open with some early cloud studies and Constable’s The Leaping Horse , last of his so-called Six-Footers, but almost everything here was made after the death of his wife, Maria, in 1828. Constable was left to raise seven young children on his own, at the age of 52. He wore mourning for the rest of his life. Continue reading... from

The rescuers are the focus as Free Solo directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin expertly weave news footage with restaged scenes A junior football team trapped deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand are making headlines all over the world. Not even the Thai Navy Seals have been able to save them and their chances of survival are bleak. That is, until a pair of middle-aged Britons arrive on the scene. Rick and John don’t exactly look like action heroes; one is bald, the other bespectacled, and both could be described as bumbling. But they are two of the world’s best cave divers, and in 2018 they led one of the most dramatic rescue missions of recent times. This hugely involving documentary from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the directing duo and married couple behind the Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo , centres on the rescuers rather than the rescued (the rights to the boys’ story were speedily bought for another project, by Netflix). Twenty-four-h

Coliseum, London This is Gilbert and Sullivan played for laughs and the whole cast, including a creditable Les Dennis as Sir Joseph, are clearly having a whale of a time Doubtless aiming for the feelgood factor, English National Opera ’s first new production since lockdown is HMS Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan ’s guarded 1878 satire on class, social mobility and Englishness, directed by Cal McCrystal and conducted by Chris Hopkins . It also marks the operatic debut of comedian Les Dennis as Sir Joseph Porter, the admiral and cabinet minister ludicrously unqualified for his job – as much an issue then, it would seem, as it is now. Dennis’s presence might raise eyebrows, but we should remember that he has already appeared in musicals and acted with the RSC. His Sir Joseph is an ineffectual old soak, who believes himself above the egalitarian values he ostensibly professes, and despite interpolated jokes about his not really being an opera singer, he delivers his patter numbers perfect

He’s the reluctant sex symbol who is now partying with the Clintons. But actor Nicholas Braun is only just coming to terms with his life-changing role as Cousin Greg, TV’s favourite antihero in Succession. He reveals how he is learning to embrace his newfound fame Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession , in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived. By this point, Braun had film

A viral sensation in the early 00s and now in print, this raw, groundbreaking tale of a teenager’s sex life revels in the language of Black Londoners In 2005, the then 13-year-old Jade LB wrote Keisha the Sket (originally called Keisha Da Sket) – a sprawling narrative about a 17-year-old girl from inner London whose life consists of sex, predatory men, parties and tragedies. LB uploaded the tale on to a blog site called Piczo and the story spread around London schools before social media was really available on phones. Its appearance was a definitive moment in Black British history. According to lifestyle platform Black Ballad , it “accidentally decolonised literature”. A raw portrayal of teenage lust, the story, now in print with new chapters, starts with Keisha excitedly planning to meet up with a boy for sex. “Dat sexc bwoi ramel iz invitin me 2 his yard 4 a lash init,” she beams. On her way there, she collects her friend Shanice, whose older brother, Ricardo, flirts with Keisha

The Stranger Things star on viral fame, the challenges of dyslexia, and convincing her actor parents she wanted to follow in their footsteps New York-born Maya Hawke, 23, began her career in modelling before making her screen debut as Jo March in the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Little Women . She was Linda “Flowerchild” Kasabian in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and plays Robin in Netflix hit Stranger Things . Hawke now stars in Mainstream , directed and written by Gia Coppola. She lives in New York and is the daughter of actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. Your new film Mainstream is a satire on viral fame. Are people too reliant on their mobile phones nowadays? I’m sure they are, but it would be hypocritical of me to be judgmental because I love my phone. I love that I can go for a walk, put on headphones, listen to Phoebe Bridgers , feel melancholy and cry. I love that I can take a bath, play an audiobook and learn about neuroscience while I wash my hair. For so

Slasher fantasy and ghostly magic collide in Edgar Wright’s heady thriller about a fashion student who is mysteriously transported into the life of a 60s nightclub singer “It’s not what you imagine, London,” says Rita Tushingham in this deliciously twisted love letter to Britain’s cinematic pop-culture past. Director and co-writer Edgar Wright , whose CV runs from the rural action-comedy Hot Fuzz to the recent dramatic music doc The Sparks Brothers , has cheekily described Last Night in Soho as “ Peeping Tom’s Midnight Garden ”, a mashup of seedy Soho nostalgia and melancholy magic. Making superb use of its West End and Fitzrovia locations, and boasting a cast that includes Terence Stamp (cutting a silhouette that weirdly recalls William Hartnell’s Doctor Who) and Diana Rigg in her final role, it’s a head-spinning fable that twists from finger-snapping retro fun to giallo-esque slasher fantasy as it dances through streets paved not with gold but with glitter, grit and splashes of s

From All My Loving to Your Mother Should Know, the former Beatle illuminates a life spent puzzling how to get from the beginning of a song to its end At the beginning of this two-volume book, Paul McCartney says that while he has no intention of writing his autobiography and has never kept a diary, it has been his habit throughout his adult life to turn his life experiences into the words of songs, and so here are 154 of them. With that kind of introduction you’d be forgiven for expecting them in chronological order. Had they been so, most of the hits would be in the first book and a lot of people would hardly open the second. Chronological was obviously a non-starter. Alphabetical it is, then, with each initial letter a fresh lottery. F is particularly solid, featuring Fixing a Hole, The Fool on the Hill, For No One and From Me to You. Unsurprisingly, almost everything under I dates from the Beatles’ personal-pronoun period – I Saw Her Standing There, I Wanna Be Your Man, I Want to

From a creepy Hollywood comedy to trick or treat for gamers, Guardian critics suggest their cultural classics Forget slasher films – the essential Halloween movie is Frank Capra’s 1944 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace , which takes place one Halloween night in Brooklyn in a creepy old house next to a churchyard. Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic who discovers on his wedding day that his sweet old maiden aunts are, in fact, serial killers with bodies piled up in their cellar. Then his long-lost brother turns up – also a serial killer, with the same body count as the old ladies, and who, to evade capture, has had plastic surgery, making him resemble the horror icon Boris Karloff (played by Raymond Massey – Karloff performed the role in the Broadway version). It has to be the most meta event in Hollywood history. A rather delirious 31 October. Peter Bradshaw Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jSsk7a

David Harewood cast as William Buckley in James Graham’s new play of fiery 1968 debates with Gore Vidal It was a battle royale fought between American political titans, and it played out on screen in a series of televised bouts in 1968 . Now James Graham, the leading British playwright behind the television drama Quiz and stage play Ink , is to put the historic clashes between the leading liberal Gore Vidal and conservative intellectual William F Buckley Jr at the centre of a new play, Best of Enemies . Playing Buckley, a man who founded and edited the rightwing, libertarian National Review in 1955 and who worked briefly for the CIA, will be David Harewood, the actor known for his roles in the TV series Homeland and for playing Martin Luther King Jr on stage in The Mountaintop . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mwTCC4

From the magazine’s archive: two essential works by two essential writers on the climate crisis. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3GCm4dK

The actor and food-show host discusses writing a memoir, surviving oral cancer, and his most memorable terrible meal. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3btynKM

Encourage bed-and-breakfast location by the sound (6). from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2ZFi8HR

Plastic-bag ghosts, heavily tattooed mermaids, and other creepy beings found nowhere else. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3muOP3N

Donald Trump, in trying to obstruct the investigation into the Capitol riot, is fighting not only to impose his view of the past but to insure his political future. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jSfh5O

In this collection of his essays and columns, the American journalist takes pride in being as ruthless as some of those he writes about – from Jeffrey Epstein to Steve Bannon Fame, according to Milton’s poem, spurs “the clear spirit... To scorn delights, and live laborious days”. For Milton, that quest for lasting renown was an aristocratic pursuit, an “infirmity of noble mind”. Michael Wolff’s new book begins by lamenting “the democratisation of fame”: no achievement is required of today’s self-promoting wannabes, and all that counts is visibility on social media. Yet the celebrities Wolff examines retain a status that he calls “semi-heroic” because they suffer the penalties of fame or infamy, which include “humiliation, prosecution, jail, even death”. Too Famous begins with Hugh Grant dodging the inevitable blitz of selfies by retreating into defensive privacy; it ends as Jeffrey Epstein dies in the solitude of his prison cell. Wolff himself became famous by writing three books of

25 questions on literature, film, TV, books and music with a spooky edge – how will you fare? If it is gothic, spooky, scary, haunted or just plain weird, and was in a book, a film, a TV show or some music, you might just be about to get asked about it. How will you fare with these 25 questions about things that go bump in the night? It is just for fun, and there are no prizes, but let us know how you got on – and how you are planning to enjoy this spookiest of evenings – in the comments. The Guardian’s hideously horrible Halloween culture quiz If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com but remember, the quizmaster’s word is always final, and you wouldn’t want him to put a hex on you. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3bsgGLM

Despite keeping one foot in the club-pop groove, commitment and maturity set the tone for settled-down Sheeran’s latest outing Within his relentless upward trajectory, there has always been tension between Ed Sheeran , the relatable and heartfelt balladeer, and a friskier musician partial to late nights out. The more playful Sheeran is represented by just two songs on the fourth album in the mathematical series (+, x, ÷). Maintaining his toehold in club pop are singles Bad Habits and Shivers : two effective, flirty bops. Other busy tracks such as Collide and 2Step, meanwhile, foreground the garage rattle of Sheeran’s early “ grindie ” (grime+indie) inspirations. But a happy marriage, fatherhood and the loss of an industry mentor (on Visiting Hours ) mean that Equals tilts heavily into contentment and maturity, including an obligatory lullaby – Sandman – for his little one. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BqSjIN

The Colour of the Climate Crisis is an exhibition by the environmental social initiative Do The Green Thing. It showcases the work of 24 Black and other artists of colour exploring the relationship between racial injustice and climate injustice. The exhibition will launch on 31 October and run until 2 November at Pipe Factory in Glasgow, Scotland, with a selection of works to coincide with the start of the Cop26 global climate summit. The works will form a permanent digital display at www.thecolouroftheclimatecrisis.art . Further gallery exhibitions will take place in London and New York in 2022 Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3GFG276

Selfridges Loading Bay; Sadler’s Wells, London While Sharon Eyal’s repetitive works writhe with energy, Dimitris Papaioannou’s new piece lacks momentum but not beauty A work by Sharon Eyal presented in the urban setting of the loading bay at Selfridges on Oxford Street, London, and one by Dimitris Papaioannou that turned the august stage of Sadler’s Wells into a watery island, took contemporary dance to different extremes. To quote Elvis Presley, one needed a little less conversation and a little more action; the other needed the opposite. Somewhere in the middle might lie the perfect dance work. Eyal’s programme (co-created by Gai Behar and with music by Ori Lichtik) was slightly derailed by Covid, which kept too many of the dancers of tanzmainz , the contemporary dance company of Staatstheater Mainz , at home in Germany for the much-anticipated UK premiere of the choreographer’s Soul Chain . Instead, they substituted Family , a slight piece in which a group of dancers stick to

Familiar enemies and surprise faces in the return of Doctor Who. Plus: Made in Chelsea-meets-primetime legal drama in BBC One’s Showtrial. Here’s what to watch tonight Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3w4Eizt

Ruth Negga is magnetic in Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s story of race in 1920s Harlem At a glamorous party in 1920s Harlem, a young black woman and an older white man perch at the edge of a dancefloor. “Can you always tell the difference?” he asks her, eyes narrowing at an exotic blond. “Hugh, stop talking to me like you’re writing a piece for the National Geographic !” she replies. “I can tell, same as you.” In Rebecca Hall’s elegant adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, the idea of who can “pass” for a different race is not nearly as enticing as why they might choose to do so. Safety, self-loathing and even plain boredom are hinted at as possible explanations. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga play two light-skinned black women who knew each other as children. When Irene (Thompson) chances upon Clare (Negga) after 12 years apart, she is shocked to discover that her friend has been passing as white. Negga is magnetic as antiheroine Clare; a slinky, charismatic presence with dub

Watch highlights from The New Yorker Live, where the chef and TV host considered the many changes coming to the way we eat. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3pVBJib

The satirist Dennard Dayle hopes to discomfit subway riders with his phony but sharp campaign posters. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3bmrPhf

The north London rapper’s playful blend of hip-hop and house is part of a new wave of British Asian talent Surya Sen was a key figure in India’s independence movement in the 1930s who led uprisings against British rule. Fast-forward a century and his namesake – a north London-based musician who prefers to remain anonymous – feels like a radical presence in UK music: a British-Bengali producer/rapper whose bumping and pristinely constructed club music finds the sweet spot between hip-hop and house, spanning purring, deep Detroit flavours, frisky French touch, slick garage and sampledelic boom-bap. Last year’s CU Later set out his stall – the playful pop sensibility of California’s Channel Tres, but with Sen’s low-pitched, distinctly London vocals – and got him signed to Skint Records, which has been re-establishing itself as a hub of dynamic dance talent since its 90s big beat days. Then came recent single Jessica , a hip-house come-on that sounds like Masters at Work cruising around

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c

Narendra Modi joins in mourning for much-loved star of southern Indian cinema Puneeth Rajkumar, a leading star of southern Indian regional cinema, has died after a heart attack. He was 46. Rajkumar had performed lead roles in 29 movies and also appeared on television, where he was the host of a Kannada-language version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31fCjgy

From living in a dugout in Little Siberia to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg in New York, artist and activist Ai Weiwei reveals what drives his restless creativity Ai Weiwei is hard to pin down. For the first few minutes of our Zoom call, him bleary-eyed at his computer, I think he’s talking to me from his new base in Portugal. My mistake – it’s Vienna, where he’s planning a show for next March. A year and a half ago, Ai was giving interviews about his new life in Britain ; before that it was Germany, the country that offered him safe harbour when he finally left China in 2015, after years of hounding by the authorities and a spell in detention. So where does he actually live? “Yeah, the question always comes up,” he says sheepishly. He moved to Cambridge so his son, Ai Lao, could improve his English. His son is still there, but in the meantime, “I found a piece of land near Lisbon, so I’m kind of settled there, but that’s only for the past year”. Continue reading... from Cultu

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys blame producers for ‘unsafe’ set and say 24-year-old ‘devastated’ over death of Halyna Hutchins Lawyers representing the crew member in charge of weapons on the film set where actor Alec Baldwin fired a gun while rehearsing that killed the cinematographer last week have blamed the producers for an “unsafe” set. The crew member, armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has “no idea” how live bullets became present on the set near Santa Fe in New Mexico where the desert western Rust was being filmed. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3Csl0Xp

Beautifully shot documentary successfully explains the Dublin singer-songwriter’s appeal by focusing on what his songs mean to fans Even if you’re not into his lumpen folk-rock polemics, this documentary and concert film goes a long way to explaining Dublin singer-songwriter Damien Dempsey ’s unshakeable home-crowd following, and why – as we see at the beginning of Ross Killeen’s reflective film – he is able to pack out a series of gigs every Christmas. Dempsey’s story makes a fine case for music as personal balm, but juxtaposing it with three of his fans’ personal histories deepens the scope of his art into a true act of public communion and shared healing. At least, if the deluge of tears streaming down concertgoers’ cheeks here is anything to go by. The three Dubliners we hear from are elegant recovering heroin addict Nadia, who “gave up on life” after her brother’s murder; boxing coach Packy, gripped by social phobia since his teens and witness to the alleyway shooting of a frien

A group of friends find a market for gruesome ‘dark parties’, in a delightfully creepy Spanish-language comedy that’s unlike anything else on TV Plenty of new comedies aim for originality, but few reach the heights of individuality that the charming Los Espookys (Sky Comedy) does in its debut. This Spanish-language series is an HBO import which feels quite unlike anything else on television, and it inhabits its own oddball skin so easily that it takes a moment to realise just how slyly surreal and clever it is. Essentially, it is a workplace comedy, but when that workplace involves using ropes and lighting tricks to spin a “possessed” young girl in midair as she projectile vomits all over a charismatic young priest, you know this is not going to be about hiding staplers in jelly or photocopying one’s body parts. Los Espookys are a group of four goth-adjacent friends who specialise in staging horror scenes. After organising a gruesome quinceañera, where they turn a cake into a rotting

How the chef and food writer Julie Sahni advanced America’s understanding of Indian food. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3EpeLUC

Most guys I meet are straight-up terrible listeners. I’m, like, “I work for the F.B.I.” And they’re, like, “That’s nice, let me tell you about my vinyl collection.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3bqblEK

When the Pultizer-prize winning poet was asked to collaborate with the former Beatle on a book, he gained a unique insight into the creative process behind the band’s biggest hits Towards the end of 2016 I had a phone call from an unfamiliar number. The voice, though, was immediately familiar. The newly elected Donald Trump introduced himself quite matter-of-factly. He lost no time in getting to the point: would I be willing to come to Washington to serve as his “Poetry Supremo”? That Sir Paul McCartney turns out to be such a brilliant mimic shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Like almost all great writers, he’d apprenticed himself to the masters of the trade: Dickens, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll. All apprenticeships are characterised by caricature and impersonation. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mqARjo

Whether it is a live gig, a new film or a game to play at home, our critics have your plans for this week covered Azor Out now From debut director Andreas Fontana, Azor is a drama set in the world of Swiss bankers, but this ain’t Wall Street with cuckoo clocks: Fontana renders everything in a Graham Greene-ish hue, with an impending sense of doom trickling through every interaction in this cloistered and morally murky world. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mpPlAc

As Halloween beckons, summon up favourite child-friendly frighteners such as The Witches, Beetlejuice and Coraline However much adults latch on to it as an excuse for partying and dressing up, Halloween remains, in its present-day incarnation, an occasion chiefly for the benefit of children: try trick-or-treating without one in tow and see how far you get. Yet film distributors don’t see it in quite the same way. This week’s suitably spooky cinema releases, from Last Night in Soho to Antlers to The Nowhere Inn , are all for adults and older teens. Warner Bros has taken advantage of the gap to at least rerelease the first Harry Potter film in cinemas, but otherwise, families seeking a bit of gentler fright-night viewing are better cosied up at home, where you can at least pause proceedings whenever things get a little too intense. Because as much as many parents prefer their children’s viewing to be as edgeless and benign as possible, many of our most formative film memories tend t

A convalescent young boy is visited by a mythical wanderer in a deeply evocative exploration of storytelling and time No writer’s body of work is more densely connected yet sparely wrought than Alan Garner ’s – connected not just to himself and the land, through stories of a long-rooted Cheshire family who “knew their place”, but to myth and folklore, flowing through the children’s fantasies that made his name. In the 1970s, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet were boundary markers between his children’s and adult books (though Garner wouldn’t recognise a distinction). Over the following decades he honed his clipped, enigmatic style, and, with the exception of Strandloper, a foray into Indigenous Australian dreamtime, stayed in the environs of his beloved Alderley Edge, digging and deepening. In 2012, half a century after the first two volumes, Boneland was an unexpected conclusion to his Weirdstone trilogy; the source material transfigured into an adult novel about loss, pain, knowl

A startup called Reef wants to un-clog city streets and deliver food to your door via robot A robot the size of a small cooler sits on the sun-soaked fake grass in a segment of parking lot close to Brickell, Miami – the city’s shiny-towered financial district overlooking ​​Biscayne Bay. Nicknamed “Reefy”, the electric-powered autonomous delivery robot wheels smoothly in front of a series of trailers set up to cook food for companies with names that sound as if they were created by algorithm to cater to stoners (MrBeast Burger and Man vs Fries) and another that serves as a storage unit for an online convenience store called Goodees – slogan: “Late Night Cravings Don’t Need Validation.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CuAJoK

Big bundles of cash are up for grabs in ITV’s Moneyball. Plus: Spitting Image stirs up double, double, toil and trouble in a Halloween special. Here’s what to watch tonight Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mzStK1

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Activists argue that the President could cancel student debt with the stroke of a pen, fulfilling a campaign promise. Newly uncovered documents suggest that Biden has been “reviewing” the issue for months. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ExgFCy

Bush theatre, London Igor Memic’s prize-winning debut is an affecting if slightly uneven conflict romance brought to life by vivid detail Igor Memic, winner of the 2020 Papatango new writing prize, was born in Mostar, the ancient city in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina that was a principal casualty of the 1992-95 wars after the racial and religious disintegration of communist Yugoslavia. Memic draws powerfully on his experience in Old Bridge , titled for the Ottoman-era crossing above the Neretva river, setting for a diving competition among local men. The 1988 dives lead to a meeting between Mina, a Bosniak Muslim, and Mili, a Croatian Catholic, who become the latest theatrical successors to the Montagues and Capulets. At the Bush theatre, London, until 20 November Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XYmvgX

There’s political skulduggery in a tense Swedish thriller, and a documentary on the bizarre billionaire space race between Musk, Branson and Bezos Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BuF0qJ

Jonathan Majors squares up against Idris Elba in an fun, gritty western, and Viola Davis shines in Steve McQueen’s heist caper Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XVIBRb

Drapers’ Hall, Coventry Punchdrunk Enrichment’s site-specific project for children aged six to 11 turns a historic building into a secretive library On the way to The Lost Lending Library, a new immersive family theatre show, I describe Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man to my eight-year-old, Hilda, in a bid to explain the “immersive” bit. One floor of a huge building was covered with sand, I say, and at one point I had to wash down a stranger with an old rag. “Ew!” she grimaces. This show by Punchdrunk Enrichment , the company’s charitable offshoot that specialises in educational and community work, is altogether more serene. A dozen or so kids gather in an oval room at Coventry’s recently refurbished Drapers’ Hall, across the road from the fantastic Herbert Art Gallery, which has lent some props to inspire our ideas. At Drapers’ Hall, Coventry , until 6 November Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZGomaP

Permanencia Voluntaria has rescued hundreds of films and is seeking to challenge attitudes towards its legacy From demons, ghosts and vampires to Martians, mad scientists and spurned lovers, the heroes and heroines of 20th-century Mexican popular cinema faced more than their share of enemies. Few foes, however, have proved quite as formidable as the combined adversaries of time, critical snottiness and oblivion – not to mention the odd earthquake. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BoqIIj

Heads of man, woman and child found on site of Stoke Mandeville church built in 1080 and abandoned 800 years later Statues of a Roman man, woman and child have been uncovered by archaeologists at an abandoned medieval church on the route of the HS2 high-speed railway. The discovery was “utterly astounding”, according to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist at the site in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire. “They’re really rare finds in the UK,” she said. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jJSs4k

Surreal drawings by author of The Trial – which he demanded be burnt after his death – to be published Stricken with self-doubt, paranoia and existential despair, the writings of Franz Kafka have taken generations of readers on what the author called “the descent into the cold abyss of oneself”. A trove of 150 drawings, retrieved from a Swiss bank vault in 2019 after years of legal wrangling and presented to the public for the first time on Thursday, offers a more cheerful interpretation of the term “Kafkaesque”, however. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3vTiqXM

(Spinster) Elizabeth LaPrelle of Anna & Elizabeth anchors the four-piece behind this comforting, intimate album of a cappella harmonies and Appalachian ballads US four-piece Doran identify themselves as a freak folk collective exploring “tradition and innovation in song, myth and ceremony”. Anchoring them is singer/banjo player Elizabeth LaPrelle from brilliant duo Anna & Elizabeth, whose experimental approach to ancient songs has always augmented their raw power. She’s joined by ethnomusicologist Brian Dolphin, and Channing Showalter and Annie Schermer of the performance art group West of Roan. For a month over winter, they went weapons-grade hippy together, recording in an attic, burying their bodies in leaves and doing tarot to see what weirdness emerged. And what did was this surprisingly comforting, intimate album, perfect for darkening nights when music can offer warmth. Consisting predominantly of original songs that nevertheless sound as if they have been around for c

The classical stories of eight weaving women are depicted on their looms’ warp and weft in this thoughtful, dazzlingly illustrated collection There is no shortage these days of lively, well-written retellings of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but Charlotte Higgins has embraced a central metaphor – weaving – that leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings. Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity. As part of her research, Higgins herself learned to weave with replicas of ancient equipment. In any pre-industrial society, textile production is socially conspicuous, if only on account of the sheer number of hours required to transform parts of plants and animal

The overly derivative new chapter to the low-budget, high-profit horror franchise struggles to justify its existence There’s an odd comfort to the release of a new Paranormal Activity film just in time for Halloween, a prime spot it owned for five years after the Saw franchise released its grip and (temporarily) bled out. The repetitive yet often ingenious formula made for an effective experience that was also commercially lucrative – the micro-budget films, along with two spin-offs, have made almost $900m worldwide – but diminishing returns and an ever-changing horror landscape led producer Jason Blum to claim that the series was done with 2015’s underperforming 3D chapter, Ghost Dimension. Yet in the horror genre, nothing remains dead for long and with the resurrection of Halloween, Scream , Saw , The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the return of the lo-fi supernatural franchise was as inevitable as its debut on its new home – Paramount’s streaming platform. It’s a bold,

(T4T LUV NRG) A compelling, cleverly inventive LP emerges from the New Hampshire woods care of a DJ and producer channeling her healing ‘Motherbeat’ There are some artists whose love for music is so strong, so genuine and so resonant that all there is to do is simply surrender to the emanating euphoria. Chicago-raised DJ and producer Eris Drew is one of those artists, and it’s a role she embraces. Her understanding of house music taps into its potential as an agent for communality, spirituality, healing, psychedelia and the divine feminine – all of which she conceptualises as “the Motherbeat”, acting as a guide and conduit to bring others to it. At 46, she’s a veteran of nightlife, witnessing its transformations while experiencing her own in recent years: skyrocketing popularity, establishment of the label and resource hub T4T LUV NRG along with partner Octo Octa, and relocation to a remote cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. It’s here she finally conceived her first LP. It feels

A sufferer writes about how the skin condition affected figures as diverse as Joseph Stalin, John Updike and Cyndi Lauper Sergio del Molino was 21 years old when he first experienced symptoms of psoriasis, a chronic autoimmune condition that causes an overproduction of epidermal cells, resulting in scaling on the surface of the skin. These scales appear in red blotches that sometimes crack and bleed. For the next 20 years Del Molino endured considerable physical discomfort – arthritis, back pain, chronic fatigue – and bodily shame; he avoided wearing T-shirts and shorts, and even in the height of summer he would have his shirt buttons done up all the way. Medical interventions provided only limited relief until a medicine called adalimumab bought the disease under control. Del Molino came to literary prominence in his native Spain with an award-winning memoir about the loss of his baby son, who died of leukaemia before his second birthday. La Hora Violeta (2013) – published in Engli

Claire Booth/Christopher Glynn (Avie) A ‘cradle-to-grave songspiel’ describing the arc of a woman’s life is brilliantly conceived by soprano Booth and pianist Glynn Modest Mussorgsky is indisputably one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian composers, but getting a real sense of his unruly output has never been easy. Well-meaning later composers – Rimsky-Korsakov , Ravel , Shostakovich – rearranged his most famous works, attempting to impose civilised accessibility on music that is anything but elegant and accommodating, and often obscured the radicalism and originality of his works in the process. Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn ’s approach to this quirky genius is through his piano music and 60-odd songs. They spent a year sifting through them all before creating the sequence that appears on this disc, following the scheme of their earlier collections for Avie of Percy Grainger and Edvard Grieg . The selection includes numbers from Mussorgsky’s three song-c

Royal Opera House, London This revival of Richard Eyre’s handsome staging features two exceptional leads in Lisette Oropesa and Liparit Avetisyan, amply supported by conductor Antonello Manacorda Richard Eyre’s handsome 1994 production of Verdi ’s La Traviata has long been a Royal Opera mainstay, and such is the work’s popularity that this season features some 27 performances with no less than six different casts. Conducted by Antonello Manacorda with stylish passion and wonderful attention to detail, the opening night of this lengthy revival was unquestionably rather special. Lisette Oropesa played Violetta opposite Liparit Avetisyan ’s Alfredo, and both were exceptional, in some ways surpassing their own very fine achievements in the Royal Opera’s recent new staging of Rigoletto . As with her Gilda, Oropesa welds sound with sense to create a characterisation of great depth and subtlety. Vocally, Violetta holds no terrors for her: the reckless coloratura of Act I is admirably se

Zack Snyder’s surprisingly effective zombie caper Army of the Dead gets a zippy prequel that follows Matthias Schweighöfer’s unlikely safecracker There was a surprising amount of fun to be had in this summer’s gory zombie romp Army of the Dead, a film that turned the not-hugely-enticing prospect of Zack Snyder working with Netflix into something strangely hard-to-deny. It was his most ebulliently entertaining offering for years, and rightly predicting its popularity (it quickly became one of the streamer’s most-watched films ever), Snyder started developing a prequel called Army of Thieves months before it had even landed. The result is an unusual one, switching genre and director but maintaining the same rambunctious energy, a zippy adventure that pushes zombies to the background. While Army of the Dead was a horror movie with a heist, Army of Thieves is a heist movie without any horror, more formulaic and less memorable but still slickly effective, a strange next step for the Army

The actor is an uncanny likeness, but – with its creepy equerries and mountains of pastries – director Pablo Larraín has created a gothic horror out of the princess’s life. They tell us how they made Sandringham her Overlook Hotel Spencer, the new film about Princess Diana, is very definitely not The Crown . Not for director Pablo Larraín the comforting grandeur of Peter Morgan’s Netflix series, whose tapestried locations are the scene of inner turmoil as private desires hit the buffers of public duty. Spencer, the imagined story of which takes place over three ghastly days at Sandringham in 1991, veers far more gothic. The Norfolk stately home becomes a kind of Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining , through whose endless, confusing corridors the camera harries and chivvies Kristen Stewart’s Diana as her psyche crumbles. Stewart and Larraín are with me in a Zoom room: the director has his camera off, a mere black square and a courteous Chilean voice; Stew

(Asylum) One of the world’s biggest pop stars only slightly tweaks the formula for an album that many will already have decided they either love or hate Ed Sheeran’s new album contains a song called 2step. It features a pummelling sub-bass and the sound of the singer-songwriter rapping, this time at warp-speed. Amid the lyrical declarations of love for his wife, there’s a line that seems to address his plethora of critics: “Sometimes,” he says, “the words cut deep.” Even if you’re inclined to the belief that pop stars – particularly those who have shifted 150m records in the space of ten years or whose last tour was the highest-grossing in history – should take their lumps when it comes to criticism, you can see why it might rankle him. As soon as Sheeran arrived in the mainstream consciousness he became subject to a particular kind of opprobrium that goes beyond bad reviews, to a disproportionate point where dislike becomes performative and the artist in question a kind of living sh

The actor will star in Londongrad as Alexander Litvinenko, who was fatally poisoned by a radioactive isotope in 2006 Benedict Cumberbatch will play the Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko in Londongrad, an HBO limited series, Variety reported on Thursday. Based on the book The Terminal Spy by Alan Cowell, Londongrad will feature the Sherlock Holmes actor as Litvinenko, the former KGB agent turned defector who was fatally poisoned by the radioactive isotope polonium-210 in 2006. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/315Zs4R

Stahl later became an award-winning journalist after exposing a massacre in Timor-Leste Max Stahl, a former Blue Peter presenter who became an award-winning film-maker after exposing a massacre in Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor, has died aged 66. Known as Christopher Wenner during his stint presenting the BBC children’s TV show from 1978 to 1980, he changed his name in the early 1990s. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CktkIx

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon It is spirited and witty, with superb puppetry and comedic performances, but this new musical’s songs don’t stay with you and the messages are overdone The tusked star of Kate DiCamillo’s novel The Magician’s Elephant arrives, like Dumbo, from the skies. This elephant falls not into a travelling circus, but an opera house in the city of Baltese and her arrival lifts the spirits of its war-weary inhabitants. Now this musical adaptation , directed by Sarah Tipple, lands at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to welcome back audiences for the first time since it closed last March. The musical was programmed before the pandemic but its storyline of collective grief, recovery and reconnection chimes with our current moment. And who doesn’t love an elephant? Puppetry director Mervyn Millar and fellow designer Tracy Waller have created a beauty who, controlled by three puppeteers inside, tickles bottoms with her trunk, flaps her ears and instantly de

Ana Fabrega, Fred Armisen and Julio Torres star as horror fans trying to turn their passion into a business. Plus: Gogglebox unpicks the week’s telly. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3bmL1eA

“Everybody’s on board,” the President said. But they weren’t, at least not yet. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3CqHyro

The choreographer found himself in a dark place after his son’s birth. He talks about drawing on his fears of being a father to create the Olivier award-winning BLKDOG When Botis Seva was a teenager, you would find him in one of two places after school: detention or dance class. Growing up in Dagenham, east London, “I never liked the idea of school,” he says. “But if it was Tuesday or Wednesday, we knew we had to just be good for a whole day and then it would be straight to dance.” It was a hip-hop dance class, where mostly girls and a few boys would practise tricks. Seva couldn’t do tricks, but he loved dancing and, within a decade or so, he went from those classes to winning an Olivier for his piece BLKDOG , without much in the way of formal training in between. We meet in a nondescript room at Sadler’s Wells theatre, where Seva’s company Far from the Norm will perform an extended version of BLKDOG. Seva, 30, is warm, easy to connect with and quick to smile; his character is q

After releasing her introspective debut EP last year, the 21-year-old emerged from lockdown with millions of listeners and a major label deal. Can she protect the intimacy behind her success? Perched on a wall outside a cafe in Haggerston, east London, Holly Humberstone looks like a harried off-duty waitress. She leans on her knees and stares at the pavement as she smokes. It is only when she looks up, revealing racoon-sized orbs of copper eyeshadow at odds with her well-loved brown hoodie, that her identity becomes clear. She is, in fact, a harried, very briefly off-duty pop star. The makeup is from a photoshoot that had her holding uncomfortable poses in the street while van drivers yelled abuse. After returning from her first US tour two days ago, the 21-year-old songwriter from Lincolnshire found that the London flat she shares with her older sister had been burgled. Work has left little time for her friends back home, relationships she is trying to hold fast to because “everythi

Productions of Wagner’s epic take years in the planning and execution, huge spaces and hundreds of people. How is a small arts collective performing all four operas in a Putney church, and how do a conch shell and a fire dance fit in? Here is an insane undertaking: a small London-based arts collective, Gafa, run by singers of Samoan heritage, putting on a complete Ring cycle – four vast operas, almost 15 hours of music – in a church in Putney, southwest London. Opera houses spend years plotting their Ring cycles, adding the parts of the tetralogy incrementally, usually year by year. Gafa (pronounced Nafa and meaning “family” in Samoan), however, are performing all four of Wagner’s herculean works on successive Saturdays. Surely an act of hubris that will invite nemesis, even from gods facing imminent twilight. Except that Sani Muliaumaseali’i , the co-founder of the collective and driving force behind the project, refuses to see it in those terms. “Everyone says that,” he says duri

Mexico-born artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer invites people to contribute pictures of loved ones who died during the pandemic for an unusual installation Rafael Lozano-Hemmer caught the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. The media artist became infected in March last year during a visit to New York, then unwittingly took the deadly virus back home to Canada. “As far as I know, I am Patient Zero,” he says by phone from Toronto. “I may have been the one that caused Canada to catch it because I was very early.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3pHTscL

Janice Hallett’s murder mystery has pipped Richard Osman to a spot on the bookseller’s list There’s a sleepy town, a murder and multiple twists, but the latest slice of cosy crime heading for the bestseller charts isn’t by Richard Osman, but from newcomer Janice Hallett, who has just been tipped for the top by Waterstones. Hallett’s The Appeal , in which law students Charlotte and Femi investigate a mystery in the sleepy town of Lower Lockwood, dealing with everything from an amateur dramatic society’s disastrous staging of All My Sons to a dodgy charity appeal for a child’s medical treatment, has been shortlisted for the Waterstones book of the year award. It is one of 13 titles in the running for the prize, for which books are nominated by Waterstones booksellers. Buyer Bea Carvalho said it had been a “real word of mouth hit” for the UK’s largest book chain. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZziKPy

The Albanian academic describes coming of age at a turning point in history, and the family secrets exposed in its aftermath One wet afternoon in December 1990, little Lea Ypi ran across Tirana to the garden of the Palace of Culture. Making sure no one could see her, she pressed her warm cheek to the cold thigh of a statue and tried to make her arms encircle its knees. And then she looked up to savour the figure’s friendly moustache, only to suppress a scream. Hooligan demonstrators calling for freedom and democracy had decapitated one of her favourite uncles. Ypi at the time had two favourite uncles, both communists, both dead, neither actual relations. Albania’s leader Enver Hoxha was one, Joseph Stalin the other, and her superbly unreliable teacher, Nora, had taught her student to venerate both. After all, was it not Marx’s teacher Hangel (not Hegel, Nora clarified), who had described Napoleon as the spirit of history on a horse? Stalin, Nora told Lea, was the spirit of history

The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3Es2bEm

No place on the island is safe from him; / Both Nassau and Suffolk Counties he’ll haunt. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/30Yk3rJ

Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in an entertaining horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright , serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises. Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise ( Thomasin McKenzie ) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 6

Hall’s directing debut stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as friends who are both ‘passing’ for what they are not in an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Rebecca Hall makes her directing debut with this intimately disturbing movie, adapted by her from the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen . Irene ( Tessa Thompson ) and Clare ( Ruth Negga ) are two women of colour, former school friends who run into each other by chance in an upscale Manhattan hotel in prohibition-era America. They are both light-skinned, but Irene is stunned to realise that her vivacious and now peroxide blonde friend Clare is “passing” for white these days, and that her odious, wealthy white husband John ( Alexander Skarsgård ) has no idea. As for sober and respectable Irene, she lives with her black doctor husband Brian (André Holland) in Harlem with their two sons and a black maid that she treats a little high-handedly. There is an almost supernatural shiver in Irene and Clare’s meeting: as if the two women are th

Proposed waterfront development is one of several ‘levelling up’ projects announced for northern England A new Beatles-inspired mega attraction on Liverpool’s waterfront , secretly in its planning stages since 2017, is to get a government cash injection of £2m. The money was announced in a budget which included a blizzard of northern England “levelling up” projects, although some eyebrows were raised that a significant chunk was going to leafier suburbs rather than places with more pressing claims. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CgDzgZ

Finds at Richborough include skeleton of cat nicknamed Maxipus and potential evidence of figurative arena panels A big night out for the people of the Roman settlement at Richborough on the Kent coast about 2,000 years ago might have involved gladiatorial contests, wild beast hunting or the occasional execution of a criminal. Taking place in a vast amphitheatre, seating up to 5,000 people, on the western edge of the settlement, such an event was a “special occasion, drawing people from Richborough town and its surrounds”, said Paul Pattison, a senior properties historian at English Heritage. “These were public spectacles, the equivalent of going to a big blockbuster film, in our terms.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mkOUa8

A study of the sex industry from ancient China to New Orleans’s red light district is undermined by its own salaciousness Consider Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne Before the Areopagus, painted in 1861. It shows the ancient Greek courtesan Phryne, who was being tried for impiety. In Gérôme’s version, sensing the case isn’t going well, her defender, Hypereides, tears off all Phryne’s clothes to expose her beautiful breasts, leaving her creamily naked and shielding her face in burning shame, reasoning that no jury will convict such an exquisite creature. Meanwhile, the 25 or so jurors, all male and middle-aged, hold their hands to their mouths in a stagey gesture of horror and desire. Aesthetically stunning, the painting is nonetheless unbearable in its bad faith. For while it pretends to condemn Phryne as a seller of sex, it simultaneously tickles the viewer with the thought of what it might be like to sleep with her. And it is this tension that runs like a faultline through Kate Lister’s st

In an affidavit, Dave Halls told investigators he ‘should have checked all’ the rounds as officials confirm gun contained live bullets Officials confirmed on Wednesday that live bullets, including the round it is believed killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza, were found on the set of the movie Rust last week after actor Alec Baldwin fired a gun during a rehearsal. It also emerged that the .45-caliber Colt – which has been described by law enforcement as a “legit” antique gun, not a prop gun – was not thoroughly checked before being given to Baldwin, who fired the lead bullet, according to officials and a new court filing. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3vREouj

Four pieces, written by personal friends of the admiral, discovered at Museum of London during lockdown “By Parker and by Nelson led, all opposition’s vain, at Copenhagen’s gates, our tars have crush’d the haughty Dane …” So go the lyrics to a piece of music by the composer Michael Kelly, written within hours of the news reaching London of Admiral Horatio Nelson ’s victory over a Danish fleet in April 1801. Emma’s Songbooks: Rediscovered Music for Nelson is on at the Museum of London Docklands on 11 December 2021. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZsdRrt

First figures since 2020 show boom in speech radio but public loses appetite for music breakfast shows When Rupert Murdoch launched Times Radio last summer, he was aiming to target the BBC and win over listeners who may have become disenchanted with the output on Radio 4 and Radio 5 live. Now, the station’s first listening figures have shown there is an audience for Times Radio, with a healthy 637,000 people a week tuning in. The figures came as a relief to staff at the station, who had been unsure whether there was an audience for their rolling discussions of Westminster politics and current affairs. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3GteZvT

Tender and humorous tales explore our need for connections with others in a world made strange by Covid As a writer who has documented Ireland’s financial and social rollercoaster since the late 1980s, it’s fitting that Roddy Doyle should be among the first to record the effects of the current pandemic, the lockdown and the loss. The 10 stories in Life Without Children, mostly written in the past year, all do that. But Doyle is an author best known for easy dialogues, big, raucous families and pubs – and there have been precious few of those. How will he handle the sudden lack of conversation and company that has characterised recent times? Will there be Zoom calls? There is one – a frustrating connection with a much-loved wife on an iPad propped up awkwardly in her hospital bed. It’s one of many images that would have seemed nonsensical two years ago but are uncomfortably familiar now: discarded surgical masks stuck to wet pavements; the “new language” of statistics on the radio; “t

As the professor guides us through the solar system via excessive CGI and poetic chat, you can’t help but think his latest quest would be more effective if it wasn’t so dumbed down I don’t know how you make an hour-long programme that takes you slowly through 14bn years of history, but the BBC and Prof Brian Cox have done it with the first episode of Universe. Possibly it is a space-time paradox that only the good professor himself could solve. (Please do not write in if I deployed the phrase “space-time paradox” incorrectly. I am an arts graduate who begins this series not entirely sure whether solar systems are bigger than galaxies, and needs this programme very much, even if I cannot honestly say I enjoy it.) The four-part BBC Two series, as you have probably guessed from the title, will eventually deal with just about everything astrophysical. But the opener is all about stars – especially our big yin, the sun. It is pegged to Nasa’s Parker solar probe’s mission, though mentions