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Culture

The latest published reporting in this category.

Entertainment

Old Vic 2027 season to open with Damian Lewis as Henry V

Rupert Goold begins his tenure as artistic director with a ‘provocative’ version of Shakespeare’s history play, followed by shows starring Milly Alcock and Arinzé Kene Damian Lewis is to play Henry V at the Old Vic in London in the first production under the theatre’s new artistic director, Rupert Goold. Goold will direct what is billed as a “provocative” version of Shakespeare’s history play that challenges “what makes a leader a legend”. It will be Lewis’s first major theatre role since he starred in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? almost 10 years ago. He has previously played Romeo and Hamlet o

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‘I’m looking for faces which surprise me’: how Richard Avedon photographed the soul of his subjects

Ron Howard’s illuminating Netflix documentary looks back on the career of one of America’s most inventive and versatile photographers Richard Avedon had only taken a couple of frames when he accidentally hit his head on a light being held above him. The Dalai Lama burst into laughter. That was when Avedon snapped two more frames and announced: “Oh, I got it!” Avedon’s assistant, Sebastian Kim, was baffled. “I was like, what the hell happened? There’s only four frames out of a roll of 12 frames,” he recalls in a phone interview. “I realised he knew at that moment that something had happened, a

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Jarvis Cocker on judging the Booker prize: ‘It’s just like being in a band’

The singer on how being in Pulp prepared him for judging a literary prize, reading 163 books while on tour, and feeling like the odd one out on the panel • M John Harrison becomes the first science fiction author to win the Booker prize Judging the Booker prize is like being in a band. A band will often bring together a very disparate set of people, their only thing in common the fact they’re in the same group. And a good band takes account of the interests and strengths of its members – that’s how you get a unique sound. Being part of this year’s Booker prize judging panel – chaired by Mary B

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Entertainment

A flaccid roam through Bloomsbury’s desperately mediocre modernists: Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant review

Tate Britain, London Trying to present these two as pioneers of British art is fruitless: their lives, sexualities and the Picasso and Cézanne paintings in their home were more exciting than what’s here The Bloomsbury Group once induced yawns as the smug epitome of a snobbish high culture but they’re now admired for their feminism and queer abandon. There’s a West End play about the loves of the Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes and if you visit the National Trust’s Sissinghurst, its flowerbeds are set alight by Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Virginia Woolf. But biography can’t set a

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Entertainment

Shower orgasms, golf carts, spread-eagled on the stairs – it’s the 10 best Rivals sex scenes so far

From naked tennis to Richter-scale juddering near wildfowl, Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster features a whopping 33 romps. Ahead of season two’s return this week, gird your loins as we celebrate the busiest buttocks in Rutshire Rejoice! Rejoice! Five months after it staggered off with its leotard around its ankles, Rivals has returned with six more bundles of ineffably filthy joy. Let perms be unconfined. What is Rivals about? Some say the bonkbuster is a fond take on the shoulder-padded excesses of the late 1980s. Others that this adaptation of the late Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles is a flambé

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‘We are human too’: the Roma film-makers striking back at stereotypes

Seven films in Seville programme highlight how Roma are creating their own narratives Growing up in Romania, whenever Alina Șerban spotted Roma people on television or in movies, they were usually cast as villains or depicted as somehow exotic. But this week the Romany actor and film-maker is part of a cohort pushing back against this stereotyping, joining forces with Romany film-makers from across Europe in a landmark screening of seven films during the Seville European film festival. Continue reading...

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‘It was hard coming after the shallow, egocentric YBAs’: brilliantly bolshie artist Ryan Gander lambasts practically everyone

He thinks painting is futile, the YBAs were an embarrassment, and most artists today might as well be working in carpet shops. So why is his new show full of, er, paintings? We meet the confounding British artist ‘This is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It’s such a

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Entertainment

M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize

The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan on M John Harrison’s win: A visionary writer gets the recognition he deserves Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison’s was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from t

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Entertainment

Paul McCartney becomes a billionaire and world’s third richest musician

According to a new analysis by Forbes, the former Beatle now has a net worth of $1.4bn, placing him behind Jay-Z and Taylor Swift Paul McCartney has joined the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Forbes has valued the former Beatle’s net worth at $1.4bn (£1.04bn), making him the world’s third richest musician behind Jay-Z at $2.8bn (£2.01bn) and Taylor Swift at $2bn (£1.49bn). The magazine attributed McCartney’s wealth to his musical catalog, legal maneuvers, tours and art collection. The 84-year-old derives the bulk of his fortune from MPL Communications, the publishing company he founded in 1

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Donnie Dunagan, original voice of Disney’s Bambi and triple Purple Heart marine, dies aged 92

Dunagan was six when he voiced the young deer in the classic cartoon, with an assistant director instructing him to pretend his own mother had died Donnie Dunagan, who voiced Bambi in the Walt Disney classic, as well as playing the son of Frankenstein opposite Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, has died aged 92. Dunagan was six when he was chosen to provide the voice of the young deer in the animation’s most heartbreaking chapter. He recalled the experience in the recording booth as easy and relaxed, with rudimentary technology and notes from an assistant director instructing him to pretend his

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Hometown glory? Norwegian library unveils £100k history book donated by Erling Haaland

Rare 16th-century edition of Viking royal sagas given to Bryne by Manchester City footballer and his father At his local library in the southern Norwegian town of Bryne, the father of superstar striker Erling Haaland made a confession. “Sometimes my son and I are a little impulsive,” Alf Inge Haaland, known as Alfie, told the assembled crowd on Monday morning. The spontaneous act in question was the purchase of the only surviving privately owned edition of a 1594 book, Snorre Sturlasons Kongesagaer (Snorre Sturlason’s Royal Sagas). The auction purchase for 1.3m Norwegian kroner (£103,000) was

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