| | | Monica Ali: 'My children say I'm the worst storyteller ever' | | by Kate Kellaway Jan 30, 2022 | | As the Brick Lane author returns with her first novel in a decade, she talks about her ‘catastrophic’ loss of self-confidence, the value of comedy, and critics in the family
Monica Ali, 54, is the author of four novels but best known for her first, Brick Lane (2003), which catapulted her to fame even before it was published, earning her a place on Granta’s best young British novelists list. Love Marriage is her first book for 10 years and a publishing event in its own right: a serious, subtle, hugely entertaining exploration of relationships. At its centre is Yasmin, a doctor from a Bangladeshi family (Ali is of Bangladeshi and English heritage) and her fiance, Joe, a fellow doctor and son of a liberal, middle-class firebrand of a mother. She lives in London with her husband and their two grown-up children. Why has it taken so long to get this novel written?
I went through a time of deciding I wasn’t going to write. I had a total loss of confidence. A healthy dose of self-doubt is good for any writer, but you also have to have self-belief. A total loss of confidence is catastrophic. I found I was depressed when I wasn’t writing and the depression fed into not being able to write – it was a downward spiral. Continue reading... | | | | | 'I grew up with Branagh in Belfast: our childhoods haunt his new film' | | by Henry McDonald Jan 30, 2022 | | The director’s first cousin Martin Hamilton tells of family and the Troubles that went on to inspire an acclaimed memoir There is one man with very personal reasons for finding the scenes of sectarian intimidation in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s film homage to his home city particularly haunting – his first cousin, Martin Hamilton. Hamilton, who grew up with Branagh and his family in inner-city north Belfast, says the images of Catholic families being forced out of the mainly Protestant district brought back painful memories of his own fractured friendships that were lost in the Troubles. Continue reading... | | | | | On Bloody Sunday by Julieann Campbell review – first-hand stories of a shameful day | | by Sean O'Hagan Jan 30, 2022 | | This oral history, using the testimony of survivors, relatives and witnesses, is meticulous and moving in telling the story of the massacre in Derry 50 years ago “As children,” Julieann Campbell writes in her introduction to this intricately woven oral history of Bloody Sunday and its long aftermath, “we were told stories about my uncle, Jackie Duddy – a teenage boxing champion – who went on a civil rights march and was shot by British soldiers.” Jackie Duddy, aged 17, was the first fatality on the afternoon of 30 January 1972. A photograph of his limp body being carried by local men, while a priest walks uncertainly ahead of them waving a white handkerchief, has since become the single most memorable image of the day’s horror. For his close family, it is also a constant and painful reminder of the casual brutality of his passing. “We knew Jackie’s face from family photographs, book covers and the Bogside mural,” she elaborates, describing the discomfort she felt as a child “seeing mum subjected to her brother’s dying moments again and again” each time footage of Bloody Sunday aired on the news. Continue reading... | | | | | Station Eleven review – a beautiful vision of a plague-ravaged planet | | by Lucy Mangan Jan 30, 2022 | | What would make life still worth living after the collapse of civilisation? This adaptation of the astonishingly prescient 2014 bestseller is deeply unsettling, even in the bits it gets wrong How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. I read Emily St John Mandel’s bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and … resonating. Or at least part of it is. There are – as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas – two timelines. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael García Bernal). Continue reading... | | | | | Mø: Motordrome review – post-burnout uplift | | by Kitty Empire Jan 30, 2022 | | (RCA)
The Danish star’s third album keeps the killer hooks coming The hugely successful Danish pop phenomenon Mø is best known as a featured artist. Her collaborations with people such as Major Lazer and Justin Bieber have been streamed billions of times. The downside of this ubiquity was burnout, vocal injury and anxiety. A 2019 break to recuperate and course-correct has resulted in an album made in Copenhagen, mostly with Scandinavian women rather than American men: heavyweights such as Noonie Bao (Sweden) and Caroline Ailin (Norway), who co-wrote New Rules with Dua Lipa. Motordrome – Mø’s third LP – refers to the “wall of death” in which a motorcyclist zooms round a circular space, defying gravity: it’s a nod to both the pop hamster wheel and the churning of Mø’s mind. If that all sounds downbeat, the recent pop era has been rife with uplifting bops about previously poor self-care. Mø’s new-era singles thus far have been earworms – the euphoric Live to Survive, the Ed Sheeran-like Kindness, the more recent electronic ballad Goosebumps. The remainder of Motordrome mostly maintains this hit rate, with New Moon and Wheelspin reiterating themes of renewal after trials. She can’t get away from famous US men, though: Brad Pitt is a song about Mø’s teen crush. Continue reading... | | | | | How science is uncovering the secrets of Stonehenge | | by Tim Adams Jan 30, 2022 | | If you see the majestic stones on Salisbury Plain as an emblem of England, think again. A major new British Museum exhibition connects them to many points and cultures across Europe through 1,500 years of immigration Among the many treasures in the British Museum’s forthcoming Stonehenge exhibition is a collection of carved and polished spherical stones, each about the size of a cricket ball. The stones are 5,000 years old and have mostly been found singly in Scotland. The most famous of the 400 or so discoveries is a beautiful polished black sphere from Towie, Aberdeenshire, with three bulbous surfaces, tactile as a miniature Henry Moore. The sphere is carved with precise geometric whorls and spirals. In common with the much weightier neolithic monuments that the Stonehenge exhibition celebrates, the longer you look at the stones, the more mysterious they seem: what and why and how? If the answers to those questions remain unknowable, one thing that the balls – and the culture that prized them – make clear is their creators were people of enormous curiosity and skill, prepared to invest untold hours in making a perfect object, because they could. They were connoisseurs of stone. Continue reading... | | | | | 'The outrage had been percolating…' The winner of our graphic short story prize 2021 | | by Rachel Cooke Jan 30, 2022 | | A funeral in Germany provides the setting for our winning story in this year’s Cape/Observer/Comica award for emerging cartoonists. It was a year of fierce competition – and much pandemic-fuelled anxiety There can’t be many things more cheering on a dark January night than having to tell someone they’ve won a prize, and when I telephone Astrid Goldsmith to give her just such a bit of good news, her reaction is everything I hoped it would be. For a while, Goldsmith, an animator who lives in Folkestone where she makes stop-motion films in her garage, struggles to speak in full sentences. She is just so thrilled. “That is the greatest compliment,” she says, when I tell her that her story, A Funeral in Freiburg, the winner of this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story prize, brings to mind the work of that genius Posy Simmonds. “I love her tone. I always have.” Goldsmith’s entry is based on a real event: the funeral of her paternal grandmother in Germany in 2015. “The outrage had been percolating for a while,” she says, with a laugh. “But I only came to write it after my first baby was born, while I was breastfeeding: I drew it all on one of those trays with arms that invalids use in bed.” Her story revolves around the difficulties involved in organising a Jewish funeral service in a place – Freiburg, in the Black Forest – where the rabbi has been imprisoned for embezzlement, and the Jewish cemetery is full. The woman in charge is, very difficult, refusing even to believe that Gisela Goldschmidt was really Jewish (at the age of 18, Astrid’s grandmother fled Germany for Zimbabwe, only returning after the war was over). Her rules and regulations, not to mention her insistence on the performance of certain rituals, infuriate the Goldsmith family. But what choice do they have? It is a case of her way, or no proper funeral at all. Continue reading... | | | | | 'I've moved on, and then some': singer George Ezra on fame, friendship and finding new inspiration | | by Laura Snapes Jan 30, 2022 | | His upbeat songs have won him legions of fans, but beneath his sunny lyrics George Ezra has a nihilistic streak that nearly ended his career. He talks about coping with OCD, walking the length of Britain – and his hopes of one day being a dad George Ezra walks into the Old Barge, the Hertford pub that’s been his lifelong local, and within three minutes his song, Budapest is on the stereo. “They’re so supportive here,” he says, with shy gratitude, as he stoops under a curtain into a back room. Ezra first came here after school, searching for a loo. At 16, he started working behind the bar. When friends come home for Christmas, this is where they meet, “and where we would have always met”. It still smells the same. (Currently: of yesterday’s log fire, a comforting contrast to the January damp.) Over the next few hours, locals stick their heads in to wave hello to their friendly neighbourhood pop star, drinking lime cordial and soda in crisp double denim, and he greets them all back by name. This is the approachable figure Ezra, who is 28, cuts in most settings, whether playing a radiant set at Glastonbury or warmly chatting about mental health on his podcast. A music college dropout born George Ezra Barnett, he emerged in 2014 as part of a cohort of middle-class British boys with acoustic guitars. Unlike most of them, he wasn’t lachrymose or ambition-crazed. Instead he had a good-weird sense of humour and a big voice, cultivated after this ardent blues fan became obsessed with the US blues singer Lead Belly. Continue reading... | | | | | Amulet review – Romola Garai's room at the top holds untold horrors | | by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic Jan 30, 2022 | | An ex-soldier renovating an old house finds more than just refuge in the actor turned writer-director’s pulsating gothic shocker Offering yet further proof that the future of cutting-edge horror is female, British actor turned writer-director Romola Garai’s impressive feature debut, which won enthusiastic applause at FrightFest last year, is a moody, brooding chiller that goes from slow-boil creaks to rapturous, hallucinogenic madness. Set largely in a decrepit building whose mouldy walls mirror a creeping moral malaise within, Amulet plays adventurously with subversive sexual politics and reconfigured horror tropes, conjuring a heady parable rich in ritual and intrigue, built upon sturdy subtextual foundations. The Romanian actor Alec Secareanu, who proved such an engaging screen presence in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, is Tomaz, an ex-soldier from an unnamed, conflict-torn country, now struggling to survive in squalid London. In his dreams, Tomaz is haunted by fable-like visions of the past: unearthing an amulet while stationed in a remote forest; meeting a fleeing woman who collapses in desperation; taking her in, giving her shelter and promising to help reunite her with her daughter. Continue reading... | | | | | Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to task | | by Charles Kaiser Jan 30, 2022 | | Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley and the best of Capitol Hill and wants to help. His aims are ambitious, his book necessary Just on the evidence of his new book, Ro Khanna is one of the broadest, brightest and best-educated legislators on Capitol Hill. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School who represents Silicon Valley, he is by far the most tech-savvy member of Congress. At this very dark moment for American democracy, this remarkable son of Indian immigrants writes with the optimism and idealism of a first-generation American who still marvels at the opportunities he has had. Continue reading... | | | | | Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics by Adam Rutherford review – unnatural selection | | by Tim Adams Jan 30, 2022 | | The geneticist offers a short, sharp, illuminating overview of the science, politics, uses and abuses of human gene editing Adam Rutherford begins this sharp and timely study of the science that dare not speak its name with an account of the professor who, in 2018, attempted to genetically modify the embryos of twin daughters, removing them from a woman’s womb and then reimplanting them. “China’s Frankenstein”, He Jiankui, had planned to give the children genetic immunity from HIV/Aids, a disease from which their father suffered. Though his efforts seem to have failed – the girls may not have that immunity and he was jailed for three years and fined three million yuan – the case provides one stark answer to Rutherford’s opening question: “If you have children, you will surely want them to live well. You hope that they are free from disease, and that they fulfil their potential … what are you willing to do to ensure this?” Ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in response to the new sciences of physiology and galvanism, that question has haunted human imaginations. After Darwin and before the Third Reich, eugenics was a science that was embraced, as Rutherford notes, by “suffragists, feminists, philosophers and more than a dozen Nobel prizewinners … [and] was a beacon of light for many countries striving to be better, healthier and stronger”. Continue reading... | | | | | Sunday with Jason Manford: 'I have six children so there's lots of dad-taxiing' | | by Michael Segalov Jan 30, 2022 | | The comedian on his busy Sunday brunch, pub quiz all-star family and recording his radio show at home How does Sunday start? With a little lie-in, but I have six children so there’s lots of dad-taxiing going on first thing. We’re pretty lazy. Whoever’s around will pop to Yardbird – the café in our village – for brunch. While on tour, family Sundays become precious – I always rush home on Saturday night. Do you work? I present a Sunday morning radio show. Before Covid that was always done live from a studio. Since the pandemic I’ve been pre-recording it from home. The bosses haven’t clocked that I’m still not coming in to do it. I’m keeping my head down and hoping nobody notices. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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