Uncategorized

I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed. This objective attitude to my own appearance reminds me of a funny story from the infant days of the internet. Imagine my surprise one morning to receive a message from an unknown recipient informing me that they had film of me masturbating to online pornography which they would make available to a wider audience should I fail to pay a ransom.

I have been having a John le Carré holiday. Five years after the great master of the spy thriller went to his final safe house in the sky, I spent chunks of the festive season watching two of his series on TV, and reading a slim volume called The Secret Life of John le Carré by his biographer Adam Sisman. Amazon Prime’s big New Year drama offering is The Night Manager, a sequel series to one of le Carré’s later stories, and simultaneously the BBC has been re-running le Carré’s 1970s masterpiece, the seven-part mole hunt Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring the late, great Alec Guinness as spymaster George Smiley.

Bonjour and bienvenue to the Clooneys. Gorgeous George, his wife Amal and their eight-year-old twins have been granted French citizenship. The Hollywood actor has long had a deep streak of Europhilia, owning luxury properties in Berkshire and Lake Como, Italy, as well as his pad in Provence. Located near the village of Brignoles, the Clooneys’ €9 million ($10.5 million) wine estate spans 425 acres, including an olive grove, swimming pool and tennis court. In an interview last month with a French radio station, 64-year-old Clooney declared (in English) that “I love the French culture, your language, even if I’m still bad at it after 400 days of courses.” He also

I can remember when I first realized that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to “make it” – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t mean the normal vicissitudes of a volatile creative industry. I don’t mean actors “resting” or scripts getting stuck in “development hell.” I mean that all jobs, and job opportunities, were abruptly vanishing. Applications went nowhere, résumés were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly canceled. And white men in Hollywood in their twenties or thirties, who had assumed they

Teams from two Islamic countries playing in one of America’s wokest cities on the anniversary of Stonewall – what could go wrong?

The pièce de résistance was roast goose with gravy and potatoes in goose fat