Books

We join Shane MacGowan, much like a character from one of his songs, in a world where prosaic, often harsh realities vie with feverish flights of fancy. The former Pogue conducts this interview remotely, ‘sitting on a vastly uncomfortable lime green leather chair, within reach of a grey bucket, in a small but surprisingly unspeakable room. In a corner, Jimi Hendrix is repairing some broken guitar strings, while in the kitchen behind me, Bono is loading the dishwasher and a leprechaun with a gold earring is rolling what he says is a cigarette. On the walls are a selection of my wife’s multidimensional angel paintings and one or two of

Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the show’s chief characteristic so far has been nervousness. Somewhere inside it, you feel, lurks an impulse to really let rip. But if so, Thursday’s first two episodes successfully resisted it. Now and again, we did get some jokes that might just frighten the admittedly neurotic horses of the new Moral Majority. The overall effect, though, was of a game of How Far Can You Go? in which the contestants’ answer was a firm ‘not very’. Still, even this level of unorthodoxy seemed unlikely

When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League university who loved to read celebrity gossip tabloids to ‘turn her brain off’. After I’d finished my homework, she and I would watch the only reality TV show I’ve ever loved, The Hills, and read magazines about Brangelina. This all ended when I was with my mom at the grocery store and I tried to buy a tabloid, and my mother, a Woman of Taste, asked what on earth I was doing. I said, copying my babysitter, ‘it’s to turn my brain off’, and my mom flipped out and made

London’s City Hall stands empty. The bulbous, Foster + Partners-designed ‘glass testicle’ — in Ken Livingstone’s words — occupies one of the best sites in the capital: Thames-side, squaring off to the Tower of London, and overlooking Tower Bridge. But in December, its occupiers — the Mayor, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority — deserted their glitzy £43 million headquarters for a cheaper building more than five miles east at the Royal Docks in Newham. It took them less than 20 years to outgrow their purpose-built home. According to the architectural commentator John Grindrod, City Hall is a giant glass-and-steel metaphor. ‘The building represents the role of the

Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is rarely on display. Until the National Portrait Gallery closed for redevelopment it was, however, possible to study Spear’s splendid portrait of ‘Citizen James’ (Sid James) peering from a black and white TV screen, and his oil sketch of Harold Wilson wreathed in pipe smoke, the epitome of political cunning. Both were strikingly more convincing than their companion array of anodyne commissioned images. Like his beloved Sickert, Spear painted commissioned portraits but also took to making enigmatic ‘unofficial’ portraits based on press photographs — or, in the case of Sid James,

‘Why did you want to climb Everest?’ reporters quizzed mountaineer George Mallory in 1922. That the question even needed asking shows mountaineering is fundamentally different from other pursuits. No journalist would ever ask a footballer why they kick a ball around. But mountaineering is gruelling and you’re way more likely to perish from it than to make a fortune. So why would anyone climb any mountain, let alone Everest? Mallory’s rationale was short and sweet: ‘Because it’s there.’ And what about Jimmy Chin? Why does he climb? Chin, 48, is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough. He has not only climbed snow, ice and rock terrain on all seven continents,

It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood. Youth goes: the skin fades, the face slackens, the lower back begins to groan in protest. The world dims and we dim with it. Yet generally speaking, we’re as personally winded by that realisation as we are indifferent to it in others. When everyone suffers, no one cares. Why should I bother with someone else’s wasted youth? I’ve got one of my own right here. Still, I was intrigued by the appearance of Once Upon a Time at… Bennington College, an eight-part oral history of three literary superstars’ time at

It is 40 years ago today since Granada’s masterly adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited first beamed into British homes. This 11-part serialisation of a book originally entitled A Household of the Faith soon gathered millions of faithful householders. The autumn of 1981 was an especially cold and wet one and it was still too soon in the Thatcher premiership for her patron saint, Francis of Assisi, to have worked his magic. So while ITV was not able to deliver harmony, truth, faith or hope, it certainly provided 659 minutes of romantic escapism. It began very soberly with the credits — a simple black screen announcing the first episode’s actors in stark white script — propelled only by Geoffrey Burgon’s majestic score. The opening scene —