A year after Johnson’s swaggering Greenwich speech, 100,000 deadIt was announced last week, to nobody’s excitement, that Sir Kenneth Branagh will take the role of Boris Johnson in a Sky TV drama about the first weeks of the pandemic. If Branagh’s casting indicates that this is to be conceived as a Shakespearean… Jan 31 21January 31, 2021Article at the Guardian
London Bridge attack, one year on: ‘Jack's story jolted people – we have to keep that going'Dave and Anne Merritt weren’t sure how to mark today’s anniversary of the murder of their beloved son Jack. Milestone days are always the hardest. Unlike the day that would have been his 26th birthday, at the beginning of October, when they and their… Nov 29 20November 29, 2020Article at the Guardian
John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'What’s it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The philosopher – to his many fans the intellectual cat’s pyjamas, to his critics the least palatable of furballs – has had feline companions at home since he was a boy in… Oct 25 20October 25, 2020Article at the Guardian
Hassan Akkad: 'For someone from Syria, the creeping authoritarianism is vivid in Britain'There have been times in the past 10 years, Hassan Akkad says, that his life has felt more like a movie. Thinking that occasionally kept him sane – and, more important, kept him going. Akkad’s walk-on part in world events began in 2011, when as a… Aug 02 20August 02, 2020Article at the Guardian
Jan Morris: ‘You’re talking to someone at the very end of things’Trefan Morys is a low 18th-century barn, stone-built, slate-roofed, topped with a weather vane and surrounded by a dense tangle of garden beneath a towering elm tree. Jan Morris has lived here, halfway up a hill in the top-left corner of Wales, with… Mar 01 20March 01, 2020Article at the Guardian
Billy Connolly: ‘Getting famous was like going up a helter-skelter backwards’The old voice you can conjure with your eyes closed, so for the first five minutes or so it’s disconcerting to sit and talk with Billy Connolly. That familiar electric gruffness has been replaced with something kindlier and more considered. Getting… Oct 06 19October 06, 2019Article at the Guardian
Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victimThere are some driveways that you hesitate before walking up and some doors that you pause at before knocking. A couple of years ago I drove the two hours from New York City to Newtown in Connecticut to meet Dr Jeremy Richman, a neuroscientist and… Mar 31 19March 31, 2019Article at the Guardian
For children, nothing beats the first literary loveThe back cover of Alan Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem, carries quotations praising the latest epic from the author of Watchmen. At first sight, it reads like the typical blurb writer’s arms race of exaggerated love. Iain Sinclair, the Hackney magus,… Jul 23 16July 23, 2016Article at the Guardian
Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’Around a small table in Cindy Sherman’s New York studio, there are a dozen mannequin heads crowding in to face us as we talk. Some wear hairpieces and some don’t. It is tempting to think of Sherman’s own face in among them as a 13th wig stand. Slight… Jul 03 16July 03, 2016Article at the Guardian
Bryan Stevenson: ‘America's Mandela’Early in the morning of Martin Luther King Day, 19 January, I walked up Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Baptist church where Dr King had been the pastor. The plain red-brick building is in the shadow of the state capitol, a grand… Feb 01 15February 01, 2015Article at the Guardian
Phone-hacking trial: now it's over, has anything really changed?Over the course of 138 working days in court number 12 of the Old Bailey, Mr Justice John Saunders proved himself a man of enormous patience, great stamina and not a little dry wit. The judge's epic five-day summing up of the hacking trial was a… Jun 28 14June 28, 2014Article at the Guardian
Binyavanga Wainaina interview: coming out in KenyaBinyavanga Wainaina made his name with a short and celebrated satire called "How to Write About Africa". It was the perfect anti-primer for any would-be "dark continent correspondent", skewering every cliche under the vast, red, setting savannah… Feb 16 14February 16, 2014Article at the Guardian
The tsunami survivor who lost her whole familyWhat will you remember of the people you love? Many of us have had that thought from time to time, but no one I know has ever had to give it the attention that Sonali Deraniyagala has given it. Versions of that question took hold in her head in the… Mar 09 13March 09, 2013Article at the Guardian
London 2012 Games fortnight has been one of dreams and wonderI have occasionally been a bit troubled by those old Pathé newsreel clips of British sporting events in which, at climactic moments, the men in the crowd chuck their hats – flat caps and trilbys – in the air, and turn to clap one another on worsted… Aug 11 12August 11, 2012Article at the Guardian
Joseph Mitchell: mysterious chronicler of the margins of New YorkOn and off over the 20-odd years that I have been trying to write journalism, I have carried around in my bag Joseph Mitchell's book, Up in the Old Hotel. Mitchell grew up in rural North Carolina at the beginning of the last century, came to New York… Jun 30 12June 30, 2012Article at the Guardian
Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me'"I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3am," Tom Waits is telling me, in the conspiratorial, wasted and wounded voice that still seems made for those early hours. "So my first studio experiences, I wanted to be recording after… Oct 22 11October 22, 2011Article at the Guardian
How the teachers of hope I met in the Congo were brutally killedThe war in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been the most faceless of conflicts. The unbearable statistics threaten to fade into abstraction: an estimated four million people killed, tens of thousands of women raped, countless numbers… Oct 15 11October 15, 2011Article at the Guardian
Royal wedding: the view from inside the abbeyFor the big day, the palace had seated the press in Poets' Corner, perhaps to inspire, perhaps as a pointed irony. As I took notes regarding that slice of the abbey's pageant that passed between the distant shoulder of Viscount Linley on one aisle,… Apr 30 11April 30, 2011Article at the Guardian
Karen Green: 'David Foster Wallace's suicide turned him into a "celebrity writer dude", which would have made him wince'The first piece of art that Karen Green made after her husband, David Foster Wallace, took his own life on 12 September 2008, was a forgiveness machine. She is standing in the neat, white studio at her house at Petaluma, north of San Francisco,… Apr 09 11April 09, 2011Article at the Guardian
Michael Munn: the celebrity biographer reveals allSitting with Michael Munn, biographer to the stars, in a somewhat bleak pub near his home in Sudbury, Suffolk, I can't get out of my head that classic Pete 'n' Dud sketch in which the flat-capped Peter Cook reveals to Dudley Moore the problems he is… Jul 24 10July 24, 2010Article at the Guardian
