Play buttonChopin Home listening: Scriabin, Chopin and Liszt piano worksThe Guardian - Fiona Maddocks• The Chinese pianist Chen Yunjie, now reaching mid-career having had a prodigious start, is among the few players in the world to have performed the 10 sonatas of Scriabin in one concert. That may sound
Shanty Towns Bangladesh fire leaves 10,000 homeless after blaze razes slumThe Guardian - Sign inAt least 10,000 people are homeless after a massive fire swept through a crowded slum in the Bangladesh capital and destroyed thousands of shanties, officials said on Sunday. The fire broke out at in Mirpur
Books Shelf Life by Livia Franchini review – quirky, awkward and freshThe Guardian - Holly WilliamsFranchini does well to swerve any over-simplistic yay female-friendship cliche When Neil, Ruth Beadle’s boyfriend of 10 years, leaves her, all she has left is their shopping list. In Livia Franchini’s
Art Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change review – an embarrassment of richesThe Guardian - Rachel CookeRalph Brown’s Meat Porters, a sculpture of 1959 that was commissioned for Harlow New Town in Essex, really must be seen to be believed – and from every possible angle. A tribute to physical labour that
Film (UK) Good Boys review: crass coming-of-age comedyThe Guardian - Simran HansProduced by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (Superbad), but written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (the considerably less skilful Bad Teacher, Year One), this crass coming-of-age comedy mines its laughs
Play buttonFilm (UK) JT LeRoy review – a less surprising hoax the second time aroundThe Guardian - Simran Hans“Sometimes, a lie’s more truth than the truth,” drawls author JT Leroy, speaking down a crackling telephone line. This straightforward dramatisation of Savannah Knoop’s 2008 memoir Girl Boy Girl: How Became
Personal Finance (UK) Meet the people trying to save enough to retire by 40The Guardian - Harvey JonesFor many, it is an idea of heaven – shutting down the computer one last time and leaving the office in the full knowledge that you are financially stable enough never to have to return. And all at an that
Jada Pinkett Smith Jada Pinkett Smith: 'the word "wife": it's a golden cage, swallow the key'The Guardian - Sophie HeawoodShe put her film career on hold and let husband Will Smith become a megastar. Now Jada Pinkett Smith’s candid chat show is opening up truthful conversations around kitchen tables everywhere Imagine the
Quentin Tarantino Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review – uneven ode to a lost eraThe Guardian - Wendy IdeIt’s hardly surprising that this, perhaps the most “Tarantino-esque” of all Quentin Tarantino’s movies to date, is a love letter to Hollywood. Who has been more vocal about his passion for the movies,
Play buttonFilm (UK) Transit review – taut German thrillerThe Guardian - Simran HansGerman film-maker Christian Petzold elegantly adapts Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel in this tightly coiled thriller about a refugee who flees Nazi occupation and awaits safe passage to Mexico in the port town
Opinion (UK) Facial recognition is now rampant. The implications for our freedom are chillingThe Guardian - Stephanie HareLast week, all of us who live in the UK, and all who visit us, discovered that our faces were being scanned secretly by private companies and have been for some time. We don’t know what these companies
Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong’s dilemma: fight or resist peacefullyThe Guardian - Lily KuoEllie Lau, a 21-year-old student, was one of thousands of protesters who flooded Hong Kong’s airport this week. There, she and a friend had an uneasy conversation about the future. As they joined throngs
Film (UK) The 30 best films about music, chosen by musiciansThe Guardian - Interviews by Jude Rogers and Killian FoxMovies about musicians, whether biopics, fictions or documentaries, are a fixture in cinema, but judging by the flurry of activity over the past 12 months – with acclaimed films about Aretha Franklin,
Lifestyle (UK) Mums-to-be reject baby showers for ‘mother blessings’The Guardian - Tess ReidyFirst there was the baby shower, then came the gender-reveal party. Now parents-to-be are embarking on a new way of celebrating imminent parenthood: the “mother blessing”. Unlike other baby events, where
Books In no man’s land: anger as publisher puts book criticising army on holdThe Guardian - Jamie DowardAfter beating four other publishing houses in an auction, William Heinemann was in no doubt that The Changing of the Guard would more than reward the five-figure advance it paid to its author, Simon Akam.
Arkansas A rural town confronts its buried history of mass killings of black AmericansGuardian US - Teresa KrugThe lessons that we can learn from 100 years ago are relevant today as we navigate race relations in the 21st century. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s office Charlie McClain was surprised to learn he
Corsica Corsica’s cape of good campsitesThe Guardian - Justine Jordan‘It’s like being in a car advert!” The corniche road along the western side of Cap Corse, the spiny promontory pointing north from the body of Corsica towards Genoa, must be one of Europe’s most dramatic
Neanderthals The five: surprising talents of the NeanderthalsThe Guardian - Laura PotierLast week, researchers from Washington University announced they had investigated the ear remains of 23 Neanderthals and found that around half had bony growths that suggested aquatic foraging was a prominent
Books Behind the Screen review – inside the social media sweatshopsThe Guardian - John NaughtonA key question is whether the moderation task is ultimately a futile, sisyphean one “All human life is there” used to be the proudest boast of the (mercifully) defunct News of the World. Like everything
Opinion (UK) Tech giants despise politics? Hardly – they are in the thick of it and being called outThe Guardian - John NaughtonGoogle’s bosses were running a secret project to build a search engine that would be acceptable to Xi Jinping and co. Eventually, it was scrapped If there was one thing that united the founders of today’s
Play buttonITV The week in TV: Succession; Deep Water; Kathy Burke’s All Woman and more – reviewThe Guardian - Euan FergusonSuccession | Sky Atlantic Deep Water (ITV) | ITV Hub Kathy Burke’s All Woman (Channel 4) | All 4 The Chefs’ Brigade (BBC Two) | iPlayer Remarkable Places to Eat (BBC Two) | iPlayer Succession burst back
Art The big picture: the heart of South Africa’s homelandsThe Guardian - Tim AdamsThabiso Sekgala grew up with his grandmother in a rural “homeland” South African settlement north of Pretoria. He subsequently worked in Johannesburg as a waiter and then as a photographer, but his creative
Northern Ireland The week in radio and podcasts: The Irish Passport; BreakdownThe Guardian - Miranda SawyerI am disgracefully late to the brilliant The Irish Passport, a podcast about the culture, history and politics of Ireland that has been going since 2017. But crikey, I am enjoying it now. More than 40
Books Reader, I downloaded him: boom times for the literary long listenThe Guardian - Nosheen IqbalFour hours of Beatrix Potter, 10 hours of Marcel Proust, or 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes. How about every single word of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Silas
Chernobyl Spinning conspiracy theories won’t help us prevent another ChernobylThe Guardian - Serhii PlokhyDid it really happen? Was it really so bad? Is it true that they were so unprepared? These are the questions I have heard the past few months in connection with the stunning success of the miniseries It
Homebuying Persimmon tries to move itself on to firmer foundationsThe Guardian - Rob DaviesA drive to improve what customers are getting has, unsurprisingly, dented the top line Persimmon, one of the UK’s biggest housebuilders, has been testing the limits of the phrase “safe as houses” over
Mike Ashley Travellers pay price as rail policy runs out of controlThe GuardianMany commuters will have been on holiday, and off the railways, when large parts of the network were shut down in a power blackout nine days ago. But they were in the dark, or powerless, in other matters
Margaret Thatcher As The Crown returns, watch out for these milestonesThe Guardian - Kate WilliamsWinston Churchill, the Queen’s first prime minister, died in early 1965. The Conservative party was changing and a key beneficiary was a Grantham schoolgirl and Oxford graduate turned ice-cream chemist
Hong Kong Hong Kong braces for huge rally as China condemns US 'gross interference'The Guardian - Verna Yu in Hong KongHong Kong is bracing for a fresh rally by more than 100,000 protesters after two months of increasingly violent clashes that have prompted severe warnings from Beijing and no sign of concessions from city’s
World News Indonesia arrests dozens of West Papuans over claim flag was thrown in sewerThe Guardian - Helen DavidsonIndonesian authorities raided a university dormitory in Surabaya on Saturday and arrested dozens of West Papuan students after a standoff over allegations the Indonesian flag was thrown into a sewer. broke
