From Simon Armitage’s The Poet Laureate Has Gone To His Shed to Lockdown Parenting Hell and Miriam And Youssef, this week’s top podcasts By Leaf Arbuthnot Published: 22:01 BST, 23 May 2020 | Updated: 22:01 BST, 23 May 2020 The Poet Laureate Has Gone To His Shed Simon Armitage, the nation’s bard, is spending lockdown … Read more
What’s The Matter With Tony Slattery? Thursday, BBC2 Rating: The Big Flower Fight Netflix Rating: This week a new Netflix show that mercilessly plunders the Bake Off/Sewing Bee format, and a documentary on the comedian Tony Slattery, who was ubiquitous in the late 1980s and early 1990s before suddenly disappearing from view. And while I’m … Read more
From Jenny Colgan’s latest to Writers & Lovers by Lily King, a mystery by Susie Steiner and Shubhangi Swarup’s debut, this week’s best new fiction By Madeleine Feeny and Hephzibah Anderson and John Williams and Max Davidson Published: 22:01 BST, 23 May 2020 | Updated: 22:01 BST, 23 May 2020 Five Hundred Miles From You … Read more
MONDAY, MAY 11 ‘Shall I cut your hair?’ asked Celia, eyeing my increasingly overgrown lockdown locks. ‘Have you ever done it before?’ I replied nervously. Piers Morgan put his faith in wife Celia Walden by reluctantly agreeing to let her cut his hair as they self-quarantine at their London home ‘No, but I’ve watched a … Read more
Not only is his new movie a hit but his marriage to Soon-Yi, 35 years his junior, has endured 21 years defying all predictions. In a rare interview, the film legend says in typical deadpan style: I got lucky From the quiet study of his Manhattan home, Woody Allen is absorbing the news that his … Read more
HISTORY Coffeeland : A History By Augustine Sedgewick (Allen Lane £25, 448 pp) Have you ever scanned the blizzard of drinks on offer at your nearest Costa and thought, ‘I just want a cup of coffee’? If so, then maybe this book — more than 350 pages of dense political history of the erogenous little … Read more
MEMOIR The See -Through House By Shelley Klein (Chatto £16.99, 288pp) From the outside it might not look like much: one of those weird, modern, flat-roofed, single-storey, ‘architect-designed’ houses with plate-glass windows. But for Shelley Klein and her father Bernat Klein, High Sunderland in the Scottish Borders meant everything. In this remarkable, moving tribute to … Read more
Bomber like a startled stallion: How the Lancaster was more than just an aircraft and stood for ‘a symbol of British freedom’ and ‘a monument to those who gave their lives in the war’ John Nichol describes visiting RAF Museum, Hendon, in company of Ron Needle Ron Needle, 93, was a former rear gunner in … Read more
FANTASY AND SCI-FI By Jamie Buxton For The Daily Mail Published: 22:05 BST, 21 May 2020 | Updated: 20:36 BST, 22 May 2020 The Book of Koli By M.R. Carey (Orbit £17.49 hardback; £6.99 paperback) The Book of Koli By M.R. Carey (Orbit £17.49 hardback; £6.99 paperback) It’s grim up north in Koli’s post-apocalyptic world. … Read more
BOOK OF THE WEEK Hold On Edna! By Aneira Thomas (Mirror Books £12.99, 304pp) Three minutes before midnight on the night of July 4, 1948, a doctor stood over the hospital bed of Edna May Rees as she prepared to deliver her seventh child. Her contractions had built steadily over the Welsh summer evening and … Read more