When Jessica Sherr arrived in Edinburgh with her solo show three years ago, she felt overwhelmed by the scale of the event. At the same time, Neil James had started his own show at the Festival Fringe and was experiencing the “terrifying” process of trying to get noticed among thousands of other performers.
We may be witnessing a new chapter in British political history. The Labour Party now has more than 600,000 members and registered supporters – a base that no other party can compete with. It is a mass movement that could sweep Labour back into power in 2020.
We all know what it’s like: you work for 40 years building up to the pinnacle of your career, re-creating one of the mightiest projects of the 20th century, and then up pops some spoilsport to announce that you’ve excluded a significant part of the population. That’s what has happened to Trevor Nunn, who has just revealed his cast for The Wars of the Roses – 22 white people – amid criticism from Equity.
He’ll come fourth. That’s what I said when Jeremy Corbyn scraped on to the ballot paper with one nomination and a minute or two to spare. He may yet, but I’m not quite as confident now as I was then. What is the point of political predictions, then? Especially mine. But the polls also got the general election wrong and no one saw the Scottish nationalist surge coming.
Nothing to lose but your fears
Simon Raven’s novel The Rich Pay Late (1964), in which the depravity of the Eden-era establishment is laid bare as with a scalpel, contains a memorable scene in which a crooked adman named Jude Holbrook attempts to buy the proprietorship of an influential weekly magazine called Strix. His conduit is the eminently corruptible editor, Somerset Lloyd-James, allegedly based on Raven’s much more saintly school contemporary William Rees-Mogg, later custodian of The Times. But Holbrook’s initial come-on merits only a shake of the head. Читать дальше...
First of all, congratulations to the successful A-level candidates in what in most countries would be the equivalent of a first-year university test. There are many criticisms of our exam system – should it be broader, should it not force students to specialise so early, and so on – but nothing should diminish the achievement. However, it is also worth observing that in the world of work, as opposed to that of education, the emphasis is beginning to shift away from testing and measuring and towards... Читать дальше...
Here we are, deep into the school holidays, and all over the land in medium-priced restaurants, families like mine are being embarrassed by people like me. Whereas my wife and sons are prepared to tolerate without complaint inordinately long waits between courses, I take a more militant attitude. The result, in the case of outstanding delays, is that when I call the manager over and renegotiate the bill, they stare uneasily into their laps wishing I wasn’t.
Few of this country’s institutions retain the power to cow the media. Neither politicians, clerics nor prize-winning novelists can expect to have their pronouncements treated uncritically, which is on the whole a good thing. The one exception is the monarchy, which flexed its muscles to dramatic effect last week.
It didn’t look good – the Joly family boarding a plane for Istanbul where a car awaited to take us across the country…. However, we were not, despite much speculation on Twitter, off to join Islamic State (Isis). We were just off on a family road trip round Turkey.
As the youngest national newspaper in Britain, The Independent on Sunday has always been optimistic, and one of the reasons for our hopefulness has been our faith in young people. Too often, the young are portrayed negatively in the media, as a problem or a threat.
As the 15th World Championships begin in Beijing next Saturday, athletics finds itself more than ever pinned into a corner, caught in a fight for its life.
The heels are six inches tall, the legs above them long, lean, and shapely, and the smiles are 100-watt. But if you think musical theatre is all tits’n’teeth, then the stars of Kinky Boots fail on one count at least … the show’s most glamorous performers are cross-dressing men. You see, Kinky Boots began life as an independent British film in 2005, based on the true story of a Northampton shoe factory saved from bankruptcy by diversifying into making sexy heels for transvestites.
“He expressed concern that the increase in take-up of academic subjects did not extend to modern foreign languages.” I’m not surprised; nobody likes anything foreign.
Why is comedy so left wing? This is hardly a new query, but has been raised once again in our report on Andrew Lawrence, the only right-wing joke teller at the Edinburgh fringe, and one of a very few anywhere.
Only a few years ago, Turkey was widely regarded as a model for the Middle East: an evolving pluralistic democracy with a robust economy, with an Islamist tinge, to be sure, but whose political stability needed no longer to be underwritten by the military. In foreign policy, it kept a reassuringly low profile, and the gates of the European Union seemed to beckon. Today, alas, that image is little more than a distant memory.
In my home turf of east London right now, the hip things are beginning to eat each other. I'm sure this is gratifying news for all non-London readers. It's essentially around the Shoreditch area, where new-wave mudslinging has broken out over who exactly is ruining the wonderful status quo with their evil sandwich chain outlet, or novelty café selling only cereal. It is all quite fascinating. I watch, just like Pepys, but with better tits.
Road trips are romantic, right? Yes that's what I thought too, before embarking on my first long-ish journey with the boyfriend on his motorbike. Preparation is everything, apparently. You know what preparation isn't? Sexy.
If I mention Europe, the first three words to come to mind are probably Greece, debt, and crisis. Indeed, as I write, the Greek saga has once again made the front page of the Financial Times as a deal between the debt-laden country and its creditors is apparently "close".
AIM seems to be attracting increasing criticism after reaching its 20th anniversary this year. I thought such an occasion would generate benign celebratory applause but such mild reactions have been few and far between.
Being a house owner, my experience of nuisance phone calls grows by the hour. In fact, the only reason I am not exposed to them more often is that I spend large chunks of my days Sellotaped to a desk here on the 342nd floor of the Independent mega-tower (corporate boast: "Our shadow is bigger than your shadow").
Q. I flew from London to Ibiza in May to take part in a charity bike ride for Great Ormond Street hospital. It was a bank holiday weekend, so direct flights were too expensive. I halved the cost by breaking up the journey with a flight from London to Madrid with Norwegian Air Shuttle, and from Madrid to Ibiza with Vueling. The Norwegian flight would get me into Madrid for 13:35 and the Vueling flight was scheduled to leave at 17:25. This was booked and confirmed on 3 March.
Is this about the high-street chains that have been charging us VAT in airport stores but pocketing it?
