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Bruce Springsteen – Last Man Standing (teen bandmate George Theiss) Last week Joe DePugh, a star high school baseball player from Freehold, New Jersey, died aged 75. It made headlines because he was the guy who “could throw that speedball by you / Make you look like a fool, boy” in Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 hit … Read more

The penguin at the centre of The Penguin Lessons, a new movie by Peter Cattaneo, is nothing if not hard-working. The film, adapted from the 2015 memoir by Tom Michell, uses the political turmoil of Argentina in 1976 as a backdrop for the personal transformation of an English teacher at a boys’ school. Michell (Steve … Read more

Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year’s International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses. British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the third time Hughes has been shortlisted … Read more

Mark Hoppus is prodding at his phone, attempting to find a photograph of the swimming pool at his mid-century modernist home in Beverly Hills. “The house was built in 1962. It has this really cool circular design – the whole house is a semi-circle, built around the pool, and the pool kind of mimics the semi-circle … Read more

Clem Burke, who has died aged 70 of cancer, was the drummer with Blondie from the group’s early days in the mid-1970s through to their disbandment in 1982 – and then again when they reformed in 1997. At other times, and during the band’s second incarnation, he was in demand as a drummer for hire, … Read more

Not winning an Oscar can do funny things to people. Look at Leonardo DiCaprio. He tried harder and harder with every successive loss until he eventually made The Revenant, the movie equivalent of getting punched in the face for likes on TikTok. Same with Lady Gaga, who reacted to losing for A Star Is Born … Read more

From its opening frame, Costa-Gavras’s political thriller Z promises to be an unflinching denunciation of authoritarianism. The kinetic camera work matches its forthright narrative of state-sponsored violence and the erosion of democracy. The Greek expatriate director’s film is loosely based on the 1963 assassination of the democratic leader Grigoris Lambrakis and although it was released … Read more

Psychotherapy is about storytelling, about roles that we assume, the veil between our truth and our invention. But for me, as a therapist, it is always a piece of theatre – a series of roles and characters that are played out. In 1986, I was just coming up to 14 with no thoughts of such … Read more

Simon Russell Beale finds it scary to play Shakespeare’s high-status characters, “the sort where you walk on stage and everyone bows”. It is surprising, given he is one of the nation’s foremost theatre actors, a king of his own realm, but also ironic because he has played most of Shakespeare’s alpha-men already: from Hamlet and Lear to … Read more

Clem Burke, the drummer whose backbeats powered Blondie to huge chart success across several decades, has died aged 70. Burke’s bandmates Debbie Harry and Chris Stein said he had died after “a private battle with cancer”, in a tribute posted to Instagram. They added: “Clem was not just a drummer; he was the heartbeat of … Read more