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For years, dual roles have been played largely for laughs. Think of Adam Sandler’s Razzie-sweeping twin turn in Jack and Jill, or Lisa Kudrow as both Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on Friends. Eddie Murphy was always particularly prolific, his most multiplicitous performance as a clutch of Klumps for Nutty Professor II. There are exceptions, of … Read more

At the centre of most things is a skeleton. So it is for the online infamy of Joyce Carol Oates. In 2021, the award-winning novelist delivered her most significant contribution to literature: a diabolical tweet ruminating on the existentialism of Halloween. (you can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or … Read more

When Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings … Read more

Ask any prominent podcast host for a list of dream interview guests, and it is quite likely that Michelle Obama’s name would be on it. That is why the former first lady shouldn’t have much trouble booking whomever she likes on her new show, “IMO,” short for “in my opinion,” which she will host with … Read more

Elena Kaiser just wanted to yodel, and living in central Switzerland, that didn’t seem too much to ask for. “But as a woman you couldn’t yodel in a choir unless you were already a professional; there were simply no options,” she says. There were also the words to the songs, portraying an idyllic Alpine life … Read more

Three People With Rebecca Front Lewis and The Thick of It star Rebecca Front tries to prise intimate interviews out of celebrity guests by asking about three people who’ve changed their lives. First up, her friend of 40 years Armando Iannucci talks about the person who opened a library near his Glasgow childhood home, and … Read more

There’s a montage in the opening of You’ve Got Mail that is so sentimentally sweet that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of a pumpkin spiced latte. As the guitars of the Cranberries’ Dreams jangle, the film’s two leads, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, leave their respective homes and walk through an autumnal-hued New York … Read more

Veteran Sirens The ghost of Ninon would be sorry nowTo laugh at them, were she to see them here,So brave and so alert for learning howTo fence with reason for another year. Age offers a far comelier diademThan theirs; but anguish has no eye for graceWhen time’s malicious mercy cautions themTo think a while of … Read more

It can take a surprisingly long time to become conscious of something that has been a feature of one’s life for as long as one can remember. I was 66 before I realised that I had always liked sitting in a corner. This revelation occurred in a restaurant while I was waiting for a friend. … Read more

Upper Lawn is a weekend retreat in Wiltshire built by the late architects Alison and Peter Smithson for themselves and their family and used by them from 1959 to 1982. It’s a place of obvious delight, thanks to a garden enclosed by old stone walls in which it stands, a clump of grand old beech … Read more