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
Flow is a gorgeous animated Noah’s Ark tale-of-sorts that bobs into cinemas like a message in a bottle. The brainchild of Gints Zilbalodis, a 30-year-old Latvian film-maker, it’s about an unnamed house cat cast adrift on a sailboat alongside a capybara and a ring-tailed lemur. The world has flooded; one disaster follows another. The animals … Read more
After the high of a record-breaking night at the Brits where his band, Ezra Collective, not only became the first jazz group to perform live but also scooped the best group gong, Femi Koleoso was quickly brought back to earth. At the Jubilee Youth Club in Enfield, north London, where he volunteers, the drummer and … Read more
We might all have domestic arguments that demand to be preserved on film for their drama, but few of them would ever live up to the intensity, eloquence and glamour of the barneys between American photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his English wife, novelist and artist Maggie Barrett. The best (or worst) of those clashes comes … Read more
On a sleek white stage made to look like a 1960s New York penthouse, one of pop music’s biggest exponents Sabrina Carpenter is sitting on the toilet. A few seconds earlier she’d wiped down the seat with a tissue before taking her spot to sing Sharpest Tool, a sweary, country-flecked bop about a hapless man … Read more