There have previously been children whose birth attracted a certain amount of attention — Jesus Christ, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten-Windsor, Brooklyn Beckham — but the recent arrival of Suri Cruise set a new record for interest in an infant.
The radio interview I recorded with Dame Muriel Spark at her Tuscan home two years ago almost never made it on to tape because a dog outside could not be silenced. We waited for the preferred BBC background quiet during what seemed like an hour of growling, but were forced to proceed with the hound […]
The modern phrase for a moment of realisation that a lifestyle is out of control is ”wake-up call”. So linguists as well as counsellors will be interested in the fact that the actor Russell Crowe has experienced a behavioural watershed that actually involves a telephone in a hotel room.
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/ 28 January 2005
The governors of America’s states intermittently meet for policy conferences and social events, and there is a chance that such a gathering in 2006 could feature a handshake between governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, and governor Kinky Friedman, of Texas. The latter, a popular country and western singer, announced last Thursday that he will run as an independent against George W Bush’s successor in Texas, the Republican Rick Perry.
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/ 19 November 2004
One might think a movie called Number 5 is a low-budget work by an austere auteur who regards narrative titles as suspiciously commercial: one to four were probably 8mm experimental pieces he made in film school. But Number 5 is, at an estimated -million a minute, the biggest-budget movie ever made and could hardly be more commercial.
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/ 21 November 2003
Richard Curtis’s Britain is a strange place where middle-class, floppy-haired folk go in search of love — usually in the snow on Christmas Eve. Mark Lawson reports.
The argument over what should be built on the mass-murder scene where the World Trade Centre once stood was, in essence, a fight between selling and telling.
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/ 4 November 2002
The United States’s idea of itself has often been expressed in the theory that anyone could become president. This has never been quite true but, during the fortnight of the Washington snipers, the country finally became, in a horrible way, a pure democracy.
It’s a key belief of conspiracy theorists that the state has shady powers, and so it was remarkable to be told this week that Britain’s head of state may share such fears.