He’s worth £450m and his Phantom of the Opera is about to hit the big screen. But Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t content. “At the moment I haven’t got a story and all musicals are story-driven.” Stuart Jeffries asks what’s next.
After Dick Francis took a tumble in the Grand National in 1956 he stopped racing and became a writer. Now, after a six-year break, he’s writing again. He spoke to Stuart Jeffries. Fifty years ago, Dick Francis was a few yards from winning the Grand National on the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, when something unexpected happened.
Before Irène Némirovsky was taken to Auschwitz, she gave her daughter a case containing papers and photos. When her daughter finally opened it, she found a novel that is now a runaway bestseller, writes Stuart Jeffries.
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/ 23 February 2005
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have agreed a pact that they hope will prevent their relationship from being destroyed. Either can have sex with a third party so long as the other gives permission. They would appear to be trying for a third way between monogamy and infidelity — being faithful to one’s partner while allowing a kind of extramarital sexual licence that will not destroy the relationship.
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/ 19 December 2004
”When this music plays, we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills.” Amid the snow-covered fields of Auschwitz, where more than a million people were killed, an extraordinary ”music memorial” has been arranged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation.
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/ 18 November 2003
It hasn’t been a good year for Birmingham — England’s second city. But, despite various calamities, it turns out that the latest makeover is Birmingham as a sophisticated city, the least plausible and yet most ambitious of all its many reincarnations.
How did one of Europe’s most controversial movie directors become one of its hottest actors? Mathieu Kassovitz tells all to Stuart Jeffries.