7 h. ago Adventurer, horse photographer, killer: Eadweard Muybridge’s extraordinary life told in a comic book

He is famed for being a pioneer of the moving image – but there was so much more to Muybridge than that. The great graphic novelist Guy Delisle explains why he turned his life into a rollicking readIt was one of the biggest talking points of the 19th century: whether a galloping horse lifted all four hooves off the ground simultaneously. Painters struggled with the notion, often wrongly depicting the animals doing a sort of leap, their limbs outstretched front and back. Then, in the 1870s, the great British adventurer Eadweard Muybridge closed the debate, devising photography with quick enough exposure times to isolate the horses in motion – and airborne.“Lots of people didn’t accept it,” says Guy Delisle. “When they saw a photograph of the horse gathering its hooves, they said it looked like a dead spider. But when the photographs were projected in sequence, they said, ‘It’s true!’” Continue reading...

Events

67 h. ago Kyren Wilson: ‘It’s not just me that’s world champion. It’s my whole family’

The 2024 winner reflects on the emotional backstory to Crucible triumph amid major health concerns for his family“‘I still believed in myself but it was quite soul-destroying out there,” Kyren Wilson says in a back room at Barratts Snooker Club in Northampton. The world champion once worked here as a barman because he had lost his place on tour after his first season as a professional in 2011. He was still only 19 and he had little idea that an avalanche of adversity would engulf him in the years ahead.Wilson begins the defence of his world title, with a first-round match against Lei Peifan, in the venerable Crucible in Sheffield on Saturday morning. But it seems fitting that we should meet here, in the unpromising surroundings which once defined Wilson’s life, as he describes his extraordinary world championship backstory. Continue reading...

Politics

4 d. ago Melinda French Gates has led an extraordinary life. This self

Bill Gates’ ex-wife might have taken the high road, but she’s mistaken what readers really want: gossip

Politics

9 d. ago The Determined Spy: Frank Wisner, the CIA and a covert career cut short

New biography tells story of operative who directed coups in Iran and Guatemala and grappled with mental illnessFrank Wisner was a leading light of the early CIA, a director of clandestine operations who came of age in the second world war then fought the cold war by fair means or foul, from funding American cultural outreach to orchestrating coups in Iran and Guatemala.Before becoming a biographer, Douglas Waller reported for Newsweek and Time. His new book, The Determined Spy, is about Wisner, a man who lived an extraordinary life but came to be buried at Arlington national cemetery, under a simple headstone, identified merely as a commander in the US naval reserve. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Gavin & Stacey's Larry Lamb on how show made him 'more bearable to be around'

Larry said the hit show was the "most extraordinary experience" of his life

Politics

1 week ago Larry Lamb says Gavin & Stacey changed his personality and it's a 'relief' it's over

Larry said the hit show was the "most extraordinary experience" of his life

Politics

1 week ago Diaries reveal extraordinary story of Sanquhar soldier's life on World War One frontline

The Sanquhar Boys and the Seaforths feature the personal diaries of Private John Hope.

Events

1 week ago Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek by Darryl W Bullock – review

This richly detailed and exhaustive biography of the maverick 60s British music producer reveals a sonic visionary whose brilliance concealed a tragically violent temperJoe Meek first tasted success as a record producer when he created the eerie backdrop for John Leyton’s gothic teen melodrama, Johnny Remember Me, which reached No 1 in the British pop charts in the summer of 1961. A mere six years later, on 3 February 1967, Meek’s name entered the mainstream consciousness in the most darkly dramatic way imaginable, when the news broke that he had killed his landlady, the elderly Violet Shenton, before turning the shotgun on himself.In the time between, as Darryl Bullock notes with characteristic understatement in his richly detailed biography Love and Fury, the producer’s chaotic, but hugely creative, life was “directed by his passions and obsessions”. Continue reading...

Events

2 w. ago Mickey Rourke and 'Britain's hardest man' ran like 'scared rabbits' after hooligan brawl

Hollywood superstar Mickey Rourke is set to open up about his extraordinary life on Celebrity Big Brother and below a former gangster reveals the night the actor bizarrely encountered football hooligans

Politics

last month Jamie Laing told wife every day he could not do Comic Relief marathon challenge

Sophie Habboo was there to meet him at the finish line.

Politics