8 h. ago John Updike: A Life in Letters review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world...

Politics

8 d. ago ‘I am much much happier here’: Ghislaine Maxwell letters reveal her life and mindset in her new Texas prison

The Epstein associate was transferred to ‘Texas Club Fed’ in August, days after meeting with top DOJ officials

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9 d. ago Lipstick, manicures ... and fascism: the ugliness behind the $450bn beauty industry

In their new book The House of Beauty, beauty writer Arabelle Sicardi examines the good, the bad and the ugly of the lucrative industryThe very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of Beauty, reads: “When I tell you that beauty is a monster, I need you to know it is my favorite kind.”Sicardi, who splits their time between New York City and Los Angeles, has a love/hate relationship with the beauty industry. A writer and consultant working in beauty and tech, their projects include a beauty newsletter, a creative collective called Perfumed Pages and a non-profit arts project called the Museum of Nails Foundation. In their new book, they examine the impact of the $450bn beauty industry – the pretty and the very ugly. Continue reading...

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1 week ago I’m a dog expert – here’s why I’d never get my dead dog cloned like Tom Brady did

For a grieving dog owner desperate to bring their pet back, cloning may feel like the answer to a broken heart. But it could be bad for us and our dogs, writes Louise Glazebrook

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1 week ago “I’m a dog expert – here’s why I’d never get my dead dog cloned like Tom Brady”

For grieving dog owners desperate to bring their pet back, cloning may feel like the answer for a broken heart. But it could be bad for us and our dogs, writes Louise Glazebrook

Events

2 w. ago An inspector’s calling: JB Priestley’s plea for justice echoes beyond his best

His parable of collective social responsibility is a hardy classic but the Yorkshire playwright’s wider legacy should not be neglectedHow on earth does one sum up JB Priestley? He wrote 39 plays, 26 novels and a huge amount of nonfiction and was dismissed by Virginia Woolf, with characteristic snootiness, as “one of the tradesmen of letters”. But, in art as in life, tradespeople are invaluable and with one of Priestley’s most popular plays, When We Are Married, about to be revived at London’s Donmar Warehouse, it is worth asking what the qualities are that make him a durable dramatist.It makes sense to start with An Inspector Calls, which was famously revived by Stephen Daldry in 1992 in a production that has lasted for more than 30 years. What Daldry and his designer, Ian MacNeil, did was to cut through the play’s schematic outline and treat it as an expressionist fable about a family poised on the edge of self-destruction. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Pluribus to All’s Fair: the seven best shows to stream this week

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is back with a gripping, funny, head-spinner of a show, while Kim Kardashian stars in a blazingly camp drama about divorce lawyers. Plus, the thrilling return of Squid Game: The Challenge Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan returns with a gripping, funny, bleak, bewildering head-spinner of a series. It begins with a mysterious communication from outer space. This turns out to be an earthly glimpse of extraterrestrial technology: a psychic glue, binding humanity together. Great news, right? If you are one of the few people across the world seemingly immune to this zombified bliss, not so much. The superb Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol Sturka, a cranky writer of bad, extremely successful historical romances and, reluctantly, the keeper of the flame of righteous human cynicism. Pluribus establishes and maintains a tone all of its own – dark humour, oddball surrealism and existential horror. Apple TV, from Friday 7 November Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago BBC doctor issues major alert over four letter word that could save your life

Dr Oscar Duke spoke after singer Lauren Jean told of her experiences in the middle of the night

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