3 d. ago Why is defence such a hard sell? The same reason Starmer is struggling in the polls | Martin Kettle

Decades of failures have left liberal democratic governments unable to command public confidence when it really mattersDefence reviews and foreign policy resets seem to turn up almost as often as the Sussexes’ lifestyle brand relaunches these days. Labour’s strategic defence review this week comes less than two years after the Conservatives’ hardly less detailed defence white paper in July 2023, which in turn was a “refresh” of Boris Johnson’s ambitious integrated review of defence and foreign policy of March 2021. By this measure, it must be doubtful if, come the 2030s, analysts will look back on Keir Starmer and John Healey’s review and say it broke the mould.The Labour government was entitled to try to put its own stamp on defence policy, of course, and its review team of George Robertson, Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill did a good, reasonably independent job. Yet this 2020s pattern of repeated strategic adaptation and refocus feels like the new normal now. It is also true that gr...

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4 d. ago Dark true story behind hit drama What It Feels Like For a Girl: Transgender author Paris Lees endured horrific sexual abuse and was jailed at 16

Critics have commended the BBC 's adaptation of journalist Paris Lees' memoir, What It Feels Like for a Girl, which looks at the British writer's tumultuous history and at times dark journey.

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4 d. ago What It Feels Like For A Girl on BBC Three review: fearless and compelling TV

Ellis Howard shines in this adaptation of Paris Lee’s memoir of sex work, drugs and crime at the turn of the millennium

Politics

5 d. ago Paris Lees adaptation What It Feels Like for a Girl is a raw, engaging case for optimism

Messy coming-of-age tale is both universal and also rooted in the trangender experience

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5 d. ago What It Feels Like for a Girl review – deeply disturbing and totally fearless TV

This extraordinary adaptation of Paris Lees’ memoir follows wild, witty teen Byron as they go from cottaging for cash aged 15 to finding solace in a raucous gang of trans and queer pals. You’ll never look at a loo brush the same wayThe title suggests a generic experience of nascent womanhood, but What It Feels Like for a Girl is miles from your typical female bildungsroman. This adaptation of journalist Paris Lees’ excellent memoir about growing up in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire (or ‘Ucknall, as the book, with its mesmeric phonetic dialect, has it) chronicles the coming-of-age of Byron, who is seen by others as a boy. Initially, our protagonist doesn’t really push back on that; despite some early gender dysphoria – angrily dismissed by their macho father – the prospect of one day openly living as a woman is completely outside their frame of reference. On a visit to a nightclub, Byron (Ellis Howard) encounters future friend Lady Die, who makes a joke about someone being a transexual. “...

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8 d. ago ‘All of us felt like we had touched gold’: What It Feels Like for a Girl, the BBC’s electric coming

Paris Lees has turned her hit memoir of growing up as a working-class trans kid into a vivid, joyful drama. Its team talks teenage sex work, nostalgia for Tony Blair, and why TV drama is so posh it’s like Jane AustenWhen the BBC was casting its adaptation of Paris Lees’s autobiography, What It Feels Like for a Girl, it wasn’t the only one wrestling with how to find the right actor to play the lead in a biopic. “Cher did an interview,” smiles Lees, “and she said: ‘We just can’t find somebody that’s Cher.’ I was like: ‘Same, girl. I hear your struggles.’ So me and Cher have been going through it.” Sitting next to Lees is the actor they went with, Ellis Howard, who you may remember as the sapling Ivan VI in HBO series Catherine the Great, but who you will never have seen being this luminous.“In the beginning, we were looking for a trans person,” Lees says. She and Howard are sharing a Zoom screen, and it’s not so much that they look similar as that they both look so cinematic, the...

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