4 d. ago Passenger flying business class for first time in his life was kicked off Emirates flight before it left the runway after enjoying airport hospitality 'too much'

Shaun Hewitt had boarded the jet from Newcastle to Dubai on December 12 last year, with an upgraded ticket for the first time ever and became 'abusive' when he was asked to move seats.

Transport

4 d. ago Richness, complexity and joy: this London exhibition paints a fittingly varied picture of British working class life

Richness, complexity and joy: this London exhibition paints a fittingly varied picture of British working class life  The Art Newspaper

Politics

4 d. ago Richness, complexity and joy: this London exhibition is a fittingly varied celebration of British working

Richness, complexity and joy: this London exhibition is a fittingly varied celebration of British working-class life  The Art Newspaper

Politics

6 d. ago British couple found dead at New Zealand rented home pictured after wife felt 'unsafe'

Police are probing the deaths of ex-pats Claire and Ben Anderson as a murder-suicide.

Society

7 d. ago My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois?

I have two degrees, two books to my name and I write for the Guardian. Yet I spent time in care, live at home and struggle for money. Can Karl Marx help me make sense of myself?I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole.And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get m...

Politics

9 d. ago After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989

Stills, Edinburgh; Photographers’ Gallery, LondonFrom loneliness in Norfolk to vibrant Indian culture in Leicester, a touring show captures a riot of contradictions. Elsewhere, Leeds is lent an otherworldly air by a colour photography pioneerGiven that we live in a time defined by the rise of far-right populism and a widespread indifference to traditional party politics, the idea of a unified “working class” seems almost romantic, a throwback to an age when Labour was synonymous with socialism rather than centrism. In this context, the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition After the End of History is a defiant statement, though it’s less a celebration of shared values and traditions than a series of revealing glimpses of what curator Johny Pitts describes as the “complex and counterintuitive expressions of working-class life”.The show’s high-flown title refers to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s controversial assertion that history of a kind ended with the collapse of the S...

Culture

1 week ago Maura Higgins looks very different as she returns to the UK to 'face the music'

Former Love Island star Maura Higgins is back on British soil after fleeing to America in the wake of being pictured kissing married McFly singer Danny Jones

Politics

2 w. ago The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review – how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain

Behind many symbols of quintessentially British culture – from Picture Post to Pevsner’s guides – were refugees who fled Europe in the 1930s and 40sIn the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures – “bright, slim volumes”, as Owen Hatherley calls them, on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, “English clocks” and “British explorers”, written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project (“a paroxysm of island backslapping”, Hatherley says) except that, “at every level except for the texts”, this was “an entirely central European endeavour”.Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was...

Events

2 w. ago UK 'UFO sightings' confuse Brits across country but it may be all thanks to Elon Musk

Confused Brits shared several pictures of spinning glowing orbs in the British night sky as the answer may be related to a man who seems almost omnipresent at the moment – Elon Musk

Politics

2 w. ago ‘I spent six years just repeating dots and lines’: the great painter Arpita Singh on a lifetime in art

She has been painting for 60 years – yet it’s taken until now for her to have an exhibition outside her native India. The artist reluctantly takes time out from her studio in order to grant a rare interviewWhen Arpita Singh’s Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India’s leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. “Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,” is about as effusive as she gets.At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders cramme...

Politics

3 w. ago Larry Stanton: the artist who captured New York’s gay scene at a time of crisis

A new exhibition in Los Angeles celebrates the life and work of a painter who died at 37 of Aids as he tried to preserve a record of those around himTaken too early by the Aids pandemic, the artist Larry Stanton created work for an exuberant, prodigious handful of years before dying in 1984 at age 37. Championed by David Hockney, whose work his paintings at time resemble, Stanton excelled in creating portraits of gay men that are at once guileless and penetrating.Clearing Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting a survey of the artist’s work titled Think of Me When It Thunders, a reference to one of the last things Stanton said to his longtime lover, Arthur Lambert, while on his hospital deathbed. Trying to assuage the pain of watching his confidant and lover deteriorating, Stanton told Lambert to “think of me when it thunders.” The latter later lamented that “it doesn’t thunder every day.” Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago ‘Painting was my final act of defiance’: how a chef from war

Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died in 2012, made vertiginous paintings celebrating family, the diaspora and his own turbulent story. His first European solo exhibition charts this remarkable journeyWhat is home? What does it mean to belong? For Eritrea-born artist, activist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, who fled war in his homeland at the age of 16 and landed on US shores in 1981, these were vital questions that played out in his vibrant, often dreamlike canvases. “Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life,” the artist wrote in 2000, in his application for a masters in fine art at Yale School of Art.Ghebreyesus, who died suddenly of a heart attack aged 50 in 2012, left behind more than 800 paintings. These were barely exhibited in his lifetime but have garnered acclaim posthumously, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale and in a handful of US shows. Now Ghebreyesus will have h...

Events

4 w. ago No one’s buying Hunter Biden’s terrible paintings any more? I wonder why | Arwa Mahdawi

It’s tough being a nepo baby – especially when your daddy suddenly loses his influencePoor Hunter Biden. His dad, who issued him an unconditional pardon as one of his last acts as US president, saved him from the justice system – but it’s quite apparent no one is coming to save his art career.You may have had other things on your mind lately, so let me remind you about the trajectory of one of the US’s most controversial artists. Just a few years ago, Joe Biden’s troubled son, who had previously earned megabucks sitting on various boards doing mysterious board things, was enjoying remarkable success as an “emerging” artist. His paintings were being exhibited in a fancy New York gallery and selling for large sums. Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer and friend of Biden, reportedly bought 11 works for a total of $875,000 (£690,000). Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Democratic donor, bought two paintings, for $42,000 and $52,000. All in all, Hunter sold art for about $1.5m between 2021 and 2024...

Politics

4 w. ago Greek lawmaker attacks paintings in Athens' National Gallery, claiming they are offensive

Greece’s National Gallery says a Greek lawmaker attacked four paintings in an exhibition, including one he had previously criticized as offensive on religious grounds

Events