Hopes for deal rise as militant group continues talks on new Israeli proposal; protests around Israel call on PM to accept deal for return of hostages
As we have been reporting, negotiators have resumed long-running ceasefire talks in Cairo – brokered by Egypt and Qatar – on pausing Israel’s war in return for freeing hostages.
Reuters is reporting that Israel has given a preliminary nod to terms that one source said included the return of between 20 and 33 hostages in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and a truce of several weeks.
Mark Harper is now being interview by Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC. When it is put to him that people in his party want it to change course, Harper says the government will stick to its plan.
In his interview on Sky News Mark Harper, the transport secretary, ducked a question about whether the party should shift to the right, as Suella Braverman is advocating, or to the centre, as Andy Street proposes. (See 7.55am.)
What he is talking about there is what I just said. He is talking about you focus on the priorities of the British people, that is what you do.
We are going to stick to focusing on the priorities that the prime minister set out, which are the government’s priorities, the prime minister’s priorities but they are also the priorities of the British people.
Swan; Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon A new era at the RSC opens with a potent staging by Emma Rice and Hanif Kureishi of his classic everyman tale and a clever take on Shakespeare’s comedy that cuts through the verbiage – with help from a Bridgerton stalwart
So this is the new RSC. Vibrant. Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey open their first season as joint artistic directors with a bold reimagining of one of the comedies and a carnival adaptation of a glorious 20th-century novel. They have filled the two stages with disguises and ideas about performing: with Shakespearean themes as well as with Shakespeare’s words.
Stratford now has more than one everyman: not only the prince of Denmark but The Buddha of Suburbia, or rather his son. The narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel is an ideal figure through whom to look inwards – at personality – as well as outwards, at an era and a society: vivid and in flux, he might have been created for the stage.
Vivid colours and powerful fresh flavours to welcome the brighter days of early May
Sorrel, asparagus, radishes: at last, some strong colours and flavours. After I’ve doused asparagus spears with melted butter at least once I’m up for something new, so we’ve been eating British asparagus with lemon-spiked gnocchi. The mellow of the cream and soft white fish underwrites the pepper of the seared radish in a quick and sustaining supper. Sorrel adds its vivid splash of green to a fresh and bolstering spring soup. This is food for the brighter days of May.
TV head hopes programme will spark ‘a #MeToo moment for men’ ahead of two-part show on the Oscar-winning actor
One of the producers of a Channel 4 documentary that contains fresh claims that Kevin Spacey “behaved inappropriately” with men says it will be broadcast as planned on Monday, despite public denials from the actor this weekend.
Dorothy Byrne, a former head of news and current affairs at the television channel, told the Observer thatshe hopes the new two-part programme, Spacey Unmasked, will prompt “a #MeToo moment for men” and start a wider discussion about standards of behaviour in working situations.
Academics warn loss of higher education arts and humanities courses will harm understanding of racism and imperial history
Cuts to arts and humanities subjects within higher education will have damaging implications for our understanding of race and colonialism, academics have warned.
Petitions have been launched to save anthropology at Kent University, where the subject has come under threat of closure, while Oxford Brookes confirmed the closure of its music programme earlier this year.
Much art, from Bob Dylan to Robert Frank, derives its greatness from its flaws. But sporting perfection is a whole different ball game
I’m not one to boast but on a recent Sunday morning I achieved perfection. To be precise – and there is no perfection without precision – I was half of something perfectly achieved. On the second version of the song Love Sick – which only saw the light of day last year as part of the continuing series of official Bootleg releases – Bob Dylan says he’s “struggling, striving / For perfection”. Proof of the struggle and strife is the way that this declaration was absent from the first take and deleted from the subsequent version selected for the album Time Out of Mind (1997). Despite what he claims, Dylan is not – and never has been – interested in perfection. He’s always been plunging on to the next line, the next verse, the next song. Yes, he looks forward, in another song, to the day when he’ll paint his masterpiece but on several occasions potential masterpieces were abandoned – She’s Your Lover Now, I’m Not There – because other imperfect masterpieces were soon jostling for attention.
Dylan has written more great songs than anyone in history but a condition of that greatness is that he was not hung up on perfecting any of them. Every version of every Dylan song could be improved. For each enhancement made to a song’s lyrics there’s a corresponding loss. He throws in wonderful lines, chucks out great lines and leaves terrible ones intact. His constant tampering with the lyrics is evidence not of perfectionism but of a restless hunger that is in some ways its opposite. In this respect he’s similar to the photographer Robert Frank, who said that a book of photographs by Hermann Eidenbenz (in whose studio he worked) “put me off perfection for life”.
Last week, Conservative campaigning gave a chilling indication of the depths to which they will sink to retain power
In the psychedelic 60s stop-frame animation children’s television series Trumpton, all the characters have identifying proper names – the fireman Captain Flack, the state stormtrooper Police Constable Potter, and the mysterious dungeon-dwelling economist Gideon Pencils Osborne. The mayor of Trumpton, however, was known only as The Mayor, and neither his actual name nor his political affiliations were ever revealed, though he smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many rightwing meetings.
All over the land last week, Tory mayors dreamed of similar anonymity, hoping that if no one knew anything about them, and their campaign literature didn’t reveal they belonged to the Tory party, people might at least vote for them by accident, thinking they were someone else. “Oh! Andy Street was the West Midlands’ Tory mayor candidate? I thought I was voting for the glamorous, and now deceased, Welsh wrestler Adrian Street. I liked it when he pulled out Jimmy Savile’s hair in 1971.”
Area around Rio de Janeiro beach filled for several blocks as singer closes her Celebration world tour
More than a million people have thronged Brazil’s Copacabana beach for a free Madonna concert, braving the heat to see the end of her Celebration world tour.
The sand and oceanfront boulevard around Rio de Janeiro’s famed beach were filled for several blocks on Saturday night by a crowd the city estimated at 1.6 million.
The actor on catching the theatre bug playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret, being a football fan, and dealing with a fire that destroyed her home in LA
London-born Cara Delevingne, 31, began modelling in her teens and was twice model of the year at the British fashion awards. She started her acting career in Joe Wright’s 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina. Subsequent big screen roles include Paper Towns, Suicide Squad, Tulip Fever and London Fields. On TV, she has starred in Carnival Row, Only Murders in the Building and American Horror Story. She is now making her stage debut in the West End production of Cabaret.
We’re speaking the morning after you went to a Chelsea match. Are you a big fan? I definitely was in childhood, so it was a treat to return. I grew up going to Stamford Bridge with my uncle. Gianfranco Zola was my favourite player. When I was eight, I refused to take off my Chelsea kit for a wedding, so I wore it beneath my bridesmaid’s dress. Luckily, the groom was a Chelsea fan too, so nobody minded.
As I found during last week’s assisted dying debate, it’s not wrong to agree with the other side
It’s not often you find yourself nodding along with those with whom you normally profoundly disagree, and raising an eyebrow at the contributions of those you would count as political allies. But it was the position I found myself in listening to MPs debate assisted dying last week.
What to make of my outbreak of fervent agreement with Conservative Danny Kruger and DUP MP Ian Paisley? Some may see this as the mark of a repressed rightwinger, or a born-again social conservative. If you agree with a member of tribe X, you must de facto be part of that tribe, or so the argument goes.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
I like the rituals of getting ready for school but recently they were are thrown into undignified confusion
‘I’m woken by screaming every morning’ I explained to my colleagues, none of whom are parents themselves, proving once again that I am occasionally a poor ambassador for the child-rearing life. Someone’s alarm had gone off in the office, prompting me to tell them why I haven’t needed one in six years.
This is true. Since the birth of my kids, there has never been a day when they’ve stayed asleep long enough for me to risk being late for anything. For a good few months each year, I beat the sun to its desk. My daughter wakes up at 6.30am, and my day begins.
The business and trade secretary played into the ideological tosh that the wonders of the Industrial Revolution were funded by beer brewers and sheep farmers
Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe “Imperial Measurement”, a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative.
If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA. The tax “burden” of defending this barely profitable empire was not worth the candle. Instead, it was free-market economics that unleashed British economic growth – a truth that must be restated before Marxists and reparation-seeking ex-colonies start controlling the narrative.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
A new exhibition asks us to look again at classic images of war, protest and revolution, and sheds light on manipulated photographs
A Russian soldier raises a Soviet flag over Berlin’s Reichstag in Yevgeny Khaldei’s well-known 1945 photograph of wartime triumph.
But in the original image, the officer standing below can clearly be seen wearing a watch on both wrists. Khaldei’s shot, first printed in a Moscow magazine, was quickly withdrawn and the extra watch, which might actually have been a military compass, was removed for safety’s sake. Looting was not a good look and was punishable by death.
British Museum, London This huge yet intimate show of the Renaissance polymath’s work guides you by the heart as well as the eyes, through hypnotic studies, his own words, and drawings that are prayers as much as pictures
The final section of the British Museum’s exhibition Michelangelo: The Last Decades is circular and enclosed. The walls are black and the light low. The feeling is of being in a small chapel: if a person was to speak in this space, they would surely whisper – though my instinct was for absolute silence. The work on display here, made in the last 30 years of the artist’s long life, is so far beyond the meaning bestowed by words, and even if it wasn’t, who could improve on those of Michelangelo himself? By the door is one of his poems, dated 1554 (on loan from the Vatican library, it is gorgeously translated by James Saslow). “The voyage of my life has at last reached/ across a stormy sea, in fragile boat,” it begins. It acknowledges that the moment of “accounting” is imminent. It speaks of a soul that may no longer be calmed by the material. Death is engraved on its author’s every waking thought.
The sketches of the crucifixion in this room are exquisite, of course, their beauty and tenderness only deepened by the fact that the artist’s hand is now less steady, his sight possibly fading. But there’s something else as well: a numinosity that radiates outwards, like heat. These drawings are as much prayers as they are pictures, each one a bead on a rosary. Over and over, the artist works away with his black chalk, moving ever closer to the truth as he sees it. In Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist (c1555-63), Mary presses her cheek against Christ’s naked thigh. Her body half curled, her hand resting on her chin, she seems in her bewilderment and her sorrow more child than mother. It is one of the most daringly intimate depictions of the crucifixion I’ve ever seen, and for all that I’m more or less entirely godless these days, it brought me almost to tears.
No bars and only two ingredients… yet this dark chocolate is intensely good
I have something very special this week. A while ago, Bobbie of L’Esterre chocolate contacted me wanting to know if I would try her chocolate. She had recently taken over the family cocoa business – started by her grandfather in 1949 – as she had found herself ‘stranded’ in Grenada, where the cocoa farm is, over the pandemic.
This is not an unusual request and I’m always happy to try new chocolate. Thing is, I didn’t expect it to be quite so good.
As more NHS trusts in England report budget deficits health leaders warn that waiting lists will rise
Hospitals are being forced to cut medical staff, threatening their ability to care for patients, senior health leaders have warned.
NHS trusts are reporting budget deficits after the chancellor Jeremy Hunt gave England’s health service £2.5bn extra funding, which only covers inflation and pay increases.
Rapper says sport, music and gaming venture in south London is aimed at widening opportunities for young black community
Stormzy has won three Brit awards, headlined Glastonbury, persuaded Usain Bolt and José Mourinho to star in a music video, and bought AFC Croydon Athletic with the former Crystal Palace player Wilfried Zaha.
His skills on the pitch, however, are not up to much. “I’m shit at football. I was never going to be a footballer,” he said. “But maybe if I knew how to be a pundit [I’d have gone down that road]. Maybe if I knew how to be a data analyst or all the intricate jobs behind the scenes that people might not know about.”
Growing up on set put Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Connelly on the fast track to Hollywood fame. But despite her success, one of her lasting regrets was not finishing college – and, she says, it’s still on her to-do list…
Jennifer Connelly is on a Zoom call from her home in Brooklyn, jetlagged after attending Louis Vuitton’s pre-fall 2024 show in Shanghai, which does not bode well: she is known to have been reticent in past interviews, and sometimes while working. When she madeA Beautiful Mind, the 2001 movie for which she won an Oscar for playing the wife of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, the co-producer Brian Grazer was unnerved by her reserve. “It was hard for me to get to know her on the set because I’m so emotional,” he told a writer in 2001. “She’s very serious. She’s not silly. She doesn’t have that buoyancy.”
It is a relief, then, to find Connelly to be thoughtful and lovely and erudite, happy enough to discuss her life and career. I ask if Grazer’s description is one she’d recognise.
Rose Glass’s follow-up to her acclaimed Saint Maud is a scorchingly sexy, darkly violent tale of a gym manager’s love affair with a bodybuilder
This may seem an unexpected point to make about an actor who is arguably one of the coolest people on the planet, but the key to Kristen Stewart’s mesmerising screen presence is her ordinariness. I don’t mean her looks, although as Lou, the manager of a bodybuilding gym in an insalubrious New Mexico backwater, Stewart’s natural magnetism is somewhat muted behind a whey powder pallor, an air of defeated weariness and hair that looks as if it’s been deep-fried rather than washed.
Rather, it’s the unstudied, naturalistic quality of her performances, which are seeded with little glitchy details and gestures – the way she rakes her fingers through her fringe; the moment when she nervously wipes her nose on the sleeve of her T-shirt. Small things, perhaps, but these seemingly unconscious tics humanise her characters. They are recognisable, relatable moments of social awkwardness that anchor her in (or at least near) the real world. It’s a quality that adds to all her performances, but which is particularly invaluable in British director Rose Glass’s second picture, the deliciously lurid and thrillingly degenerate outlaw romance Love Lies Bleeding. When the rest of the movie launches itself headlong into outlandish, almost cartoonish excess, Lou is plausibly three-dimensional and grounded. The rooted realism that underpins Stewart’s performance offers a necessary balance to some of the more untrammelled impulses in Glass’s follow-up to her impressive debut feature, Saint Maud (2020).
Athletics Kenya is worried about how the climate might shape the future of its country, let alone its sport. And it is not alone
The drive from the tiny Eldoret airport to the town of Iten in the south-west corner of Kenya takes about an hour. It’s a winding unlit road with few road signs: you need to know where you’re going to get there. The town’s population isn’t known – there hasn’t been a census in more than a decade – but the local municipal authority estimates it around 56,000, up from 40,024 in 2009.
Roughly 35% live below the poverty line. And yet, a sign on the only paved road into town calls this the Home of Champions, owing to its phenomenal athletic success. This corner of Kenya has produced 14 men’s and nine women’s Boston Marathon winners since 1991, who have brought home 22 and 14 wins, respectively. They have also won 13 of 18 gold medals in the 3,000m steeplechase at the World Athletics Championships since the event was introduced in 1983.
Raised as we now are on social media and true crime, we need to fight the impulse to always find out more
If you haven’t yet watched Baby Reindeer, a story that begins with its star Richard Gadd’s experience with a stalker, you probably have a good reason. It will not be because, for instance, nobody has recommended it, told you how extraordinary it is, or powerful, or unique, and it won’t be because you haven’t heard of it – its success has been startling (as I type it’s at the top of Netflix’s UK and US charts weeks after its release) and its themes have made headlines. It could be, as is the case with a friend of mine, that its subject matter hits too close to home, and however unsettling it is for me to watch, for them the prospect feels like it might pull a thread and unravel everything, not least the damage caused by police failures, but we’ll come to that.
Despite Gadd’s nuanced portrayal of the woman who stalked him, and his beautifully strange story of love and trauma, some fans of the show quickly created a horrible sort of sequel when they attempted to expose the stalker on social media. Historic tweets were urgently screengrabbed, photographs posted side by side, she was quote-tweeted as if a celebrity – the character’s name was trending for days. On Instagram, Gadd urged them to stop. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
The traditional British weekend lunch is being revamped with more exotic ingredients by chefs with worldwide influences
The ingredients of a traditional Sunday roast are often passionately debated: does a yorkshire pudding belong if the meat is not beef? Is cauliflower cheese an acceptable side?
Now a growing number of pubs and restaurants are adding even more unusual contenders into the mix, adapting the beloved meal with global additions.
As this year’s event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City draws nearer, we look back at some of the biggest, boldest and most iconic looks to ascend its steps
The WTA finals host revealed its commitment to women’s rights by jailing a female activist
If a record of sexual apartheid is not the ideal look for a nation that must still, occasionally, placate progressives, news of an extreme example – the lengthy imprisonment of Manahel al-Otaibi, a 29-year-old fitness instructor and women’s rights activist – has at least arrived too late to tarnish Saudi Arabia’s latest sporting triumph: buying up the Women’s Tennis Association finals.
In fact, given that country’s hectic promotional schedule, there could hardly have been a more convenient time for human rights organisations to report, as they did last week, that al-Otaibi whose circumstances were for months unknown, is serving 11 years in prison for the “terrorist” offences of wearing “indecent clothes” (ie, not an abaya) and supporting women’s rights. Her sister, Fouz al-Otaibi, fled the country in 2022 to avoid similar persecution. Fouz tweeted last week: “Why have my rights become terrorism, and why is the world silent?”
Anger and grief have erupted, with women demanding action from the government on what has become a national emergency
It was the death of Samantha Murphy that prompted a sense that something in Australia was very wrong.
The 51-year-old mother of three left her home in Ballarat in regional Victoria to go for a jog at around 7am on a Sundaymorning in early February and did not return.
Longer sentences and court backlogs push 25% of prisoners in England and Wales into shared cells, adding to drug-use and violence
The scale of the prison overcrowding crisis has been laid bare by figures revealing that a quarter of prisoners in England and Wales have been sharing cells designed for one person with at least one other inmate.
According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), 11,018 cells intended for single use were being shared by two prisoners, with a further 18 such cells shared by three inmates. The overall prison population – which has ballooned over recent decades because of longer sentences and court backlogs – stood at about 88,000 when the statistics were originally compiled in late February.
Lost documents prevented victims from finding out the truth, official inquiry told
Disastrous failures that caused the contaminated blood scandal were denied by ministers for decades after officials destroyed, lost and blocked access to key documents, memos submitted to the official inquiry reveal.
Several batches of files involving the work of a blood safety advisory committee were shredded as the government faced the threat of legal action, documents show. Patients who were given contaminated blood when they were children have also told the infected blood inquiry how their hospital medical files were destroyed or initially withheld.
Centre-right politicians must resist urge to copy or work with far right, Spain’s environment minister says
The future of the EU is being jeopardised by people stirring up social tensions for short-term political gain, Spain’s environment minister has said ahead of next month’s European parliamentary elections.
Teresa Ribera, who is heading the list for the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ party in June’s poll, said the European project is at risk of “an implosion”.
I travelled the UK interviewing teenage boys. I found openness, thoughtfulness, honesty and vulnerability on topics from sex to pornography, feelings and isolation
It was two separate conversations that made me think properly about what life might be like as a boy these days. The first was about a 13-year-old, the son of a friend, who said he had been rounded on for making a small (and, he thought, complimentary) comment about a girl’s haircut.
He told his mother that the girl’s friends were outraged: “Oh my God, you can’t say that about someone’s appearance. That’s so bad. You can’t talk about a girl like that!”
Formerly best known as The Crown’s Prince Charles, the British actor is starring as a cocky US tennis pro in Guadagnino’s new hit film. But, he says, he was happiest living off grid in a van for his next film, La Chimera
What makes a movie star? Josh O’Connor, the 33-year-old British actor best known until, well, last week as the thin-skinned, tight-lipped Prince Charles in seasons three and four of The Crown, has been mulling over this question of late. Earlier this year he completed a drama set in the first world war called TheHistory of Sound, with Paul Mescal. “Paul’s a friend, and to watch him work was amazing,” says O’Connor. “I really can’t underplay how brilliant he is. Paul has that movie-star quality, whatever that is. I wish I could articulate it, but he’s just graceful about it all.”
Zendaya is another one. O’Connor is currently in cinemas alongside her in Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s critically acclaimed psychosexual tennis romp, which topped the box offices in both the UK and US last weekend. They play two sides of a lascivious love triangle, with Mike Faist as the third, but it is clear that Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan is the one pulling the strings. “I’ve never done premieres like I’ve done with Challengers,” says O’Connor. “So that’s alien to me anyway, but to see how she breezes through them with such class and generosity. I’m a nervous wreck, I don’t think I’m helpful to anyone. And Mike as well, we’re both a bit like: ‘What the fuck? This is mad!’ But she’s just on the nail.
Berkshire Hathaway’s billionaire CEO, 93, steels shareholders for new eraat the annual meeting known as ‘Woodstock for Capitalists’
As dawn broke on Saturday, thousands had gathered outside Omaha’s CHI Health Center Arena. Some arrived before 3.30am, standing for hours in the drizzle.
This is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, said Larry Blivas, 70, near the front of the line. The realtor traveled from Los Angeles to see “an icon”, he explained.
Organisers of this year’s environmental conference hope cooperation on green issues could help ease global tensions
This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit will be the first “Cop of peace”, focusing on the prevention of future climate-fuelled conflicts and using international cooperation on green issues to help heal existing tensions, according to plans being drawn up by organisers.
Nations may be asked to observe a “Cop truce”, suspending hostilities for the fortnight-long duration of the conference, modelled on the Olympic truce, which is observed by most governments during the summer and winter Olympic Games.
An absorbing study of five Labour radicals – Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Ken Livingstone, plus Benn himself – makes a convincing case for their cultural victories but romanticises Corbyn’s years as the party’s leader
This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.
In the long, final section, covering 2015 to the present day, Beckett writes nostalgically about the excitement of the early years of Corbyn’s leadership when the left, for so long ridiculed, traduced and marginalised (Peter Mandelson joked during the era of New Labour dominance that they had been contained in a “sealed tomb”), seized control of the party and unlocked a spirit of radical countercultural optimism, especially among younger voters.
There’s a great restaurant and bar scene in this surf mecca, plus birdlife and snorkelling on peaceful islands a short ride away
It was the small and enigmatic Berlengas archipelago that drew us to Peniche harbour. Peniche, 60 miles north of Lisbon, is famous for its surfing beaches, but the islands off its coast often get overlooked. Every morning a couple of hardy passenger boats bounce over eight miles of waves from the peninsula of Peniche to Berlenga Grande. We took our seats on deck between sacks of onions and oranges and, flecked with sea-spray and followed by flocks of screaming gulls, we watched green hills emerge from blue waves ahead. At the port, the goods are unloaded with gulls wheeling and cawing overhead.
Seabirds nest everywhere: in the island’s grass, its sea caves and its hidden coves. Keeping out of nesting areas, we followed a footpath to a pair of sandy beaches. The sea is warmer here than at the more open mainland stretches and, at Praia da Berlenga, it is as still and clear as sea-green stained glass and offers fantastic diving.
The celebrated writer, who died last week, is captured by Arnold Newman in his study in 1993 with his trusty Olympia manual typewriter
Few novelists ever inhabited their vocation with more conviction than Paul Auster, who died last week of lung cancer at the age of 77. This picture, taken in 1993 by Arnold Newman, captured the writer in his element and among the objects that defined him.
The author of The New York Trilogy is pictured in his basement study in the Brooklyn brownstone house that he shared with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt (she wrote in a room in the attic). The white walls and bare lightbulbs cast the 19th-century workspace in 20th-century light; you are reminded that his contemporary and friend Don DeLillo had, the previous year, described Auster’s fictional method as “building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors”. There is the ever-present authorial cigarette – Auster’s 1995 film Smoke was set in a Brooklyn tobacconist (he belatedly switched to a vape in 2018) – and, centre stage, the Olympia manual typewriter on which he produced every word of his novels and which was itself the subject of a short 2002 book.
The comic snuggles her cats, goes to gymnastics, squeals in delight at vegan Yorkshire puddings
Sunday mornings? I recently bought this book called Morning Miracles. It’s all about getting up 90 minutes earlier for journalling, exercise, meditation and breathing. When I started, I felt like a CEO; I told everyone about how life changing it was. Day six, I binned it off, and have never looked back.
What do you do instead? I get up around 8am, then I go and see my two cats: I follow them around, trying to snuggle, to let them know they’re loved.
Sunday workout? I’m back into fitness now – a swim at the lido or some yoga. Sometimes I go to a gymnastics class. I’m no natural, and have been trying to master a front-flip for longer than I can remember.
What’s for lunch? I love a roast. A friend invited a few of us round for Sunday lunch the other week. I got there, and she’d just made a normal meal. Lunch-on-a-Sunday is not Sunday lunch. I was livid. Feed me vegan Yorkshire puddings and I’ll squeal in delight like a piggy.
Sundays growing up? If Dad picked us up, he’d take us to the Toby Carvery. There’s nothing wrong with a Toby Carvery… but also there is? Else we watched telly. Families weren’t so child-focused. We might have gone to a castle once with a sandwich, but that was it.
The dream day? Write some really good jokes; a cold-water swim; meet friends at a fireside pub table for games: Bananagrams, Scrabble. And then, ideally, someone would tuck me in.
Last thing at night? I fiddle myself silly… No, that’s not true. I’ve just started face yoga, thanks for noticing. I don’t want to go under the knife, so with this you pinch your cheeks and nose like a nutter to keep yourself looking young.
Lou Sanders tours the UK with her show, No Kissing In The Bingo Hall, from Feb 2025 (lousanders.com)
Georgia’s brutal crackdown is aimed at torpedoing the population’s accesssion hopes
The tendency of long-entrenched governments to arrogantly ignore or override the public’s clearly expressed wishes is a familiar democratic flaw, attributable to the arrogance and hubris that stems from continuing, unchecked power. The former Soviet republic of Georgia is a prime example.
Polls consistently show that about 80% of Georgians want their country to join the European Union. The aim of achieving membership is enshrined in the constitution. Yet last week, Georgia’s government, ruling party and thuggish police did their violent best to torpedo hopes of EU accession. That they ultimately fail to do so is of great importance to Georgians and to Europe.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
Canelo Álvarez held off a feisty challenger Saturday night, proving to be the stronger and more effective boxer to retain his undisputed super middleweight championship, winning by unanimous decision to hand Jaime Munguía his first loss.
Tim Cheatham scored the fight 117-110, David Sutherland had it 116-111 and Steve Weisfeld 115-112.
Union leader Sharon Graham says Keir Starmer risks ‘limping into Downing Street’
Labour’s biggest union backer has warned it may divert election funding earmarked for the party, amid claims that Keir Starmer is diluting plans to overhaul workers’ rights.
In an interview with the Observer, Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, said the Labour leader risked “limping into Downing Street” if he backed down in the face of intense lobbying from businesses.
Legacy can be found in the lives you touch and your impact on others
The question I am a 54-year-old woman with a good career and a stable marriage. I live across the globe from my parents, my siblings and their kids and I am child-free. I have reduced contact with them to brief and polite birthday and Christmas messages, which they respond to, but we have no relationship or ongoing contact as such. It is close to estrangement, and I have no desire to try to repair this. I am child-free because I always feared repeating my family’s parenting style and had no sense of my childhood as a positive experience.
I have become preoccupied with the idea of a legacy of a life well lived. I have always placed high value on social contribution and working hard. But, as I increasingly ponder the likelihood of dying alone and without children, I have started to become quite critical about the point of striving in my career, and how and what I should be doing with my time. I feel “being forgotten” is a realistic proposition – and it leads me to wonder whether this is liberating, and I can stop striving, do as I please, or should I strive harder and find a way of leaving my mark, ensuring I have a life that will mean something? Is this just an indulgent existential crisis? Do I need to just get over myself?
With a famed pie maker on board, the new ‘British brasserie’ in Paris ought to be glorious. Instead, it’s a huge disappointment
Public House, 21 rue Daunou, 75002 Paris, France (+33 1 77 37 87 93; publichouseparis.fr). Starters €8.50-€19.50; mains €19.50-€36.50; desserts €9-€15; wines from €28
It was a simple plan: hop on the Eurostar to Paris and go for dinner at Public House, a new and audacious restaurant in the 9th arrondissement by pie king Calum Franklin, formerly of the Holborn Dining Room. Its mission: to bring scotch eggs, sausage rolls and the best, most golden, flaky pastry creations to the French. I could then write a sweet observational piece about the bourgeoisie of the Louboutin-shod opera district swooning over steak and ale pies, and adjusting both their corsets and their gastronomic perspective. Behold, the gravy-slicked anglais showing us how to eat. “Donney-moi une autre pie” etc. Because if anybody could do it, if anybody could finally make the French understand the quality and depth of modern British restaurant food, it had to be Franklin. He’s a gifted chef. He’s a lovely man. He literally wrote the book on pies. Go Calum, go.
The IPP scandal should not be seen in isolation. It is all part of today’s politics by vilification
David Blunkett acknowledged last week that it was the “biggest regret” of his political life. As home secretary under Tony Blair in 2001, Blunkett was the architect of the “imprisonment for public protection” scheme, or IPP.
Under the IPP system, offenders were given a sentence (or “tariff”) proportionate to the offence committed. Once that sentence was completed, the offender was not released but remained imprisoned for as long as the Parole Board deemed them a “risk to society”. And when finally released, they remained on licence, meaning they could be recalled to prison at any time for minor breaches of regulation, or even because, as MPs discovered, of a “lack of… suitable accommodation”.
The health service took a turn for the worse under David Cameron and Keir Starmer has said nothing of improving the nurses’ lot
Reading of Dan Poulter’s defection (“Top Tory MP defects to Labour in fury at NHS crisis”) was of particular interest to me: I am a mental health nurse in the NHS; I too cover the A&E department in my local hospital; and I work for the same NHS trust. He lists many reasons why he is appalled at the state of the NHS, and does well to highlight the suffering that mental health patients are forced to go through, thanks to lack of resources and outsourcing to private providers.
However, it was laughable to read of his praise for David Cameron’s Conservative party, with its “commitment to the NHS”. Poulter speaks of his concern over health inequalities, yet it was Cameron’s party that unleashed austerity and only advanced such inequalities. Poor mental health is overwhelmingly experienced by those from a lower socioeconomic standing. Many people were accelerated into poverty thanks to Cameron’s policies.
The UK regulator has been criticised by grieving families and internet abuse survivors for failing to engage with them
Bereaved parents and abuse survivors who have endured years of “preventable, life-changing harm” linked to social media say they have been denied a voice in official discussions about holding tech firms to account.
Night-response officer Chris Carson is dragged into Liverpool’s drug war. Plus: a beautiful documentary about The Piano winner Lucy. Here’s everything to watch this evening
In the right hands, there’s diversity and much to love about grüner veltliner, the signature Austrian white grape, and other local drops
Funkstille Grüner Veltliner, Niederösterreich, Austria 2023 (from £12.49, Hay Wines) It’s taken a while, but it does seem as if Austrian wine, a long-neglected part of the classical European vinous repertoire, is finally getting something like its due attention in British wine shops and supermarkets. The country’s wines have, in fact, long been sommelier favourites, thanks, I think, to their ability to combine freshness and ripeness. Certainly, when it comes to Austria’s signature white grape variety, grüner veltliner, there’s no lack of aromatic fleshy fruit flavour of the sort that drinkers reared on, say, New Zealand sauvignon blanc, might enjoy. But there’s a natural briskness, too, plus a range of intriguing spicier flavours, notably white pepper and something green and savoury I think of as celery salt. There are some very attractive own-label bottlings at M&S, Waitrose and Morrisons around the £8-9 mark, but if you can it’s worth shelling out a few quid more for the extra level of concentrated ripe pear, peach and pithy, zippy lime and orange in the exuberantly youthful new vintage from Funkstille.
Maria & Sepp Muster Gräfin, Steiermark, Austria 2020 (£41.60, Vinvm) Another outstanding grüner comes from a producer that has winemaking roots going back more than a millennium: the impeccable Schloss Gobelsburg Grüner Veltliner Langenlois, Kamptal 2022 (from £18, Hedonism, The Whisky Exchange) is an irresistibly stylish swish of luscious apricot fruit seasoned with that classic grüner white pepper and salt. Austria’s growers are also justly famous for their rieslings, for which there is a heritage every bit as rich and long as in Germany or Alsace: Domäne Wachau, a contender for the title of the world’s best co-operative producer, makes a number of superb examples, starting with the perfectly weighted mix of fleshy tropical fruit and lime ping and zing of Domäne Wachau Riesling Federspiel Terrassen 2022 (£19.40, Noble Grape). As well as the classics, Austria also has one of the world’s most vibrant and adventurous natural wine scenes, which is responsible for some truly extraordinary orange wines, such as Maria and Sepp Muster’s Gräfin, a soft, gently grippy but exceedingly complex wine with flavours that range from strawberry and Campari to ripe apple.
Login
