Category Culture
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There’s a new space race – will the billionaires win?
The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose
If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.
The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.
Not just love, actually: why romance fiction is booming
From Emily Henry to Rebecca Yarros and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – romance has dominated the book charts this year. So why is it still dismissed by critics?
People buy lipstick when the world is falling apart. This genuine economic theory, known as the “lipstick index”, was first noted by Leonard Lauder (son of the more famous Estée). When the world seems very bleak – in the weeks and months after the twin towers fell, for instance, or after the 2008 financial crash – and spending generally goes down, lipstick sales trend strongly upwards.
The psychological truth at the heart of this equation is real: when people have less than they need, they spend more on small, beautiful things. It’s easy, maybe, to dismiss this in the way most feminine-coded things are dismissed: frivolous, wasteful, foolish. But that would be a mistake. A single treasure, bright and gorgeous, is like a talisman; a candle in the night. It is possible, with your small candle, to make your way in the darkness. One delight, against all this. The world crumbles, and lipstick sales go up.
‘There’s a sense of our freedoms becoming vulnerable’: novelist Alan Hollinghurst
A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change
If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it”, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.”
But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole”.
David Walliams dropped by publisher over alleged inappropriate behaviour
HarperCollins has ‘decided not to publish any new titles’ by Walliams after the successful children’s author was reportedly accused of harassing junior female staff
David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher after an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards young women, the Telegraph has reported.
Walliams, one of Britain’s most successful children’s authors, was reportedly the subject of complaints that he had “harassed” junior female staff at HarperCollins UK, prompting the publisher to decide it would no longer release new titles by the author.
Yael van der Wouden : ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cured my fear of aliens’
The Safekeep author on her secret childhood reading, falling in love with Elizabeth Strout and why she keeps coming back to Zadie Smith
My earliest reading memory
I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed – orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic – but I retain nothing of what I read. I do remember a book of dirty jokes I was obsessed with at the age of eight. I was convinced it was off limits to me (it wasn’t) and so I waited until my parents were at work to shamefully steal it from the bookshelf. One time, my mother found it under my pillow and I was mortified. I recall her being confused and putting it back with a mumbled “I don’t judge” as she left the room.
My favourite book growing up
hat must have been one of Thea Beckman’s novels, most likely Hasse Simonsdochter. Beckman was the author for young adults in 80s and 90s Netherlands.
Making Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce review – the musical brothers behind the movie magic
Bob and Dick Sherman take centre stage in this well-researched account of how Walt Disney created a classic
Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.
The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future.
A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke audiobook review – an honest and hilarious memoir
The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-liners
A lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,” she hooted, and did a little dance.
Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and French and Saunders, being called a genius by Peter Cook and taken by Luc Besson’s private jet to collect the prize for best actress at Cannes film festival for Gary Oldman’s 1997 film Nil By Mouth. There, much to her chagrin, she found herself “accepting a bellini cocktail from Harvey fuckface Weinstein”.
Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen review – a prescient classic of cryogenics
This resurrected Danish novel about a man who is ‘frozen down’, awaking in an Orwellian dystopia two decades later, is inventive, funny and all too timely
In the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.
It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are “frozen down”, remaining in a state of suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced sufficiently to offer a cure.
The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore review – do we now know what causes schizophrenia?
A brilliant history of psychiatric ideas suggests we are on the cusp of a transformation in our understanding of severe mental illness
In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.
Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients admitted, 20% were deemed suspicious. It was then that Rosenhan revealed this had been a ruse as well: no pseudopatients had been sent to the hospital at all. Not only had doctors failed to spot sane people in their midst; they couldn’t reliably recognise the actually insane.