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Saoirse Ronan on playing a vampire in Byzantium
WHO is afraid of Saoirse Ronan? In the bowels of a Glasgow hotel, she looks innocent enough, sitting demurely in the manner of a 1950s model, legs crossed at the ankle and chatting about how best to drain a body of blood.
Angelina Jolie brings home a frightening dilemma
AS WENDY Helliwell came downstairs on Wednesday morning, the name Jolie flashed on the TV screen. She caught the words “double mastectomy”.
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Claire Black: Young women face the same problems as men
DIANE Abbott MP, is a woman I have some trouble taking seriously since my retinas were scarred watching as she and Michael Portillo writhed together, OK sat, on the This Week sofa, and also that time she said private schools were bad before promptly sending her son to one.
Fordyce Maxwell: Fifteen minutes ago I knew what a pediment was. Now I was damned if I did
IT WAS some years since I’d been in an exam room.
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: Yes vote is a leap of imagination
HOW important are the voices of artists in the independence referendum?
Art review: Scotland + Venice 2013, Venice
I MEET the artist Hayley Tompkins in a Glasgow coffee shop during a brief sunny interlude in a week of rain.
Film review: Beware Of Mr Baker
THERE are probably more foolhardy enterprises than interviewing the aggressively venomous rock drummer Ginger Baker for a documentary, but it’s hard to think of many.
Film review: The Great Gatsby
IT HAS been suggested that there’s something of the Gatsby about Baz Luhrmann, since both men are predisposed to throwing extravagantly spectacular parties, with just a hint of hollowness.
Album review: Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
Like the ubiquitous single Get Lucky, Daft Punk’s new album is a distillation of pop’s better moments of the last four decades.
Book review: All That Is by James Salter
IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-certainly-last novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?
Flowers of Scotland at the Chelsea Flower Show
THERE are nine of them. Nine Chelsea girls, or Chelsea ladies to be precise, down from Scotland, from Kelso, Keith, Castle Douglas, Dalgety Bay, North Berwick, East Lothian, from all over, and poised, secateurs in hand, to take Britain’s most prestigious gardening show by storm.
Film reviews: Fast & Furious 6 | Something In The Air | Epic
DO YOU like cars? Or do you prefer movies where bulging, baldy action heroes like Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel glower at each other like homoerotic new potatoes?
Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown
ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.
Book review: The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley
A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”
Book review: Grace And Mary by Melvyn Bragg
OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
TV review: Apprentice | The Politician’s Husband | Life of Crime
‘CLICHES, cliches... I’m sick and tired of all that bloody rubbish, to be honest with you.” Is this a) Lord Sugar when confronted with another bunch of braggards spouting business-speak on The Apprentice? Or b) your correspondent on having to listen to yet more soundbites, headlines and clunky phrases passing for dialogue in The Politician’s Husband? Both, actually. Let’s deal with The Apprentice first.
Claire Black: Reading time is precious and I don’t want to waste it on Dan Brown
DAN Brown has a new book out this week. I confess I am underwhelmed.
2 commentsFordyce Maxwell: I felt I could come off the subs bench at short notice if needed. I wasn’t, so didn’t
TWENTY minutes into the demonstration I had my lightbulb moment with: “I could do that.”
Eurovision: From nul points to Number One
It’s Eurovision time again, and David Elder has the lowdown on the cheesiest show on TV
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: The problem is Merida has been turned into an object
AS YOU may have heard, Merida from Brave has just become an official Disney princess, and had a makeover to celebrate.
Book review: The Society Of Timid Souls: Or How To Be Brave, Polly Morland
IN THIS fascinating rumination on the nature of courage and cowardice, there’s a chapter titled “Crime And Punishment” in which, among other things, Polly Morland has frank conversations with two armed robbers, now reformed.
Book review: Dear Lumpy, Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer
A DEFTLY witty collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his wastrel son Charlie, Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year.
Book review: The Round House, Louise Erdrich
LOUISE Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many of her novels and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.
Romain Duris on his new film, a ‘Rocky with typewriters’
Having swerved some English-speaking roles, French actor Romain Duris tells Siobhan Synnot why there’s no place like home when it comes to his film choices
Film review: The Stoker (15)
IT’S hard to define the films of Alexei Balabanov; he’s like an angry Aki Kaurismäki, or a more impassive Gaspar Noé.
Film review: The Liability (15)
LIKE the trade itself, movies about hit men work best when they are quick, capable and thoroughly bloody.
Art review: David Batchelor - Flatlands, Edinburgh
FOR most people October is a month. For art world types it’s a secular bible. October, founded in New York in 1976, is the journal that, depending on your point of view, is the voice of radical critique or the delusional product of an inward-looking clique. Unbelievers have even named a syndrome after it: Octoberism.
Album review: Primal Scream - More Light
THERE’S more light but much less of an Exile On Main Street parody here than on much of the band’s recent work, as Bobby Gillespie submerges us in his wonderful world of psychedelic paranoia.
The Royal Caledonian Ball keeps it reel in London video
Once a year the Grosvenor Hotel in London is turned into a floor-shaking bacchanal when the tartan aristocracy take the floor for the Royal Caledonian Ball
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Book review: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Vol 1, Charles Moore
Sir Malcolm Rifkind hails a biography of Thatcher that finally offers an authoritative voice on the woman behind the legacy
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How Clyde shipyard technology created the ultrasound
Shipyard equipment, maverick characters and bits of Meccano ... Dani Garavelli reports on the amazing birth of the ultrasound scan
Now That’s What I Call Music: Then and now
As Now That’s What I Call Music celebrates its 30th birthday, Andrew Eaton-Lewis explores the enduring appeal of the strange pick and mix that has been the soundtrack to 100 million lives
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Claire Black: One in five young adults doesn’t own a hammer, a screwdriver or a spanner
OUR stair door started sticking recently. It wasn’t entirely refusing to close, just being a bit recalcitrant unless you really slammed it.
1 commentFordyce Maxwell: Most killer dogs start with the excitement of seeing something run away
MY FATHER was an intermittent diary-keeper. Occasional bursts of a few days would be followed by weeks or months of no entries. Years could pass without a diary at all.
Anna Burnside: It’s a frog’s life
With spring barely sprung and an alarming dearth of spawn, our favourite amphibian’s fight for survival has never been tougher
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Andrew Eaton-Lewis: In some respects American Psycho makes perfect sense as a musical
IS IT a good idea to make an all-singing, all-dancing stage version of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho?
Book review: The Bonobo And The Atheist, Frans de Waal
IN THE opening scene of Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planete Des Singes, two pampered space travellers, coasting the interstellar tides in a space-skiff, discover an interplanetary message in a bottle.
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Book review: Cities Are Good For You, Leo Hollis
LEO Hollis opens his latest book by asking readers to close their eyes and imagine a place where they feel most happy. The chances are, he points out, this won’t be an urban scene but beaches, meadows, mountains, villages.
Book review: The Humans, Matt Haig
IN THE acknowledgments at the end of his latest novel, Matt Haig reveals that he first had the idea for this story in 2000 while he was in the middle of a breakdown.
Book review: A Place In The Country, WG Sebald
When WG Sebald pays his dues to the ghosts of his literary past he reveals why his own legacy will endure, writes Stuart Kelly
Film reviews: A Hijacking | White Elephant | Gangs of Wasseypur (Parts 1 and 2)
The rest of this week’s film releases, reviewed by Siobhan Synnot
Visual art review: Carol Boave, The Foamy Saliva Of A Horse
The flotsam and jetsam of Carol Bove’s sculpture belies a maddening attention to detail the Victorians would have understood
Album reviews: Noah & The Whale | Ghostpoet | Alison Moyet
The latest album releases reviewed by The Scotsman music critics
TV review: Vicious | The Job Lot | Dave Allen: God’s Own Comedian
LAST week I slagged off Ben Elton’s sitcom The Wright Way for being old-fashioned. Poor Ben took such a kicking for it that I almost felt sorry for him.
House of cards: The dangers of interest-only mortgages
If they could pull their heads out of the sand, many interest-only mortgage borrowers would realise their best move is to sell up now, writes Dani Garavelli
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The Great Gatsby kicks off Cannes Film Festival
There’s a delicious irony in Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby kicking off the star-studded celebrations at the world’s most glamorous film festival, writes Hannah McGill
Stockholm’s Abba museum is thankful for the music
As a shrine to pop’s cheesiest foursome opens in Stockholm, Emma Cowing explains why Abba’s songs will never be history
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Film review: Star Trek Into Darkness
FOUR years ago JJ Abrams rescued Star Trek from the Neutral Zone with an amped- up reboot which managed to channel the original characters in ways that were funny, smart and sometimes even touching.
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 20 May 2013
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