FilmObituaryJohnny SekkaDakar-born actor whose film career was built in LondonJohnny Sekka, who has died in California at the age of 72, built a name for himself in films in London in the 1960s, breaking new ground at a time when substantial roles for black actors were hard to come by. In the 1970s, when British cinema was going through hard times, he moved to the United States, but the good parts were still hard to come by. Read More...
UK newsMurder charge man tells of neck fetishA musician wept yesterday as he told a court he accidentally strangled a schoolteacher to death after she consented to his 20-year fetish for women's necks.
Graham Coutts, 35, used a washing up bottle and a length of ribbon to simulate the moment he wrapped a pair of tights around Jane Longhurst's neck after explaining the "ground rules" of asphyxial sex.
He then broke down in the witness box at Lewes crown court in East Sussex as he claimed that Ms Longhurst's naked body fell limp, and began bleeding. Read More...
The ObserverHistory booksReviewMalise Ruthven admires two books that ask how modern conflicts have come to be clothed in the language of medieval holy warsThe historian Marc Bloch, who died a martyr's death when shot by the Nazis, observed that "once an emotional chord has been struck, the limit between past and present is no longer regulated by a mathematically measurable chronology". Although we are approaching the millennium of the First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, the spirit of this archetypal conflict between a militant Catholicism and its rival faiths in Iberia, Southern France, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic lives on. Read More...
