Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, in 1992, two years before he died. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex ShutterstockDerek Jarman at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, in 1992, two years before he died. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex ShutterstockAutobiography and memoirWild, honest, riotous, the film-maker’s diary showed me what it meant to be an artist, to be political – and how to plant a garden
There’s no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature. There’s nothing I’ve read as often, or that has shaped me so deeply. Read More...
The ObserverTrue crime booksMore than a century after a crime that gripped America, it is still a magnet for authors and film-makersHere in Britain if we know Lizzie Borden at all it’s probably as the gruesome subject of an infuriatingly catchy children’s rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty one”. But that is all set to change as a host of new projects including a film, Lizzie Borden, starring Chloe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, a highly anticipated debut novel, See What I Have Done, and a revival of a cult US rock musical, Lizzie, place America’s most famous probable parricide back in the spotlight again. Read More...
BooksReviewA study of Thatcher's era that leaves vital questions unansweredBritain changed more in the 1980s than in almost any recent decade. The rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the wider retreat of the left and the return of military confidence, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment – more than twice as high even in the mid-80s boom as when Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979 – all make the decade feel like the hinge of our modern history. Read More...
