The pressure’s off when we’re not staring at each other, we can relax and have a nice chat
On the day after Boxing Day last year, my dad and I went to buy some cabbage. My aunt and cousins were joining us for dinner that evening and we had a meal to prepare. The local supermarket was closed and the cabbage, sourced from an Italian deli around the corner, was obscenely overpriced. In a bind, we bought some anyway and headed back home to begin cooking. Standing around the kitchen island chopping and peeling vegetables, preparing a rib of beef and assembling a side dish of dauphinoise potatoes, we listened to music and chatted. The meal was a success and the cabbage – lightly browned and decorated with caraway seeds – tasty. But most important was that, for the time we had spent cooking, I felt closer to my dad.
This kind of intimacy almost always occurs for me while I’m cooking with someone. When I was 14, I was paired with a classmate in food technology where we were tasked with making a meal from scratch. We decided on a menu of jerk chicken, rice and peas. For practice, we gathered a group of friends at my house and, after procuring our ingredients, got to work. The results of our efforts were average, but that joint experience of clumsily blitzing fiery scotch bonnet peppers, onions, garlic and various sauces into a clumpy and barely edible mess cemented our friendship.
The actor, 49, talks about his royal heritage, earliest memory, hard times in a hostel, four gifted kids and what happened when he met Sidney Poitier
David, you are going to walk among kings.” This was my mum’s prophecy when I was small. My father is from a royal family in Nigeria, so I interpreted it that way. Remarkably, she was right: I went on to play King Pelasgus, Henry VI, Martin Luther King and Seretse Khama.
My earliest memory is sitting on my dad’s shoulders as he walked down Balham High Street in London. I was eating a cream puff, watching the sugar fall into his hair. I can still smell and taste the cream. It felt magical, both the longest and the shortest walk imaginable.
We moved from the UK to Nigeria, where I attended a military-style boarding school for three years. There were lashings and I was made to cut an entire field with a cutlass. Those formative years were character-building and made me value the wisdom of elders, but the idea of subjecting my own children to that is inconceivable.
When we returned to the UK, we lived in a hostel for a time. Mum was coping with a lot of challenges, but she was a joyful person and always made our environment feel like we were kings again.
My wife [actor Jessica Oyelowo] was told her IQ is off the charts during an assessment for ADHD. Now, she’s a member of Mensa. Our four children are neurodiverse, too. They have incredibly special attributes that they wear as superpowers. I’m in awe that I get to be their father.
Any lasting relationship needs non-negotiables. We made the decision early on never to be apart for longer than two weeks: 26 years married and we’ve only broken that rule once, by 11 hours, when my wife was in Sleepy Hollow. If I ever meet [director] Tim Burton, I’ll be having words.
Never let the sun go down on your wrath. We won’t go to bed if a disagreement isn’t resolved – sleep makes it grow like cancer. Before you know it, you don’t remember why you were fighting, ego and pride becomes a factor, and then it starts to fall apart.
God has never let me down. He’s a key factor in guiding my decisions and feeling safe within them. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages, one of them quite late in the pregnancy. Without faith, we would have retreated into our own corners to lick our wounds, but our love increased.
Sidney Poitier, a hero of mine, was full of compliments and respect when we met. I mustered up the courage to say hello and to tell him what he means to me, but instead he started talking about my work. I still doubt myself that it happened, but I have the photograph.
Oprah Winfrey played my mother in The Butler. In one scene, she slaps me across the face, which was nerve-racking, because with each take she was gaining in confidence. Oprah taught me that the intention with which you do something manifests in the thing itself. If your intentions are pure, the chances are that it will be edifying both for you and the people you’re doing it for.
Success is subjective. It can sometimes mean coming away from something that failed, knowing you gave your best. That has been a guiding and guarding principle for me and has stood me in very good stead.
A Wall Street Journal article offered disturbing details about the billionaire’s behavior. Imagine the backlash if he were a woman
I regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.
Somerset House, London After 10 fun-packed years, it’s a wrap for the UK’s biggest celebration of indie, communal gameplay. But the folk games at the heart of this year’s edition have now filtered into the mainstream, from Taskmaster to The Traitors
When she was a child growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Holly Gramazio made up a game with her friend Summer. The two girls would lie back on swings with their eyes closed. When someone made too much noise nearby, they’d sit to attention and yell as loudly as they could: “Don’t wake me up!” The game captured a child’s view of grownups and their irksome inconsistencies – the self-defeating idea, or perhaps threat, that an adult could scream themselves awake amid their stated efforts to remain asleep. It was a co-operative game: the two girls “won” if they shouted in unison. If only one yelled, they lost. “This is the first game I remember playing,” records Gramazio in the printed guide (which also doubles as a delicious compendium of folk games) for the final Now Play This festival of experimental game design.
It’s wrapping up “for the same reasons a lot of festivals wrap up”, she writes in a blog post marking its closure. “Sooner or later you need to find a way to make it more sustainable… Or if you can’t do that, you have to go: well, we had a fun time but that’s enough.”
The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students, alumni, and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington.
Duke of York’s, London A triumphant staging by Rebecca Lucy Taylor of her new album, A Complicated Woman, is part artistic statement, part power pop club night
Hard-edged digital club music throbs from the theatre stage – a place mostly in darkness, its shadows hiding a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. Standing in a row, glaring at the theatre audience, are Self Esteem and 10 dancers. They are not dancing. It’s a tense, delicious contradiction. The company stand stock-still for what feels like ages, clad in bonnets, collars and black gowns – half convent, half Gilead.
When they do move, it’s just their heads at first, glaring accusatively at one spotlit audience member. Gradually, these halting and jerky gestures become spasms, which become seizures, until finally the tension is released into something akin to dancing.
“Still all square,” writes Simon McMahon. “A Celtic v Aberdeen Scottish Cup final would result in fifth place in Scotland getting a European spot, which means that it would be likely that Dundee United finish their first season back in the top flight with a European ‘adventure’, if that’s what you can call a Conference qualifying round defeat in some European outpost in July. I’ll take it though. Oh, and ‘Big’ Sam Dalby has made the PFA Scotland Team of the Year, one of only two non Old Firm players to do so.”
Graeme Winn, 65, and Elaine Winn, 58, were among four people who died in incident on Thursday
The UK Foreign Office has said it is supporting the family of a couple who were killed in a cable car crash in Naples.
Graeme Winn, 65, and Elaine Winn, 58, were among four people who died on Thursday at Monte Faito in the town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples in southern Italy.
ITIA responds after reminder about anti-doping rules
Mark Petchey says that the statute is ‘unacceptable’
The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) has come under fire after it issued a reminder about anti-doping rules, saying players chosen to give samples must remain in full view of chaperones if they choose to take a shower first.
In a note sent to players via the tours that has found its way on to social media, the ITIA said although it had worked hard to ensure that showers after matches can amount to permissible delays to doping control it was not an “entitlement”. It requested players opting to freshen up first to strictly adhere to the requirement to stay in full view of the chaperone observing them at all times, and that failure to do so would be taken extremely seriously by the ITIA.
Aaron Ramsey takes over for last three games of season
Bluebirds currently languishing 23rd in Championship
Aaron Ramsey has been given the task of trying to save Cardiff City from relegation after manager Omer Riza was sacked on Saturday.
The Bluebirds parted company with Riza after a 2-0 defeat at Sheffield United on Good Friday left them 23rd in the Championship, one point from safety.
Non-league club garners attention after overseas trip to St Ives match arranged for subscribers to YouTube channel
Football tourism is usually seen at Premier League stadiums like Old Trafford, Anfield and the Emirates, so fans of Harborough Town, who compete in the seventh tier of the football pyramid, were stunned when 100 Spaniards arrived at Bowden Park to watch them take on St Ives Town.
The Spanish fans, who turned up last Saturday, were subscribers to a Spanish YouTube channel, La Media Inglesa (LMI), focused on English football, which has now started arranging overseas trips for its followers.
Revulsion at deadly Oklahoma City explosion in 1995 has faded. But echoes of the blast, and its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, are heard today as far-right ideas storm the US
The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.
A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.
Recent research suggests our brain power is in decline. Is offloading our cognitive work to AI driving this trend?
Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: “Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author.”
Today, most of us wouldn’t need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We’d get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend.
UK brands are finding ever-inventive ways to quench consumers’ thirst for non-dairy alternatives
With white-suited operatives tapping buttons on huge machines and its walls a tangle of heavy-duty pipes, the sprawling complex in the Northamptonshire countryside could pass for a Bond villain’s lair, were it not for the comforting porridge smell.
But rather than plotting world domination, the site’s owner, Navara Oat Milling, is piggybacking on Britons’ growing thirst for plant-based alternatives to dairy. At regular intervals, trucks loaded with up to 30 tonnes of oat flour trundle eight miles up the road to the Alpro factory in Kettering, which churns out over 200m litres of plant milk a year.
Appraisal of international public affairs leaders warned companies against aligning with ‘polarizing’ Trump ally
Associating with the Donald Trump administration’s multibillionaire adviser Elon Musk and misusing artificial intelligence are among the most surefire ways for companies to damage their brands, a new survey of more than 100 international public affairs leaders found.
Those findings stem from an appraisal conducted by the Global Risk Advisory Council, which was chaired by the head of the US Small Business Administration during Joe Biden’s presidency, Isabel Guzman.
Grand Designs team to make show set in wealthy English countryside that promises to be part glittering social whirl and part bloodbath
The Cotswolds had better steel itself: reality television is upon it. A series is planned (rumoured working title: Ladies of the Cotswolds) and it sounds posher than most. It’s made by the company behind Grand Designs and set in the “chocolate box” town of Charlbury, in the Evenlode valley.
Names are being proposed for the series, such as Gabriela Peacock (nutritionist entrepreneur married to hedge fund banker David Peacock, and pals with Joan Collins and Princess Beatrice). Plum Sykes (author of last year’s Cotswolds-set novel Wives Like Us) is thought to be scripting the voiceover. Then there’s “Suzie Jet” (Suzannah Harvey), CEO of the local airport. How marvellously down to earth and relatable they all sound. Though of course they don’t, and that’s the point.
Member states are considering removing the country’s voting rights after its attempts to stymie support for Kyiv
The posters are going up all over Hungary. “Let’s not allow them to decide for us,” runs the slogan alongside three classic villains of Hungarian government propaganda.
They are: Ukraine’s wartime leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy; the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen; and Manfred Weber, the German politician who leads the centre-right European People’s party in the European parliament, which counts Hungary’s most potent opposition politician among its ranks.
Organizers have called for 11 million people across country to participate this weekend in effort to ‘protect democracy’
The US will witness its second wave of protests in a fortnight on Saturday as organizers seek to turn discontent with Donald Trump’s presidency into a mass movement that will eventually translate into action at the ballot box.
More than 400 rallies are anticipated across the nation loosely organized by the group 50501, which stands for 50 protests in 50 states, one movement.
iPhones and Google Maps are out – and you can keep your existing friends from across the pond, but don’t go making any new ones
I really wish I had a Tesla. Ideally it would be a Cybertruck but any Tesla would do. Then I could plaster it with those “I bought this before Elon went mad” stickers, shamefacedly sell it at a loss and write a performative social media post about no longer being able to stomach the guilt of driving it around town. But as I don’t actually own a car, let alone a Tesla, I’ve felt unable to add my voice to the anti-Musk and anti-Trump protests gaining momentum around the world. Until now.
Of course, I will not be travelling to the US at any time soon. As former US secretary of labor Robert Reich writes, why reward Trump’s America with my tourist dollars? But as I wasn’t planning to visit America, this doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, let alone a meaningful one. So the appearance of the #BoycottUSA movement has arrived at just the right time. Here is a campaign I can sign up to wholeheartedly. But I plan to go further than the one in three French people who are merely “avoiding” American products. Instead, I am proposing a total purge, ridding my house and my life of any taint of Americana. Not a Marlboro will be smoked, no Manhattan drunk, no foot stomped to the exuberant refrain of Cotton Eye Joe.
Tasneem Sharif Abbas, 16, flew with her sister to the US, where doctors awaited and volunteers cheered their arrival
Dozens of people across the world were in non-stop communication for several months to arrange the arrival of Tasneem Sharif Abbas to the US. Abbas’s entire life changed when a bomb dropped on her family’s home in Gaza on 31 October 2023. A piece of metal severed her arm and she blacked out as rubble fell on her. Soon after, her arm was amputated at a local Gaza hospital. “This is not a movie or a fictional story. This is the reality I have lived,” Abbas said in a statement. “This is just a glimpse of the dark days that have turned my life into a nightmare.”
Last year, the 16-year-old and an accompanying guardian, her adult sister Ashjan who is not injured, evacuated to Egypt, where they spent several months aboard a medical ship. The journey to fit Abbas with a prosthetic arm began with a 24-hour-flight from Cairo to New York, where volunteers met them in the airport during a several-hour layover. “The only time there was uncertainty was in the visa process,” said Raghed Ahmed, vice-president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a non-profit that has provided medical care to Middle Eastern kids since the 1990s. The group also facilitated the sisters’ travel. “We weren’t sure if it would take two weeks or six months, but her visa was approved in a couple of weeks,” Ahmed said.
At a moment when leaders of tech companies, law firms, media corporations and academic institutions have bent the knee to Donald Trump, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation insists that charitable organisations choose resistance over capitulation.
The revered artist conjured groundbreaking scenes of gods, legends and lost civilisations, but, more than anything, his work came to represent the complex soul of Britain like that of no artist before or since
He never crossed the Atlantic. Never sailed the Aegean. A cross-channel ferry was enough for Joseph Mallord William Turner to understand the might and majesty of the sea. His 1803 painting Calais Pier records his feelings on his first arrival in France as foaming green mountains of waves look as if they’re about to sweep away the frail wooden jetty where passengers from England are expected to disembark. He is fascinated and appalled by the water, so solid in its power but always shifting, dissolving, sheering away.
If JMW Turner, born 250 years ago this spring, is Britain’s greatest artist – and he is – it is partly because he is so intensely aware of a defining fact about his country: it’s an island. For Turner, Britain is bordered by death, terror and adventure. Just one step from shore takes you into a world of peril. In the Iveagh Seapiece, fishers are hauling up their boats on a soaking beach while a wave like a wall surges towards them. One fishing boat is still out on the wild waters, so near to shore yet so far from safety.
Kadidiatou Diani breaks the deadlock! The Lyon forward latches onto a through ball and races away on the right. Allowed too much space, the France international arrows the ball into the bottom left corner of the goal.
Peer-reviewed study’s findings raises fresh question on the toxic substances’ impact on fertility
Microplastics have been found for the first time in human ovary follicular fluid, raising a new round of questions about the ubiquitous and toxic substances’ potential impact on women’s fertility.
The new peer-reviewed research published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety checked for microplastics in the follicular fluid of 18 women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment at a fertility clinic in Salerno, Italy, and detected them in 14.
The Convenience Store Woman author is renowned for challenging social norms in darkly weird near-future fiction. She discusses sex, feminism and her struggles to be an ‘ordinary earthling’
“I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories,” Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestseller Convenience Store Woman, confides a few minutes into our interview. “I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.”
It is 7pm in Tokyo, mid-morning in London. Sitting upright at a desk in an empty publisher’s office, the 45-year-old author – wearing a cream silk blouse and with a neatly curled bob – might be reading the news rather than discussing imaginary friends. For context, her latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, depicts a future in which people no longer have sex and the main character carries 40 “lovers” – plastic anime key rings – in her black Prada pouch. Our conversation is made possible thanks to the skilful translation of Bethan Jones, who relates Murata’s long, thoughtful and utterly unpredictable answers. As video calls go, the experience is so otherworldly the three of us might be beaming in from different planets.
Price of cocoa – chocolate’s key ingredient – has climbed over past year and tariffs on imports will keep prices high
For many Americans celebrating Easter, the holiday is incomplete without chocolate: chocolate bunnies and eggs, bars tucked into Easter baskets, candy hidden in plastic eggs for Easter egg hunts.
But the rocketing cocoa costs will mean higher prices for chocolate candy this year, and Donald Trump’s tariffs on all imports will likely keep prices high for the foreseeable future.
A chocolatey after-dinner Easter treat that treads the line between a cake and a mousse
Rich, dark and squidgy, this cake is very much an after-dinner, rather than an afternoon-tea affair – something you’ll need a fork for, and quite possibly a spoon, too. Somewhere between a cake and a mousse, it’s the perfect end to an Easter celebration (serve with creme fraiche and chilled sliced blood oranges) and a great make-ahead dessert at any time of year.
After the famous physicist fled Germany in 1933, his cousin Robert moved his family to Italy, where they thought they had found safety. Then, the day before liberation, Nazis smashed down their front door …
Early on the morning of 3 August 1944, a unit of heavily armed German soldiers arrived at the Villa Il Focardo outside Florence.
They didn’t knock. They didn’t ring the bell. They simply smashed through the front door, marched in and started shouting for the villa’s owner, Robert Einstein, cousin of the world-famous scientist Albert Einstein.
Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing
Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-kilometre (13-mile) course.
The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120cm (3ft 9in), others as tall as 1.8m (5ft 9in). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features and the ability to wink and smile. Some firms tested their robots for weeks before the race. Beijing officials have described the event as more akin to a race car competition, given the need for engineering and navigation teams.
Mary Annette Pember’s expansive and shocking book Medicine River looks at the many ways that the US has tried to dehumanise and eradicate Native families
Mary Annette Pember will publish her first book, Medicine River, on Tuesday. She signed to write it in 2022 but feels she really started work more than 50 years ago, “before I could even write, when I was under the table as a kid, making these symbols that were sort of my own”.
A citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, Pember is a national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. In Medicine River, she tells two stories: of the Indian boarding schools, which operated in the US between the 1860s and the 1960s, and of her mother, her time in such a school and the toll it took.
Chancellor supports economic ties with Beijing as she prepares to fly to US next week for trade deal talks
Rachel Reeves has dismissed the idea of economically disengaging from China, amid concerns the US may put pressure on the UK to limit its deals with Beijing.
The chancellor, who will discuss a trade deal with the US on a trip to Washington next week, said it would be “very foolish” for Britain to have less involvement with Xi Jinping’s administration.
The Indian photographer captures his neighbour breathing fire at the finale of a major Hindu festival
In a narrow lane in Kolkata, West Bengal, Ankit Ghosh paused for a moment to take this photo. Ghosh was among crowds attending Vijaya Dashami, the last day of the Durga Puja, a festival he describes as “cultural potpourri”. He says, “It’s celebrated all across India, but there is no other place to experience it better than West Bengal. As this was the grand finale, the atmosphere was one of joy, pride and celebration.”
The man in the photo is Ghosh’s neighbour. “He’s a fine performer of this trick, which you don’t see very often; it is generally saved up for special festivals and celebrations,” Ghosh says. “The liquid in the air is kerosene [paraffin], which is spat upwards through a lit matchstick to create these cloudy flames.
The singer on a precious photograph of his mother, losing his brother and the wonders of cooking with butter
Born in California, Gregory Porter, 53, released his Grammy-nominated debut album, Water, in 2010. He went on to receive best jazz vocal album Grammys for Liquid Spirit in 2014 and Take Me to the Alley in 2017. He sang for Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee and was the first celebrity to sing a lullaby on CBeebies Bedtime Stories. Next week, he begins a UK tour. He is married with two children and lives in California.
Our writers made their predictions with the NBA postseason tipping off in proper on Saturday afternoon
Absolutely not. Could it stand to be a little shorter? Sure. Do the referees need to be more judicious with when they intervene? I’d argue they do. But the real problem the NBA faces is, in my opinion, a PR one. Its loudest voices should spend less time pearl-clutching and more time celebrating. Claire de Lune
Here are some of the latest images on the newswires:
Russian troops recaptured the village of Oleshnya in Russia’s western Kursk region from Ukrainian forces, the RIA state news agency cited the Russian defence ministry as saying on Saturday.
News outlets pull articles featuring ‘psychologist and sex adviser’ Barbara Santini amid doubts over her credentials
Over the past couple of years, the Oxford-educated psychologist Barbara Santini has been widely quoted as an expert. She has contributed thoughts on everything from the psychological impact of the Covid pandemic to the importance of vitamin D and how playing darts can improve your health.
However, her pronouncements have begun to disappear from articles after concerns that Santini may not be all that she appears. Major news outlets have removed entire articles featuring Santini, or comments made by her, after a series of questions were raised over her qualifications – and even whether her entire identity could be an elaborate hoax.
The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativity
Last month, the New York Public Library opened the doors on one of its most thrilling acquisitions of recent times: the archive of Joan Didion and her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. After two years of preparation, both scholars and anyone with a library card can arrange a visit to pore over the material contained in a total of 336 boxes of correspondence, photographs and screenplays from the couple’s joint projects, which included the 1976 version of A Star Is Born and the film that in 1971 provided Al Pacino with his first leading role, The Panic in Needle Park.
Alongside material evidence of two long writing careers, there is much that is deeply personal: paperwork recording the naming of orchids in honour of Didion, Dunne and their adopted daughter Quintana, the couple’s only child; kitchen notebooks and lists of party guests; the handmade cards and pressed flowers that the young Quintana made for “the best mom ever”. But it is infinitely more troubled times that are the subject of a new book drawn from the archive, Notes to John – accounts of Didion’s sessions with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon at the turn of the century, in which she discussed her daughter’s struggles with alcohol addiction and depression and the writer’s attempts to excavate the roots of their relationship in her own formative years.
Social media is turning the spring festival into yet another opportunity for lavish spending. What’s in your #EasterBasket?
As a child, I was keenly aware of the inequitable practices of the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the so-called Easter Bunny. How could it be that my teeth were less valuable than Abbie Smith-Arthur’s? Why was my stocking sock-sized, and the Walter boys next door had novelty sacks the size of their sofa? For what reason did I get but one big Easter egg, and Bethany down the road got 11?
If I was a child today, I would be even more confused (and radicalised), thanks to the relentless rise of “Eastermas”. More than quarter of British adults now buy Easter presents, giving their loved ones not only chocolate but flowers, toys and clothes. On TikTok, videos tagged #EasterBasket show the headphones, trainers, face creams, keyrings, hoodies, teddies and concert tickets that parents bestow upon their children – in short, more gifts than most people receive at Christmas. I won’t deny that it is nice to give each other nice things, but I fear the trend puts pressure on parents, and normalises a level of consumption that would perhaps have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
A poet’s memoir of family, trauma, and Virginia Woolf pulses with feeling and intelligence
Like most kids, Heather Christle was drilled about “stranger danger”. Like some, she had a family codeword designed to show that an adult picking them up from school when her mother was busy could be trusted. But, in her American home town in the 1980s, no other kid’s word was a bygone British sweet. And so “Dolly Mixture” joins the growing list of things learned from her English mother that Christle, looking back, finds out of place. Things such as dining etiquette, cardigans, M&S outfits, margarine. But also bigger stuff: beliefs and behaviours. Assumptions. Silence. Shame.
With her mother in her 70s and their relationship strained, Christle, a poet and academic, embarks on a quest for new understanding – of her mother, of “Englishness”, and of herself. In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, she excavates the past to expose difficult truths. As she proved with her acclaimed 2019 cultural history of tears, The Crying Book, she excels at facing the unfaceable, weaving her personal experience into the wider tapestry of science, history, politics and other people’s lives.
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