Essential beauty penrith

The actress' hit show Stranger Things is nominated for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series, going up against Big Little Lies, The Crown, Game of Thrones and The Handmaid's Tale.  … [Read more...] about Millie Bobby Brown looks angelic as she hits the red carpet of the SAG Awards in a pristine white ensemble

Avedon never made any pretence to objectivity; the notion of the dispassionate lens he wrote off as delusion. His work, he said, was at least as much about him as his subjects: a vast collective self-portrait of the compulsions he projected on to America's faces and figures. In person, he was a merrily humane optimist, warm-blooded and gregarious; to know him was to love him. But he was no sentimentalist and there was a Daumier streak in him: coolly contemptuous of the political masquerade even while enthralled by its performances. Like a caricaturist, he thought that lies and cruelty settled like a crust on the physiognomy. All he had to do was to supply a lit exposure of the particular features in which moral intelligence or its absence had been inscribed. … [Read more...] about Players and contenders

From the 1970s onwards, flush with oil money, the Saudis exported across the world Wahhabism, a vicious, austere form of Islam that the Saud clan has used to establish loyalty to its rule after creating Saudi Arabia in 1932. Riyadh has funded myriad madrasas and mosques. It has funded, too, jihadist movements from Afghanistan to Syria. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi. So were most of the 9/11 bombers. A 2009 internal US government memo described Saudi Arabia as “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”. The Saudis have leveraged their knowledge of such groups to win influence with the west. … [Read more...] about Don’t be deluded – our Saudi ‘partners’ are masters of repression

Neville has been key in helping to transform this. At first he was so intense, so startlingly well-prepped that it seemed unsustainable. There was a bump in the road when he took that sabbatical in management. But he kept going, got better, filtered the experience into his analysis. Best of all Neville is fearless: burdened with a conscience, but also answerable to it. And now he’s been to the Gulf and been danced around a little by people who know how to play a slightly harder game than this. Gary Neville in Qatar was first shown in December, three years to the day before the World Cup final. This week it entered a period of heavy rotation on Sky Sports. … [Read more...] about Gary Neville asks right questions of Qatar but gets no nearer answers we need

Occasionally Henderson offers signposts. The chapter "Nautilus" promises to explore three wonders associated with this subclass of cephalopods: their lifespan (leading into a discussion of ammonites, Italo Calvino and Tristram Shandy), their chambered shells (naval warfare, submarines and Jules Verne) and their eyesight (eagle acuity, pin-hole cameras, and daguerreotypes). But the reader is often treated to rocambolesque free-association, to rival that of Laurence Sterne or Robert Burton. Charles Darwin is one of Henderson's heroes, as are the 17th century physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne and his late, great admirer WG Sebald. There is a sort of nature-writing that enchants by encouraging us to re-examine the familiar, superbly expressed by, for example, Annie Dillard. But while he acknowledges it, Henderson turns his back on this tradition, instead giving us a tour of bizarre species that most of us will never encounter. Two-thirds of the examples he has chosen come from the … [Read more...] about The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson – review