Culture

‘The most spontaneous person I’ve ever met’: Guardian writers remember Diane Keaton | Diane Keaton

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‘I can’t imagine crying about the death of any other actor’Laura SnapesLovable … Keaton in Father of the Bride. Photograph: Touchstone/AllstarThe first person I texted about Diane Keaton’s death was my mum. Our love of her films is pretty much the only cultural taste I inherited from her. I was about 10 when she first let me watch a VHS off the grown-up shelf. She picked Baby Boom. I might wonder what the appeal of a film about a high-flying 80s businesswoman inheriting a baby was to a kid – were it not so plainly funny, spanning Keaton’s talents from…

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Keira Knightley says she was ‘not aware’ of JK Rowling boycott calls before joining Harry Potter audiobooks | Film

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Keira Knightley said that she was “not aware” of demands to boycott JK Rowling prior to joining the cast of the new audiobook versions of the Harry Potter series.Knightley was speaking to Decider to promote her new Netflix movie The Woman in Cabin 10 (in which she plays a Guardian reporter), and was asked if she knew that “some fans are calling for a Harry Potter boycott”.Knightley said: “I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry. You know, I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure…

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Mitsuko Uchida review – enthralling and exhilarating late Beethoven | Classical music

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Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas are a gift for a pianist as adept at balancing the playful and the profound as Mitsuko Uchida. Each is potentially a work of astonishing individual impact, yet they can come together to form something even greater than the sum of their parts.Perhaps it’s in the way that each sonata seems to pick up on and amplify the conflicts, beauties and struggles of the one before. Op 109 came to its close above a low rumble that Uchida made sound like an earthquake – Beethoven must have thought of sound as something to be felt…

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How Hitler’s architect escaped the death penalty

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Speer also claimed to be no different from anyone else in his generation who was seduced by the Nazi leader. "Hitler himself was appearing in a time which was to us young people a time of disillusionment. It was a time, we had no hope for our future, and now a man came and said you shall have hope, we can do it, we can manage it, Germany is prospering again. Of course it was a temptation big enough to think about."AlamySpeer's Cathedral of Light saw hundreds of searchlights piercing the night sky at Nazi Party rallies (Credit: Alamy)But surely…

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Tomorrow I Leave review – poignant portrait of a care worker sacrificing her home life for her work | Film

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Every four weeks, Maria leaves her small Romanian town and heads to Austria, where she is employed as a care worker for elderly people. Her life is split between borders and constant goodbyes, a transient emotional state vividly captured in Maria Lisa Pichler and Lukas Schöffel’s intimate portrait. In the opening scene, Maria drives along her local roads, pointing out the houses left empty by those who have moved abroad for work opportunities. Under the precarious forces of economy, it seems as if a whole community is gradually evaporating.Structured around Maria’s monthly drives, the film juxtaposes her home life with…

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After Oscar by Merlin Holland review – Wilde’s grandson on the legacy of a scandal | Biography books

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Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested…

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TV tonight: new comedy The Chair Company is quirky viewing | Television

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The Chair Company9.45pm, Sky ComedyTim Robinson uses his hilariously odd brand of comedy to give a voice to anyone who refuses to let go of the real injustices of the world. In this case, it’s an office chair that breaks under newly promoted William Ronald Trosper (Robinson), when he gives a speech to his colleagues. He goes to great lengths to track down the chair company’s customer services to complain – but instead finds himself investigating a far-reaching conspiracy. Hollie RichardsonWhy Planes Crash8pm, BBC OneFrom South Korea and India to Washington DC, it has been a deadly year for aviation,…

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Iggy Pop is mother nature: best podcasts of the week | Television & radio

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Pick of the weekSweet Little HumanFor a sideways take on the climate emergency, look no further than this series featuring Iggy Pop as a potty-mouthed Mother Nature. Skip the opening episode and its slightly overwrought attempt at world-building and head straight to Fire Animals for an entertaining take on a vital – but often destructive – element. HJDWidely available, episodes weeklyTubbyThis weight-themed podcast from Canadian outfit Left of Dial can be a difficult listen, with host Alan Zweig sometimes a self-flagellating guide. But it is candid and far-reaching; the Washington Post’s Shane O’Neill is strong on what it means to…

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‘A hunger for wild, physical sensation’: Alan Hollinghurst on painter and writer Denton Welch who died tragically young | Art and design

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What Denton Welch’s life was like before his accident we know from the books he wrote after it. They give a picture of a teenager’s experience unparalleled in its vividness and oddity. Welch was born in Shanghai in 1915, to an American mother and an English businessman father, and brought to England when he was four. In his first book, 1943’s Maiden Voyage, he describes his return to China in 1932, after he’d run away from Repton school in Derbyshire.All his characteristics as a writer are evident from the start: an astonishing candour of response to sensations of all kinds,…

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Jade review – pop’s quirkiest star transcends manufactured past | Pop and rock

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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time in the years before the inevitable reunion tour.It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade…

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