The Old Guard 2 review – Charlize Theron’s delayed Netflix sequel is an incomplete mess

 

Charlize Theron

The Old Guard 2 review – Charlize Theron’s delayed Netflix sequel is an incomplete mess

Five years after the first film came out, a misshapen action fantasy follow-up arrives with a baffling cliffhanger ending

Even with our thick-of-Covid desperation for anything that felt big at a time when life felt too small, there was more to The Old Guard than the average churned out Netflix mockbuster. Released in the hell of July 2020, it came with the requisite boxes ticked (big star, international locations, franchisable setup) but felt closer to the real thing than most, proving to be a hit for those eager for escapism, scoring one of the streamer’s biggest launches to date.

Review / “Little Women” By Louisa May Alcott

Book Review: “Little Women” By Louisa May Alcott

After seeing Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of “Little Women” at the start of the year, I was totally captivated by the heart-warming story.

Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss review / 'A hard-working novel about hard-working women'

Exposed loneliness … Moss's protagonist is sent to sleep in the attic, 'vulnerable as a wounded animal'.
 Illustration: Clifford Harper for the Guardia

Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss review – 'a hard-working novel about hard-working women'

Historical detail comes to the fore in this story of familial violence and female emancipation in Victorian Manchester

Alexandra Harris
Sat 19 Apr 2014 09.00 BST

I

f you are following the career of Sarah Moss, this is an exciting moment. Her third novel confirms the richness of her concerns (remoteness, maternity, how we make life hard for each other) and it sharpens our sense of her steely, no-nonsense voice. It suggests that, though her books are closely linked, she has much more to write and will never produce the same thing twice.

The trend of living in houses made with shipping containers

Shipping container homes in Fredericia, Denmark.JUMPING ROCKS ( EDUCATION IMAGES/ UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/ GETTY IMAGES) (JUMPING ROCKS/EDUCATION IMAGES)

The trend of living in houses made with shipping containers 

The demand for this type of housing is growing, due to their affordable prices and their short assembly times. But some still associate them with a lack of comfort

SANDRA LÓPEZ LETÓN

Madrid - JUL 30, 2023 - 17:13 COT

Stadium 974, in Doha, Qatar, designed by the Spanish studio Fenwick Iribarren Architects for last year’s World Cup, was built using standard shipping containers and modular steel elements. Eight years ago, Amsterdam was home to the largest shipping container neighborhood in the world, Keetwonen. The United States is one of the pioneering countries in the construction of houses with these units, particularly in urban areas where there is an urgent need for affordable housing. Australia and the United Kingdom, among others, have also embraced this construction method, which is cheaper and much faster than the traditional one; it has been tested for years in different countries and it is in tune with the global trend to increase the use of recycled materials and promote a circular economy.

Inside Casa Malaparte / Capri’s house of paradoxes XLISTO 2020

Casa Malaparte, designed by Adalberto Libera in the 1930s for Curzio Malaparte, writer and architect manqué 

Inside Casa Malaparte: Capri’s house of paradoxes

The villa, a cocktail of the real and the imagined, is the subject of a new exhibition

Edwin Heathcote

 

JUNE 26 2020

Casa Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri was a house conceived in lockdown. Built in the late 1930s, its first occupant, Curzio Malaparte — an Italian-German poet, novelist, war correspondent, editor, fascist, communist and finally Maoist — had turned himself into an architect during time spent in exile. But only in his head. 

Inside story … detail from Richard Hamilton's collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? showing at the Tate Modern retrospective Feb-May 2014. Photograph: Tate Images

 

The top 10 books about houses

From fiction to memoir to social history, author Ben Highmore selects books that open up the most intimate spaces of our lives

Ben Highmore
Wed 15 Jan 2014 15.08 GMT

The Great Indoors explores changes in domestic life over the last hundred years or so, and it does so room by room (starting in the hallway and ending in the attic). I was interested in how these "living" rooms have been used, what they have been filled with and what they felt like across the 20th century and into the 21st.

The trials of immortality … sketch of Circe by John William Waterhouse.

Top 10 goddesses in fiction

In ancient myth – and novels by authors from Neil Gaiman to Toni Morrison – these ambiguous figures are sometimes repressive, sometimes inspiring

E Foley and B Coates
Wednesday 9 September 2020

What springs to mind when you think of the word “goddess”? Divine feminine energy? Mother Earth? Ancient Greek women wafting around in white dresses causing mischief? “Domestic goddesses” or “sex goddesses”? Or even Anastasia Steele’s exuberant “inner goddess” who spends a lot of Fifty Shades of Grey salsa-ing and pole-vaulting in excitement about her romantic escapades? (Each to her own.)

 

Commanding presence … God, as depicted on the dome fresco by Johann Michael Rottmayr at Karlskirche (St. Charles’s Church) in Vienna. Photograph: Fred de Noyelle

Top 10 novels about God

He doesn’t appear very often in fiction, but in these books – by authors ranging from Fyodor Dostoevsky to John Updike – his impact is almighty

Neil Griffiths

Wednesday 6 December 2017

God seldom features in fiction. Having been dispensed with by Enlightenment philosophes around the time the first novels were emerging, he must have seemed irrelevant. The novel was new and God was old. Even clergy, who were facing an existential crisis of great literary potential, seemed infra dig to most novelists. There were new professions to explore: revolutionary, businessman, detective.

Paul Bowles

Top 10 books based in Tangier

From William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Paul Bowles’s translations of Moroccan authors, here are the best novels set in the city

M

ark Twain. Edith Wharton. Patricia Highsmith. The Beats. At one time or another, these literary figures passed through Tangier, and were inspired by the places they saw and people they met. Then there is the wealth of great writers born there: traveller Ibn Battutah, storyteller Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, writer Mohamed Choukri.

Between promise and devastacion / Liminal spaces by Ferdinanda Florence

Ferdinanda Florence

Ferdinanda Florence

Jan 20, 2021

BETWEEN PROMISE AND DEVASTATION: LIMINAL SPACES BY FERDINANDA FLORENCE

While I love art that is epic, complex, colourful, of mythic proportions and multi-layered, there’s a side of me that is very much into creative expressions that are stripped down and unassuming.

Nicolás de la Hoz II

 

Nicolás de la Hoz II

Nicolás de la Hoz I / Self-Portraits

 

Nicolás de la Hoz I

SELF-PORTRAITS

Moroccan Sojourn / A Visit with Paul Bowles

PAUL BOWLES
Painting by Annette Solyst

Moroccan Sojourn

A Visit with Paul Bowles by Annette Solyst

If someone is really, seriously interested in Morocco, they will sooner or later find out about Paul Bowles. For the ones who have never heard of Paul Bowles, here is a little summary: Born in NYC in 1910, he starts writing poetry and stories as a young boy. He runs off to Paris in his first year of college. / Returns to Paris a short while later and meets Gertrude Stein/ Studies music under Aaron Copland/The two visit Morocco together, on the recommendation of Gertrude Stein./Adventures and misadventures in Tangier and Fez./ He starts composing music, in particular he composes scores for plays like Tennessee Williams' "Glass Menagerie"/ Marries Jane Auer/ Continues to compose music/ Travels a lot and likes it/ Feels too tied to NYC due to the music and changes genres/ Writes " The Sheltering Sky" which is published in 1949 to some acclaim/ Moves to Tangier/ Tangier becomes his home, and to my knowledge he is still there.

Ian Fleming / Casino Royale / Bond and Vesper

Casino Royale

by Ian Fleming

BOND AND VESPER

Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming is the book that launched James Bond‘s career and his iconic following ever since has enchanted countless readers and moviegoers.

Andrea Camilleri had a late but great career in crime writing

Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri had a late but great career in crime writing

The author, who has died aged 93, was almost 70 when he took up the genre, but his novels are as rich with serious thinking as with thrilling plots

Mark Lawson
Wed 17 Jul 2019

Vampire by Jan Neruda

 

 

VAMPIRE

by Jan Neruda

 

The excursion steamer brought us from Constantinople to the shore of the island of Prinkipo and we disembarked. The number of passengers was not large. There was one Polish family, a father, a mother, a daughter and her bridegroom, and then we two. Oh, yes, I must not forget that when we were already on the wooden bridge which crosses the Golden Horn to Constantinople, a Greek, a rather youthful man, joined us. He was probably an artist, judging by the portfolio he carried under his arm. Long black locks floated to his shoulders, his face was pale, and his black eyes were deeply set in their sockets. From the first moment he interested me, especially for his obligingness and for his knowledge of local conditions. But he talked too much, and I then turned away from him.

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In Bed The Kiss, 1892-1893

The Kiss Throughout Art History

Love is in the air! With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, Artsper has gathered a few of the most iconic images of the kiss in the history of art. Whether in painting or in sculpture, romantic gestures are an all-time source of inspiration for artists. Hopefully, these dreamy kissing scenes will inspire you too, just in time for your next date…

A kiss for Valentine's day

René Magritte, Les Amants I, 1928

A KISS FOR VALENTINE'S DAYS

February 8, 2022

Love (in life, as in art) covers the full range of emotions, from the spiritual to the sleazy, provocative to the profound. But what better conveys true love, than true love’s kiss?

Whether it’s fine art, literature film or movies, there have been some momentous kisses that truly left their mark on history. Who doesn’t recognize the infamous V-J Day sailor’s kiss, the tragedy of Romeo’s “blushing pilgrim” lips meeting Juliet’s or the golden ecstasy of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting?

Deborah Eisenberg / A writer´s life

Deborah Eisenberg
Poster by T.A.

A writer's life: Deborah Eisenberg

The short-story writer tells Daniel Swift that September 11 politicised American life.

Daniel Swift

12:01AM BST 30 Jul 2006

Deborah Eisenberg is an unlikely activist. She lives in a clean, narrow loft in Chelsea, a part of New York in which the haircuts are often the most radical thing on the street. "I would like to never ever think about any political issues," she says. She reads the New York Times only once a year. Last time, she found an article on the links between caffeine and breast cancer, and promptly gave up coffee. She does not have a TV, and in her loft the windows are covered with white curtains. The only view looks out onto a brick wall. "I'm almost impervious to information," she tells me.

Evelio Rosero
Bogotá 2013
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

Good Offices by Evelio Rosero – review

A satire of the Colombian Catholic church incorporates humour, pathos and power


Maya Jaggi
Friday 7 October 2011 22.55 BST

E

velio Rosero's powerful novel The Armies depicted a South American provincial town exploding into violence in the hands of rival armed groups. Drawn from tales of terror and kidnap in the shantytowns of the author's native Colombia, the novel descended from comedy into brutal nightmare, in a rural landscape hemmed in by coca fields and landmines. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2009, in Anne McLean's superb translation.