Tuesday, June 2, 2026

‘I felt I could smash my past up through sex’ / The ruthlessness and redemption of Rupert Everett

Everett at a banquette with a cup of tea on his knee

‘I felt I could smash my past up through sex’: the ruthlessness and redemption of Rupert Everett

‘Brash, disingenuous, lethal’: that’s how the 67-year-old actor describes his younger self. He lied to his partners, disrespected his audiences, betrayed his friends. Has this indiscreet, unreliable heartbreaker finally grown up and settled down?

Simon Hattenstone
Monday 1 June 2026

Rupert Everett is struggling with the heatwave. It reminds him of the summer of 1976, when he was 17, basking in the sun, serene as a sloth, his future spread out ahead of him. It’s so different now. “When you were young, hot weather was nice. But when you’re chubby like me now, it’s not so nice,” he says.

Patrick Radden Keefe indoors, in a wooden chair

Patrick Radden Keefe … ‘I think there are some pretty malign forces, particularly affecting boys, in adolescence.’ Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

The big interview

A gangster, a bogus inheritance and a dead 19-year-old: the mystery Patrick Radden Keefe couldn’t ignore

This article is more than 1 month old

Anna Moore

When Zac Brettler jumped to his death in London, the coroner recorded an open verdict, admitting: ‘I don’t know what happened.’ The acclaimed author of Say Nothing and, now, London Falling, talks about his search for answers

Anna Moore

Tuesdahy 7 April 2026

In the summer of 2023, the American writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was in London for the filming of Say Nothing, the television adaptation of his much-lauded, much-awarded account of a Troubles murder. It was there, on set, that Keefe got talking to a visitor, a friend of the director, who happened to tell Keefe about friends of his, the Brettlers, a London family who had experienced something tragic, strange and terrible.

Thaddeus Bradley holds up a playing card

‘I enter a room and people say: “God just walked in”’: Morgan Freeman on voicing the divine, meeting Mandela – and his six decades on screen

The 88-year-old actor has appeared in more than 100 films, playing everyone from presidents to prisoners. Here, he reflects on AI’s ‘robbing’ of his voice, not believing in Black History Month – and why he’s nowhere near retirement

David Smith
Monday 10 November 2025

In a dishonest age when truth is under siege, media attention shatters into a thousand shards of glass and nothing is quite what it seems, what could be more precious than a voice of authority? Cue Morgan Freeman, an actor who has portrayed a US president, Nelson Mandela and the Almighty, and replaced Walter Cronkite on the voiceover introducing the CBS Evening News. If John Gielgud’s baritone was described as being “like a silver trumpet muffled in silk”, Freeman’s is like rich wood polished to a quiet shine.

Four intractable crises facing Colombia’s next president

A soldier walks through an area attacked by FARC dissidents in Buenos Aires (Colombia), in 2025.SANTIAGO SALDARRIAGA (AP)

Four intractable crises facing Colombia’s next president

Violence, the deficit, the collapse of the healthcare system, and corruption await the winner of the presidential elections

María Martín
Bogotá, 29 May 2026

In Catatumbo, a region on the border with Venezuela, women have been giving birth at home for months. It is not for lack of hospitals but because they are afraid to take the roads and get caught in the crossfire between two guerrilla groups. Babies take months to be registered, farmers fear stepping on mines, and children hide when they see drones flying overhead laden with explosives. Those who stayed do not venture out and live locked up as if during a pandemic. Those who could leave fled, and the region has lost nearly 100,000 residents over the past year. “We are not part of this war, but we are in it,” a community leader told EL PAÍS, fearing he could be killed. This Sunday, Colombia holds the first round of its presidential elections. It does so with that war in the background, and with three other deep wounds that no candidate has fully explained how they intend to heal.

In Colombia, De la Espriella and Cepeda head to a runoff as Petro questions the results

The far‑right candidate secured 43.7% of the vote and the left‑wing contender 40.9%. The president challenged the preliminary tally and rejected the figures released on Sunday

MARÍA MARTÍN

Bogotá - JUN 01, 2026 - 01:49 COT

Colombia will hold a presidential runoff between two candidates who embody irreconcilable visions for the country. Abelardo de la Espriella, the ultraconservative lawyer who ran as the outsider promising to break with everything, won the first round with 43.7% of the vote, with 99% of polling stations counted. Iván Cepeda, the candidate of the governing left, received 40.9%.

Review

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland

Set in the aftermath of the famine, the Hamnet author’s family saga folds in myth and folklore

Melissa Harrison

Mon 1 Jun 2026 07.00 BST

‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”

Maggie O’Farrell / ‘Life is too short to waste time on books you don’t like'

Maggie O'Farrell
Illustration by Alan Vest

Books that made me

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Life is too short to waste time on books you don’t like'

This article is more than 6 years old

The award-winning author on being inspired by Angela Carter and struggling with Henry James

Maggie O’Farrell
Friday 2 April 2020

The book I am currently reading
Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. I picked it not knowing anything about her – that fabulous title was enough – and I was swept away by the energy and immediacy of the stories. She has all the verve and daring of the best of Junot Díaz, with the insight of Edith Pearlman. I’m slowing down because I don’t want the book to end.

Maggie O'Farrell at home in Edinburgh.

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’

From a young age, the author was told that one of her ancestors had drawn some of the first maps of Ireland. Then she found a photograph, and embarked on a journey to discover his story

Maggie O’Farrell

Sun 31 May 2026

very family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary person in unspecified period dress – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – striding pensively about fields and mountains, pen in hand. On summer holidays, I would stare out of the window of our red car as Donegal or Galway rolled by and wonder that such a task could be achieved. How did one man set about drawing a map of a whole country, of these towns and strands and trees and rivers?

A soldier holding a gun stands guard, with houses clustered on a slope in the distance — A soldier stands guard in a street in Medellín. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Tuesday, June 2, 2026