Friday, August 21, 2026

The man who forgot himself / Life before and after total amnesia

Closeup of Eric Lampaert with a wide grin and his eyes screwed up — ‘Life is much better, but I feel very alien’ … Eric Lampaert. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The man who forgot himself: life before and after total amnesia

In 2019 Eric Lampaert woke up unable to recognise his friends, his parents, even his own name. After decades of anxiety, abandonment and bullying, was his mind just trying to shield him from his past?

Paula Cocozza

On the day his life changed, Eric Lampaert woke up and saw his hands. What amazed him was that they were moving in front of him, and he appeared to be the person in control of them. We’re drinking coffee in the Groucho Club in London, and at this point he lets go of his cup and wriggles his fingers. Lampaert is an actor and standup whose work has a strong clowning dimension. His hands always seemed to have minds of their own – and, sometimes, strong differences of opinion. But as he got out of bed that fateful morning, marvelling at the magical things on the ends of his arms, he felt only wonder. What he didn’t yet know was that he had lost his memory, and his life would no longer feel like his own.

Makeda … ‘It’s enough to know I can look like this.’ Photograph: Elizabeth Okoh

‘It was no longer a gift for my husband. It was all for me’: four women on how boudoir photography changed their lives

Now a hugely popular photographic genre, many women pay thousands to have intimate portraits taken of themselves by a professional. What do they get out of it?

Paula Cocozza

27 November 2025

Afew hours into Brittany Witt’s boudoir shoot, with the mimosas kicking in and the music going strong, the photographer asked: “How do we feel about some completely nude photos?” Witt was lying on the bed in lingerie, in a studio in Texas, and hadn’t considered nudity an option. “I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this trust path.’” She undressed. The photographer, JoAnna Moore, covered Witt with body oil and squirted her with water, then asked her “to crawl across the floor with my full trust,” Witt says. “I did so. The pose was nude, and it was completely open. I wasn’t covered with a sheet. It was all out, it was all open, and it brought that worst level of self-doubt. I was terrified.”

The cover of the sheet music for Debussy’s La Mer, 1905. Photograph: DEA/G Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images

Tuesday 21 January 2025

ou are never far from a great wave. Its foaming crest froths and sputters like ghostly fingers or monstrous claws raking over tote bags and journals. You can probably find it miniaturised in your emoji keyboard on your phone, and fading on a mouse mat or pair of socks somewhere nearby. The image – officially known as Under the Wave off Kanagawa, from Katsushika Hokusai’s series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji – depicts small boats facing down a large wave, and almost two centuries after its creation its appeal spans generations, continents, and socioeconomic bands.

‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns

A bald-headed man in a blue jumper looking quizzically at the camera

‘My mother could be very critical of my books.’ Photograph: David Levene/

The big interview

Interview

‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns

Three decades after he channelled his heroin addiction into the cult classic Trainspotting, the Scottish author has discovered the joys of yoga, breathwork and standing desks. But is he quite as ‘Zen’ as he claims?

By rights, Irvine Welsh ought to be photographed somewhere gritty, looking grumpy, he says: “That’s the brand.” Beside a graffitied wall or at the docks, with a beanie pulled low, and definitely not smiling. But here he is, clear-skinned and wholesome in shorts and a T-shirt, drinking tea and – it’s hard to think of anything more off-brand – talking about the health benefits of yoga. Given his reputation for having lived in the worlds his books portray, he should or could look a lot worse. He guffaws at this, eyes a delighted blue, and repeats the phrase as if he’s found a new personal tagline: “Could look a lot worse!”

‘Proust is the godfather of fashion’: what writers’ clothes reveal about them

This article is more than 9 years old

Samuel Beckett had a Gucci bag; Dorothy Parker worked for Vogue. A new book on writers’ style uncovers the hidden links between clothes and prose

Paula Cocozza
Sunday 16 July 2017

The title reads like a provocation: Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore. What? Shouldn’t authors, especially “legendary” ones, be exempt from fashion scrutiny? Surely we should look at their words, not their outfits. If they produced great works of art, who cares how they dressed?

Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’

This article is more than 11 years old

The writer asked friends for their experiences of everyday racism and turned them into the award-winning Citizen. Here she talks about the power of making private anecdotes public

Paula Cocozza

Monday 21 June 2015

When Serena Williams was contesting the US Open in 2012, the American poet Claudia Rankine watched from the stands, engaged in a parallel skirmish of her own. She had taken her nine-year-old daughter to the final. They were sitting next to a white American. “And the guy,” Rankine says in surprise, “is cheering for the other player, not for Serena. So I say to him: ‘Are you American?’ And he says: ‘Yes.’ And I say: ‘So why are you cheering for the player from Belarus and not Serena Williams?’”

‘Every time I look at one, I smile!’: how axolotls took over the world

Our passion for these cute-looking salamanders means they are everywhere – except in the wild, where the species is under increasing threat

Julio Cortázar / Axolotl

Paula Cocozza
Wednesday 21 January 2026

xolotls are the new llamas. Which were, of course, the new unicorns. Which triggered a moment for narwhals. If you are an unusual-looking animal, this is your time. Even humans who have never seen an axolotl – a type of salamander – in the smooth and slimy flesh will have met a cartoon or cuddly one. Mexican axolotls have the kind of look that is made for commercial reproduction. The most popular domestic species is pink. Some glow in the dark – and their smile is bigger than Walter’s in the Muppets.

THE NATURE OF

A piranha: it is boiling the water you’re swimming in and taking bites out of you

This article is more than 5 months old

They don’t chew: they bite, the meat goes straight into their stomach, and they bite again

Helen Sullivan

Imagine a bulldog flattened with a meat tenderiser, shaved and sprinkled with glitter. Imagine more, and everywhere, or else: when I was a child, as sure as all cartoon sand would turn into quicksand, in every fictional body of fresh water swam very real fish with very real, sharp, tiny little teeth.

In The Simpsons, Millhouse is more worried about piranhas than that his mother will stop loving him. Bart is reduced to a skeleton by piranhas from a hosepipe.

WE’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT ANIMAL SEXUALITY ALL WRONG

A new documentary, Second Nature: Gender & Sexuality in the Animal World, explores our misconceptions of the animal kingdom

Raquel Brodsky

24 June 2024

I want to take you back to the year 2008, when New York City’s Museum of Sex Launche an exhibit on the sex lives of Animals.The exhibit ran for a full decade, and I have the chancrto check it out about a year or so before it closed in 2018. “The Sex Lives of Animals” exhibit is, in fact, where I learned that ducks possess massive, corkscrew-like penises. But duck genitalia aside, the Museum of Sex’s intention, nearly 20 years ago, was to reveal the “astonishing array” of sexual behaviors animals routinely engage in, from kissing to hugging to, well, everything else. And definitely not always male-on-female.

Friday, August 21, 2026