Saturday, October 31, 2015

My hero / Lisa Jardine by Martin Rees


 Lisa Jardine.
Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi


My hero: Lisa Jardine by Martin Rees

The astronomer royal pays tribute to polymath Lisa Jardine, who died this week


Martin Rees
Sat 31 Oct 2015

M
ost people’s careers run in grooves. Even if their achievements are lasting, they are usually within an established role – in politics, business, academia or a profession. But there are some people who can’t be categorised – creative personalities who straddle conventional boundaries in a unique way. These are the individuals who leave the most distinctive legacy, and Lisa Jardine was one of them. Scholarly in science as well as literature and history, she spanned the “two cultures”. She was politically engaged and campaigned for many causes and institutions. Above all, she had a zest for communicating and was able to engage with a wide public, young and old.


I first met Lisa when she was a young lecturer at Cambridge University. Later, when I was president of the Royal Society, we were fortunate to have her support and her advice on our archives. She was especially excited to recover a folio by Robert Hooke, containing long-lost records of the society’s meetings.
Her response to a cancer diagnosis in 2004 was to work even harder. During the last decade she presented dozens of radio talks and a fine series on the history of science; she was active on innumerable panels and committees. We both resigned from the board of the Royal Institution, in protest against actions we thought deplorable.
One of her most surprising decisions, in 2008, was to become chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a challenging role involving novel ethical issues. It was perhaps in homage to her father, Jacob Bronowski, that she felt she should do some scientific service to the nation.
In her public and private roles she was a supreme life-enhancer. Her death has come as a shock and sadness to those of us who hoped that her effervescent enthusiasm would inspire us for at least another decade.
THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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Friday, October 30, 2015

Adele: the 'regular girl' who became a singing superstar


Adele has enjoyed global success while protecting her privacy. 
Photograph: Chris Pizzello



Adele: the 'regular girl' who became a singing superstar

The privacy-protecting London woman has won six Grammys and one Oscar with her gift for lustrous ballads that helped her last album to sales of 30m

Caroline Sullivan
Fri 30 Oct 2015 16.54 GMT


S

ince announcing her comeback via a 30-second ad during the X Factor a fortnight ago, Adele has occupied a great deal of newsprint and bandwidth. Yet little has been with the participation of the singer herself.

There have been a handful of interviews and appearances, and a televised chat, Adele at the BBC, will air in November.But the singer has largely been avoiding the promotional grind as if she didn’t have a single entering the chart at number one this week, followed by an album, 25, being released next month.

The album, whose title marks Adele’s age when she began writing it – she’s now 27 – has its work cut out. Its predecessor, 21, which sold 30m copies, was the top-selling album in the world in both 2011 and 2012; in Britain it was the fourth biggest album of all time.

So it is not just Adele’s fans who are excited at the prospect of her new record – the music industry also has high hopes. “The talk is that she might single-handedly be able to turn around the 20% plus fall in album sales in the UK this year,” reads an article in music magazine Record of the Day. “Projections that the album will do [only] 500,000 in its first week in this country alone are now being ripped up.”

In fact, some retailers think 25 could sell half a million copies in its first day – putting even guaranteed super-sellers Justin Bieber and One Direction in the shade. Both were rumoured to have changed release dates to avoid clashing with Adele – something denied by their labels.

It is the sort of hysteria that should normally be taken with a barrel of salt – but with the single Hello entering the chart at number one this week, Adele has a clear run at dominating sales and streaming figures through Christmas and beyond.

Hello’s chances are hardly hurt by being a lustrous, emotive ballad in the vein of Someone Like You, the 2011 single that launched the singer’s imperial phase. If 25 ends up selling a mere 20m copies, some will be disappointed, but it will still be a triumph, both for the battered British music business and for XL Records, the Wandsworth indie label that signed Adele four months after she graduated from the Brit School performing arts college.

Yet throughout the hype, Adele remains only semi-present. At a time when it is commercial folly for a star not to share pictures of their breakfast, she only created an Instagram account last week, and she rarely tweets. The last 10 days have seen a whirlwind of three posts, the most recent saying: “Throwing it back with this! Thank you for all the love, I am so blown away” above a photo of her as a child.

Public sightings are as infrequent as ever, and interviewers have had to sign non-disclosure agreements. “I can’t even tell you what mood she was in,” one said.

That Adele guards her privacy zealously is perhaps unremarkable – most artists at her level are unreachable, protected by layers of label and management. What is unusual, however, is that the singer has done so from the beginning of her career, even before debut album 19 was released in 2008.

When I interviewed her for the Guardian in late 2007, she said: “If I don’t like [success], I’ll walk away. You don’t have to lose your privacy. If you’re in control of your career, you won’t get followed. Just don’t go to celeb hangouts.”

She did interviews at home then, in the south London flat she shared with her mother. We were in the kitchen, where she was winding down after a photo shoot outside on the communal walkway.

With a roll-up in her hand (“Smoking is my favourite thing to do in the world,” she said in 2011 after a polyp on her vocal cords forced her to quit) and a packet of Garibaldi biscuits on the table, at that stage there was nothing notable about Adele beyond the clarity of her mezzo-soprano voice and a confidence that was more than just teenage cockiness.


But even then she’d mastered the art of appearing open in conversation while giving away nothing personal. Her songs are where she lets her real feelings rip, her heartbreak transmitting itself as luxuriant pop-soul. The winner of six Grammys and two Brit awards, 21 was the dark, furious break-up album, while 25 is “a make-up record … I’m making up with myself, making up for lost time,” she has written.

Recent Adele collaborator Damon Albarn has called her music middle of the road. (He has since claimed he was misquoted.) But if middle of the road means that Adele and her music speak to people beyond the demographic that buys Albarn’s usual genre-bending experiments, that’s hardly unforgiveable.

As she prepared for the launch of her first album, Adele appeared the unaffected working class homegirl – an image that’s stuck despite her anger in 2011 at owing £4m in tax after 19 sold 7m copies. “I’m mortified to have to pay 50%! Are you having a laugh?” she complained, seemingly invoking the scorn of the entire internet.

My abiding impression, though, was of a woman warily weighing up whether success would be worth the sacrifice of privacy. Already sensing an invasion of it, the singer insisted the interview be done in the kitchen at the front of the flat, rather than allowing journalists to venture further inside.

Ever since, she’s maintained a buffer zone between herself and the public. She didn’t announce her pregnancy with son Angelo, now aged three, until four months before she gave birth. She is rarely seen in public with her partner, Simon Konecki, a former banker who now runs a charity called Drop4Drop, which funds clean-water projects in deprived areas.

At a time when top-flight artists count live gigs among their biggest sources of income, Adele has never done a world tour, and recently said that playing Glastonbury – a muddy rite of passage for nearly all first-tier artists – was out of the question because crowds made her nervous.

She even skipped the premiere of the Bond film Skyfall, for which she recorded the theme. It did her career no harm at all: Skyfall proved one of Adele’s biggest successes, winning an Oscar and cementing the perception of her as a polished chanteuse whose craft owes as much to Dionne Warwick as childhood heroes Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys.

“She flips between being a regular girl and Adele,” says Alison Howe, producer of Later … with Jools Holland, who booked the singer for her first TV appearance in early 2007.

“She’s like every other girl from London, she’s just got more money. But she’s also a woman who knows exactly what she wants her music to do and how she wants it to make [listeners] feel. She completely knows – that’s what makes her special.”


Howe was among the first to hear the 21 album. “She played me some of the second record and I thought it was more of the same – I mean, more of these beautiful songs, but bigger and bolder.

“They sounded great, but I never really forgot this one song, Someone Like You. She did it on the last [Later] show of 2010, and then the same song at the [2011] Brits, and the rest was history.”

The Brits performance, where Adele sang her about-to-be signature tune accompanied only by a pianist, was the moment that transformed an already successful artist into the UK’s top singer. “She brought the ballad back to being number one, which disappeared for a while in the midst of dance music,” says Jan Younghusband, the BBC executive who commissioned Adele at the BBC.

Ballads and chat are Adele’s forte, Younghusband says, and apparently the programme, which will be recorded this weekend, will feature plenty of both. “She’s spontaneously funny and really makes the audience laugh. She’s so down to earth – the person you hear in the songs is the person you meet in real life.”

But it always comes back to the ballads, she adds. “Songs about real life, friendships, relationships … they’re universal themes which transcend language, hence her global success.”

But can Adele arrest the 20% decline in UK album sales, as predicted by some intemperate industry figures? That’s the kind of task you wouldn’t wish on even your least favourite artist, but if any single British singer can do it, Adele is probably the one to put your money on.

Potted profile

Born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, 5 May 1988, in Tottenham, north London. Her parents, Penny Adkins and Mark Evans, split up when she was two


Career XL Records signed her when she was 18 after she posted a demo on MySpace. Debut album 19 was an instant success and 21 is the top-selling British album of this decade. Writer’s block held up progress of 25, expected to be this year’s biggest album

High point 21 breaking the record for most weeks at number one in the US album chart by a woman (23)

Low point Attracting wrath by bridling at having to pay 50% income tax

She says “I’m uncomfortable with [celebrity]. Me being photographed in Waitrose is being famous for no reason and that is something that I am not up for and I will not stand for, for myself”

They say “She’s a genuine artist. When you watch her live on stage and hear her, she’s the real deal” – Dizzee Rascal


THE GUARDIAN



KISS

Adele quiere dejar de ser gorda
Adele regresa con 68 kilos menos
Adele / La voz que conquistó al mundo
Adele / Hello
Adele / When we were young
Adele canta con melancolía en su nuevo disco
25 / El tercer álbum de Adele, perfecto para unos y fácil para otros
Por qué el rostro de Adele se ve tan diferente después de su extrema pérdida de peso
Adele le dice ‘adiós’ al drama y no hará temas inspirados en su divorcio
Adele presenta a su nuevo novio en Instagram
El regreso de Adele / La industria califica su nuevo álbum como un ‘gran acontecimiento mundial’


DRAGON

Adele confirms album release date and new single, Hello

Adele: the 'regular girl' who became a singing superstar

Adele's 25 set to break UK first-week album sales record

Adele / I can finally reach out a hand to my ex. Let him know I’m over it

Adele's Carpool Karaoke proves James Corden has found the perfect comedy vehicle

James Corden's Carpool Karaoke: why is this late-night segment such a hit?

Adele cast black star in Hello video to address 'police brutality'

Weight loss, deadlifts and divorce: what we learned from Adele’s One Night Only special

Adele opens up to Oprah about divorce and being a single parent

Adele / 30 review / The defining voice of heartbreak returns






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Thursday, October 29, 2015

Albert Einstein / Not everything


Albert Einstein
NOT EVERYTHING

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.



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Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / The Sunset Limited


Cormac McCarthy
THE SUNSET LIMITED
A Novel in Dramatic Form
(2006)
by Dianne C. Luce

For the protagonist of the American west, to ride off into the sunset is to complete the heroic mission and to take a solitary journey, perhaps to the end of things. The historical Sunset Limited was a transcontinental train that crossed the American south from Atlantic to Pacific. Metaphorically, to ride the sunset limited is to take the mythic train west, to go to the western wall, to sail over the edge of the world. The literal train in McCarthy’sThe Sunset Limited is a New York subway, but the destination of the suicidal professor White is the solitude of death, an escape from the hell of other people, from the human history of war and genocide, and from his own intractable alienation.
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Monday, October 26, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / The Road


Cormac McCarthy
THE ROAD
by Rick Wallach

Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Cormac McCarthy / No Country for Old Men


Cormac McCarthy
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
by Rich Wallach

It’s the early 1980s, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell has presided over his small south Texas border county for decades. In all that time he has sent only one criminal to death row in and is otherwise secure in his belief that “it takes very little to govern good people.” Unbeknownst to Bell, however, a local welder named Llewellyn Moss has, while out hunting near the Rio Grande, stumbled across the bodies of a half dozen drug runners who have killed each other off during a deal gone bad. Moss has discovered and made off with a satchel containing two million dollars in cash found near the site of the carnage. Moss, a former sniper during his tours of duty in Vietnam, is himself unaware that the satchel contains a radio transponder. After a lapse of caution enables the drug dealers’ bosses to identify him, Moss and his young wife find themselves fleeing from the cartel hitmen who have been dispatched to recover the satchel of money, and Sheriff Bell finds himself confronting a surge of violence the likes of which his quiet community has never before experienced.


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Adele confirms album release date and new single, Hello

Adele

Adele confirms album release date and new single, Hello

This article is m

ore than 6 years old

Fans can hear 25 on 20 November, with her new single Hello released on 23 October


Following news that Adele’s 25 is a “make-up record” inspired by coming to terms with adulthood and all of its grown up responsibilities and regrets, the singer has revealed its 20 November release date, as well as its official artwork.


Guardian music

Thu 22 Oct 2015 16.33 BST

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