Scarlett Johansson has been named Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive for the second time. She was first granted the title in 2006, and she didn’t seem thrilled at all. During that interview, ScarJo was aghast to learn about a British poll claiming she had the best female bum. Her response: “There are plenty of girls with nicer butts. There are plenty of girls who work harder for nicer butts. What about my brain?What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?”
Makeup artist Ashleigh Louer wanted to create a sultry, glowing, and beautiful makeup look on Dylan for this shoot. Perfect skin was her focus and she started by prepping with Avene Thermal Spring Water mist and mixed Embryolisse moisturizer with Dior Pro Youth Sorbet essence serum. She also prepped the eyes with Kate Somerville Line Release eye repair cream. Next, she mixed a little Charlotte Tilbury Wonderglow primer with Laura Mercier’s Radiance primer to make the base extra bright and glowy.
Scarlett Johansson interview: 'I would way rather not have middle ground'
The star talks to Carole Cadwalladr about playing an alien in Under the Skin – Jonathan Glazer's low-budget sci-fi film set in Glasgow – and her role in the recent SodaStream controversy
T
here is something very levelling about seeing a major Hollywood star walking past Primark. And not just any Hollywood star but Scarlett Johansson, twice crowned Esquire's "Sexiest Woman Alive", three times Woody Allen muse, Bafta winner, noted beauty. Yet, there she is, in her latest film, in a pair of stonewashed jeans and a fake fur coat, walking down a busy shopping street in Glasgow and, well, blending in. She looks normal. Ordinary, even. Strip a star of their Hollywood get-up, remove them from their Bel Air mansions, and it turns out that they look just like the rest of us.
Only Johansson is different. Theoretically, this is because, in Under the Skin, a low-budget sci-fi indie adapted from a Michel Faber novel, we know she's an alien. In reality, it's because we know she's Scarlett Johansson. We watch her prowling the outskirts of Glasgow, the in-between lands of industrial parks and council estates, looking for fresh man meat, and there is an eerie sense of alien universes colliding. Scenes include Scarlett Johansson on a bus. Scarlett Johansson being given directions to Asda. And Scarlett Johansson sitting in front of an electric fire in a council house watching Tommy Cooper on TV.
If I looked like Scarlett Johansson I’d probably understand her view on monogamy
The actress has said that monogamy is unnatural and hard work, but it’s more about demand, supply and opportunity
Tim Lott
S
carlett Johansson has said it “isn’t natural” to be monogamous. She claims it’s too much like hard work, and continues, “the fact that it is such work for so many people … proves that it is not a natural thing. It definitely goes against some instinct to look beyond.”
The supermodel, 34, on the humiliation of poverty, weekends in nightclubs and building a play park for children from the Beslan siege
Ruaridh Nicoll
25 February 2017
Natalia Vodianova
Poverty is humiliation. You feel like there is something wrong with you, not with society, especially as a child. You see other children who are happy and you think it must be so incredible. You daydream a lot about not being yourself. Maybe that helped me model.
Boys in my school in Nizhny Novgorod hated me. I was unhealthily skinny because sometimes we had nothing to eat. They used to draw me like a stick. And the stigma against my sister [Oksana, who has cerebral palsy and autism] brushed off on me. They called me dirty.
I have an animal sense for danger and make decisions based on intuition. I arrived in Paris at 17, but changed agencies within the week. On the second night, I was taken to a nightclub with some guys. Nothing happened, but I was a young girl so I liked young guys, and these were not young guys. A day or two later the Viva model agency said: “If you ever want to change…” and I was like: “Yes, right now.”
Susan Hill: ‘Can I be a serious writer, keeping such casual hours?’
Susan Hill on starting her career during her O-levels, Twitter and completing her 59th book Susan Hill Saturday 25 February 2017
T
he past is another country. I wrote things differently there. First it was the school day: O-levels, A-levels. I was always writing. Some paint, some play an instrument, some swim fast, some run. I wrote: poems, plays, stories – anything, so long as it was words on paper. During O-levels I started a novel, because I asked advice from the writer Pamela Hansford Johnson, who told me I should.
When I left school, writing had to be fitted around work as a book reviewer for a newspaper. I wrote early morning and late at night, in sample notebooks given by a neighbour who worked “in stationery”.
I started to write all day when I was sacked from the Coventry Telegraph, an incoming editor not caring for books. I had a £500 loan from a bank manager who took a punt on my becoming rich and famous. He wanted no interest, only a signed copy of the eventual novel. Was ever a bank manager such a fairy godfather?
Several novels came after that, written in great bursts, every day, all day, when I rented a house in Suffolk overlooking the North Sea. I did my best work during those few years, writing by hand, still, then typing up. The novels were shortlisted for, and won, prizes. I was still in my 20s. Slowly, the backlist grew.
A personal tragedy, three years in the wilderness, and another novel, written at white heat, often all night, in six weeks. I needed no schedule. I ate, slept, walked by the sea, wrote. Days went by when I spoke to no one. It was a focused time.
But then came marriage, domesticity and a child, followed by a long, desperate quest to have another. More tragedy, before a final gift of the gods, and another baby. I was out of the writing game. I had no interest in writing, no energy, no emotional space. I thought I had given up for good and said so.
But unlike for the athlete or the ballet dancer, age is of no consequence to the writer. When I was 40, and my eldest child five, I felt a tension within me which I recognised, belatedly, as the need to write again. I had had my gap years. I was still a wife and mother, but time had expanded while I wasn’t looking.
A production of The Woman in Black at the Fortune theatre, London. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
For six weeks, someone looked after my daughter every morning. I had to write a book. And I did. The Woman in Black, for fun, really, to see if I could. It was nothing like any I had written before and it was fun. It wrote itself.
Since then, there have been no more long gaps between books. I am 75. My daughters are adults. I am a grandmother. Time stretches ahead. Or does it? “At my back, I always hear ... ”
Writers die but they never retire. I no longer have time pressure. No exam looming, no school pickup. I can write as I like, when I like, and I do. Mornings – not often. Afternoons – sometimes. Evenings, and late nights. Yes. Weekends. Yes, if I want to. I have no office. No room of my own. Kitchen table. Sitting room sofa. Bed with mounds of pillows. An hour. Two. No long days. There are places to go, things to see. Coffee shops. Dog to be walked on empty beaches under wide skies. Family to see. Twitterers to follow. Something of everything. The best way.
I am rebuked. Can I be a serious writer, keeping such casual hours?
Maybe I am not. The books are all very different from each other now. I challenge myself. Ghost stories. Crime. Literary fiction. Non-fiction. That does not sound like proper professional writing either. Whatever. My 59th book, From the Heart, is a novella and as serious as I can get. It comes from a writer without a schedule, office or desk, who still writes by hand.
But a writer, all the same. I had better be. I am unemployable otherwise.
John Kennedy and his wife Jakie
Dallas, November 22, 1963
THE TRANSITION
Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas
By Robert A. Caro April 2, 2012
Johnson behind President Kennedy as they left the Hotel Texas, in Fort Worth, the day that Kennedy was assassinated.Photograph from Houston Chronicle / AP
Friday, November 22, 1963, began for Lyndon Johnson in Fort Worth, with the headline he saw on the front page of the Dallas Morning News:“yarborough snubs lbj.”
Johnson, accompanying President Kennedy on a tour of Texas, had been given an assignment that the President considered vital: since a unified Democratic front in the state would be needed to carry it in 1964, the Vice-President had been made responsible for healing the bitter Democratic Party rift between Governor John B. Connally, a former Johnson assistant, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, the leader of the Party’s liberal wing. The previous day, however, Yarborough had refused even to ride in the same car as Johnson. Assigned to accompany the Vice-President during a Presidential motorcade through San Antonio, the Senator had gotten into another car instead, and, in a procession in which the other vehicles behind the Presidential limousine were packed with people, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, had had to sit conspicuously alone in the back seat of their convertible.
What a magical car engine has to do with social justice, a parrot named Arturo and the history of jazz.
A week ago, we featured 7 little-known children’s books by famous authors of “grown-up” literature, on the trails of somefavorite children’s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups. The response has been so fantastic that, today, we’re back with seven more, based on reader suggestions and belated findings from the rabbit hole of research surrounding the first installment.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Aldous Huxley may be best known for his iconic 1932 novelBrave New World, one of the most important meditations on futurism and how technology is changing society ever published, but he was also deeply fascinated by children’s fiction. In 1967, three years after Huxley’s death, Random House released a posthumous volume of the only children’s book he ever wrote, some 23 years earlier.The Crows of Pearblossom tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Crow, whose eggs never hatch because the Rattlesnake living at the base of their tree keeps eating them. After the 297th eaten egg, the hopeful parents set out to kill the snake and enlist the help of their friend, Mr. Owl, who bakes mud into two stone eggs and paints them to resemble the Crows’ eggs. Upon eating them, the Rattlesnake is in so much pain that he beings to thrash about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes merrily on to hatch “four families of 17 children each,” using the snake “as a clothesline on which to hang the little crows’ diapers.”
Melvin Burgess Building a children's library Monday 17 April 2000 17.10 BST
Last modified on Saturday 5 July 200813.25 BST
One minute they are children, the next they are adults. One minute they are reading Frances Hodgson Burnett and the next Angela Carter. Five years ago, most bookshops didn't even have a young adult or teenage section. Now they are bursting to the seams with TV tie-ins and spinoffs and fantasy horror novels. More encouragingly, the last few years have also seen a huge increase in quality writing for young people. Writers such as Melvin Burgess and Phillip Pullman are not simply writing bridging books, but novels that stand alone in their own right and deserve to win prizes in any category of fiction. From these books it is no leap at all into the big pond of adult fiction, merely a swallow dive.
Dick Bruna in his studio in UtrechtCREDIT: PORTRAIT BY CUNY JANSSEN
Author and illustrator Dick Bruna died yesterday, at the age of 89. In celebration, here is an interview he gave in 2008 about how he came to create the £150 million rabbit.
Dick Bruna has already made tea and brought over biscuits, and now he leans forward from a chair in his airy, top-floor Utrecht studio. Spectacular white walrus whiskers twitch expectantly and behind a pair of oval spectacles, his eyes twinkle.
Dick Bruna, the 80-year-old creator of miffy, the £150 million rabbit, leads a life of almost zen-like simplicity - or at least he would if it weren't for the Japanese groupies.
By Horatia Harrod 4:01PM BST 31 Jul 2008
Dick Bruna has already made tea and brought over biscuits, and now he leans forward from a chair in his airy, top-floor Utrecht studio. Spectacular white walrus whiskers twitch expectantly and behind a pair of oval spectacles, his eyes twinkle. This man - Geppetto made flesh - does not look or behave like the head of a global empire worth about £150 million annually. But Bruna is not your typical multi-millionaire mogul. No, he's the creator of Miffy, the world's most popular rabbit (and think for a moment of the competition for that title: Br'er, Peter, Roger...), whose modest adventures have sold more than 85 million storybooks, been translated into 40 languages, and whose clean, simple little face (two dots for eyes, a cross for a mouth) is recognised throughout the world. Hers is the first gaze I meet when I walk into the arrivals hall at Amsterdam airport, staring blankly from a shiny helium balloon. Later, I see her on pencils and building blocks, fridge magnets and school satchels, stitched together in plush and, most spectacularly, cast as a gold-plated statue.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
