Evan Rachel Wood and Marilyn Manson

 

Evan Rachel Wood and four other women accuse Marilyn Manson of abuse

This article is m

ore than 7 

months old

Manson describes allegations as ‘horrible distortions of reality’ after record label drops him from their roster

Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Mon 1 Feb 2021 17.06 GMT

Evan Rachel Wood has accused her former partner Marilyn Manson of years of “horrific” abuse.

In an Instagram post, the actor wrote:

The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson. He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.

Four other women – Ashley Walters, Sarah McNeilly, Ashley Morgan and Gabriella (with no surname given) – have also alleged abusive behaviour via public Instagram posts. McNeilly and Walters allege physical and emotional abuse, including behaviour they characterise as torture; Morgan alleges sexual and physical violence, and coercion; Gabriella alleges rape, physical violence and that Manson forced her to take drugs.

 

‘He really got into it’ … Marilyn Manson, in a shot taken
for the cover of his album Mechanical Animals, 1998. 
Photo by Joseph Cultice

My best shot

Photography

Joseph Cultice’s best photograph: Marilyn Manson with prosthetic breasts

‘I wanted to make Manson look beautiful. But people found this image haunting and grotesque’

Interview by Henry Yates
Wed 16 Sep 2020 16.29 BST

In the late 90s, Marilyn Manson was the new rock star in Los Angeles. I’d already gone on the road with him and shot a few covers, including the Smells Like Children EP, and done the press shots for his album Antichrist Superstar. So I felt like I’d earned the album cover of Mechanical Animals.

 ‘I’m not wearing any short skirts. I’m not an exhibitionist!’ … the burlesque star. 

Interview

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her

Scarlette Johansson and Dita von Teese

Dita von Teese / This much I know / The young Marilyn Monroe was a pretty girl in a sea of pretty girls

Dita Von Teese / This much I Know / ‘Staying pale takes some effort in LA’

Lyndsey Winship
Wed 29 Sep 2021 06.00 BST

D

ita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson, you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese.

The retreats where famous authors found inspiration – in pictures

The French Polynesian island of Tetiaroa, where former US president Barack Obama plans to write his memoir.

The retreats where famous authors found inspiration – in pictures

Former president Barack Obama is to journey to the South Pacific island of Tetiaroa, once owned by Marlon Brando, to write his memoir. Here’s a look at where other famous authors found the inspiration to write

Sarah Gilbert

Mon 27 Mar 2017 19.30 BST

The small hut where Mark Twain brought Huckleberry Finn to life on a farm in Elmira, New York,
now housed on a college campus

The Elephant House cafe in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the cafes
in which JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel

The wooden shed at the Boat House in Laugharne, Wales, where Dylan Thomas worked

The Writing Lodge in the garden at Monk’s House in England,
was the writer Virginia Woolf’s country home and retreat

The Goldeneye estate in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote the bulk of his James Bond novels

A replica of the hut that Henry David Thoreau built himself to write in near Walden pond
In Concord, Massachusetts

The house in Key West, Florida, where Ernest Hemingway did some of his best work,
including To Have And Have Not

The sitting room at South Cottage at Sissinghurst Castle,
the retreat of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West

Isolated Barnhill House on the Scottish island of Jura
where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Bernard Shaw’s rotating shed in St Alban’s, England,
which he built so he could always face the sun while writing his plays

THE GUARDIAN

'Where do I think best? In bed' – authors reveal their dream retreats

Paul Bowles in Tanger

'Where do I think best? In bed' – authors reveal their dream retreats

A hotel on the Moray Firth estuary; an adrenaline-filled auction room in west London; an ad man’s office in Manhattan on DVD … AL Kennedy, William Boyd and others celebrate their cultural hideouts

by William Boyd, AL Kennedy, Nicola Barker, Joan Bakewell and Daljit Nagra
Friday 29 December 2017

AL Kennedy

AL Kennedy: My bed

I’m typing this in bed – but more of that later. Writers asked to expatiate on cultural or creative spaces may tend to feel they have to swear they can’t add one word to another without staying in a Tuscan palazzo, or being surrounded by folk musicians from obscure mountain villages and their charmingly artisanal children. (Sort of like Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes only more lifestyley.) This helps advertisers offer you Tuscan holiday packages, or mountain socks made from homespun doghair.

 

Book of the day
Autobiography and memoir

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel review – a remarkable talent

An outsider perspective on the TV industry exposes its sexism, racism and complacency

Legends of the fall / The 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

Fiona Sturges
Wedenesday 8 September 2021

I

n 2018, the actor and screenwriter Michaela Coel addressed the bigwigs of the television industry at the Edinburgh festival. She had been invited to deliver the 43rd MacTaggart lecture, a prestigious spot that had previously gone to Dennis Potter, John Humphrys, Greg Dyke and three Murdochs: Rupert, James and Elisabeth. In 43 years, Coel was only the fifth woman to take the podium and the first person of colour. Not for nothing did the event chair and head of Sky Arts, Philip Edgar-Jones, remark how her presence “makes you wonder what we’ve been doing all these years”.

Michaela Coel / The Quietest Emmys Speech Was the Loudest

Michael Coel
Photo by Cliff Lipson

The Quietest Emmys Speech Was the Loudest

After winning her award, Michaela Coel delivered the rare message meant for those outside the glitzy room in which she stood.

By Shirley Li

September 20, 2021

When the camera turned to Michaela Coel after she won an Emmy for limited-series writing, she looked overwhelmed. The creator, star, writer, and co-director of I May Destroy You kept her head down, her shoulders slouched. Next to her, Coel’s former co-star Cynthia Erivo whispered something into her ear—a pep talk, maybe. But for a few seconds, Coel remained still, as if the weight of her first, historic Emmy win might keep her from going onstage. 

BOOK OF THE DAY

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka review – a vast danse macabre

The Nigerian writer’s first novel in nearly 50 years is a vivid, shocking story of political corruption in a country much like his homeland

Legends of the fall / The 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

Ben Okri

Monday 27 September 2021

W

ole Soyinka’s new novel tells the multidimensional story of a secret society dealing in human parts for sacrificial uses, whose members encompass the highest political and religious figures in the land. It details how the conspiracy and cover-up of this quasi-organisation affect not only the life of the nation but, more specifically, the lives of four friends. This is essentially a whistleblower’s book. It is a novel that explodes criminal racketeering of a most sinister and deadly kind that is operating in an African nation uncomfortably like Nigeria. It is a vivid and wild romp through a political landscape riddled with corruption and opportunism and a spiritual landscape riddled with fraudulence and, even more disquietingly, state-sanctioned murder. This is a novel written at the end of an artist’s tether. It has gone beyond satire. It is a vast danse macabre. It is the work of an artist who finally has found the time and the space to unleash a tale about all that is rotten in the state of Nigeria. No one else can write such a book and get away with it and still live and function in the very belly of the horrors revealed. But then no other writer has Soyinka’s unique positioning in the political and cultural life of his nation.

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell tells her side of the story about her affair with Harold Pinter

In response to Pinter’s hit 1978 play Betrayal, which chronicled their relationship, Bakewell wrote Keeping in Touch – which is to be aired on Radio 4

Published: Saturday, 22nd April 2017 at 8:00 am

When Joan Bakewell embarked on an eight-year affair with the playwright Harold Pinter in the 1960s, she never suspected he would make a play out of it. But then he wrote Betrayal and sent it to Bakewell for her comments. Her first response was horror.

Joan Bakewel / A Day in the Life

 

---

Joan Bakewell

A Day in the Life 

The Sunday Times Magazine. Writer’s Cut

Dame Joan Bakewell has been a leading broadcaster, journalist and author since the 1960s, when comedian Frank Muir dubbed her “the thinking man’s crumpet”. Now 86, she was awarded a life peerage in 2011 and took the title Baroness Bakewell of Stockport to reflect her Northern upbringing. She has been married twice and famously had an eight-year affair from 1962 with playwright Harold Pinter, which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal. Bakewell lives alone in Primrose Hill, North London, and has two children from her first marriage, Harriet, 59, and Matthew, 57 and six grandchildren, aged 18-26. 

24 MARCH 20019

My day begins with a rigid routine that gradually gets ragged as the day continues. The alarm goes off at 6.50am, which gives me time to fetch a cup of tea and come back to bed to listen to the Radio 4 news at 7am. I have Earl Grey – always decaffeinated because I have a lot of adrenaline of my own. I’ve not had caffein for at least ten years, so if I ever have it these days without knowing I’m as high as a kite. 

 

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell: I met Harold Pinter in Paris and was back for children's supper

18 April, 2017 07:06

Joan Bakewell has told how she once jetted to Paris to spend the day with playwright Harold Pinter during their affair before returning to England to cook dinner for her children.

The Labour peer, 84, is preparing to release her own account of the eight-year relationship nearly four decades after Pinter used it as the basis for his play Betrayal.

Heart of the matter / Joan Bakewell reveals how her affair with Harold Pinter - and the play it spawned - still dominates her life

 

Joan Bakewell

HEART OF THE MATTER:

Joan Bakewell reveals how her affair with Harold Pinter - and the play in spawned still dominates her life

She was the original 'thinking man's crumpet' and remains disarmingly frank about sex. But as Joan Bakewell reveals in this compelling interview, she is still not over her affair with the playwright.

By JAN MOIR FOR THE DAILY MAIL
UPDATED: 19:38 BST, 4 March 2009

Dame Joan Bakewell points a finger in my direction 'You make me laugh,' she says, although she is not laughing. Not really.

Fresh from fluffing her hair and applying a stripe of lipstick, she whisks around her home with the lively intent of someone far younger than her 75 years. Half a life younger, to be honest.

Bloomin’ Marvellous! / Joyce and Trieste

Bloomin’ Marvellous! Joyce and Trieste.

by Andrew Lawless

As the world and his wife, in Joycean terms, turn their attention to Dublin, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fictional event of Bloomsday, it seems almost as if a lone Irish voice is reminding us that Joyce wrote most of his work outside of Ireland, and in particular a large part of it in the Italian City of Trieste.

Dr. John McCourt, an Irishman who settled in Trieste, and who has worked on Joyce related material for over ten years, has recently published The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. He’s at pains to point out, particularly now, as Dublin is taken over by Bloomsday Breakfast parties, that Joyce took a huge amount of influence from the Italian city on the Adriatic. “The received wisdom of it was that Trieste didn’t influence Joyce at all. That was what his brother Stanislaus said, and that was largely what Richard Ellman, and the critics who followed on from him, said. They depicted the Trieste years as very difficult years, years of poverty, of difficulties getting published, and all of that is true, but at the same time the years in Trieste were his richest creative period. It’s the period when he finished Dubliners, wrote all of Portrait of the Artist as a young man, wrote a good deal of Ulyssesand planned the rest of the novel, wrote Giacomo Joyce, so they’re very, very creative years, despite the personal problems he had here”.

The Joyces in Paris, 1924. From left, James, Nora, and their children, Lucia and George.

Lucia by Alex Pheby review – in search of James Joyce’s daughter

This extraordinary novel inspired by the life of Lucia Joyce tells the troubling story of a woman who is confined and abused

Ian Sansom

Thu 12 July 2018

T

his book”, reads the prefatory note to Alex Pheby’s third novel, “is intended as a work of art. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in an artistic manner. Any representations of actual persons are either coincidental, or have been altered for artistic effect.” Erm, OK.

Joyce / All Life Was Grist For The Artis

James Joyce
by Apranihita

October 25, 1959

All Life Was Grist For The Artist

By STEPHEN SPENDER

JAMES JOYCE By Richard Ellmann.

tanislaus Joyce, who bore throughout his life, like an enormous load, all the fame and most of the cares of his more famous brother, once made an entry in the diary he kept as a record of James Joyce's unfolding genius: "Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language- an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue."

Cartoon / Burns / My Problem

 

MY PROBLEM

By Burns

“Thanks, I knew I could count on you to turn my problem into something way worse that happened to you.”

The New Yorker
September 24, 2021

Ellen Duthie / Sendak's Windows

 

Maurice Sendak

Sendak's Windows

Ellen Duthie / Las ventanas de Sendak

Ellen Duthie

Monday 3 November 2014

Last month the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in Spain (SCBWI) had invited me to give an informal talk on Sendak. 

Over twenty-five people came along to what had initially meant to be a 'bring along a few books and talk about them' kind of affair, so I had to prepare more of a presentation, the notes of which I share below for anyone interested. These are notes for my own personal use, with only some references included (I'll be completing those over the next few days).