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| Jason Isaacs |
Jason Isaacs: ‘Daniel Craig is more comfortable naked than with clothes on’
As told to Rich Pelley
The Liverpool-born actor on going to school with Mark Kermode, massages with Mel Gibson and why he will never be James Bond
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Post your questions for Rebel Wilson
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| Rebel Wilson |
Post your questions for Rebel Wilson
Whether you want know about starring in hit comedies, raising the roof at awards ceremonies or snogging Elton John, the actor is ready to tell all
Rich Pelley
Thu 29 May 2025 11.23
Friday, May 30, 2025
The Salt Path review – Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs hike from ruin to renewal
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| Emotional … Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as Raynor and Moth Winn. |
The Salt Path review – Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs hike from ruin to renewal
Marianne Elliott directs this affecting drama, based on Raynor Winn’s memoir, which builds steadily as the couple journey towards redemption
Cath Clarke
Wed 28 May 2025 11.00 BST
This film gives cinema one of the most nail-biting scenes of the year so far: an edge-of-the-seat moment as Gillian Anderson puts her bank card into a cash machine. Is there enough money in the account? Everything is at stake. This impressive, intelligent drama is an adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir about walking the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, with her husband, Moth. Unlike other hikers, the couple were not walking for pleasure – at least not to begin with. They had nowhere else to go after losing their farm. From theatre director Marianne Elliott, it stars two fancy actors – Anderson and Jason Isaacs – both giving lovely, emotional, low-key performances.
Walk on the wild side / Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path
Interview
Walk on the wild side: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path
Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir about her and her husband’s 630-mile trek around England’s south coast has become a film. Its stars, makers and Winn talk floods, fog and forgiveness
Ryan Gilbey
Friday 30 May 2025
‘Ihave played a lot of powerful, well-dressed women in my career,” says Gillian Anderson. They flash before your eyes: Margaret Thatcher (The Crown), Eleanor Roosevelt (The First Lady), Emily Maitlis (the Prince Andrew/Newsnight drama Scoop) – as well as the formidable sex therapist in the Netflix hit Sex Education, a role that led to her being inundated with dildos from over-enthusiastic fans. “These are all women in control of themselves and their environment. Any time I have an opportunity to steer against that, particularly lately, it’s of interest to me.”
Madeleine Thien / ‘I ran in blizzards and -20C – all I wanted was to listen to Middlemarch’
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| Madeleine Thien |
| The |
Books
0f my
life
Madeleine Thien: ‘I ran in blizzards and -20C – all I wanted was to listen to Middlemarch’
The Canadian author on mountain running to George Eliot, powerful reminders from Omar El Akkad and the translation that brought Homer’s Iliad to life
Madekeine Thien
Friday 30 May 2025
My earliest reading memory
Resting in my father’s arms as he read the newspaper. I must have been three or four years old. He read the paper cover to cover, and for an hour or so each night, I watched the world go by.
My favourite book growing up
When I was 11 I would go to the library downtown and request microfilm of old newspapers. I clicked the spools into place and read and read. I was horrified and baffled and amazed that there existed so many decades, so much time, in which I was … nowhere and not yet.
The book that changed me as a teenager
My parents were educated in missionary schools in Hong Kong and Malaysia; in Vancouver, they enrolled me in a Catholic school. The religious texts and sermons that we read, and the things I saw around me, made me turn away from religion when I was a teenager; but those texts instilled in me a lasting relationship with philosophy. I left religion, but not its questions.
The writer who changed my mind
Omar El Akkad. I used to think that, sometimes, people are made speechless by the horror of events, by fear, by grief. Perhaps the words they need don’t exist. But One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This reminds us that the words are there. We have the language to describe ethnic cleansing and genocide. When journalists are murdered, when 183 children are killed in a single day, when 15 paramedics are executed, and we stay silent, words don’t fail us – we fail our vocation and each other.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Plurality! It’s really all of them, isn’t it? Contending with one another across time. Reading is prismatic, and a great writer shows us how to read far beyond their own works. John Berger, Canisia Lubrin, Rawi Hage, Yan Lianke, Balam Rodrigo, Yōko Ogawa, Adania Shibli, Ma Jian, Italo Calvino, James Baldwin, Alexis Wright, Kafka, my beloved Proust … and on it goes.
The book or author I came back to
During the pandemic, I ran 10km up and down a mountain every other day while listening to Middlemarch. I ran in blizzards and -20C – all I wanted to do was listen.
The book I reread
Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. Hrabal’s knowing, sorrowful, open-hearted, gleeful, broken genius. I love him as one loves a friend.
The book I could never read again
For now but not forever, the work of a writer who shaped me, Alice Munro. Yet often I find myself thinking about the experience of reading her – this feeling that I knew the women in her stories, had lived among them, had loved them or fled them. The memory of reading, the imprint of the encounter, is a lifelong confrontation.
The book I discovered later in life
I read The Iliad when I was 15 but I feel as if I experienced it for the first time when I read Emily Wilson’s 2023 translation, which overflows with names and lives and which records the utter waste of war. Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force also changed me – her belief that, century after century, we’ve ignored or misunderstood or misrepresented what Homer was trying to tell us. Weil writes: “Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, The Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities of war, never.”
The book I am currently reading
Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson, and Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi. Everyone read these infinitely wise and haunting books.
The Book of Records is published by Granta
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