Jack Vettriano / Unreal Rooms

Jack Vettriano, Mad Dogs

Jack Vettriano

Unreal Rooms

1 JULY 2017, 

EMANUELA BORGATTA DUNNETT

Why are we able to feel nostalgia for a world we have never visited nor known, in front of Jack Vettriano’s paintings? Why do we feel as strangers - yet accomplices - in front of the men and women populating his works? These are key questions to understand the Scottish painter’s success, a painter who has managed to become one of the most followed artist of contemporary painting, all over the world. First, we need to focus our attention on the use of the light: unprecedented in the way he uses to play with the darkness which characterises all his works: faces in half light, thoughtful, facing a crossroad where they are asked to state their position. The bodies are captured at the beginning of an action, the consequences of which are unknown: deceitful gazes, arms meeting in secret relationships. 

Mario Puzo / The Godfather / Quotes

The Godfather 

by Mario Puzo

BIOGRAPHY

Quotes

BOOK I

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of a family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me for help.” – Don Vito Corleone

 

Interview

‘It felt dangerous. You got naggy’: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on power, combovers and Blue Moon

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills

 

Ethan Hawke

Review

Blue Moon review – Ethan Hawke is terrific in Richard Linklater’s bitter Broadway breakup drama 

This article is more than 1 month old

Hawke plays with campy brilliance and criminal combover the lyricist Lorenz Hart as he spirals into vinegary jilted despair after his split from Richard Rodgers

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 16 October 2025

Breaking up with the more prominent partner in a showbiz double act is a hazardous business. Larry David did it. So did Andrew Ridgeley. Now this witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the all but unbearable story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke, who is often digitally reduced in size – but is also occasionally filmed standing in an off-camera hole to look up poignantly at taller characters, facing Hart’s vertical challenge as José Ferrer once played the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec.

Françoise Gilot y Pablo Picasso

 

Françoise Gilot y Picasso

Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso

Françoise Gilot y Picasso

J. D. Salinger / The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye

The 100 best novels / No 72 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

To my mother

1

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

Isaac Babel / Justice in Quotes

Isaac Babel

 

Justice in Quotes

By The Odessa Review -

 

July 17, 2017

First I had dealings with Benya Krik, then with Lyubka Shneyveys. Do these words mean anything to you? Do they leave a taste in your mouth? The only thing I dodged on this trail of death was Seryozha Utochkin. Him I didn’t run across — and so I’m still alive. He straddles the city, this Utochkin, like a bronze monument, with his red hair and grey eyes. And all of us have to scurry between his legs.

Derek and Quentin, twins from Indiana who live in the woods: Robin de Puy’s best photograph

 

Derek and Quentin, twins from Indiana who live in the woods: Robin de Puy’s best photograph

This article is more than 6 months old

‘I spotted them in a town called Elkhart, jumped out of the car and ran towards them. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were runners or cyclists. Then you see the tattoos’

Interview by Chris Broughton

Wed 21 May 2025 14.36 

My first trip photographing Americans was in 2015, when I drove 8,000 miles across the country on a Harley-Davidson. I’d spent too long caught up in assignments and wanted to take some time off from commercial and editorial work to follow my own creative urges. America offered an opportunity to explore a landscape I didn’t know, and was far enough away from my home in the Netherlands to ensure it wouldn’t be easy for me to just go back if things got difficult.

Farmer Annie and her prize-winning sheep: Joanne Coates’ best photograph

 

MY BEST SHOT

Farmer Annie and her prize-winning sheep: Joanne Coates’ best photograph

This article is more than 1 year old

‘Sheep are Annie’s passion. She won an award with this north country cheviot. It’s put on a stand to keep it still’

Interview by Ella Braidwood

Wed 12 Jun 2024 15.20 BST

I moved back home to rural North Yorkshire in 2016, where I met my partner, a farmer. When you spend a lot of time on a farm, you end up helping out. I’m not from a farming background so I joined a Facebook group for women in farming to feel a bit more supported. You can ask about practical things – no question is a stupid one.

 

MY BEST SHOT

‘My mother had dementia but beautiful things unfolded’: Cheryle St Onge’s best photograph

‘She wasn’t very fond of Skipper, our jack russell, who loved the hose. But they were dancing together – two beings in the afternoon sunlight, having their own conversation’

Interview  by Charlotte Jansen

25 November 2025

Iam an only child. My father was killed in a car accident when I was 14 and my mother was 47. We were really tightly bonded after that. She worked at a university and was an artist: she painted and carved birds. She was a wonderful person, who lit up a room and was someone everyone wanted to be around. She was very giving.

Roman Polanksi / The Ghost Writer

 

THE GHOST WRITER

Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, and Olivia Williams star in a film written by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Harris, and directed by Polanski. 

By Indy StaffWed Mar 10, 2010

In the real life of Roman Polanski, ghosts of misdeeds past have been swirling around of late, and fans of his mostly dazzling filmography must always clarify that we’re fans of the artist, not the man. All that real-versus-reel business aside, Polanski’s newest film—his first strong work since 2002’s The Pianist—reminds us why that effort to separate man from artist is worth making. The Ghost Writer is an expertly and artfully made film, a slow-brewing but compelling thriller that avoids cheap shock tactics or clichés. It’s the work of a master in touch with the masterly side of his art.

Woody Allen / What’s with Baum?

 

Woody Allen
What’s with Baum?

A middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun, Baum’s turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife. He is uneasy with her close relationship with her son, a more successful author than he, and suspicious of her closeness with their neighbor in Connecticut. And in a moment of irrationality, he has impulsively tried to kiss a pretty young journalist during an interview that she is about to go public with.

What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

 

FOTOGRAFÍA DE  MANHATTAN  DE WOODY ALLEN

 

¿Qué hacemos con el arte de los hombres monstruosos?

Por Claire Dederer

 20 de noviembre de 2017

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, VS Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather... aunque si empezamos a enumerar deportistas, no pararemos. ¿Y qué hay de las mujeres? La lista se vuelve inmediatamente mucho más compleja y tentativa: ¿Anne Sexton? ¿Joan Crawford? ¿Sylvia Plath? ¿Cuenta la autolesión? Bueno, bueno, supongo que volvamos a los hombres: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.

The Art of Losing Love / Masahisa Fukase

 

The art of losing Love
Masahisa Fukase

It must be difficult to live with a photographer.

First, you must think you're eternally being spied upon, trying to be caught unawares, that an eye waiting to catch the true-true-you is always present, and always watching. It is only later that you realize that it isn't your essence that the photographer is trying to capture and distill truth from, it's theirs. That each image pointed at you is really just a sublimated view of themselves, and that what they project when they point and click in your general direction is really just a reflection back of self, sometimes twisted and sometimes upside-down.

The Solitude of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase

 

Masahisa Fukase, Erimo Cape, 1976. All images courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery © Masahisa Fukase Archives

Masahisa Fukase THE SOLITUDE OF RAVENS

‘The Solitude of Ravens’, by the late Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase, is an expressive metaphor of almost unmitigated darkness. Shot between 1975 and 1982, ‘Ravens’ stands as a requiem for Fukase’s marriage to Yo¯ko Wanibe. It is bookended by his two other most significant projects, both of which are also currently on show in London (as part of the group exhibition ‘Performing for the Camera’ at Tate Modern). ‘From Window’ (1974), a series of ‘straight’ photographs of Wanibe, speaks eloquently of the highs and lows of their marriage and its break-up. By contrast, 1991’s ‘Bukubuku’ (Bubbling) is a heavily claustrophobic, often surreal, set of self-portraits, which Fukase made in the bath after learning his ex-wife was to remarry. While all three bodies of work successfully convey Fukase’s feelings towards Wanibe, it is ‘Ravens’, on display at Michael Hoppen Gallery, which is his masterpiece.