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| ‘Pottery is deep in the human story’ … De Waal in his studio Photograph: Linda Nylind/ |
The great potter explains why he turned his decades-long fixation with Axel Salto – maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show
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| Edmund de Waal |
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| Natalue Haynes |
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The author and comedian on the immortal lines of Snoopy, discovering the heart of Homer’s Iliad and her culinary comfort read
Natalie Haynes
Friday 10 October 2025
My earliest reading memory
Harvey’s Hideout by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban. Harvey is a muskrat with a grievance against his awful sibling. His sister Mildred feels just the same way. I read this at four or five curled up on a yellow beanbag next to the radiator, in Bournville, where I grew up. I honestly don’t think there is a better reading spot anywhere in the world.
My favourite book growing up
Peanuts. I loved Snoopy long before I became an author. But he is an inspiration to all writers, sending a novel to his publishers with an immortal covering letter: “Gentlemen, enclosed is the manuscript of my new novel. I know you are going to like it. In the meantime, please send me some money so I can live it up.”
The book that changed me as a teenager
Thrasymachus, by CWE Peckett and AR Munday. There were newer Greek textbooks, so I have no idea why we used this. It had been written for prep school boys, I think, so the stories centred on a little boy named Thrasymachus, wandering about the Underworld, using simple constructions until we got the hang of the alphabet and the many, many verb endings (perfect, imperfect and pluperfect not enough for you? Let us throw in the aorist to keep you on your toes). I was terrible at Greek for ages, but it all worked out in the end.
The writer who changed my mind
Anyone who has ever written an instruction manual, for anything from a boiler to a board game. It took me many years to accept that I would honestly rather sit being cold than read the instructions to anything. There’s something about turning the first page that makes me feel as if I’ve been buried alive.
The books that made me want to be a writer
Cynthia Heimel. Her collected columns were so smart and funny, with their pop art covers and excellent titles – If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?!, Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye etc. I was about 20 when I first read her, and just starting to do standup, which would go on to be the next decade of my life. She made me see a different way of being funny, in print. I still think of her often when I’m writing.
The author I came back to
Homer. I hated the Iliad when I read it at school: all those loathsome, posturing men, and endless descriptions of people dying. And now I know it has worlds contained within it, about war and loss, anger and grief, love and fear.
The book I reread
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It never migrates back from my desk to the bookshelf. We have unfinished business, I assume. I just don’t know what it is yet.
The book I could never read again
Anything by a Brontë. I just don’t need that much torment in my life, and if I do, there’s always Catullus.
The book I discovered later in life
Bleak House. The Turning Point by Robert Douglas Fairhurst – which charts the year when Dickens wrote it – made me want to read Dickens for the first time since school.
The book I am currently reading
The Politics of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica by Anatole Mori. Because how else will I find out all the things I wish I’d known when I was writing about the Argo?
My comfort read
Meera Sodha’s Dinner. She’s such an open-hearted writer. She makes you feel fine about the days when you can’t face cooking, and she has a thousand great ideas for the days when you can.
From children’s funerals to underground shelters to the frontline, Kochetova has captured the conflict with power and humanity for the Guardian. ‘I have the same scars as the people I photograph,’ she says ahead of a major show
It was April of last year, and the production of the limited series “Love Story” was three weeks away from starting. Cameras were ready to go up — but for the fact that Camelot’s princess, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, to be played by Sarah Pidgeon, didn’t yet have her prince.
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Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr in FX's Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. |
As Ryan Murphy’s new mini-series focuses on their explosive relationship, aides and experts explain the real-life couple behind the myth
He only met John F Kennedy Jr for five minutes but, three decades later, the memory lingers on. “Oh my God, he had it all,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist, recalling their encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “He had his mother’s poise and his father’s charisma; it was a perfect combination of the two. If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him.”
Style watchers quick to disapprove of late publicist’s portrayal in Ryan Murphy’s American Love Story
In fashion, only the real favourites have acronyms. See SJP for Sarah Jessica Parker, ALT for the fashion editor André Leon Talley and – particularly relevant right now – CBK for Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
