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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 |
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
The British-American author on arguing about Jane Austen, the joys of Jerome K Jerome, and revising his opinion of Philip Roth
Ben Markovits
Friday 27 February 2026
My earliest reading memory
I used to read Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American kids’ series about a boy detective and his brilliant sidekick, Sally, who protects him as they tackle their arch enemy, Bugs Meany, a kind of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We’d sit in the kitchen together and try to solve the crimes. Of course, for me it was also an opportunity to hang out with my mom. I’m one of five kids; attention was hard to come by. But I was also drawn to the picture Sobol paints of small-town all-American life, which I don’t think I ever felt a part of. We moved around too much.
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.
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There had been a sign to detour in the centre of the main street of this town, but cars had obviously gone through, so, believing it was some repair which had been completed, Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brick-paved street, stopped by traffic lights that flashed on and off on this traffic-less Sunday, and would be gone next year when the payments on the system were not met; on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced cleanly away and the second-growth timber on both sides. It was not his country but it was the middle of fall and all of this country was good to drive through and to see. The cotton was picked and in the clearings there were patches of corn, some cut with streaks of red sorghum, and, driving easily, his son asleep on the seat by his side, the day's run made, knowing the town he would reach for the night, Nick noticed which corn fields had soy beans or peas in them, how the thickets and the cut-over land lay, where the cabins and houses were in relation to the fields and the thickets; hunting the country in his mind as he went by; sizing up each clearing as to feed and cover and figuring where you would find a covey and which way they would fly.
Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero.
—Martin Luther
HORROR and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity—as La Bruyère says of all our unhappiness—“vient de ne pouvoir être seuls.” {*1}
by Algernon Blackwood
(Full story)
Some nights are merely dark, others are dark in a suggestive way as though something ominous, mysterious, is going to happen. In certain remote outlying suburbs, at any rate, this seems true, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where little happens, where a ring at the door is a summons almost, and people cry “Let’s go to town!” In the villa gardens the mangy cedars sigh in the wind, but the hedges stiffen, there is a muffling of spontaneous activity.
