tue 08/07/2025

literature

Sagan

Whisky, cigarettes, gambling and the little black dress: Sylvie Testud in a typical moment from Sagan

A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory...

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Design Gallery: The Art Nouveau Dacha

Vladimir Story's 1917 brochure for patterns for building Russia's traditional wooden country houses - called dachas - has been rescued from oblivion by the chance discovery of an ancient copy of it in Georgia. Now reprinted, The Art Nouveau Dacha:...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Sarnath Banerjee

Sarnath Banerjee: 'Everybody has his own aesthetics; but mine are a bit… wonky.'

When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public...

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Art Gallery: Sarnath Banerjee

The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in...

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then...

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Photographic Gallery: John Angerson's English Journey

Anna Baranovska, single mother, Birmingham. Originally from Lativa, she was shortlisted for Miss England

“Being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England.” Upon its publication 75 years ago, J B Priestley’s English Journey became an important influence for writers, photographers...

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The Last Station

The final days of Tolstoy are innately dramatic, as the American author Jay Parini intuited. The Last Station, published in 1990, was his novel about the novelist’s own denouement. Towards the end of his long and prodigiously successful life,...

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Famous literary drunks and addicts

Life magazine has a terrific photographic portfolio up on its site of famous drunks and substance abusers - with quotes - including Dorothy Parker: "One more drink and I'll be under the host",  Jack Kerouac: "I'm a Catholic and and I can't commit...

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A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov, Hampstead Theatre

The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and...

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Emma, BBC One

There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all...

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Lolita, National Theatre

Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is...

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