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Culture

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Entertainment

Stick review – you really need Owen Wilson’s beautiful golf comedy in your life

TV’s biggest dopamine hit is back, and it is thoroughly spoiling us with amazing new guest stars. What’s more, our hero is coming out of retirement to try to win the US Open! It’s tee time Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson) isn’t worried about his midlife crisis. “Moses had a crisis! Churchill had a crisis! Charlie Sheen had a crisis!” We’re not worrying, either: Pryce has been living fairly happily through a midlife crisis for as long as we’ve known him, which is for the one previous season of the superficially inessential yet sneakily deeply emotional golf comedy Stick. Stick is the sort of chummy h

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Entertainment

‘May every data centre crumble to dust!’ How can we stop the tech bros, tyrants and tycoons? With quilts!

Taking aim at every modern malaise, anarchist artist CJ Reay is going viral with his witty, call-to-arms slogans on beautiful tapestries. Altogether now: ‘Tyrants of today will be the compost of tomorrow!’ CJ Reay quilted so hard all summer that now he needs glasses. “After four months of doing it, I found myself getting really bad headaches towards the end, so I had an eye test,” says Reay. “I totally ruined my summer!” If that sounds extreme, he had given himself a relatively extreme task: to produce 14 of his Anarchist Prayer Quilts, adapting the slogan-forward graphic poster work that has

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Entertainment

Constantinople to Istanbul review – you won’t want to leave this lavish celebration of double imperial splendour

V&A, London Treasures from the two world-defining cultures that somehow coexisted in one mighty city keep on dazzling in this gorgeous, unmissable show Two empires compete to bewitch you in this exhibition that offers a double bubble of beauty. It collides the Byzantine empire, whose capital Constantinople was officially inaugurated on 11 May AD330, with the Ottoman Turks who conquered this great city in 1453 and turned it into Istanbul. The combined glories of two lost worlds – the Ottoman empire was dissolved in 1922 – beget an utterly enrapturing blockbuster. I lost all track of time in thi

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Entertainment

Tall Tales and Murder review – this Irish version of The Wire makes for mile-a-minute TV

You definitely won’t be bored by the TV take on the first of the Dublin Trilogy novels. But you might well feel confused by this Bonnie and Clyde-style caper through gangland Ireland (featuring Aidan Gillen) Tall Tales and Murder is likely to elicit varied responses from viewers, but boredom will surely be low on the list. This Irish caper – based on the first of the Dublin Trilogy novels by Caimh McDonnell, and written for TV by Stuart Carolan – moves at a mile a minute, taking in disgruntled gangsters; a dysfunctional care home; buried treasure; bedroom cuckoldry; a Paul Mescal lookalike con

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Entertainment

Latest Sarah J Maas book becomes UK’s fastest-selling adult fantasy novel

A Court of Splintered Harmony also records biggest single week of sales since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015 Sarah J Maas’s long-awaited return to her bestselling romantasy series has smashed UK sales records, with A Court of Splintered Harmony becoming the fastest-selling adult fantasy novel since accurate records began in 1998. The novel, the sixth in Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (Acotar) series and her first return to it in more than five years, sold 188,914 copies in the UK between publication day on 27 October and 31 October, according to NielsenIQ BookData. That also makes

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Entertainment

‘A trailblazer in the truest sense’: poet Grace Nichols wins £10,000 Pioneer prize

The Guyana-born, British-based writer takes home the Royal Society of Literature prize honouring women writers over 60 who have broken barriers The poet Grace Nichols has been named the winner of the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize, a £10,000 award that recognises women writers over 60 who broke through at a time when the literary world was less open to them. Nichols, 76, who was born in Guyana and moved to the UK in 1977, made her name with I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which took the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1983, and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, a collection published the f

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Entertainment

They fell in love on The Simpsons and married in real life. Meet the French Homer and Marge

They have brought TV’s most famous cartoon couple to life in France for the last 38 years. Philippe Peythieu and Véronique Augereau tell all about working and living together for so long, still being lovebirds – and rarely arguing The Simpsons is the biggest cartoon comedy in the world, with suburban couple Homer and Marge at its heart. From their beginnings as high-school sweethearts to the travails of married life, they’re an unbreakable pair. Gag-heavy as it may be, it’s also a series with plenty of sentimental plots, from Homer giving up his beloved Duff beer for a month to prove his love

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Entertainment

China’s first AI-generated film is a flop. Some still see it as the future of cinema

Chinese investors placing high value on AI despite unpopularity of Sanxingdui: Future Past China’s first fully AI-generated movie has flopped, earning just 1.7m yuan (£191,000) at the box office despite costing “tens of millions” to make, according to its producer. But is it any good? The Guardian watched Sanxingdui: Future Past in a virtually empty cinema in Beijing, and found it no worse than plenty of human-centred mindless action flicks. Continue reading...

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Entertainment

True crime novel about 1949 murder of Paris life model wins France’s biggest literary prize

Philippe Jaenada wins Prix Goncourt with novel that seeks to solve 77-year-old case and rehabilitates reputation of its victim A literary true-crime investigation that tries to solve a 77-year-old cold case and ends up rehabilitating the reputation of its life model victim has won France’s most prestigious literary prize. The author Philippe Jaenada was announced on Tuesday afternoon as the winner of the Prix Goncourt, for his book L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), a recreation of the murder of a 29-year-old Breton woman named Louise Cansot. Continue reading

The Guardian
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Entertainment

‘Music is the most powerful way of connecting to what’s happening’: can this album change your mind about the climate crisis?

With globe-spanning artists – including Charlotte Church doing angry electropop – the Flow project is hoping to make an impact at this month’s Cop31 Amid tense and long-winded negotiations, and with the future of the planet at stake, emotions can often run high at Cop climate summits. But last year, when the annual conference arrived in Brazil, one UN official was unexpectedly moved to tears by five women singing about the power of water. “She gave me a massive hug after the event and said, ‘We need to bring music into Cop,’” says Nikita Llerena, the project manager for Flow, a music collectiv

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Entertainment

My fiancee, my foreskin and me: the comic who turned adult circumcision into a jaw-dropping show

To be with the woman he loved, Max Olesker had to convert to Orthodox Judaism – which required an unwelcome operation. He relives a painful and sometimes infuriating journey When Max met Eliana at the Edinburgh fringe, the romcom vibes were strong. Shots, songs, falling headlong in love. Less vibey was the conversion Max Olesker had to navigate to marry his Orthodox Jewish beloved. The comedian had always thought of himself as Jewish – when his parents married, his mum converted to a less rigorous branch of Judaism. But to the Beth Din, the rabbinical court, that didn’t count. To be with the w

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Entertainment

‘The output of a lunatic asylum’: what the Bloomsbury group can tell us about mental health

From Virginia Woolf’s horrifying views on eugenics to James Strachey’s seminal translations of Freud, the Bloomsbury set didn’t only experience mental illness, they shaped how society thinks about it ‘As an experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, “madness is terrific and not to be sniffed at … In its lava, I still find most of the things I write about.” Woolf’s 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, is usually framed as evidence of her tortured genius. But a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes radically excavates this narrative while challenging idea

The Guardian
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