‘All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from … Read more
When Penguin bought the rights to Al Pacino’s memoir in 2022 for $5m, it raised questions about the true value of Hollywood celebrity autobiography at a time when most stars happily spill sanctioned life highlights for free on social media. Yet it seems there remains a considerable premium on the value of stories from those … Read more
Alexei Navalny was watching his favorite show, Rick and Morty, when he suddenly began to feel unwell. He was 21 minutes into an episode where Rick transforms into a pickle. The late Russian opposition leader was on a flight back to Moscow after campaigning ahead of regional elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk in … Read more
In his posthumously published memoir, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, describes how he was directly inspired by American grassroots politics as depicted in The Wire, David Simon’s seminal HBO series about crime and power in Baltimore, when he launched his political career in the campaign for mayor of Moscow in 2013. “I was banned … Read more