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Culture

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Entertainment

‘It was hard coming after the shallow, egocentric YBAs’: brilliantly bolshie artist Ryan Gander lambasts practically everyone

He thinks painting is futile, the YBAs were an embarrassment, and most artists today might as well be working in carpet shops. So why is his new show full of, er, paintings? We meet the confounding British artist ‘This is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It’s such a

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Entertainment

M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize

The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan on M John Harrison’s win: A visionary writer gets the recognition he deserves Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison’s was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from t

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Entertainment

Paul McCartney becomes a billionaire and world’s third richest musician

According to a new analysis by Forbes, the former Beatle now has a net worth of $1.4bn, placing him behind Jay-Z and Taylor Swift Paul McCartney has joined the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Forbes has valued the former Beatle’s net worth at $1.4bn (£1.04bn), making him the world’s third richest musician behind Jay-Z at $2.8bn (£2.01bn) and Taylor Swift at $2bn (£1.49bn). The magazine attributed McCartney’s wealth to his musical catalog, legal maneuvers, tours and art collection. The 84-year-old derives the bulk of his fortune from MPL Communications, the publishing company he founded in 1

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Entertainment

Donnie Dunagan, original voice of Disney’s Bambi and triple Purple Heart marine, dies aged 92

Dunagan was six when he voiced the young deer in the classic cartoon, with an assistant director instructing him to pretend his own mother had died Donnie Dunagan, who voiced Bambi in the Walt Disney classic, as well as playing the son of Frankenstein opposite Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, has died aged 92. Dunagan was six when he was chosen to provide the voice of the young deer in the animation’s most heartbreaking chapter. He recalled the experience in the recording booth as easy and relaxed, with rudimentary technology and notes from an assistant director instructing him to pretend his

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Entertainment

Hometown glory? Norwegian library unveils £100k history book donated by Erling Haaland

Rare 16th-century edition of Viking royal sagas given to Bryne by Manchester City footballer and his father At his local library in the southern Norwegian town of Bryne, the father of superstar striker Erling Haaland made a confession. “Sometimes my son and I are a little impulsive,” Alf Inge Haaland, known as Alfie, told the assembled crowd on Monday morning. The spontaneous act in question was the purchase of the only surviving privately owned edition of a 1594 book, Snorre Sturlasons Kongesagaer (Snorre Sturlason’s Royal Sagas). The auction purchase for 1.3m Norwegian kroner (£103,000) was

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Entertainment

A one-part wonder! The West End’s streamlined Harry Potter and the Cursed Child works like magic

Palace theatre, London Five hours have been trimmed to three for this new version but it is packed with magic moments and superb performances Ten years on from its premiere, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been transformed from an epic two-part play into a richly absorbing one-part production. A similar version is already running to great acclaim on Broadway but it still feels risky to tinker with a show that has come to feel like a fixed jewel in the West End. Happily, that risk has paid off and Cursed Child hasn’t lost any of its sparkle. Admittedly, there are some drawbacks to reducin

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Entertainment

‘A three-minute history of England written in the tour bus toilet’: how Tenpole Tudor made Swords of a Thousand Men

‘Dressed as knights, we’d walk onstage to the sound of the William Tell overture. I’d quote Henry V and the crowd would shout, “You’re the rightful king of England!”’ I’d worked up the basic idea on Stiff Records’ three-month tour of the northern hemisphere. It’s near-impossible to write songs on the road because you lack the basic solitude, so I’d retire to the tour coach latrine. The melody was really a boogie-blues progression, part-inspired by Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky and Canned Heat’s On the Road Again. But lyrics only flowed when we came off the tour. Rehearsing near our favo

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Entertainment

‘We did 10 takes of it!’ Kerr Smith on Dawson’s Creek and filming US TV’s first gay kiss

As he releases a memoir, the actor opens up about the late James Van Der Beek, the magic of the Creek, and facing homophobia for playing gay in the 90s There are worse things to spend a couple of decades chasing than the feeling of being young, successful and surrounded by people who love you. For Kerr Smith, though, the particular magic of Dawson’s Creek has proved just about impossible to replicate. “I’ve spent the last 25 years of my career trying to re-create that experience,” Smith says of the WB teen drama, on which he played the sensitive jock Jack McPhee for five seasons. “I’ve been tr

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Entertainment

‘A medieval jigsaw puzzle’: rediscovering Coventry cathedral’s ‘stunning’ stained glass windows

Remnants of 15th-century artwork form a treasure trove that can now be viewed for the first time in almost 90 years In the decades after Coventry cathedral was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, the shattered fragments of what had once been its glorious medieval stained glass windows were packed into 30 wooden crates and stored in a cellar. First smashed during the Reformation and then dismantled for safekeeping before the second world war, the cathedral authorities knew the remnants made up a treasure trove of spectacular 15th-century glass, but not, exactly, what had survived five turbulent

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Entertainment

U2: Carnaval de Luz review – rousing, restorative rock from a band ready to take on the world again

(Island) On their first album of new songs in nearly a decade, even earnest Bono-isms carry weight amid music that is impassioned and rejuvenated Even artists who enjoy a seemingly unstoppable imperial period eventually seem to encounter spells of turbulence when the creative planets no longer align – which has been the story of U2’s last 20 years. Try as they might, nothing has matched their earlier albums – especially that mostly uninterrupted golden run from their 1980 debut Boy to 90s benchmarks Achtung Baby and Zooropa. They’ve tried going more pop, becoming more experimental, touring 198

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Entertainment

Crime pays: how Grand Theft Auto became a cultural colossus

Ever since it crashed on to PC and consoles in the late 90s, GTA has been tearing up the game-making rulebook. We explore how its cultural references, rebel spirit and sprawling sense of freedom make it a definitive work of art In the 00s, when the Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games revealed a new project, video game writers from all over the UK would make the journey to the company’s office in London. They would be ushered one by one into a darkened room to sit facing an enormous TV. There would be a dish of sweets on a low bench in front of them but, in the reverential hush that desce

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Entertainment

‘I didn’t dance until I was 45’: how Jorge Drexler went from repressed doctor to rump-shaking Oscar-winner

How did a Uruguayan medic who grew up under an anti-music dictatorship win a best song Academy award? As he looks set to scoop up more prizes at the Latin Grammys, we meet the extraordinary Jorge Drexler It makes sense that a Uruguayan doctor turned singer would write a song that begins: “Long live science! Long live poetry!” Guitar y Vos (Guitar and You) is also the first track that Jorge Drexler performs this afternoon at a music industry event in the basement of Madrid’s Movistar arena. The second is El Otro Lado del Rio (The Other Side of the River), which he composed for the Che Guevara r

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