Yoko Ono acclaimed as an avant-garde artist and controversial as John Lennon’s muse, blamed for the Beatles’ split, is having a retrospective at Tate Modern as she nears her 91st birthday. She was well known in the New York art world before she met Lennon in the late 1960s, staying with him till his … Read more
King Charles no sooner across the threshold of his long awaited reign than he is sidelined with a cancer diagnosis must be dejected at the timing no matter how sanguine a face he puts on publicly. The Royals are on the whole famously long lived with his beloved grandmother surviving colon cancer in 1966 … Read more
The tawdry world of high society gossip is the centrepiece of the tv docu-drama series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.” Truman Capote, a feted writer of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the true crime novel In Cold Blood which brought him fame, fortune and friendships with high-society female friends, the wives of New York’s richest and … Read more
The temperature gauge is over-heating in the Middle East with fears of a flash point coming as US and UK forces have retaliated against Houthi shipping attacks in the Red Sea and a drone attack which killed three US soldiers. There were joint strikes on 36 Houthi targets in Yemen; and the US hit … Read more
Michael J Fox, whose documentary Still made by Davis Guggenheim (Apple TV) has won several Emmys is now up for a BAFTA. It tells the tale of his stratospheric rise to success, moving from Canada to dumpster-diving for food in Los Angeles, becoming a yuppie teen on a smash TV sitcom Family Ties, followed by … Read more
The actor Patrick Macnee, best known as Steed in the Avengers, had a confusing childhood after his socialite mother in an open marriage with his father had a younger illegitimate half-sibling and then contracted a lesbian relationship. He stayed with his mother and ‘Uncle Evelyn’, as his mother’s partner was, known in a house where … Read more
Northern Ireland appears to be on track to resume their power-sharing government after two years of stalemate. A new agreement has been reached over goods moving through the UK’s internal market which has apparently overcome the border problem caused by Brexit, though details have not yet been published. The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) collapsed the … Read more
Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, one of Hollywood’s longest-lasting marriages of 26 years, are appearing on stage together is London in a Neil Simon play Plaza Suite. Reviews are generally good though focus on the stratospheric ticket price. She has had an award-strewn career with Sex and the City the highlight. Matthew Broderick has … Read more
The surreal and shocking tale of the “silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons is now the subject of a series of podcasts. Intelligent, creative and well-read, with ambitions to become authors, they started life with a speech impediment and were then relentlessly and racially abused and bullied at school, withdrew into themselves and became electively … Read more
Hugh Hefner, a headline-grabber in the days before #metoo when Playboy bunnies and the bon vivant lifestyle that went with them were regarded as acceptable entertainment has been cut down to size six years after his death by his third wife, Crystal Harris, in a tell-all memoir. She was 26 when they married and he … Read more