London, UK
Writes features, reviews and interviews on literature, film, theatre, art, photography and travel. Currently at August Media; previously at It's Nice That. Contributed to the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Cherwell, Atlas Obscura and Culture Whisper.
Features
Essentials: We take you through the highs and lows of the Brutalist movement.
Mark Twain had one major complaint about his journey from San Francisco to New York in 1866: the sandwiches showed a singular lack of variation. Eschewing a rickety and possibly perilous stagecoach journey across the continent, he had opted to take one of Cornelius Vanderbilt's steam boats across Lake Nicaragua and along the San Juan river to the Caribbean.
David Smale, a farmer in Essex, announced last week that he would be producing the largest saffron harvest England has seen for at least 200 years - a full 3¼oz. Smale, also a geophysical consultant, began putting the saffron back into Saffron Walden 10 years ago after reading a medieval manuscript in his local library.
The best portrait photography is truly mesmerising; a compliment which can surely be paid to Alex Ten Napel's series of Alzheimer's patients. In a somewhat ironic manner, the Dutch photographer has created enrapturing, memorable images of elderly and enigmatic faces.
His work is so iconic it's almost surprising to recall that someone created it; the style is now so ubiquitous and well-known it seems as though it always existed. Sometimes chic, at other times like an illustrated still from a Hitchcock thriller, Mac's work captures (or did it create?)
It's Friday evening, and you want nothing more than to leave work and eat something special to signal the arrival of the weekend. The only problem is that you, like nearly every other respectable middle-classer, don't live in a hipster haven but in the sensible suburbs.
Interviews
"Bourdin was a consummate draghtsman," Alistair says. Often he took very little interest in the model, composing scenes like an artist. "He carried around an orange Rhodia notebook which was full of little statements, rough sketches and gridded drawings" - snatches of images dreamt up before he photographed them.
Heads are turning in Covent Garden this morning, and they're not just looking at the usual street performers - they're gawping at a levitating building. Master of illusions Alex Chinneck's latest mind-boggling public art installation is on show in what must surely be the spiritual home of his craft; one of the busiest piazzas in London and its theatrical hub.
In 1974, when I made my first Birthday Suit self-portrait, I had no idea it would become a life-long series. I'd just started studying photography in San Francisco, and went to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, CA on a lark, and as a kind of homage to Antonioni and his film about the counter culture.
With more than 75 years of cartoon history under its belt, you'd think that Disney would have nailed the animation of its heroines. But you would be wrong. It turns out that all those princesses are the cinematic giant's ultimate bugbear, and it's all down to those pesky XX chromosomes.
A Dartford man who suffers from a rare terminal abdominal cancer has started a "gallows humour" style blog to take away the stigma around his illness. Nicky Boardman, 34, of Birdwood Avenue, started the blog called 'Too Upbeat for Cancer' to let his family and friends know what was going on with his condition so he didn't have to keep repeating himself.
Vascular surgeon David Nott, who last week returned from a six-week trip to northern Syria, said that doctors and other healthcare workers were being targeted by the regime, and that aid supplies were being disrupted by Islamist militants who were increasingly at war with both the Assad government and the rebel Free Syrian Army.
Reviews
Indian novels are cacophonous: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy is enormous, with almost as many characters as it has pages; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is like a riotous street party; Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama tells one family's story, yet finds itself hopelessly tangled up in endless others.
Once upon a time, the church spires of New York offered an unrivalled view of the city. But in photographer Berenice Abbott's Manhattan of the 1930s, skyscrapers shot up on every side and suddenly there were windows and back streets, balconies, construction sites and advertising billboards all crying out for a camera to capture their unique perspective of the metropolis.
Previews
A.A Gill, Sunday Times critic and author, debates the importance of arbiters of taste with John Mitchinson, QI's hilarious head of research. In one of his many witticisms, writer, poet and critic Oscar Wilde wisely warned that, " If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
The latest installment of unscripted talk series 5X15 invites a diverse cast of experts to reveal something about their own lives, passions and inspirations. The name says it all: 5x15 puts five brilliant speakers onstage for 15 minutes each. Over the evening, they reveal the inspiration behind their greatest ideas, tell their favourite stories and elaborate upon their latest theories.
"Riverbed is running." So tweeted Studio Olafur Eliasson yesterday - a poetic press release if ever I heard one - to announce the opening of the Danish-Icelandic artist's latest epic installation. Something of a titan in the art world, having already created moon, he's now built riverbed in the south wing of the Louisiana Musuem of Modern Art in Denmark.
Older Articles
It can't be every day that a UK studio gets approached by a leading Russian bank after a brand identity for their new app.
Website pageviews: 1548 Amy Lewin has published 4 articles Amy Lewin takes a journey through the very early years of Tinseltown 126 years ago today, a man was wheeled, hat in hand (so I imagine), into the Los Angeles County recorder's office and registered a plot of land, whichhe named Hollywood.