Culture

Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain.

We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not altogether free.

The news that the producer Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down with immediate effect as president of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, may not sound especially consequential; film executives come and go all the time, and their arrival and departure is normally only of interest to those in the movie business. Yet Kennedy, who has run Lucasfilm – home of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a great deal more – since 2012, and been in sole charge after the departure of the company’s founder George Lucas the same year, is the most consequential Hollywood studio head of the past couple of decades. And, her millions of

When the actress Claire Foy – still best known for her deservedly award-winning performance in The Crown – was interviewed recently by Harper’s Bazaar to promote her new film H is for Hawk, an adaptation of the Helen MacDonald memoir, she must have expected an easy ride. Estimable title though Harper’s Bazaar undoubtedly is, few would confuse it with a hard-hitting investigative magazine. Yet Foy made some remarks that have blown open the whole vexed question of what the point is of actors getting involved in public discourse, and whether they should, instead, stick to reading other people’s lines. Foy said, when asked about her public opinions, that it was

Did you know we’re living in a dictatorship?

My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes. The waitstaff called back 11 times over the next two days. I thought they were debt collectors. Finally, I went into his office, where we had found him, picked up his phone, and yelled, “He’s gone! Stop calling!” That’s how I learned what he’d been doing. They were trying to confirm. And in the corner