Culture

“They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,” said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. Britain’s Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer was used instead. “Language has moved on and changed,” the UK government says, since 1970, when the legislation was first drafted. One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now it has been decreed that no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages across Europe.

The casting of the new James Bond is the biggest story in Hollywood at the moment. The sheer amount of disinformation and exaggeration that has accompanied snippets of news about the production of a new 007 adventure is remarkable, even by the standards of La La Land. Ever since the Bond franchise was purchased by Amazon, taken out of the restrictive hands of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and placed in the care of Amy Pascal and David Heyman, the question of who’s doing what has been a source of fascination. The hiring of Dune’s Denis Villeneuve to direct was broadly seen as a smart, auteur-ish move; the decision to entrust the script to Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, who has written an awful lot of bad films and television series, less so.

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 detractors would argue, the most destructive, too.

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 not her place to sound off on social or wider issues.

So, One Battle After Another is going to sweep the Oscars. That was fairly certain before last night’s Golden Globe awards, but it is now essentially guaranteed. Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation won best film in the musical/comedy category, as well as Best Director, Best Screenplay – over the hotly tipped Sinners, which had been expected to win the award as a consolation prize – and Best Supporting Actress for the scene-stealing Teyana Taylor as the superbly named Perfidia Beverly Hills. Those of us who would have liked to see Amy Madigan take that award for her indelibly creepy performance in Weapons will have been disappointed, but in truth the Globes threw up a modest number of surprises.

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 of my eye, on his bookshelf: Irish Folk and Fairy Tales by W.B. Yeats.