Curb your enthusiasm

Saturday

Christopher Sandford

Inside the mind of Cheryl Hines

From our US edition

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress – who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major movie star – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced Health and Human Services Secretary who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book so straddled the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those embodied by the current administration. Yet, against all the odds, Unscripted is an enthralling read. To address the burning topic first: no, not all of Hines’s friends were entirely happy with her husband’s appointment, nor with his views on Dr.

Tuesday

Paul du Quenoy

Curb your lefty law professors

From our US edition

“I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda,” said hapless University of California Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Last week, Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, were humiliated at a home dinner they hosted for third-year law students when Malak Afaneh, a Palestinian-American student who is co-president of the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, produced a microphone she had brought with her and launched into a speech protesting the dinner and, apparently, her host.

erwin chemerinsky curb

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale was a mission statement for the show

From our US edition

And so, after twelve seasons and twenty-four years, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has finally come to an end. Opinion online has been divided as to the effectiveness of the ending, in which, spoilers, Larry is placed on trial in Atlanta for inadvertently breaking the Electoral Integrity Act by offering a voter a bottle of water in the line; a rare act of kindness he suffers for. It was an intentionally low-key ending that can nonetheless allow for callbacks to early episodes and brief returning cameos from the guest stars who have somehow been maligned, offended or otherwise dismayed by Larry’s antisocial antics in the previous quarter-century.

curb your enthusiasm

Wednesday

Ben Lazarus

‘I disliked him intensely’: Richard Lewis on first meeting Larry David

Richard Lewis has died at the age of 76. Ben Lazarus interviewed him for the magazine last year: Richard Lewis first met Larry David at a summer sports camp, aged 12. ‘I disliked him intensely. He was cocky, he was arrogant,’ Lewis says. ‘When we played baseball I tried to hit him with the ball: we were arch rivals. I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry. I’m sure he felt the same way.’ Eleven years later they met again on the New York stand-up scene – but didn’t recognise each other. One evening, as they drank into the night, it dawned on them. ‘I looked at his face and I said, “There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.” Just saying that spooks everyone!’ It clicked. ‘“You’re Richard Lewis!