Meryl streep

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

What have they done to The Devil Wears Prada?

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will always stick with for a bit. It has zing. It has bite. It has memorable lines that I can remember without having to look them up. (‘Are we going to a hideous skirt convention?’) But mostly it has Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the wonderfully toxic editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. She is still terrific. But while the landscape has moved on, the characters have remained the same and halfway through I started to drift. Another blow is that it’s become more sentimental and less satirical. In other words – and I hate to be the one to say it – it’s not as good as the original. Where are we, 20 years on?

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

How two children vanished for a week en route from Africa to London

As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that seems too distant, an image viewed down a telescope held the wrong way — yet there are moments when the months retract into almost hours. We are still castaways in London, still waiting for the airspace to open so that we can fly home to Kenya. I feel glum about it, then remember how my father was marooned for 12 years in southern Arabia and Africa on either side of the war. He missed his mother, as I do, sitting in his mud tower on the edge of the Empty Quarter listening to Churchill on the wireless broadcasting about faraway battles. Letters arrived every few weeks or months and he just got on with his adventures.