Roma

Monday

Alexander Larman

Disclaimer is the best show on TV — and the most underrated

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón announced that his next project would be a seven-part adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel Disclaimer, it was met with a mixture of excitement and surprise. Excitement, because anything that Cuarón involves himself with tends to be an event; surprise, because after a series of high-profile recent projects that have included everything from a near-experimental sci-fi blockbuster (Gravity) to a black-and-white Mexican drama he shot himself (Roma), it seemed almost mundane, rather as if Stanley Kubrick, at the peak of his success, had decided to make a movie out of a Harold Robbins potboiler.

disclaimer

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why there’s rioting in Leeds

From our UK edition

As something of a fan of riots and social unrest I was interested to know who, precisely, had gone doolally in the Harehills area of Leeds last week and started setting fire to buses and so on. The local police announced that it was a ‘serious disorder incident’, but I could find no information at all about who it was doing the rioting. Just people, I suppose – and we are all people, aren’t we? Still I scoured the paper – and nope, no enlightenment. Perhaps it was just northerners – Leeds is full of them, after all, and they can be fractious and violent when the mood grips hold of them. Inner-city northerners with their slavering pitbulls, their skag and their misplaced sense of pride and grievances.

Tuesday

Susanna Forrest

From pit-ponies to polo ponies: hoofprints on the British landscape

From our UK edition

Horses have schlepped, hauled and galloped grooves into Britain, providing the muscle for transport, industry, agriculture and leisure and the inspiration for myth, art and literature. In The Bridleway, the environmentalist Tiffany Francis-Baker maps this busy-storied topography from the Uffington White Horse to ancient roads, canals, coaching inns, race courses, conservation projects and public art. She crosses the country to speak to horse-people and explores old bridleways. Some of the landscapes she visits are subsiding, as she puts it, ‘into the healing bosom of the earth’. Others are threatened with erasure, and so, ‘to keep these spaces full of memory, all we must do is tread the same paths, either on foot or by hoof’. The charm of her book lies in wayside details.

Sunday

Dea Birkett

Why do we envy nomads but treat Travellers so badly?

From our UK edition

Oh for the open road! Who doesn’t want to abandon the suffocating suburbs – waking to an alarm at the same time every single morning, hearing brown envelopes pushed through the front door, filling the dishwasher, paying that damned mortgage – and head out for endless sunsets falling over infinitely empty land? Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand as a woman who leaves her home behind after she loses her husband and her job and travels around the United States in a campervan, is predicted to win Oscar for Best Picture this weekend. The film, whose large cast mainly consists of real-life nomads, has led to a flush of appreciation and enthusiasm for a less settled life.