Olivia Cole

The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal to do anything other than gawp at the view. Two and a half hours pass quickly when you are travelling at sunset, passing between rain clouds with rainbows falling out of the sky. While my trip was, as they say, for ‘the craic’ (a good friend’s 40th), I couldn’t come to Galway without making time for a W.B. Yeats pilgrimage. His patron Lady Augusta Gregory had her home near Gort, in the south of the county: Galway is saturated in his poetry; or perhaps I mean his poetry is saturated in Galway. But in the county today, there is both chaotic reverence and wilful disregard.

This is an extract from Spectator Life, available with next week's issue of the Spectator: You adapted very well to life in London — were you concerned about how you might get on working in Hollywood? I was rather worried at first, but then I discovered I only had to go as far as Elstree to do my filming, which meant I was able to come home each night to 32 Windsor Gardens. I did offer to go on the bus but I think Mr King was a bit worried I might get lost so they sent a special car to pick me up every day. Spectator Life has heard that film producers can be quite fierce creatures. What advice have you for other animals looking to pursue projects in the film industry? Mr Heyman is a very nice man, so I haven’t had much experience of fierce producers.

Ahead of the Scottish referendum in September, and as the country prepares for the Commonwealth Games, Spectator Life caught up with a new generation of fine Scottish actors who seem destined for Hollywood, from Joanna Vanderham, star of The Paradise, to Laura Fraser of Breaking Bad and Richard Madden and Rose Leslie, who you may recognise from Game of Thrones.  We also took the chance to canvass their views on independence. Speaking of new talent, I’m delighted to feature the novel Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler, a midwestern story of family, fame and friends. It’s one of my favourites in a long time, and if you are packing for a beach or, like Melissa Kite, a yoga retreat, it’s a must to squeeze into your bag.

From Homeland to Game of Thrones and House of Cards, it’s an observation often made that we’re in a golden age of television. If there's a TV renaissance afoot, and a renewed appreciation of what good writing, subtle character development and long form drama can achieve on a small screen, David Hare's Johnny Worricker trilogy, which started in 2011 with Page Eight, is without doubt one of the best things to have been made for British TV in recent years. Our cover star Bill Nighy plays a modern day MI5 agent, and the production has a cast list from Rachel Weisz to Michael Gambon, Christopher Walken, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter and Winona Ryder, which could only be described as out of the ball park.

The late Anthony Minghella described our cover star, Ralph Fiennes, as a ‘held, slightly unknowable person’. Though I’ve long admired his work, I got to know him a little bit better when we met to talk about The Invisible Woman, his unforgettable account of Dickens’s secret life with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Fiennes both stars and directs, which he terms a ‘brilliant, scary’ feeling.   It’s a strategy that has produced some great American films (last year’s Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, or Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, or Robert Redford’s Quiz Show), but it’s a particular pleasure to celebrate a Rada-trained, homegrown talent taking on Hollywood on his own exacting terms.

From fashion to festivals, Life's summer issue arrives with your Spectator this week. On our cover this time is the film star Diane Kruger — Helen in Troy, and a scene-stealer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A woman whose talent and sense of style I have long admired, when I met her in New York, she told me in no uncertain terms why Hollywood needs more parts for grown-up women. Kruger's career started as a model in her teens. 'If I thought about my daughter being 15 and saying, "Can I go away and live in Paris?" she reflected, 'I'd be like, "Fucking get to your room and don't leave your room for another year!"' Her feistiness turned me into even more of a fan.

From a wedding to an awards ceremony, no self-respecting Los Angeles beano can take place without endless fixtures around the main event. The Oscars barely get a look in between a clutch of warm-ups and afterparties. The Friday night (Oscar night being Sunday) is traditionally the preserve of the agents, the most high-profile of whom throw open the doors of their Hollywood homes to their clients — and no one else. It was a rarity, then, that at the party given by the super-agent Ari Emanuel, stars (‘Talent’, in the argot) schmoozed and ate macaroni cheese with a certain number of the not-so-famous (‘civilians’). Marooned somewhere between Dustin Hoffman and Wales’s most glamorous export, Catherine Zeta-Jones, I felt horribly conspicuous.

‘Bathers at Asnières’ is a dreamily double-edged impressionist painting: an idyll as tricksy as the tiny dots, instead of brushstrokes, that Seurat used to paint. Young Parisian workers are stretched out like cats in the sun, or swimming in water so cool that you can almost feel it, and yet in the background the chimneys puff away, calling them back to work. At the National Gallery the other day, I overheard an official gallery guide addressing a heap of near-comatose teenagers: ‘This is a very large painting,’ she said, ‘and it was painted about 100 years ago.