Andrea Corr, 51, has barely aged a day as shows off toned body in tiny bikini
corr-tastic Andrea Corr, 51, has barely aged a day as shows off toned body in tiny bikini
ANDREA Corr has barely aged a day if these stunning bikini snaps are anything to go by.
The Irish singer, 51, is currently holidaying in the Caribbean, and showed off her toned physique in a designer Missoni bikini and blue baseball cap.
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Andrea Corr has barely aged a day since rising to fame in the 1990s
Credit: BackGrid
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The singer showed off her tone physique while on holiday in Barbados
Credit: BackGrid
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The Corrs were a hit band from Ireland who continue to tour the world to this day
Credit: AP:Associated Press
Andrea rose to fame in the band alongside her siblings, Caroline, Sharon and Jim Corr in the 1990s thanks to their the catchy pop tunes complete with violins and tin whistles.
The Irish siblings were best known for songs like Breathless, So Young, and Runaway, and they won Best International Group at The Brits in 1999.
The band singer looked like she'd barely aged a day in 30 years as she took a dip in the sea outside the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados.
Andrea wore her black locks in a pony tail but days earlier wore them long, down her shoulders while going for another swim in a black bikini top, matched with pink, scalloped hemmed bottoms.
Earlier this year, Andrea stunned Masked Singer judges after being unmasked as Snail on the show.
The Corrs singer said she "loved" the costume, gushing: "I had such a good time, everyone's been lovely, it's been really joyous. I wanted to do it for the children."
The 90s band, made up of Andrea on lead vocals, Sharon on violin, Caroline on drums and brother Jim on the guitar and piano, have continued to perform together over the years.
Andrea was once married to barrister Gavin Bonnar, who she wed in 2001, and they split in 2019.
Since the split, Bonnar went to live with Telma Ortiz in Madrid, the sister of Spain's monarch, Queen Letizia.
The 51-year-old opened up about their break up at the time, saying she had a breakdown on a flight.
90s pop legend unrecognisable 23 years after winning a BRIT Award
She said: "I was going through a tumultuous experience. I was on a plane from Madrid to Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Something very personal and distressing had occurred the day before, which shocked me
"I was reeling, absolutely reeling, from it."
Continuing, the Corrs singer shared: "I was crying on the plane and I didn't care that I was crying. If people were looking at me, that didn't matter."
She said after the flight she was on became delayed by a few hours due to weather it allowed her time to think, and she channelled her emotions into writing.
She added: "I felt the gigantic storm outside was in sync with what was going on in my life.
'It was almost therapy, because there was definitely a huge storm going on inside of me. These words of a song just started to fall out of me. While the plane took ages to take off, I wrote and wrote and wrote."
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‘I've taken to sleeping in my teeth' – the wartime admissions of T.S. Eliot
In 1944, T.S. Eliot is 56 years old. He seems older: 'I am getting to be a wambling old codger.' He is war-worn: 'I have taken, when in London, to sleeping in my teeth.' As a fire-watcher sharing shifts, his sleep is hampered by understandable pudeur: 'I haven't got enough phlegm to undress completely, and I think it best to sleep in my truss, in case of sudden blasting, which is not very comfortable.' He knows, too, that his letters are dull. To Anne Ridler, 19 June 1942, he confesses: 'If I had any small gift for letter writing, it has been ruined years ago by the pressure of the kind of correspondence I have to practise most of the time.' Namely, the business letter, where you can see Eliot now and then resorting to the formulaic. For example, touching on the prose poem, he says: 'Years ago I did a little of the sort myself but was never able to persuade myself that the result was more than just a note for a poem to be written.' A year later, he is rejecting the poems of Kay Dick: 'The effect is rather of notes for poems or notes for something, rather than of poems. And a few months after that he is applying the formula to D.H. Lawrence, who 'wrote a kind of free verse, but it seems to me to be mostly notes for poems'. In January 1944, Eliot turns down the poems of Michael Burn (of whom more in a moment): 'I should call them notes for poems than poems.' Now and then, very rarely, these rejection letters sound a note of pained asperity. To one Arthur Sale, Eliot is momentarily incontinent, in his measured way: 'One is ready to concede admiration, rather than put oneself to the torture of reading to the end.' And he closes, stingingly: 'I have never read poetry that irritated me more than yours, and it would irritate me if there was nothing in it.' The editorial annotation tells us that poor savaged Sale later went on to teach at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his pupils included Michael Hofmann and Bamber Gascoigne. Of course, Eliot – ever compliant, exhausted by good works, school prize-givings, readings for wartime causes, endless theological faffing and fussing, broadcasts to India and servitude to the British Council – could occasionally ironise the public man he had become. To Mary Trevelyan (29 June 1942): I ought to have explained to you long ago that I had an Irish grandmother, of a respextable [sic] family founded by a man who tried to steal the Crown Jewels. This accounts for a good deal but is far from being the whole story. In my father's family is a hereditary taint, going back for centuries, which expresses itself in an irresistible tendency to sit on committees. A rare frisk. John Haffenden's footnote tells us that Eliot's mother believed she was descended from Thomas Blood (1618-80) who tried to steal the Crown Jewels in 1671. These spectacularly unspectacular letters are salvaged by the footnotes. For example, we learn that Michael Burn was bisexual, slept with Guy Burgess, met Hitler at a Nuremberg rally, was briefly persuaded of 'the values of National Socialism' but later became a communist after witnessing poverty in the Barnsley coalfields. He joined the commandos and was wounded and captured during the raid on St Nazaire in 1942. He was awarded the MC and sent to Colditz. There, he was the recipient of an aid package from a Dutch one-time lover, Ella van Heemstra. On his release from Colditz, he sent her food and cigarettes. She sold the cigarettes to buy penicillin to save the life of her 'ill and undernourished daughter – the future actress Audrey Hepburn'. Gossip. Top gossip: 70 per cent proof. Three more footnotes. On a British Council trip to Sweden, Eliot stayed with Sir Victor Mallet at the British Legation. Haffenden has read Mallet's unpublished memoirs, of which this is an extract: T.S. Eliot pursued his quiet way with the Swedish Pen Club and other intellectual bodies and achieved an outstanding success. We were much amused when he came home late one evening from one of these parties, his cheeks covered with lipstick from being embraced by a number of enthusiastic Swedish girls after reading his poetry. F.R. Leavis secures Eliot's help in preserving Scrutiny, which is threatened by the paper restrictions. In a letter of thanks, Leavis adds: P.S. Ralph, my small son, looks forward to seeing you again. He said to his mother at bedtime after you had gone last Whitsun: 'Now I only want to meet Mr Shakespeare.' What we want, fervently, from letters is the authentic, unofficial version of events and people – indiscretion. Here, the widow of the American literary critic Irving Babbitt is trying to edit the correspondence between Babbitt and his late colleague Paul Elmer More. She complains to Eliot that More's widow has redacted everything of interest from her husband's side of the correspondence. The following –another footnote – is from a letter to Valerie Eliot about her husband, dated 20 February 1972, written by Dr Elizabeth Wilson, the daughter of a Surrey GP whom Eliot had consulted 'at some time in the 1940s': After tea we invited him to join us for a swim. He had no costume but a very antique ladies model (navy wool, to be tied round his waist by an old tie) was found & we walked to a nearly artificial lake, at one time properly dredged as a swimming pool but by then pretty muddy & well supplied with tadpoles. There were, of course, no changing facilities, only bushes. Mr Eliot never expressed by word or expression, any dismay – he appeared to quietly enjoy himself although I always wondered whether he was aware that the moths had feasted on the posterior of his borrowed garment. This seems worth much more than the clunky, jaundiced repudiation by Eliot of his own literary output: 'The structure of the play [The Family Reunion] is very defective theatrically.' He can't bear to re-read his critical prose. The unrevised The Use of Poetry is 'one of my works with which I had the least cause to be satisfied'. The moth-eaten cossie trumps this bogus, high-fallutin' incitement to endless hermeneutics: 'I don't know whether there is any 'complete understanding' of a poem that has any depth to it.' Think of a very good poem like W.H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', the fall of Icarus representing the world's indifference to individual tragedy – easily understandable and profound nevertheless. Eliot is merely hiking the price on his own sometimes difficult poems. And personally I would prefer to hear about Stephen Spender's elastic stocking for his varicose veins; or Eliot's delight when the Chinese minister of information addresses Spender as 'Steve'; or about the (incomprehensible) message from William Blake conveyed by Mrs Millington, Eliot's blind masseuse; or the survival of Omar Pound's bombed stamp collection; or about Winston Churchill (the grandson) saying grace then standing on his head, rather than read this example of Eliot's prose at its most comatose: I admit frankly this personal difficulty in reading because I know it may be something of which the reader is very much more conscious when presented with a part of the book than he might be if he had the complete work before him and read it from cover to cover. A sentence that is asleep, sounds asleep, before it reaches the full stop. These letters, with their rich annotation and the intimate correspondence with Emily Hale, are the real biography of Eliot. We don't need Peter Ackroyd's off-the-cuff impressions and cavalier opinions. Nor Robert Crawford's numbly industrious two-volume biography and its dour judgments. The life of the life is here – in its dullness, in its detail, in its attention to the very texture of Eliot's existence. The boredom and the horror and the glory.
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The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
