In Pictures: Cate Blanchett's shell-themed dress warms the cockles at Serpentine
Cate Blanchett brought the seaside to central London as she turned up in an eyecatching dress for the Serpentine Summer Party.
The actress warmed the cockles of admirers with a shell-themed outfit as she joined figures from the world of art, showbiz and politics.
Advertisement
Pop diva Lily Allen, Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan and Minnie Driver also attended the event which is an annual fixture in London's cultural scene.
Minnie Driver and a guest (Doug Peters/PA)
Dina Asher-Smith (Doug Peters/PA)
Lady Amelia Spencer and Lady Eliza Spencer (Doug Peters/PA)
Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan and his wife Saadiya Khan (Doug Peters/PA)
Kelly Osbourne (Doug Peters/PA)
Lord Frederick Windsor and Lady Frederick Windsor (Doug Peters/PA)
Philippa Perry and Sir Grayson Perry (Doug Peters/PA)
Eiza Gonzalez (Doug Peters/PA)
Beth Ditto and Charles Jeffery (Doug Peters/PA)
Jourdan Dunn (Doug Peters/PA)
Georgia May Jagger (Doug Peters/PA)
Celia Imrie (Doug Peters/PA)
Lily Allen (Doug Peters/PA)
Joanne Froggatt (Doug Peters/PA)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
19 minutes ago
- Times
80 best books to take on holiday this summer — chosen by the experts
Whether you're jetting off to Bali, hopping on the Eurostar to the Continent or planning a staycation to make the most of our balmy British summer, you're going to want a holiday read. Luckily, the books team have put their heads together to come up with the best novels and non-fiction titles to accompany you on the sun lounger. There are gripping thrillers, steamy romances, big fat histories and engrossing memoirs, both brand new hardbacks and some more lounge-friendly paperbacks. What are you planning to read this summer? Let us know in the comments below. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel in 12 years is a big, ambitious, scintillating ensemble piece about four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment. It's a comedy of manners about female experience, from bad boyfriends to genital mutilation. But for all its moments of darkness, the novel has an irresistible vitality that hooks you from the first page. It reads like a feminist War and Peace.4th Estate £20 pp416Buy a copy of Dream Count Kaliane Bradley's fish-out-of-water rom-com has a winning premise. A group of refugees from different eras are dragged into a laboratory in 21st-century London, where a new ministry is testing the limits of time travel. The narrator, a young British-Cambodian civil servant, is paired with Commander Gore, a cigar-smoking polar explorer from the Victorian era who must get to grips with everything from feminism to falafels. The book's combination of whimsy and seriousness works £9.99 pp368Buy a copy of The Ministry of Time In My Father's House, Joseph O'Connor brought to life the world of Nazi-occupied Rome, as an Irish priest, Hugh O'Flaherty, smuggled fugitives out to safety. In this follow-up, set a few months later, the tension doesn't slack an inch. When a parachutist descends into the Colosseum, it sets off a chain reaction involving a widowed young aristocrat, a singer and the head of the Gestapo. It is haunting, sensuous and immaculately constructed — without sacrificing any Secker £20 pp384Buy a copy of The Ghosts of Rome Miranda July practically invented a new genre of perimenopause fiction with this deliriously playful novel about midlife transformation. An artist in her mid-forties leaves her husband and child to embark on a three-week road trip to New York, but only makes it to a motel outside Los Angeles, where she lusts after a young Hertz rental car employee, whose wife she employs to redecorate her room. A strangely touching tale about a woman prepared to pay a high price for her sexual £9.99 pp400Buy a copy of All Fours A powerful account of the aftermath of the 1958 Munich air disaster that killed half of a brilliant young Manchester United team. The author of The Damned United, who can squeeze more poetry and tension out of a team sheet than any other living writer, reveals the details of what happened in the fabled crash. Faithful to the language of the place and time, David Peace gives a sense of the distinctive communities out of which Manchester United was £9.99 pp480Buy a copy of Munichs Sally Rooney made her name as the master of complicated, yearning romantic entanglements between people with terrible communication skills. There's still plenty of that in her latest novel, Intermezzo, but the focus is on two brothers, Peter and Ivan, who have recently lost their father. Peter is a high-achieving lawyer while Ivan is a socially awkward chess whizz — they must navigate their tricky relationship with each other, while also handling some typically Rooneyan £9.99 pp448Buy a copy of Intermezzo • Sally Rooney in her own words: 'I'm fighting a cultural battle' In Killybegs in 1973, a man can do three things: be a fisherman, work in a fish factory or drive the fish to buyers. But when a baby boy is discovered in a barrel floating close to shore, the place acquires an air of magic. In Garrett Carr's wise and witty debut we follow that boy, Brendan, and his adoptive family. But the book is expansive, too, with a chorus for a narrator and delightfully well-rounded minor characters. It's an ode to Donegal and its no-nonsense £16.99 pp336Buy a copy of The Boy from the Sea With a greasy fried egg flopped on to the cover, Gunk is the It novel to be seen with on the beach this summer. But it's more than its aesthetic. Written by the 29-year-old Brit (and mother of three) Saba Sams, it's a tale of unconventional parenthood and the fuzzy lines between friend and lover. Set around a grotty Brighton nightclub (the eponymous 'Gunk'), it follows thirtysomething Jules as she navigates working with her loser ex-husband, Leon, and the new, enigmatic barmaid £16.99 pp240Buy a copy of Gunk David Nicholls's most satisfying love story yet is full of longing and doubt, of crap English B&Bs and soggy hikes. It centres on two lonely people thrown together on Alfred Wainwright's famous coast-to-coast walk. Michael, a geography teacher mourning the end of his marriage, and Marnie, a divorced copy editor, are given a second chance at love when a mutual friend invites them on a group holiday, only to abandon them. Nicholls hits the sweet spot between pathos and £9.99 pp368Buy a copy of You Are Here • How I wrote One Day — the bestseller that changed my life After the phenomenal success of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has been widely appreciated as an author of quiet, often older lives. In The Homemade God she changes tack, instead following the family holiday of Vic Kemp, a popular but ageing artist, and his children: Goose, Susan, Iris and Netta. As the sun beats down on their mansion on an Italian lake, the holiday threatens to spoil — particularly with the appearance of Vic's young new wife, £20 pp384Buy a copy of The Homemade God If you're looking for literary value, Dream State is basically three novels for the price of one. We start off in 2004 as Cece plans her wedding to Charlie, with the help of his best friend Garrett. But what begins as a high-stakes love triangle tale transforms into an engrossing family saga, spanning 50 years. The magnetic pull between the three characters is enough to sustain a third plotline: the devastating effect of climate change on Montana and the life they have built £18.99 pp448Buy a copy of Dream State Shy Creatures contains many of the same winning ingredients as Clare Chambers's whirlwind 2020 bestseller, Small Pleasures: a hardworking heroine in her thirties, an extramarital affair, a freakish real-life mystery and an undercurrent of sex and danger. Set in 1960s Croydon, it tells the story of an art therapist working in a psychiatric hospital who is trying to help a young man whose spinster aunts have kept him locked away for several & Nicolson £9.99 pp400Buy a copy of Shy Creatures How do you write a ghost story for Gen Z? Make it about the horrors of London's housing market, of course. In Róisín Lanigan's smart, pacey debut, a young couple, Áine and Elliot, are shocked when they find a one-bed flat to rent at a reasonable price. But then mould begins to bloom across the walls, the heating is terrible and Áine becomes afraid of glaring neighbours whom Elliot can never seem to see. This is a sharp and witty read, best enjoyed far from damp and oversized Tree £16.99 pp288Buy a copy of I Want to Go Home but I'm Already There This is a fantastically original revenge drama about Cumbrian sheep farmers. Set during the foot-and-mouth disease crisis in 2001, this dark, visceral debut is a blood-soaked 'English western' narrated by Steve Elliman, a brooding truck driver who is drawn back to his father's farm. The novel begins bloodily: Steve and his neighbouring farmer, William Herne, are forced to slaughter and burn all livestock within three miles of the outbreak. A thrilling, cinematic book full of black Murray £10.99 pp272Buy a copy of The Borrowed Hills Looking for something a little bit … filthy? Try Paperboy, the Scottish crime writer Callum McSorley's follow-up to Squeaky Clean, where the (slightly incompetent) detective Ali McCoist has to solve the murder of a lawyer. Meanwhile, she's bumping up against some of Glasgow's worst gangsters — and trying to make it out alive. This energetic novel from a rising star of crime is full of black comedy, gore, slapstick and street Vertigo £16.99 pp384Buy a copy of Paperboy The video game designer Holly Gramazio has produced a satire on the Tinder generation's commitment issues that takes a clever concept and turns it into one of the most inventive debut novels in years. Thirtysomething Lauren returns home drunk from a hen do to discover that her flat has a magical attic that generates a revolving door of husbands. When she tires of one spouse, she can summon another, just as long as she can coax the rejected man into the £9.99 pp368Buy a copy of The Husbands • The Sunday Times Bestsellers List — the UK's definitive book chart There was a lot of scepticism in the air when Nick Harkaway, the son of John le Carré, announced that he was resurrecting George Smiley, but he has pulled it off with brio and an air of effortlessness. Karla's Choice is set in the ten-year gap between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A Russian agent arrives to kill a Hungarian publisher in Primrose Hill but realises he can't do it. All roads, Smiley discovers, lead to his KGB nemesis, £9.99 pp320Buy a copy of Karla's Choice Jessica Stanley's novel combines romance with brutal realism as it follows Coralie, an Aussie expat in London, as she falls in love with Adam. It's all going well until Adam gets his dream job as political sketch writer at The Times and their life is taken over by Brexit, squabbles and appearances on The Andrew Marr Show. Coralie, meanwhile, feels 'like a widow without the sympathy'. A wickedly funny tale about ambition, parenthood and long-term Heinemann £16.99 pp352Buy a copy of Consider Yourself Kissed • The best books of 2025 so far — our critics' picks Vincenzo Latronico's ingenious satire on Insta-friendly millennial living has become one of the buzziest books of 2025 — and it's only 120 pages. Anna and Tom are members of the 21st-century creative class living in a fashionable Berlin neighbourhood in the early 2010s. We learn about them through the images they present and the items they own — a Japanese teapot, a Berber rug and houseplants. So many houseplants. It's a horribly compelling tale of commodity £12.99 pp120Buy a copy of Perfection The first book in a crime series by the granddaughter of Kim Philby, who is celebrated for her espionage novels. Dirty Money features a winning duo in DS Madeleine Farrow, a successful operative in a government agency, and Ramona Chang, a former investigative journalist trying to make it as a private detective. In this story, which spans dingy east London and upmarket Marylebone, Farrow is investigating the wife of an oligarch from Kazakhstan and Chang is getting to the bottom of a dodgy dating site. Baskerville £16.99 pp320Buy a copy of Dirty Money A radical and funny reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain that was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It's told from the perspective of the seemingly placid slave, Jim, who we discover is only pretending to be superstitious and illiterate so his white masters aren't threatened by him. Percival Everett subverts and enlarges Twain's classic to produce a thrilling, canon-shattering £9.99 pp320Buy a copy of James If you don't mind crying on the beach then pack a copy of The Names. In this (deservedly) hyped debut Cora must take her baby boy to be registered. Her abusive husband wants him to be named Gordon, after himself. Their daughter, Maia, likes Bear as a name, while Cora is drawn to Julian. Florence Knapp's novel then splits into three, following the family through the twists of fate set in motion by each name. Prepare to be irritated by anyone who interrupts your £16.99 pp352Buy a copy of The Names It's 1891 in the mining town of Butte, Montana. A young Irish immigrant called Tom Rourke works as a photographer by day and prowls the town's bars and brothels by night. But when he has to photograph Polly Gillespie, the mail-order bride of the mine captain, it's love at first sight. The pair soon decide to get the hell out of Dodge. The Heart in Winter is a hot-blooded, chaotic wonder of a novel, written in Kevin Barry's typically inventive £9.99 pp224Buy a copy of The Heart in Winter 'Bridget Jones goes to Iraq' is probably the simplest way to explain this hilarious debut novel. Thirtysomething Nadia is heading up a UN programme to deradicalise Isis brides in Iraq. That sounds pretty harrowing, but this is an utterly riotous satire as our hapless protagonist runs into a sweary east London Isis bride (who jokes about the sexual proclivities of Osama bin Laden). When you're not giggling you'll find yourself thinking differently about this most divisive of & Nicolson £16.99 pp336Buy a copy of Fundamentally • 'I could have been an Isis bride': Nussaibah Younis on making fun of extremism Colm Tóibín's enthralling sequel to his acclaimed novel Brooklyn reunites us with Eilis 20 years later, in the 1970s. The girl from Co Wexford is now a middle-aged woman living in Long Island, New York, with her children and husband, whom she learns has made another woman pregnant. The revelation causes Eilis to head back to Ireland, where she goes in search of Jim, a shy publican whom she once loved. Tóibín dramatises secrecy and its consequences better than almost any other contemporary £9.99 pp368Buy a copy of Long Island • Colm Tóibín: a writer's last work has a special intensity This is a novel about Yugoslavia's civil war but seen through a specific lens. In 1989 a teenage girl, Silva, disappears from a village on the Dalmatian coast. But the fall of communism and the rise of unrest means that the investigation to find her slows to a halt. It is fascinating how Jurica Pavicic, who is from Split, tracks the impact of the missing girl and of the political situation on ordinary people in the village — her parents, a friend, the Lemon £9.99 pp402Buy a copy of Red Water If you're searching for proper escapism, why not head to the 1480s? John Collan, a peasant boy, has his life upended when an aristocrat sweeps him away to Oxford, claiming that John is really the Earl of Warwick, with a claim to the throne. Based on the real life of Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne, Jo Harkin's novel is touching and hilarious. She has immense sympathy for John as he tries to figure out who he really £18.99 pp464Buy a copy of The Pretender Robert Harris's 16th novel is a riveting tale of politics, war and erotic obsession centred on the prime minister HH Asquith and his vivacious aristocratic mistress Venetia Stanley. At the time of their all-consuming intimacy in 1914, he was 61 and she was 26 and, extraordinarily, Stanley became Asquith's 'most darling counsellor' as his Liberal government faced devastating battle losses and ammunition shortages. Penguin £9.99 pp544Buy a copy of Precipice Yael van der Wouden's steamy, twisty debut about forbidden love and the heavy burden of history has just won the Women's Prize for Fiction. It follows Isabel, a young woman living alone in her deceased mother's home in 1960s Holland. Her quiet, controlled life is interrupted by Eva, her brother's girlfriend, who comes to stay for a month and disrupts everything Isabel thinks about herself, her family and the country she lives in. There's an incredible twist about halfway £9.99 pp272Buy a copy of The Safekeep Management consulting and tidal energy start-ups … I know, I know, it doesn't scream 'beach read'. But Alexander Starritt's third novel will have you hooked. It's a tale of two promising young men, James Drayton and Roland McKenzie, who graduate from Oxford in the early 2000s and enjoy the promises and pitfalls of 21st-century capitalism, from the recession to Covid, from Brexit to Trump. More than that it's an ode to the enduring power of male £16.99 pp512Buy a copy of Drayton and Mackenzie Butter is a feminist crime novel with a delicious premise. Manako Kajii is sitting in prison, convicted of murdering men whom she had dated and swindled out of millions of yen before poisoning them with beef stew. To get close to Manako, the reporter Rika Machida agrees to start cooking all her favourite recipes. This is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat that moves seamlessly between an angry young woman narrative and an engrossing detective drama and back again.4th Estate £9.99 pp464Buy a copy of Butter David Szalay, the author of Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is, has adopted a leaner, sparer style of writing for his latest beguiling novel, which tracks one man's life over 50 years. He follows an inscrutable Hungarian called Istvan from awkward adolescence, when he had an affair with an older neighbour, into middle-age as an intensely wealthy man in London. It's tense, unnerving and charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our Cape £18.99 pp368Buy a copy of Flesh A quietly powerful story of a woman searching for the daughter she gave up for adoption. Dawn, a recently divorced Londoner who grew up in Trinidad, has spent years trying to track down the daughter she secretly gave birth to as a teenager. She became pregnant in 1980 and was smuggled to a convent in Venezuela, where she handed the baby over to nuns. A tender story about a woman trying to make sense of her life, it reads like a Claire Keegan story expanded by Elizabeth £16.99 pp304Buy a copy of Love Forms Moses McKenzkie's vivid, witty, exuberant novel goes back to 1980, to a defining moment in Bristol's history, when many of the residents of St Pauls were clashing with the police over the treatment of the Afro-Caribbean community. It's narrated in a propulsive patois by 14-year-old Jabari, whose father, a Rastafarian community leader, has been thrown in a police cell. It's an electric novel about black £10.99 pp256Buy a copy of Fast by the Horns • The Sunday Times Young Writer award: meet our shortlisted authors If you're heading to Capri, why not pack this superlative crime novel, which contrasts the area's rugged landscapes and high-end visitors? It centres on the wealthy Lingate family, who have been holidaying there for ever, even though Richard Lingate's wife died there 30 years ago, falling from a cliff. When his wife's necklace reappears (with a blackmail note demanding millions), long-buried secrets threaten to float to the £16.99 pp336Buy a copy of The Vipers Gail's daughter is about to get married despite significant qualms, and her annoying ex-husband has forgotten to book a hotel (and brought along a cat). All that would be manageable if she hadn't just quit her job (or been sacked, depending on who you ask). Anne Tyler's latest novel is a joy to read as she once again transforms the problems of ordinary people living ordinary lives into something funny, touching and real. It's also short — you could get through it on a long-haul & Windus £14.99 pp176Buy a copy of Three Days in June This darkly funny book about power, manipulation and complicity in the 1930s feels very relevant to the present-day political climate. It's about the small compromises that led the Austrian film director GW Pabst to accept fascism. Having fled the shadow of the German Reich to Hollywood, he was forced to return to Germany to create propaganda films for the Nazis. Daniel Kehlmann is strong on how quickly fear and corruption become £22 pp352Buy a copy of The Director This powerful portrayal of coercive control follows Ciara, who decides to leave her husband, Ryan, one afternoon after years of emotional and sexual abuse. At the time she flees her daughters are two and four and she has just discovered she's pregnant again. But she doesn't get very far after Ryan manages to block her children's passports. With skill and economy Roisín O'Donnell puts you inside the dilemmas of a woman who is constantly doubting herself. Scribner £16.99 pp400Buy a copy of Nesting The set-up of Louise Hegarty's debut seems simple: Abigail is hosting an annual murder mystery party held on New Year's Eve to celebrate the birthday of her brother, Benjamin. As morning dawns Benjamin, of course, is dead. Cue the arrival of Auguste Bell, a private detective plucked straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. We flick between a meta murder-mystery comedy and the very real grief of Abigail. A great read for any murder mystery £16.99 pp288Buy a copy of Fair Play It's the summer of 1989 in rural 'horses-and-beeswax' New England and after convening at the house of their childless Aunt Frankie, nine children must find their cousin, three-year-old Abi, who has chased a wild creature. This short, ambitious, surreal debut novel is written in the first person plural, representing the gulf between a motley group of young cousins and their bickering parents, who harbour secrets and Heinemann £16.99 pp192Buy a copy of Idle Grounds Geoff Dyer's memoir of growing up in 1960s and 1970s Cheltenham as part of an ordinary working-class family is wonderfully evocative, ranging from his love of Eagle and Beezer comics to The Generation Game playing on television and the 'slop' of school dinners. Dyer writes especially movingly about his parents, and how his life became 'incommunicable' to them after he passed the 11-plus and later left home. 'If you've read Dyer before then you'll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven't, it's the perfect place to start,' John Self said in his review. Canongate £20 pp288Buy a copy of Homework Max Hastings first wrote about the world-changing events of June 6, 1944, in his book Overlord, in 1984. This new one approaches the Allied invasion of Normandy from the bottom up; it's less interested in generals and geopolitics and instead focuses on individual soldiers, in particular the British men who landed on Sword Beach. He carefully sketches their characters, often by describing the things they carried. Lieutenant Alan Jefferson, for instance, took a tuning fork and a copy of Hamlet. Signaller Finlay Campbell carried a fountain pen — given to him for his 21st birthday. A thoroughly moving history. William Collins £25 pp400Buy a copy of Sword When 29-year-old Lamorna Ash heard that two of her university pals had given up their careers in stand-up comedy to become Anglican priests, it prompted her to undertake a nationwide search for other young people who were turning (or returning) to religion. Ash throws herself fully into this investigation of faith, saying yes to everything from a Bible course to a silent retreat. 'It is not only a fascinating sociological study and religious memoir, but a profound look at the power of ritual and communion with others,' Laura Hackett said in her review. Bloomsbury Circus £22 pp352Buy a copy of Don't Forget We're Here Forever Muriel Spark knew as a schoolgirl that she was 'destined' to write, that she had to take up her pen 'or else burst'. In a new biography of the great 20th-century author, known best for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Frances Wilson reveals that Spark had a life almost as strange and offbeat as her novels. At 19 she moved from Edinburgh and got married in southern Rhodesia, but within two years, she'd run off to London to be general secretary of the Poetry Society, abandoning her young son. There she had a breakdown — partly brought about by diet pills — and became convinced that TS Eliot was stalking her. A woman with a brilliant, uncanny Circus £25 pp432Buy a copy of Electric Spark 'So it's you. Here you are.' That's what crossed Salman Rushdie's mind as a man in black climbed on to the stage at a literary event in New York state in 2022 and stabbed him many times. His 'almost murder' lasted 27 seconds, but Rushdie had been anticipating it for decades, ever since the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in 1989. This affecting memoir chronicles exactly what happened that day, as well as Rushdie's long, arduous recovery. Vintage £10.99 pp224Buy a copy of Knife • Salman Rushdie: I am 'over my attack' and have found closure This history investigates pop's greatest bromance: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It begins in 1957, when 16-year-old Lennon invited McCartney, a year and a half his junior, to get involved with his skiffle group. The journey from there to global domination is familiar, but there's a freshness to this most recent telling, and Ian Leslie is particularly knowledgeable when it comes to the key songs and records. 'This is a wonderful contribution to the ever-growing Beatles library,' our reviewer £25 pp432Buy a copy of John and Paul This is both a memoir of a divorce and a sweeping cultural commentary. Starting with the enormous heart-shaped tin she used to bake her wedding cake — now a painful reminder of her separation from her husband after 23 years of marriage — Bee Wilson proves that it's not unusual for the things we keep in our kitchens to develop outsized sentimental value. Melon ballers, milk jugs and vegetable corers all have something to tell us. A fascinating and heartwarming read.4th Estate £18.99 pp320Buy a copy of The Heart-Shaped Tin Hares are too often dismissed as big ugly rabbits, but with her gentle yet remarkably detached memoir, telling how she found an abandoned leveret during lockdown and raised the little beast inside her home, Chloe Dalton sets the record straight in her unexpected bestseller. The supposedly untameable creature gets so comfortable in human company that Dalton even installs a hare-flap in her back door. It reads like a love letter to the natural world. Canongate £10.99 pp304Buy a copy of Raising Hare • Chloe Dalton: My father read Joseph Conrad to us at the kitchen table Few motherhood memoirs start with coke dealers and edibles, but Sarah Hoover's curious contribution to the canon is different. It opens with a candid admission that 'the last line of my baby shower invitation said no gifts unless it's drugs', and proceeds to repeatedly flip the bird at a society that expects women to be natural mothers and believe their children are the most precious things that exist. When Hoover's son arrived in October 2017, she admits with refreshing candour, she just thought he was ugly. A frank, often funny account of a reluctant & Schuster £20 pp352Buy a copy of The Motherload In this eccentric mash-up of biography, history and memoir, Philip Hoare reveals how the Romantic visionary William Blake made the world a more strange and beautiful place. If you're after a straight-up account of the poet-artist's life, this isn't for you. But if you want an account that pinballs from his influence on Oscar Wilde, to David Bowie's pop videos, then on to the author getting drunk with Peter Ackroyd, then onwards to an account of looking at the world through Blake's spectacles, then this is the book for you. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in his review described it 'as one of the most original and uncategorisable works I've read for a long time … Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.'4th Estate £22 pp464Buy a copy of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love Between 1964 and 1973, the psychiatrist William Sargant was in charge of the in-patient psychiatric unit in St Thomas's Hospital, London. The unit came to be known as 'The Sleep Room', because Sargant drugged his female patients so they would be unconscious for up to 20 hours a day, waking them up only to administer electroconvulsive therapy. In this shocking yet thorough investigation, Jon Stock speaks to some of the women who were admitted to the ward, uncovering the truth about this abuse of power. Bridge Street £25 pp432Buy a copy of The Sleep Room By all accounts, Eric Tucker's life didn't amount to much. Born in Warrington, Lancashire, he left school at 14 and spent his life drifting between jobs, including labouring, sign painting and, for a little while, grave digging. It was only after he died that his nephew Joe discovered a treasure trove of impressive paintings, which Tucker had completed across many years. In this loving memoir, Joe paints a portrait of his uncle, who would later be labelled as 'the secret Lowry'.Canongate £18.99 pp224Buy a copy of The Secret Painter Except for their literary prowess, what do Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann have in common? Each moved to rural England after personal tragedy. In this charming, vivid portrait of the three 20th-century figures, which won this year's Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Harriet Baker explains how the countryside was, more than just an escape, a means of carrying out 'new experiments in form, and feeling'. Penguin £10.99 pp384Buy a copy of Rural Hours Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents reported loneliness in 2018 compared with 2012. In England, NHS records show that more than 10,000 girls under 18 were treated in hospital for self-harm in 2010 and that by 2016 it was nearly 15,000. In The Anxious Generation, the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the almost unanswerable case that the root of such tragic trends is the spread (and constant use) of smartphones. Rather than hanging out with friends, the youth of today are isolated in their bedrooms, scrolling through social media content that frequently includes toxic information. This is a dispiriting but essential read about a large and looming social £10.99 pp464Buy a copy of The Anxious Generation • Jonathan Haidt: How we can save our children from smartphones In her jaw-dropping memoir, the self-confessed sociopath Patric Gagne explains what it's like to experience emotions differently to the average person, piecing together the events from her early life that first made her think that she might be immune to the pangs of guilt, remorse and affection that guide most ordinary people's actions. Cat-strangling, carjacking, lock picking and a party at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion feature in this eye-opening cocktail of pop psychology and shocking personal £10.99 pp368Buy a copy of Sociopath The author best known for The Buddha of Suburbia had his life changed by an unlikely accident in 2022, when he passed out, slumped off his sofa and snapped his spinal cord. It left him paralysed, unable to walk or even to wash himself. In just a few weeks, however, his writing impulse returned. This memoir combines the notes he took in hospital, dictated to family members, and post-accident reflections on becoming a 'near vegetable'. It makes for uncomfortable reading, but is full of wisdom about freedom and self-renewal. Penguin, £10.99 pp336Buy a copy of Shattered • Hanif Kureishi: The accident left me 'like a turtle on its back' In 2011 Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook as an optimistic young New Zealander. She left seven years later, disillusioned by what she sees as the tech company's moral corruption. In Careless People she turns whistleblower, alleging that Facebook has crept up to dictatorships and manipulated algorithms to prey on the insecurities of its users in its ruthless pursuit of money and power. 'It started as a hopeful comedy and ended up in darkness and regret,' she writes. The book, our reviewer said, is at once 'compelling and depressing'.Macmillan £22 pp400Buy a copy of Careless People The world's oceans contain 97 per cent of all water on the planet, and yet us landlubberly humans only glimpse the top of them. Except for the marine biologist Drew Harvell, that is, who has spent a lifetime donning scuba gear and risking the unseen dangers beneath the surface to get up close and personal with the creatures that live there. In this enchanting book she uses the complex histories of eight underwater creatures to showcase the mind-boggling variety of marine life, from nine-brained octopuses to phosphorescent sea gooseberries and gunge-busting sponges. Bodley Head £20 pp288Buy a copy of The Ocean's Menagerie New York jazz, London punk, hip-hop: Neneh Cherry has moved through enough music scenes to have material for a dozen books. But in this, her first memoir, the 61-year-old Swedish singer offers a brilliant insight into the joys — and the perils — of a creative life. The influences of her mother, the bohemian artist Moki, and her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, are key — and explain why, as a child, she was given a Toblerone by Miles Davis — but she proves with gusto that she has her own tales to £10.99 pp336Buy a copy of A Thousand Threads This quirky biography tells the story of Louis Wain, the troubled artist who carved out a career as a cat cartoonist for the illustrated press, before ending up in a lunatic asylum where he drew bright, kaleidoscopic kittens decades before they became popular (Sixties pop artists loved them). Alongside this, Kathryn Hughes gives us a social history of the cat, how it went from unloved mouse catcher to the most pampered of pets. One thing we learnt: there is a long tradition of giving felines lamentable names — Thomas Hardy, who really ought to have known better, had one called Kiddlewinkpoops-Trot. 4th Estate £10.99 pp416Buy a copy of Catland Many books about the world wars are depressingly inelegant, but Jonathan Dimbleby's works are in a different league. This titanic account of the Eastern Front in 1944 covers an enormous canvas from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but it's the human details that linger in the mind, from the panic of German soldiers driven back through the snow to the doomed heroism of Warsaw's resistance fighters. Despite the harrowing subject matter, Dimbleby handles his material with such skill and wisdom that his book is a pleasure to £10.99 pp640Buy a copy of Endgame The paperback of this Baillie Gifford-shortlisted book comes out on July 3. It's timely. It's a non-fiction, tick-tocking thriller that imagines how a nuclear war might start and then unfold. Well, at least the end will be quick: it could take as little as 26 minutes and 40 seconds before the Earth becomes uninhabitable once the rockets start flying. Annie Jacobsen's account isn't based on fancy; she has interviewed dozens of military experts to make her various scenarios as plausible as possible. Mark Urban described it as an 'undeniably gripping narrative', which perhaps explains why Denis Villeneuve, the Dune director, is adapting it for the screen. Penguin £10.99 pp400Buy a copy of Nuclear War Why did the French Revolution happen? One could examine bread prices or the manoeuverings in conventions and assemblies — or maybe it would be more fruitful to get a sense of the national mood. The distinguished historian Robert Darnton does just that — he casts his eye over poems, gossip, scandal sheets, the bonnets that women wore and the songs that were sung to get a sense of the 'revolutionary temper'. He juxtaposes highfalutin philosophy with low rumour, showing how one blended into the other, to explain how revolution erupted in 1789. 'This book is, quite simply, a feast, but one that, thanks to superb storytelling, is easy to digest,' Gerard DeGroot £16.99 pp576Buy a copy of The Revolutionary Temper For sheer entertainment, this rollicking account of Britain before the Great War is hard to beat, brimming as it is with swindlers, murderers and charlatans, imperialist fantasies and saucy innuendos. The scope is vast, covering everything from the suffragettes to The Wind in the Willows, and the social historian Alwyn Turner proves a wonderfully enthusiastic narrator. Profile £11.99 pp400Buy a copy of Little Englanders The comedian Al Murray is a serious history buff and the battle of Arnhem has been an obsession since childhood, 'present in my imagination for as long as I can remember, a peculiar and powerful singularity'. He has read everything there is to read, walked the streets of the old town and stood on the bridge across the Rhine — that bridge too far. He does a terrific job of evoking the chaos of one day — Tuesday, September 19, 1944 — as the men of 1st Airborne tried to secure that bridge against fierce German opposition. It was bloody chaos. 'Everything was happening everywhere, all at once.'Penguin £10.99 pp432Buy a copy of Arnhem Britain had waited centuries for a landscape artist of genius and suddenly in the early 19th century two came along at once — John Constable and JMW Turner. Little wonder, that in art history they tend to be stereotyped as rivals, as polar opposites. Nicola Moorby in this dual biography counsels against seeing them as such. Both men had a bigger problem — that most English of themes, the countryside, was not seen as a fitting subject for artists. To Constable's despair, the aristocracy — the source of patronage — preferred 'the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of landscape'. Yale £25 pp352Buy a copy of Turner and Constable Homo sapiens is on the edge of extinction — we'll probably die off within the next ten millennia; a blink of an eye in the deep time of the Earth. Henry Gee, a palaeontologist, takes the long view. He looks at what might kill us off — famine, war, climate change, pandemics and so on — but the most fascinating parts of the book look at our distant past, when Homo sapiens was one of a number of different hominids before we drove our competitors into oblivion (bye bye Neanderthals, Denisovans and so on). In his description, 100,000 years ago we lived in a real Middle-earth alongside giants, troglodytes, hobbits and so on. Gee has a knack for making science come alive with a vivid image and witty £18.99 pp288Buy a copy of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire James I had serious affairs with at least six men. 'He loves indiscreetly and obstinately,' a contemporary observer remarked, 'despite the disapprobation of his subjects.' These favourites he showered with favours, land, titles and slobbering kisses. In Queen James, the historian Gareth Russell foregrounds the intimate side of the king. It's seriously researched history, though, rather than salacious speculation. The man that emerges is clever, educated, filthy-tongued with a talent for languages, unpleasant, a lover of dirty jokes and luxury. It's good to know that he had a pet otter, which he would take for walks on a jewel-encrusted leash. William Collins £25 pp496Buy a copy of Queen James Two bright young journalists on this paper give us the inside story of how Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff and the most interesting character in this account, fought the battle to win Labour back from the Corbynistas. Starmer emerges as a ruthless, deeply pragmatic and strangely apolitical politician, a man 'forever uninterested in the politics of politics itself'. Bodley Head £25 pp480Buy a copy of Get In Thomas More, like Henry VIII's other chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, has always divided historians. Was he a heresy-hunting Catholic zealot, a torturer and murderer of Protestants? Or a martyr of saintly, spotless conscience, the cultivated author of Utopia? Joanne Paul in this biography errs towards the more sympathetic camp. Our reviewer Alice Hunt wrote: 'Paul is brilliant at bringing the swirl of Catholic England to life: its candlelit rituals, Latin prayers and saints' days, punctuated by tinkling royal processions.' Michael Joseph £30 pp644Buy a copy of Thomas More In December 2011 a young male wolf left his territory in Slovenia and began an arduous journey of several thousand miles across the Alps. He was wearing a GPS collar, so we know which rivers he swam, motorways he crossed and Alpine passes he loped along, on his travels across Austria and down into Italy. The nature writer Adam Weymouth follows in his pawprints, describing what he sees, as well as musing on our changing attitudes to the wolf. Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp384Buy a copy of Lone Wolf Barbara Demick won the Baillie Gifford prize for her book Nothing to Envy, an extraordinary piece of reportage about ordinary lives in the totalitarian state of North Korea. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is a similarly impressive journalistic exercise, an investigation into how corrupt officials in China, especially the goons who enforced the brutal one-child policy, started stealing children and passing them off as orphans who could be adopted, for a fee (of course), by western couples. She focuses on the story of twins, separated as toddlers, and remarkably reunited 20 years later thanks to her sleuthing. Granta £20 pp336Buy a copy of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove The subtitle gives a clue to the large cast of characters involved in this lively, vivid history of Budapest during the Second World War. We meet glamorous actresses working for the anti-Nazi resistance, a Jewish teenage draughtsman who became a brilliant forger of passports, a Polish aristocrat who turned out, perhaps to her surprise, to be rather skilled at blowing things up … But, of course, this is a horrible story. The cosmopolitan city of Budapest descended into barbarism — and as the Red Army neared its walls, the fascist Arrow Cross government started to deport and murder the surviving Jews. Head of Zeus £27.99 pp512Buy a copy of The Last Days of Budapest If you're bored of history books that entomb you in dates, extraneous details and footnotes, then The Golden Throne might be the answer. This account of the middle years of the reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent reads like a novel (the early years are recounted in The Lion House). The world of the 16th century — of eunuchs, diplomats, pirates and princes, of sea battles, stranglings and perfumed goings-on in harems — pops to life. Christopher de Bellaigue's writing is confident and playful. If only more historians wrote with such verve. Bodley Head £22 pp272Buy a copy of The Golden Throne Suzanne O'Sullivan, an NHS neurologist, is a humane and thoughtful observer of the oddities of the human mind, especially psychosomatic conditions. Her 2015 book It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness and the 2021 follow-up The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness are full of intriguing case studies and wise observations. The Age of Diagnosis ranges widely, taking in the drawbacks of mass screening for illnesses as well as the perils of overextending mental health categories so that what was once simply unusual behaviour earns itself a medical label of ADHD or autism. We make people sicker by the simple act of diagnosing them with a medical problem, she says. A fascinating & Stoughton £22 pp320Buy a copy of The Age of Diagnosis • ADHD, autism, cancer: this doctor says overdiagnosis is the issue The eerie tale of how in the early 20th century, Dr Hawley Crippen fell in love with his typist, murdered his second wife and then fled across the Atlantic, triggering one of the most celebrated pursuits in modern history, is well known. But the historian Hallie Rubenhold thinks we have been telling it all wrong. Too often the wicked doctor is put at the heart of the story, while the women whose lives he touched are ignored or caricatured. She puts the victims centre stage. 'Even though we know where the story is leading,' Dominic Sandbrook wrote in his review, 'Rubenhold makes it tremendously exciting.'Doubleday £25 pp512Buy a copy of Story of a Murder The rising young historian Tim Bouverie made a name for himself with Appeasing Hitler (2019), a compelling study of the disastrous British diplomacy of the 1930s. This ambitious follow-up dissects the 'improbable and incongruous Alliance' that defeated Hitler. Well-trodden ground, you might think, but it goes far beyond the British-Soviet-American troika, so we learn about Britain's relationship with France (before and after its fall in 1940), nationalist China, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. It's full of fascinating nuggets, character sketches and peppery judgments. Saul David called the book 'a fine reassessment of Allied politics and diplomacy during the Second World War: impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued.'Bodley Head £25 pp688Buy a copy of Allies at War In 1919 four teams of aviators battled to become the first to cross the Atlantic — and win a £10,000 prize (about £660,000 in today's money) posted by the Daily Mail. These men were driven by the purest form of heroic adventure — what one journalist called 'sublime insanity'. The Big Hop is a glorious romp through an overlooked part of aviation history, stuffed full of intriguing characters and white-knuckle & Windus £22 pp320Buy a copy of The Big Hop Edmund White died this year aged 85 — but the grand old man of gay literature was writing up until the end. This 'sex memoir' has all the unfiltered candour you'd expect of an octogenarian who was too old to care what anyone else thought. We learn everything — penis size, favoured positions — as well as meeting dozens of the thousands of men he fell in love with, ever so briefly and untenderly. It's the rather touching last hurrah of a writer who never believed in something being 'too much information'.Bloomsbury £20 pp256Buy a copy of The Loves of My Life Vasili Mitrokhin didn't fit the Hollywood image of a secret agent. He was a scruffy oddball who had been demoted from fieldwork to the dreary backwater of the KGB's archives. But the information he gleaned from burrowing in the shelves and boxes — and then passed on to the West — was described as 'the biggest counterintelligence bonanza of the postwar period'. Gordon Corera, formerly the BBC's security correspondent and now a co-presenter of the intelligence podcast The Rest Is Classified, tells the story of this irascible, unlikely spy and his trove of Collins £25 pp336Buy a copy of The Spy in the Archive
Times
19 minutes ago
- Times
The ‘wonderbra' for men, and nine other new menswear trends
The international fashion circuit kicks off with menswear in Italy, and as the shows take place in the heat of Milan, they are perfectly timed for presenting on the catwalk what we will see in a year's time on the streets all over the world. This season it was all about relaxed style — from silk eveningwear to driving blousons and comfortable and flexible suede moccasins. The look is elegant but not formal, a grown-up take on warm-weather chic. You may not think of leather for summer, but then there is leather and there is leather. Summer leather needs to be soft and supple, as seen at Montblanc, the makers of Swiss pens, watches and leather goods, which launched its first fashion collection with 16 looks for spring/summer 2026 designed by the artistic director Marco Tomasetta. These jackets, shorts, shirts and trousers have a subtle summer colour palette — mustard, brown, blue and green — and feature the quirky detailing that speaks of the firm's enduring association with the film-maker Wes Anderson. There are multiple pockets for your pens and a '4810' embossed pattern referencing the height of the mountain of Mont Blanc in metres. But the key is the softness. Which is also Brunello Cucinelli's starting point with leather. Alessio Piastrelli, the menswear director at the brand, says, 'It's difficult to wear a leather jacket during the summer, so we were looking for a special leather that is all about weight.' He settled on a lightweight, supple quality. 'It's a really beautiful, soft nubuck,' he says, citing an ecru leather trench coat as well as pieces in colours like orange and red. There's also an ecru shirt and a black zip-up blouson. 'This is not the big-sized approach to leather of the Eighties and Nineties.' Instead this is tailored leather, to be worn elegantly. Not rugged or oversized styles, but a sleek look. Summer colours usually lean towards neutrals and naturals, with a heavy dose of navy and white. This season we're seeing some pastels — 'dirty' pinks, sky blues and mustards at Prada, for example — but the real story is the use of colour as a highlight. Prada also has a strong red for this purpose, with a few pops of bold green, yellow and blue for sporty track pants with contrast side stripe. Meanwhile Massimo Alba introduced a rich 'grape' purple in a double-breasted jacket-cum-peacoat and a terry towelling short-sleeve shirt. Giorgio Armani also breaks from his greige palette to bring us shades of mauve. But it is to the king of colour, our very own Sir Paul Smith, that we have to look for a masterclass in using hues to spice up a summer wardrobe. Returning to show in Milan for the first time in several years, he presented a collection full of colour and prints. The source, he told us, was a book he bought 25 years ago in a street market in Cairo with his wife, Pauline, which had photographs of Egypt that had been hand-tinted. 'The entire colour palette is from that, and the prints are from photographs I took of the reflections in the water when we went down the Nile on a felucca,' the designer says. So look out for a sleeveless orange V-neck and socks and trainers, a yellow suede jacket, dusty pink trousers and red shorts. 'I just like the optimism of colour. Pauline always calls colour in an outfit a punctuation mark, because while a rock star can wear all red, or an actor can on a red carpet, most of us would just wear a colourful shirt or a belt or a sock.' • Read more luxury reviews, advice and insights from our experts If there's a competition going on to see who can make the bendiest shoes then Zegna and Santoni are tied in first place. Zegna had leather slippers that literally fold in half, with a flexible flat sole, while Santoni, the shoemaker from the Le Marche region in Italy, has a folding driving shoe with a natty orange rubber sole so you make a statement every time you cross your legs. This flex is more to do with on-foot comfort than any space-saving you achieve by compressing your footwear in your luggage — although this seems to be a selling point too. Elsewhere there are woven leather lace-ups at Emporio Armani and leather mules at Canali and Zegna, all of which are flexible. As is the Shanghai monk strap range at Church's, so called because these models are based on a pair from 1929 sent to the factory in Northampton by the grandson of their owner as a curiosity. It arrived from Shanghai, hence the name of today's interpretation. These have a leather fringed apron, brogueing and are made with a mix of materials, often calfskin and linen. They are a distinctive summer choice, like a sort of golf shoe mixed with a co-respondent. The originals were on show in Milan, displaying the worn Church's logo on the bendy rubber sole. The new variants have been distressed to look like the source pair, so no breaking in is necessary. Luca Larenza took over one of Milan's regular flower stalls to present his handmade crocheted knits (alongside his equally handmade ceramics). The knitwear, a sporty polo in aquamarine cotton and a crewneck in beige, illustrated what he can do with an open-stitch effect, which is very comfortable in the summer. At Canali there was a zip-up ecru collared cardigan also in crochet. 'It's inspired by knitted, fingerless driving gloves, and we took that idea and applied it to knitwear,' Stefano Canali, the president and CEO of the company, explained. At Giorgio Armani, too, there were summer knits with big stitches that had a crocheted appearance in ecru and pale mint. It's all about the artisanal look and a ventilated feel. A number of brands showed cars alongside their collections. There was a classic caramel Porsche 911T at Canali to mark the collection's Gran Turismo theme that saw relaxed pleated trousers (good for sitting behind the steering wheel) and cropped blousons in brown suede and natural and ecru linen for the gentleman driver. There was a beautiful vintage Lamborghini at Tod's, where the granddaddy of driving shoes, the rubber pebble-soled Gommino, had a whole show dedicated to it. The famous loafer-style moccasins, on display here in suede in a range of colours, also provide the inspiration for many of Tod's other styles that are co-opting the pebbles, like deck shoes and even sneakers. Ferrari, as you would expect, has great driving shoes, and also high-top driving 'sneakers' in a technical knit, similar looking to the boots that Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc actually wear when racing. But, more than that, Rocco Iannone, the creative director of Ferrari Style, continues to develop pieces that subtly reference the factory in Maranello, like a two-piece garment-dyed denim boiler suit in the Rosso Maison red with custom rivets featuring the prancing horse logo. The most literal racer offer came from Fay, which proudly showed two vintage Alfa Romeo race cars to support its collaboration with the driver Ronnie Kessel, the son of the F1 driver Loris. The collection featured all manner of cropped race jackets, including a limited edition cotton style (only 70 pieces will be made) with quilted lining that looks like you're about to step from the pits into your Le Mans car. • Read more fashion advice and style inspiration from our experts The Italian quest for how to parlay its sartorial tradition into contemporary form continues apace. This week saw many variations on jackets and trousers that had little to do with the established notch lapel classic with matching trousers most commonly associated with traditional tailoring, though that combo is by no means finished. But we have certainly come to the point where a chore jacket, or a tailored bomber, is an option for a smartly dressed man who is not so much looking to make a fashion statement as express stylish elegance. These jackets are characterised by being unstructured and often feature practical on-show pockets. Corneliani is exploring this with a cotton button-up chore jacket with four large flap pockets on the front, an ecru suede blouson with two button-up chest flap pockets, and a tailored outerwear piece with drawstring fastening at a stand-up collar, as well as a cotton zip-up shirt jacket again with flap pockets at the chest. If you can match this type of jacket with trousers in the same fabric, you have a modern take on the suit. Summer eveningwear can often feel like it's designed for formal occasions like Ascot. But in Milan there was an alternative, modern take where the idea is to look superlight. Leading the charge is Brioni, which has a history of innovation dating back to the 1950s, when it started to introduce 'ice cream' colours to tailoring. Now, under its executive design director, Norbert Stumpfl, it's pushing the boundaries again with extremely luxurious fabrics and eveningwear that is anything but formal. 'It's very modern, you just put on a shirt and trousers, but they're made in the most beautiful fluid silk or embroidered in gold,' he says. 'We try to take everything out, all the construction. We don't weigh our wearer down, we make him feel completely at ease. Nothing stuffy, nothing heavy.' • Agnès b on 50 years in fashion: from Breton stripes to dressing Bowie There's one summer fabric that's getting a billowing airing this season and that's silk. At Giorgio Armani the silk came thick (well, thin actually — which is the point) and fast. From a Nehru-collared fuchsia suit to geometric patterns printed on silk shirt-jackets with matching trousers, to silk shirts with a dégradé effect, to more conventional tailored jackets and trousers. A standout was a gossamer-fine black silk evening suit that makes you look like you are floating. It's comfortable and speaks of luxurious, indolent days in the sun. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana threw a veritable pyjama party on their catwalk. A style first shown by the duo in the 1990s, the collection placed pyjamas centre stage. These are an Italian classic — striped and in lightweight cotton jacquard, these PJs are for day and night — with the evening pieces also embroidered with crystals and stones. The pyjama theme also surfaced at Emporio Armani, but while Dolce & Gabbana's take evoked lounging in a Venetian palazzo, the Emporio Armani version was straight out of Marrakesh, with big, bold and flowing striped cotton trousers. Meanwhile, at Zegna washed silk pyjama-style striped jackets, shirts and trousers felt more like something you might see on a global traveller — maybe in Dubai, for example, which is where the brand actually showed its spring/summer collection before bringing it to Milan. It was a season of extremes where trousers are concerned. I'm not sure what to call Prada's new shorts for men, so cropped that there are no leg parts as such. If Paul Mescal's Gucci style from last year was the micro short, maybe these are nano shorts? Or just pants, but not in the American sense. At the other end of the spectrum are Emporio Armani's voluminous harem pants. And somewhere in between are Dunhill's Gurkha trousers. Dunhill's creative director is a fan of the style, which sees the waistband extend round to the side where it fastens. 'The great thing about the Gurkha is that it comes from the military wardrobe, where so much of classic menswear originates,' Holloway says. 'It gives a flattering silhouette, sitting high on the waist. And because of how it is cut it really is the equivalent of a Wonderbra for men,' he says with a laugh. Expect them to sell out.
Times
19 minutes ago
- Times
Jo Whiley: When Glastonbury wasn't on we hosted ‘GlastonWhiley'
Home is a barn conversion in Northamptonshire. We call it the compound. Three of my children are adults now and my youngest is doing her GCSEs. I cherish every moment all four of them are under one roof. It's a barn with huge windows that look out on to what used to be a field. I've desperately tried to make it into a cottage garden. It's light and it's airy, which is the most important thing to me. I can't bear being somewhere with low ceilings and small windows. That makes me feel depressed. Maybe I have spent too much time in studios where I don't see any daylight. I also grew up in a really old, dark cottage. My parents lived in a post office in a small village; I just remember the ceilings were very low. I craved the feeling of being outside and being able to access the sky and the sun and nature. • Read more expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement Where we are right now. After Covid with everybody at home, I feel like we've gone through so much living in this house. We've lost people, we've had various animals coming into our lives and living with us, and we've had a lot of fun. It definitely is. The doors are always open, spilling out on to the garden. We're big on fancy-dress parties. We had one celebrating the Olympics; everyone came as a country. We did a procession all the way round the garden with flags, then we had a big sports day. I think I was Team GB. My favourite outfit was for a Disney-themed party when my daughter, India, who is now 33, was obsessed with The Lion King. She was Timon and I came as Pumbaa. I've always been the warthog, and I reprised that role for her 30th birthday party, which was hilarious. Snow Patrol performed in my lounge. We did a Christmas show from the house, so we had Jona Lewie doing Stop the Cavalry in the kitchen, with Alex James from Blur serving cheese and cider, Jamie Cullum on the piano in the hallway and Kae Tempest was there too. No Paul McCartney in a Daffy Duck costume though, sadly. We do have a tiny shed called the Miniscule of Sound. My husband [music executive Steve Morton] is obsessed with dry ice, so it's like an incredibly small nightclub with DJs hammering out tunes until five in the morning. The last time Glastonbury wasn't on, we hosted an event call GlastonWhiley, where all our friends camped in the field and we had a pig roast and loads of festival stuff going on. I first went when I was about 17. I saw Van Morrison and John Cooper Clarke and Aswad and it rained so much. I remember our tent, which was right in front of the Pyramid Stage, sliding down a hill towards the stage. We left at five o'clock the following morning, after cooking bacon sandwiches on the platform of the train station. Accommodation has improved since then. We did the Winnebago thing and it got trashed and then we weren't allowed to have another one. We did shows from there, so we had the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Klaxons, Mika and Amy Winehouse — they kept coming into the Winnebago to do interviews because it was the only dry place. I remember interviewing Amy Winehouse and Blake [Fielder-Civil] from basically my bedroom, with my kids there, too. I can't remember exactly who was responsible for the trashing, but I'm sure the Klaxons played a fairly large part. Now I stay in a nearby hotel, with all the other people working for the BBC. I've had the same room for the past ten years. It feels like going home every time I go back there because the staff are so welcoming. • Glastonbury 2025 TV Guide: How to watch the festival live from home No, because I'm their mum. I'm just a figure of fun. I've got a bronze sculpture of my grandad's hands holding my daughter's hands that we made before he died. It's really freaking heavy, but I would definitely take that, as it always brings back special memories of him. My dad was an electrician, so I am the most practical one in the family. We've done up two bathrooms recently. I got obsessed with tiles. I tend to do most of the gardening, especially after my husband got grass feed and weed killer muddled up and destroyed the lawn for six weeks until it grew back. He's now banned from gardening. I went to Chelsea recently and my desperation to get bigger and better plants is extreme. And I've just had an irrigation system installed which has been life-changing. Will Young is my gardening buddy. He was in Cabaret in Milton Keynes and he stayed with us, and we did the vegetable patch together. We regularly exchange chat about gardens. Sharlene Spiteri from Texas is a really keen gardener as well. I regularly write Post-it Notes saying, 'Clean the shit out of the sink', because the gunk is my absolute pet hate. It's gross and it annoys me that people leave it for me to deal Whiley has worked with National Rail on a series of audio guides exploring the connections between artists and the places that inspired them. Find the guides on or Spotify
