'I played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars and what happened after was horrifying'
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Brian Davis obituary
My friend and former colleague Brian Davis, who has died aged 91, was a journalist of the old school, meticulous in his commitment to fair, accurate reporting throughout an understated but distinguished career. All those he trained remember his mantra: 'If you can't get names right, why should anyone trust the rest of the story?' He spent the bulk of his time in regional journalism, except for a stint subediting on the Guardian in the 1960s. He trained dozens of young journalists, including the future broadcaster Richard Madeley at the Brentwood Argus, where Brian was the launch editor in 1968 and stayed for nearly 20 years. He later appeared as a guest on an episode of This Is Your Life that featured Madeley. Brian was also the author of three books: Ferndown, The Back of Beyond (1996), about growing up in a Dorset village; You 'Orrible Little Man (2010), highlighting his experience of national service; and I'll Take That One (2013), about child wartime evacuees. Brian was born in Ferndown, to Ernest Davis, a hotel waiter, and his wife, Norah. He never entirely lost his Dorset lilt or his love of the county. He attended Queen Elizabeth's grammar school in Wimborne and at 18 worked at the Wimborne News for two years before beginning his national service in 1955. After that he worked on papers including the Hertfordshire Mercury, the Romford Recorder and the Ilford Pictorial, and then moved to launch the Argus – a tough job in an already crowded but very lucrative market, served at one time by five different newspapers. His fierce insistence on fact-checking belied a character that former colleagues described as encouraging, kind, funny, quirky, intelligent and patient. Brian went on to become an editor at the Yellow Advertiser before freelancing until a stroke in 2014 brought his career to an end. He was devoted to his second wife, Joy (nee Noys), a receptionist and typist, whom he married in 1973 and her son, Alan. They survive him, as do his children, Russell and Kate, from his first marriage, to Joan, which ended in divorce.
Scotsman
10 hours ago
- Scotsman
Bestselling stars Jenny Colgan and Lucy Mangan at the Edinburgh Women's Fiction Festival
Award-winning authors Jenny Colgan and Lucy Mangan will close the first day of the Festival, with a special conversation discussing the authors who have inspired their own bookish habits, and the joy of discovering hidden gems and lost voices in women's fiction. This event is in partnership with Penguin Michael Joseph, celebrating 90 years of bestselling publishing with the launch of their new Mermaid Collection. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Jenny Colgan, the multi-million-selling novelist whose warm, witty and heartfelt stories have won her legions of fans around the world, will join forces with Lucy Mangan, one of Britain's sharpest critics and most engaging voices in print and on air. Together, they will discuss the power of women's fiction, the authors who shaped them, and their role in reintroducing overlooked classics to today's readers. The Mermaid Collection, launching this September, brings back to life mid-to-late-twentieth-century novels by women that remain fresh and strikingly relevant today. Each title has a new introduction by a contemporary writer, offering a bridge between past and present. The first four books are: Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Jenny Colgan Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon, introduced by Jenny Colgan Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy, introduced by Lucy Mangan Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy, introduced by Gillian McAllister Fenny by Lettice Cooper, introduced by Jennie Godfrey Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novels and has won various awards for her writing, including the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the RNA Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide and have been published in 36 territories, and in 2015 she was inducted into the Love Stories Hall of Fame. Jenny is married with three children and lives in Scotland. Lucy Mangan is a journalist and columnist. She spent two years training as a solicitor but left as soon as she qualified and went to work much more happily in a bookshop instead. She got a work experience placement at the Guardian in 2003 and hung around until they gave her a job. Lucy is now TV critic at the Guardian, and a columnist for The i newspaper. She has written for most of the major women's magazines, including Grazia, Cosmopolitan, and Stylist. Bookish, a sequel to her 2018 memoir, Bookworm, was published March 2025 by Vintage. Lucy Mangan is represented by Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedman. This conversation will be a highlight of the festival programme – a chance to hear two leading literary voices reflect on women's writing past, present and future. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Edinburgh Women's Fiction Festival returns on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 September at Christ Church Morningside. The festival champions writing for, by, and about women – from commercial and romance to historical, literary, and book club fiction – giving readers the chance to connect with their favourite authors and hear new voices.
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox review – shockingly tense TV from Knox and Monica Lewinsky
Two things need to be borne in mind about The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new true crime drama. The first is that Knox and Monica Lewinsky – both members of 'The Sisterhood of Ill Repute', as Knox has described them in the past – are executive producers of the show. The second is that the family of Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British exchange student with whose murder Knox and others were charged in 2007, were not involved in the series. Her sister Stephanie said last year to the Guardian: 'Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.' To the first point: it is undoubtedly true that the subject of The Twisted Tale is Knox and her survival of an extraordinary and extraordinarily awful experience, and while not hagiographic, it is not a warts-and-all profile either. Then again, how much warts-and-all can there be for an ordinary 20-year-old excited to be studying abroad – in Perugia, Italy – for the first time? If you set aside the salacious narrative built up around her by a rabid press and fuelled by the preconceived prosecutorial notions around the crime, that is what she was. To the second: the grief of the Kercher family, and their enduring loss, is a terrible thing. But the purpose of the series is clear – to show how this particular miscarriage of justice took place and, by implication, how different forces, prejudices and appetites can combine to bring them about in general. It is designed to give the lie to the appealing notion that justice is always blind and its administrators are always beacons of rectitude, shining light into the darkness of depraved people's souls. Over the course of eight dense and often extremely tense episodes, writer KJ Steinberg (best known for This Is Us) maps out Knox's long journey from first arrest for her flatmate's murder to eventual exoneration, via wrongful conviction, four years in prison and multiple trials. The outlines of the case are probably remembered by many of us of an age to have followed the headlines and articles that proliferated at the time, and the series does a good job of illustrating each pivotal point as it arises (the initial misstep in establishing the time of death, for example. Similarly, the misinterpretation of the English phrase 'See you later' as meaning definite plans to meet had been established between Knox and her initially co-accused, Patrick Lumumba, reminiscent of the very British 'I popped him on the bed' expression misconstrued by a US audience in the Louise Woodward trial), while a propulsive energy keeps the whole narrative going. Strenuous efforts are made to humanise public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who led the murder investigation as a man led astray by his passionate sense of duty and frustration over his experience of pursuing the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer. His subordinates are given shorter shrift, and remain ciphers who are portrayed as having taken against Knox on a whim then found more and more things to be disgusted by, such as her public displays of affection with her boyfriend and later co-accused Raffaele Sollecito, and the vibrator in her washbag. Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is the fact that Knox's ordeal continued even after the trial and conviction of Rudy Guede, the man whose fingerprints and DNA (unlike that of Knox, Lumumba and Sollecito) were all over the crime scene. Or perhaps the most shocking part is that his name hardly resonates in the public consciousness, while 'Foxy Knoxy' still has such potency. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has its flaws. The mannered, Wes Anderson-lite openings to each episode sit uneasily with the harrowing hours to which they give way and the script – particularly in those openings – can be dreadful. 'We were just getting to know our young selves in this charmed and ancient city,' says Knox in a voiceover early on. And later: 'Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?' At one point, investigator Monica (Roberta Mattei) describes Knox providing 'unsolicited information in crude American spasms'. Fortunately, the main parts are held together by an unreservedly brilliant performance by Grace Van Patten as Knox, in English and Italian (halting at first, fluent by the end of Knox's incarceration), the ebullient, naive, overconfident, shattered young woman caught in so many currents and cross-currents it seems a miracle that she ever made it back to shore. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is on Disney+ now
