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Tony Judt is dying, cruelly. Eighteen months ago the British historian — a professor of European history at New York University and the author of Postwar, a bravura history of the continent since 1945 — was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a motor neurone…
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Meet Alex. He is 26, handsome, privately educated, and, for most of his week, a freelance director of documentaries. His wardrobe is immaculately shabby: designer jeans, cast-off T-shirts and vintage trainers. The kitchen of his boutique Victorian terraced house is decked with a vast, chrome Smeg refrigerator, a dining table for 12, and two sinks…
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Greatness is something that happens to other people. When the critics began to hail Don DeLillo as one of the most significant American novelists — when, correctly, they positioned his postmodern masterpieces White Noise and Underworld among the great books of the 20th century — he noticed only passingly. On winning the National Book Award…
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Britain spends £250,000 a day supporting the UN peacekeeping force charged with ending the war in Congo. So why is there no conclusion in sight to a conflict that has already claimed more lives than any since WWII? GQ reports from the shifting front line of a human rights catastrophe The shoeless headmaster said it…
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The Irish actor thought that Winston Churchill was an imperialist bully. Now that he’s played the role, has he changed his mind? Stately, plump Brendan Gleeson folds himself into the sofa, rests his paws on his knees, and begins one of his long-distance sentences — sentences that can fill minutes and rooms; sentences with their…
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An interview with the Irish author of Let the Great World Spin, a 9/11 novel set in 1974. Philippe Petit should be charging commission. Not only was his audacious wirewalk between the twin towers on August 7, 1974 the subject of James Marsh’s joyous 2008 documentary, Man on Wire, but it is now the focal…
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As the citizens of the Islamic Republic Of Iran prepare for this month’s presidential election, GQ gate-crashes Tehran’s underground nightlife and discovers a seditious secret society flourishing in one of the most repressive nations on earth. Ed Caesar reports. The room smells of smoke and sex. The excitable, scruffy boys, cradling glasses of bootleg vodka,…
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Author James Lever has written an spoof autobiography of the star of the Tarzan movies but the real life story is stranger Listen to James Lever, the raffish English author of Me Cheeta, expound on the “natural Barthesian tools” of OK! magazine readers, or “the loss of quiddity” in the star system, or the “Flaubertian…
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In the early hours of April 9, 2008, a 44-year-old Englishman and a 48-year-old Frenchman sat silently on the edge of the windowless 155th floor of the Burj tower – the tallest building in the world – watching dawn bleed over Dubai. From their eyrie half a mile up, they saw the desert turn from…
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Mupagasi is Helen’s neighbour. He is also the man who butchered her husband and son during the Rwandan genocide. How have they learnt to live together? Helen Mukandori has no choice but to remember every damned thing. She remembers how, in the early hours of April 7, 1994 – the morning after the plane carrying…
