Category: The Sunday Times

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Fifteen years on, have they any regrets about joining the cult that declared war on America? Livingstone Fagan, a squat 49-year-old with ash-tipped dreadlocks, answers the door. He is dressed in a grey sweatshirt, dark trousers, white socks and plastic sandals: penitentiary chic. In his spotless one-bedroom flat, high in a social-housing block on the…

“Fame is not a cultural achievement. It’s just a sign of our times. If your movie doesn’t make an enormous amount of money, is it a failure? I have different criteria on what constitutes a success.” A defiant Kevin Costner defends his Hollywood legacy. “Are you anxious to die?” It’s a little after 3pm on…

This young man was both victim and villain when he was stabbed to death in London’s West End in May. We mourned Steven Bigby for one whole evening. For those few hours, his death at the hands of another young black man outside a McDonald’s on Oxford Street on a bright May day seemed shocking.…