
Tate Britain, London
The Young British Art of the 1990s was brash and macabre but also intelligent and emotional. This breathlessly superficial show reduces it to a stylish pose
Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither.
You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role, staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 1990s no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.
Continue reading...Badenoch would never have reopened the door on Brexit, but now that the PM has, it suits the Conservatives to let him walk through it
There’s no way on earth it should have worked, but somehow he may have got away with it. Last week, the actor Richard E Grant became the first contestant on The Traitors – a show whose only unbreakable rule is never to let anyone know you’re the murderer – to gleefully announce within minutes of being selected that yes, haha, it’s him! Yet even then many of his fellow contestants seemed to like him too much to recoil.
And that, roughly speaking, is now Andy Burnham’s Brexit strategy. After years of Labour politicians – not least Burnham himself, in the Makerfield byelection, without which he would not now be prime minister – trying to hide their real feelings about Brexit, Burnham has decided just to tell the truth and hope people roll with it. Leaving hasn’t worked, he said bluntly last week in Liverpool, and Britain should consider the alternatives. If you’re a leaver who suspects him of being out to unwind Brexit – well, yes, he is. This bold strategy seemingly surprised much of his own cabinet, an early lesson in how he likes to work for those who hadn’t studied his Manchester operation closely enough. But the oddly muted initial response to what would once have been a seismic shock suggests it’s wrongfooting some opponents, too.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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Continue reading...On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock started ticking
Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.
He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then,” he said, “all hell broke loose.”
Continue reading...It’s being sculpted for fashion parties, collected by tourists and hoarded in freezers. There are even entire shops devoted to it. What’s behind the revival of the much-maligned foodstuff?
Temperatures in Paris were nudging 41C when Erwan Leo opened Le Butter this summer. Wildfires had already been tearing through France and the city was quiet, particularly in the less touristy 8th arrondissement, a flex-your-wealth area near the Eiffel Tower known as the “golden triangle”. The last thing it needed, you would think, was a shop that sold loads of butter. “We were just so worried about the fridges,” says Leo, the 34-year-old owner. “We didn’t think anyone would even turn up.”
I visit Le Butter, the first shop in Paris dedicated to selling the stuff, two months later in September. It’s a quaint, photogenic spot between a wine shop that was opened by Leo eight years ago and a cafe famous for being blown up in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Inside there are candy-striped walls, little shopping baskets, a shelf of Instagrammable buttery merch (knives, hats, totes) and two double fridges containing 50 different types of butter. It’s a lot cooler today; the fridges purr away at an exacting 3C. And the past few months have been busy – so much so that Leo has had to erect a bench for those waiting outside, and a retractable barrier to manage the queues.
Continue reading...He has shot everyone from Madonna to Rihanna, Kate Moss and Frank Ocean. Now Walker has turned his lens on the activists, artists, writers, models and everyday heroes of gay life
Six years ago, Tim Walker was walking in the Highbury Fields area of London when he came across a plaque on the side of a building. In 1970, at these now-converted public toilets, Louis Eakes, chairman of the Young Liberals, was arrested for importuning following a “pretty police” entrapment in which male officers posed as would-be sex partners.
It was here, the plaque told the photographer, that the first ever gay rights demonstration in Britain had taken place, organised by the Gay Liberation Front, in protest at Eakes’s arrest. But Walker was jolted by the date: 27 November 1970. It was the day he was born. So he wondered: “Who were those people out marching that day? Where are they now?”
Continue reading...Experts looking at UK, US and Dutch data found ‘significant increases’ in early onset cases of seven cancers, prompting warnings about lifestyle choices
Cases of seven types of cancer have risen sharply among younger people in England, major new research has found, prompting warnings that lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives each year.
The number of people under 50 diagnosed with prostate cancer in England has quadrupled since 2001, while early onset bowel, kidney and uterine cancer diagnoses more than doubled.
Continue reading...Publisher says author died peacefully at home ‘between writing sessions’
Jeffrey Archer, the bestselling author and former MP whose political career ended in disgrace when he was imprisoned for perjury, has died at the age of 86.
Archer, who was a Conservative MP for five years before serving as the party’s deputy chair, died “suddenly and peacefully” at his home “between writing sessions” on Monday, his publisher HarperCollins said.
Continue reading...Tory leader says proposed ‘Britannia Shield’ would not be comparable to Israeli missile defence system
Kemi Badenoch has denied she compared a new air defence system proposed by the party to Israel’s Iron Dome, despite using the term in her press release and a newspaper article.
The Conservative leader said the party’s proposed “Britannia Shield” would not be comparable to the missile defence system in Israel, which is primarily designed to counter short-range attacks.
Continue reading...European Green party says motion goes against its policy, with German Green co-leader calling it ‘intolerable and unacceptable’
The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.
The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.
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