Good morning, and happy Saturday. I’m back with some more recent Guardian highlights that you may have missed amid the hurly burly of the news. This week: a wealth of interviews and profiles.
Sometimes it’s nice to look at a story – or an industry, or a whole era – through one person’s eyes, see what they saw, hear what they said, why they took one road rather than another. From war zones to film sets, we’re all just making our way best as we can.
I hope you enjoy these reads, and have a lovely weekend.
1. In her 80s, Helen Garner is experiencing a career high
Helen Garner’s first novel annoyed Australian critics, who sneered that she had merely “published her private journal”. On Tuesday night (a Melbourne Wednesday morning), she took out the UK’s top nonfiction prize for an 800-page collection of her actual diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.
My colleague Sian Cain spoke to her a few hours afterward.
Garner has been a national treasure at home for years – and after decades of being ignored overseas, “Australia’s Joan Didion”, who turns 83 this week, has become globally cool.
(Happy birthday, while we’re on the topic, to my mother, who has always been cool.)
How long will it take to read: about four minutes
Further reading: the diaries themselves, of course, out in a collected volume this month, and dubbed by one Guardian reviewer as “the greatest journals since Virginia Woolf’s”.
2. ‘We are all witnesses to it. It’s happening in real time’
Navi Pillay was the first nonwhite woman to sit as a judge on the high court of South Africa and the longest-serving high commissioner for human rights in UN history.
Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – on Gaza, there is one to which she returns, she told senior reporter Ben Doherty: a lone shell, fired by the Israel Defense Forces at Al-Basma fertility clinic in December 2023. “Families will be forever changed,” Pillay said.
This year’s recipient of the Sydney peace prize cited the attack not as a totality, but a signal example, one among “a great number” of incidents, that led to her commission finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. But the report has not brought the global response she expected, nor hoped for.
Lessons from South African apartheid: “You might think, well, how is it going to help the struggle if I stop eating an orange? Well, it did. Collective action helped achieve the impossible.”
How long will it take to read: about four minutes
Further reading: this beautiful and bittersweet story from Sarah Basford Canales and Adeshola Ore about a Gaza grandmother reunited with her Australian family after more than a decade.
3. Paul McCartney’s lost years (in his own words)
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“The strangest rumour started floating around just as the Beatles were breaking up – that I was dead.” – Paul McCartney
As the former fab four member writes in an extract from his new book, the rumour took on a force of its own, “so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone”.
Celebs, they’re just like us! It’s astounding to recall McCartney was at this point only 27. Three years earlier, he had bought a 183-acre sheep farm in Scotland – and in the autumn of 1969, he and wife Linda decided it would be a great place to escape his various troubles.
“Looking back, we were totally unprepared for this wild adventure,” he writes. He learned to shear and mix cement, the kids rode horses and picked veggies from the garden, Linda went on to write a famous cookbook. It looks – and sounds, from the new and archival interviews pieced together here – frankly idyllic.
How long will it take to read: six and a half minutes
4. Sudan’s ‘true hero’, who told the world what was happening in El Fasher
For months, Kaamil Ahmed writes, Mohamed Khamis Douda stayed in the besieged Sudanese city El Fasher, working to tell the outside world what going on. After 26 October, when paramilitary Rapid Support Forces overran the city, his friends and family confirmed that Douda had been killed.
Daily dispatches: He had been in regular contact with the Guardian, describing daily survival in a place that for months had seemed doomed to fall to the RSF. Here’s one example from 4 August:
Even the glow of a cigarette can alert the drones that fly overhead, so once we finish our meals there is nothing to do but sit in silence, listening to the sound of the buzzing drone and the explosions … This is our daily life, we live in hope that this nightmare will one day end.
Peace campaigners and supporters are mourning the loss to civil society, of “one of the true heroes of the war”.
How long will it take to read: two and a half minutes
Further reading: Nesrine Malik’s searing commentary on 18 months of horror unfolding in plain sight: “Blood spilled in Sudan can be seen from space,” she writes. “Nobody can feign ignorance about what’s going on.”
5. Anthony Hopkins on anger, awards and 50 years of sobriety
Hopkins will be 88 this December, and still has plenty on his schedule. There’s so much in Steve Rose’s profile of the revered actor: the “calamity” of losing his home in the LA wildfires, the event that finally got him to go to AA, why he was asleep when he won his second Oscar – and how the art of acting, for him, “is to be able to listen”.
Come for Rose’s masterly interview writing, stay for a sweet and immediately identifiable photo of Sir Anthony, aged five.
Behind the scenes on the Silence of the Lambs: “I remember Jonathan Demme saying: ‘How do you want to be discovered when Jodie first sees you? Would you be lying down or reading a book?’ I said: ‘No, standing.’ He said: ‘OK. Why?’ I said: ‘I can smell her coming down the corridor.’ He said: ‘You’re weird.’”
How long will it take to read: eight or nine minutes
Plus a PSA to watch – or read – Remains of the Day, either version of which makes me cry every time.
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