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    Michael Palin on His Diaries and Adventurous Life

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    In 1969, the British comedy writer and performer Michael Palin, then building a career out of being extremely silly, did something utterly sensible: He quit his 40-cigarettes-a-day smoking habit and began keeping a diary instead.Over the years, his meticulously maintained journals captured the rise of Monty Python — the hallowed sketch troupe he formed with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Terry Jones — including the creation of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian.” Later, they chronicled a surprising career development, when Palin reinvented himself as an amiable presenter of travel documentaries, crossing the globe for acclaimed series like “Around the World in 80 Days.”The first volume of his diaries, “The Python Years,” was published in 2006. The fourth, “There and Back,” will be released in the United States on Tuesday. In a video interview from his home in northwest London, Palin, 81, fielded questions about the four decades’ worth of life covered in his diaries and more. He’s come to expect this sort of inquisition.“That’s the thing about publishing your diaries,” Palin said. “I have to be able to justify my behavior in my life in a way.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did quitting smoking lead you to start keeping a diary?When I gave up smoking — it was virtually overnight — it was a quite extraordinary feeling of effective use of willpower. In the back of my mind, I thought, how else can I use this newly enlivened willpower? Keeping a diary must have been the first thing that came into my head.Palin started keeping a diary in 1969, the same year Monty Python began. “The diaries constantly surprise me, how I completely contradict myself,” he said.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,’ by Michael Owen

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      In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words, by Michael OwenThe lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

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      The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

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      Interview: S.E. Hinton on ‘The Outsiders’ and Her Reading Life

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      What books are on your night stand?I am currently rereading “Middlemarch” (it takes rereading), and “The Last of the Wine,” by Mary Renault. Socrates is a character in that book. So is Plato. To have them appear casually in a novel, yet be very faithful to what we know of them, is great.How do you organize your books?I have a beautiful library, organized by subjects: History (early to late), Author Biographies, Exploring, Women’s Studies, Journalism, Entertainment, English Fiction, American Fiction and Children’s Books. The Paranormal books are organized by Ghosts and Hauntings, Reincarnation, Coincidences, Strange but True.Why so many books on the paranormal?I have had many strange things happen in my life.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).Any time, on the sofa, with good lighting, my cat and a small glass of wine.What’s the last great book you read?“Demon Copperhead.” I don’t know a whole lot of Dickens but I know “David Copperfield” inside and out. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver followed some of the plot. Also, Demon is a great narrator — talking the way you can imagine him talking, thinking the way you can imagine him thinking.What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?I wish I knew more Shakespeare.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Falling in Love With Nora Ephron

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      Ilana Kaplan’s new coffee table book pays tribute to the godmother of the modern rom-com.“I’ll have what she’s having.”There are few writers whose voices have been so indelibly stamped on our psyches that they can be conjured up with just one line. Nora Ephron, the godmother of the modern rom-com, is one of them (even if she didn’t take credit for the line in question).Her spiky heroines, epistolary romances, cable knit sweaters and explorations of intimacy and heartbreak transformed American cinema, giving rise to a generation of screenwriters and directors who have striven to follow in her oxford-clad footsteps (not to mention the swarms of fans for whom films like “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally” are annual viewing traditions, bookending that sepia-tinged, pencil-shaving-scented season known as “Nora Ephron Fall”).Meg Ryan in a climactic scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” one of Ephron’s many films that took women — their neuroses and their desires — seriously.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionRyan and Rosie O’Donnell in “Sleepless in Seattle.” The movie is as much a celebration of their characters’ friendship as of romantic love.TriStar PicturesIlana Kaplan explores this legacy in NORA EPHRON AT THE MOVIES (Abrams, $50) — a tribute, despite its title, not just to Ephron’s screen work but also to her essays, plays and searingly autobiographical novel, “Heartburn.”Each of them gets a chapter here, as do the fastidious enthusiasms that illuminate them all: Ephron’s love of language, her eye for fashion and her devotion to food. This is a woman, Kaplan explains, who turned ordering a piece of pie into an art form and whose version of a postcoital cigarette, in “Heartburn,” was an in-bed bowl of homemade spaghetti carbonara.Ephron’s passions — for language, fashion, food — infused her work.Katherine Wolkoff/Trunk ArchiveShe also drew on her personal heartbreaks, particularly in her novel, “Heartburn,” and its subsequent film adaptation, which starred Meryl Streep as an Ephron-esque food writer.Paramount, via Everett CollectionStanley Tucci and Meryl Streep in “Julie and Julia,” Ephron’s final film.Jonathan WenkEphron’s clarity of voice gave her work a steely backbone, bolstered by a screwball wit. She did not invent the meet-cute, the swoony set piece or the friends-to-lovers trope, but she made them so thoroughly her own that you’d be forgiven for thinking she did. Above all else, she took women seriously — their desires and neuroses, their careers, their friendships, their great beating hearts.Whatever she wrote about, we wanted what she was having. More

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      Book Review: ‘Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film,’ by Julie Gilbert

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      In “Giant Love,” the novelist’s great-niece chronicles the Texas saga’s divisive reception and the epic film adaptation that’s now better known than the book.GIANT LOVE: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie GilbertAs if to defy her adult height of 5-foot-1, the writer Edna Ferber lived large, traveled widely and typed long and often.Her dozen-odd novels were Dagwood sandwiches of intergenerational drama, hotly seasoned with social commentary. “So Big,” about a female farmer and her son in a Dutch community outside Chicago, sauntered off with the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. “Show Boat,” set along the Mississippi River, inspired an oft-revived musical and three movies. And then there was her penultimate epic, in some ways her ultimate, published in 1952: “Giant,” about a Texas cattle rancher’s evolution throughout his long marriage to a more progressive Easterner, and much else besides.Its depiction of discrimination against Mexicans and the mores of the nouveau riche made many Texans very, very angry. (A woman who read an excerpt in Ladies’ Home Journal detected Ferber “trying to weave in the race prejudice you Northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about,” and declined to buy the book.) In one of her memoirs, “A Kind of Magic,” Ferber likened the general response to being publicly hanged and dropped through a sheet of glass: “cut into hamburgers.”The 1956 film version, directed by George Stevens in panoramic 35 millimeter and starring Rock Hudson as the rancher Bick Benedict, Elizabeth Taylor as his wife and James Dean as a ranch hand turned oil tycoon, was better received, won Stevens an Oscar and helped inspire the blockbuster television series “Dallas.”Ferber’s great-niece, Julie Gilbert, who wrote an excellent biography of her published in 1976 and is a novelist and playwright herself, has now gone back to focus on the development of this one work. Replete with interviews old and new and the comma-challenged, sometimes UPPERCASE notes and correspondence of its strong-willed subject, “Giant Love” is a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Yourself on These Young Adult Novels Adapted Into Films

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on tween and teen novels that made the leap from the page to the screen — and some of them more than once.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions.3 of 5This 1972 middle-grade novel by Mary Rodgers has been adapted for the screen in 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018, and its various productions over the years have starred Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Heidi Blickenstaff and Jodie Foster, among others. What is the title of the book? More

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      Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch

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      An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Emma Corrin and Maggie Nelson on the Strength in Vulnerability

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      Admiration Society brings together two creative people from two different fields for one wide-ranging conversation.Emma Corrin first encountered Maggie Nelson’s work three summers ago, when the actor was in Brighton, England, filming 2022’s “My Policeman,” a British drama about postwar sexual repression. At the time, Corrin, now 28, was grappling with their gender identity, and a friend recommended “The Argonauts” (2015), Nelson’s memoir about queer desire and making a family with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. The book appealed so deeply to Corrin that, when that production ended, they decided to remain at the flat they’d rented during filming to finish reading it.Nelson, 51, was born in Northern California and moved in the 1990s to New York, where she worked as a waitress, trained as a dancer and took workshops with the poet Eileen Myles before getting her Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. In addition to “The Argonauts,” Nelson, who’s now based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Bluets” (2009), a meditation on love and loss in the form of a treatise on the color blue; “Like Love” (2024), her latest collection of essays and conversations; and eight other books that include scholarly criticism, autobiography, true crime and poetry.Corrin’s career has also spanned genres. After earning a degree in education, English and drama at the University of Cambridge, the London-based actor gained sudden acclaim as Princess Diana on “The Crown” in 2020, and then went on to star in the historical romance “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2022), the psychological thriller “A Murder at the End of the World” (2023) and in the 2022 stage adaptation of “Orlando: A Biography,” Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. Once billed as an ingénue, Corrin brings a fierce physicality to their roles, the next of which will be in Robert Eggers’s gothic horror film “Nosferatu,” an update of the vampire classic that will be released next month.For Corrin, who recently wrote a screenplay with a friend, Nelson’s work remains a touchstone. After wrapping “A Murder at the End of the World,” the co-creator Zal Batmanglij presented the actor with a copy of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s 2007 memoir of following a murder trial. Earlier this year, Corrin saw the playwright Margaret Perry’s adaptation of “Bluets,” starring Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, in London. It was the first time that Nelson’s work had been performed onstage.This past summer, Corrin, who was in Los Angeles to promote their turn in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” met Nelson for the first time in a Hollywood photography studio, where the actor and the writer discussed vulnerability, the dangers of self-editing for social media and the pleasure of bringing a sense of play to their work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More