The actor Paul Hilton brilliantly inhabits the character of a ranting working-class academic in this debut novel
Some books feel so suited to the audio format that they could have been written with the voice in mind. All My Precious Madness is one of those. Mark Bowles’s debut novel, which won the audiobook fiction category at the inaugural British Audio awards (where, full disclosure, I was a judge), is a deliciously sweary monologue from a middle-aged malcontent.
A sideways reflection on working-class identity and masculinity, the novel gives voice to Henry Nash, a man of little patience. Sitting in a London coffee shop and trying to write a monograph of his father, he rains judgment on the other patrons whose obnoxious phone calls he can’t help but overhear. An Oxford graduate turned writer and academic, Nash lives in a Soho flat where he has been known to furtively drop eggs on passersby who disturb him with their drunken racket.
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© Photograph: PR - no credit needed
© Photograph: PR - no credit needed
© Photograph: PR - no credit needed
Climate Cabinet supports candidates in state and city races as the federal government ignores the climate crisis
With a president who has called climate change a “hoax”, refused to send a delegation to international climate talks, and packed the federal government with former fossil fuel industry employees, this can feel like a dark moment for climate action in the US. But shifting one’s focus to local and state law makes for a very different outlook.
Analysts have estimated that 75% of the commitments that the US made at the Paris climate agreement – which Donald Trump pulled the nation out of as soon as he took office – can be reached entirely without federal support.
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© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Caroline Spears/Juan De Jesus Sanchez
© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Caroline Spears/Juan De Jesus Sanchez
© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Caroline Spears/Juan De Jesus Sanchez
The Nash Ensemble
(Onyx)
The chamber group’s all-Ravel CD is an impeccable farewell to its much-missed founder
This all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman’s extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it’s a fitting farewell to the group’s much-missed founder, who died in July. It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer’s own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece La Valse: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music’s increasingly sinister nature.
The 1905 Introduction and Allegro was a commission from a harp manufacturer, intended to make their instrument sound good – which it duly does as played by Lucy Wakeford, although what is most striking is the way the seven instruments coalesce and separate to create kaleidoscopic textural interest. Indeed, as confirmed by their quicksilver, sometimes excitably fierce String Quartet and especially by their vibrant performance of the Piano Trio, it’s the attention to the details of colour and tone that really makes these performances take flight, the instruments combining to catch the dazzling light and intriguing shade that are such intrinsic features of Ravel’s music.
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© Photograph: Oscar Torres
© Photograph: Oscar Torres
© Photograph: Oscar Torres
Move follows Guardian revelations of Israel’s mass surveillance of Palestinians using Microsoft cloud
Irish authorities have been formally asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by the Israeli Defense Forces.
The complaint has been made by the human rights group the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) to the Data Protection Commission, which has legal responsibility in Europe for overseeing all data processing in the European Union.
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© Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
© Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
© Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
© Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
The box office smash of Halloween 2023 gets a shoddily made follow-up written carelessly and devoid of an actual ending
The ghost-possessed family-restaurant animatronics of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies lumber around with such heavy-footed gaucherie that it’s hard to figure out how they’re physically able to move from place to place as quickly as they’d need to for a proper killing spree. In what could be mistaken for a case of form following function, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 moves the exact same way. It’s so ostentatiously awkward that it constantly draws attention to its inept imitations of actions that other movies, even bad ones, intuitively understand – like making transitions between scenes or locations.
For example, when faced with the need to isolate a mean science teacher (Wayne Knight) so that he can be vengefully murdered by one of the aforementioned animatronics, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 bafflingly cuts to him walking down a school hallway (during a science fair that has inexplicably run far into a Saturday evening), having a cell-phone conversation about how he needs to visit his office to retrieve his keys. The keys themselves, the location of his office, and the unseen person on the other end of the phone have no meaning in the greater story, not even nominally. They’re just a jumble of elements that the film-makers grasp at, under the assumption that it will add up to something that looks and sounds like a movie should.
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© Photograph: Ryan Green/AP
© Photograph: Ryan Green/AP
© Photograph: Ryan Green/AP
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