Adam Mars-Jones

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Olivia Laing |Alan Hollinghurst |Adam Mars-Jones

‘He showed me gay fiction could also be high art’Alan HollinghurstBritish novelistEdmund White’s luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a “cure”; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 90s.

Jan 8, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Arts ReviewA remake |J. S. Barnes |Adam Mars-Jones |colin grant

The Transylvanian Count Dracula is a shapeshifter in multiple senses. In Bram Stoker’s novel of 1897 he is seen frequently to transform, moving from an old man to a young one and from human form into a bat, a dog and a column of mist. In terms of the archetypes of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, he is both Shadow and Shapeshifter: a being composed of pure malevolence who also twists and changes, remaining one step ahead of his adversaries until the end.

Jan 8, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.

Dec 4, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones |Mary Beard |Vanessa Curtis |J. E. Smyth

Dear Pedro Almodóvar, I resisted your early films when they came out, put off by the naughty-boy transgressions and failing to recognize their vitality and underlying good humour. Then, in 1988, the first sequence of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made a convert of me, with the camera on a level with Carmen Maura’s feet as she paced in desperation back and forth across a polished floor like a cornered tigress in high heels.

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Vanessa Curtis |Adam Mars-Jones |J. E. Smyth |Philippa Snow

In a market crowded with full-length biographies of Vivien Leigh, Lyndsy Spence wisely refrains from adding another one. Instead she focuses on the years 1953–67, covering the period when Leigh was beginning to lose her grip on reality due to an escalation of bipolar illness. She had already won Oscars for the roles of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois, and her high-profile marriage to Laurence Olivier was failing, damaged by his repeated infidelities and her fragile mental health.