Screen bitesTelevisionIn her new web series, art historian Christina Chau asks whether disgusting viewers runs the risk of closing minds instead of opening them
Emerging from a bath filled with stew – potatoes, carrots, onions and all – the art historian Dr Christina Chau is a little disgusted and not entirely impressed. “If you really want to confront people’s stereotypes, I think you’ve got to ease them into it,” she says. Read More...
Book of the dayFictionReviewA brilliantly funny, deeply sad portrait of an Irish family in crisis from the author of Skippy Dies
Paul Murray’s second book, Skippy Dies, was one of the standout novels of the previous decade: a riotously entertaining tragicomedy, set in a posh Dublin boys’ school, in which bone-deep sorrow and pathos cut through the teenage hilarity and fart jokes. The Mark and the Void, 2015’s tricksy satire of both the banking crash and the difficult novel-writing business, strayed into metatextual noodling, but with The Bee Sting, Murray is triumphantly back on home turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage. Read More...
TV reviewTelevisionReviewThe softly softly approach of this Channel 4 documentary doesn’t make it any less extraordinary, with Enoch the polygamist’s multiple wives and massive wheelies
Key moment in Three Wives, One Husband (Channel 4): Enoch Foster, a fundamentalist Mormon, has gathered his two wives – Catrina and Lillian – and 17 children for a meeting in one of their houses blasted out of a rock in the Utah desert. For the past months he has been courting a potential third wife, the nanny Lydia Rose, and he wants to propose. Read More...