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Families who usually head to Spain, Portugal or Greece are eyeing up home canal boat jaunts and rural breaks, creating a bonanza for a sector crippled by the pandemic. The Bike & Boot hotel was due to open in Scarborough just as Covid struck. Now its occupancy over Easter is 65 per cent, while July and August are even better. Simon Kershaw, its co-founder, said: What a shame it has taken this national tragedy to show people that taking holidays in the UK can be fantastic and rewarding.
Ben Hopkins has spent most of his career in film, creating award-winning features and documentaries, including
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, a documentary about the Pamir Kirghiz, an Afghan tribe now living in Eastern Turkey (billed as a collaboration between the London film crew and the tribe in telling their history),
Welcome to Karastan, aka Lost in Karastan, a feature about a washed-up filmmaker attending the “world’s worst film festival” in the Republic of Karastan, and
Hasret-Yearning, in which filmmakers doing a documentary about the life of Istanbul (so low budget they travel by container ship from Berlin to Istanbul) turn toward the mysterious secretive side of the city. The films mix fact and fiction, slapstick and noir, gothic and satire. Not exactly the approach Hopkins takes in
5 books not to miss: Cicely Tyson memoir, Joan Didion essay collection visaliatimesdelta.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from visaliatimesdelta.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Jan 22, 2021
The books we love coming out this week include new titles from Ben Hopkins, David W. Brown, and Jeff Wheeler.
John Ghazvinian. Knopf, $38.95 (688p) ISBN 978-0-307-27181-5
The hostility between the U.S. and Iran is a tragic lapse from a once-friendly relationship, according to this sweeping study. Historian Ghazvinian (coeditor,
American and Muslim Worlds Before 1900) surveys American-Iranian relations back to colonial Americans’ support for Persia in conflicts with the Turks and Tehran’s perennial desire for closer ties to the U.S. as a counterweight against British and Russian domination in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Iranians’ pro-American outlook soured, he contends, when the C.I.A. orchestrated the 1953 coup against liberal nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and then lavished arms on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s unpopular dictatorship. After the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, Iranian rage and American cluelessness precipitated the U.S
Beach Slang frontman James Alex. CREDIT: Travis P Ball/Getty Images for SXSW.
Polyvinyl Records, the label that signed Philadelphia band Beach Slang in 2015, will pull distribution of the group’s music after allegations of emotional abuse were made against frontman James Alex.
Last week, the singer was accused of emotional abuse by former manager Charlie Lowe, who alleged she endured “constant emotional, psychological & narcissistic abuse from James Alex for years”.
“Fuck him for using me as his goddamn personal servant, on tour & not. For making sure I was always so financially fucked with no other options. For being a textbook narcissist abuser. For making me feel so worthless & alone. I see you clearly now,” Lowe wrote on Twitter.