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How to date a widower

When is it acceptable to consider dating a widower? How do you know if they are still grieving and not ready to move on? According to statistics, men die earlier than women, so I was surprised this year to meet several whose wives had died before them. Divorced since the early 1990s, I had no intention of remarrying, but thought of striking up some sort of liaison with a widower. I had heard of women behaving in a desperate and undignified way, charging round with casseroles I had rejected two non-widowers, whom my grandmother would have described as ‘cast-offs’, meaning exes one mustn’t go back to. I knew I would

Why have we forgotten David Cassidy?

Everyone has a guilty pleasure. Some have several. One of mine is David Cassidy who died six years ago from liver failure at the age of 67, an event that barely made more than a back-of-the-book page lead in many newspapers. Which is a shame. For at his peak, he had a fanbase on a par with Elvis and The Beatles, looks that sent young girls into delirium, a rich and textured voice that was tailor-made for the three-minute pop single and a charisma, not to mention a personal life, that in its prime gave showbiz reporters round the clock bylines. Deep down, David Cassidy wanted to be remembered as

At last, Hollywood mocks cancel culture

Dream Scenario is a film about modern celebrity culture and the terror of losing yourself to the internet’s virtual mob. It’s the story of evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews, a balding, befuddled, bespectacled everyman who is the walking embodiment of anonymity – played by Nicholas Cage, the face that launched a thousand memes. At the start of the film, he gives a lecture on how zebras have adapted to avoid the mortal danger of standing out from the herd. Suddenly, in a supernatural, psychopathological epidemic, anorak-clad Paul finds himself appearing in everyone’s dreams. At first, he is just a benign bystander; in one dream, he stands there admiring a mushroom while

JFK’s assassination and the landscape of loss

It has become a commonplace to observe that, 60 years ago, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, America lost its innocence – or at least the myth of its innocence. Certainly, the event has left a stubborn impression on history and culture; something to do with the power, grandeur and grubbiness of US politics, with Vietnam, civil rights and the sixties. But I have always sensed that there was something else; something that also formed part of the loss-of-innocence narrative somehow. I have finally realised what it is. It is Dealey Plaza itself. On the fateful day 60 years ago, everything had been washed doubly

Why women still love Twilight

Anybody who has been a teenage girl will know how dark and swampy the sexual imagination of that demographic can be. At 14 and 15, after watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), and then James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), I became so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio that I’d lie for hours on my bed hatching feverish plans for going to New York and meeting him; comparing fictional fling Kate Winslet to me (similar body type, I told myself) and broodingly calculating my chances. It wasn’t a funny light-hearted thing, but deadly serious, awash in life or death longing. The same quality applied to Will, Pete, Travis, Chris, and the other

What Ridley Scott gets wrong about history

The film director Ridley Scott says that those who worry about the historical inaccuracies in his new biopic of Napoleon should ‘get a life’. Or as the told The Sunday Times last week: ‘When I have issues with historians, I ask: “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up, then.’ If you’re not careful you can end up changing history You don’t need to be Alan Bennett to cock an eyebrow at that. While I’ve not yet seen Napoleon – and I will because I’m sure it’ll be a cracker (it’s Ridley Scott, after all, and Joaquin Phoenix) – I have read about its various delusions,