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Express.co.uk
09/10/2013
The truth about Formula One legend James Hunt
DURING his Formula One heyday in the Seventies, James Hunt was once asked by a sports journalist, "Are you a playboy?" With a toss of his blonde locks, the champion racer replied suavely, "I don't know...but I like playing"…
Express.co.uk
15/03/2013
Nigel Kennedy on his accent, Aston Villa and playing violin with the greats
THERE are a few things that most people know about Nigel Kennedy. The first is that he’s a pretty mean violinist, especially when it comes to Vivaldi. The others are that he has a "mockney" accent, a spiky hedgehog haircut and a tendency to litter his speech with swear words. But here's the thing….
Express.co.uk
03/20/2013
The ghosts of Pompeii
FOR most people, the Roman city of Pompeii will forever be associated with catastrophic disaster. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, its terrifyingly unstoppable volcanic flow buried anything and everything in its path, including the city's doomed inhabitants who were engulfed by the scorching sulphurous avalanche….
Express.co.uk
04/23/2012
Dawn French: I've lost the mum who inspired me
WHEN Dawn French wrote her heartfelt autobiography four years ago she dedicated it to her father Denys, who committed suicide when she was weeks away from her 20th birthday. She wanted to tell him everything he had missed: her marriage to Lenny Henry, her adoption of daughter Billie and her (hugely successful) comedy career with Jennifer Saunders…
Express.co.uk
24/05/2012
What happened to the Chariots Of Fire heroes?
THERE'S a touching moment at the end of the new stage production of Chariots Of Fire when, after winning gold in the 100m of the 1924 Paris Olympic Games, Harold Abrahams reflects on the differences between himself and his fellow British athlete, “flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell. “I was faster,” he says, “but Eric was better.”…
Express.co.uk
03/15/2011
Brian Cox: The pop star professor with the answer to the world's problems
Professor Brian Cox is looking excited. Anyone who is watching his latest BBC Two programme Wonders Of The Universe will know this is not a particularly unusual state of affairs. The pop star turned particle physicist (and now popular scientist pin-up) has an uncanny way of communicating his enthusiasm for all…
Express.co.uk
28/05/2012
Dangerous day at the races
THE black and white Pathé News footage may be grainy and flickering but it still shocks.
The day is June 4, 1913, and the occasion is the Epsom Derby and one group of racehorses, running at 35mph, have come thundering down the course at Tattenham Corner. Just after they do, the figure of a woman emerges from the thronging spectators behind the boundary…
Express.co.uk
02/18/2011
My mission to discover what really happened to my family
In his airy studio in south London ceramic artist Edmund de Waal is showing me a small, smooth, ivory sculpture of a hare. It is a netsuke, a miniature Japanese carving traditionally used as a belt toggle for a kimono and this one has become rather famous. Despite being a potter by profession de Waal is now better known as…
Express.co.uk
06/11/2012
Tommy Steele: I’m 75 and my Palladium comeback shows that I’ll never retire
TOMMY Steele tells a good anecdote. Take the one about his stage debut when he introduced rock and roll to the Sunderland Empire in 1957. The fresh-faced 19-year-old was part of a variety show but the theatre’s producers had never seen an electric guitar. Fearing this newfangled instrument might catch fi re and set…
Express.co.uk
28/02/2013
Mother Mary who Sir Paul McCartney never forget
IT was a brief but touching answer to a question from a fan. When Sir Paul McCartney was asked on his website this week what he would do if he had a time machine, he had one heartfelt response: “Go back and spend time with my mum.”
The former Beatle’s mother Mary died in 1956 when McCartney was just 14, long before Sir Paul became…
Express.co.uk
16/01/2013
What became of the first breakfast TV stars?
“It’s 6.30 on Monday, January 17, 1983,” declared Frank Bough, decked out in a grey velour jumper. “And you’re watching Britain’s first ever regular, early morning television programme.”
Now we take it for granted but back then, exactly 30 years ago tomorrow, breakfast TV was ground-breaking…
Express.co.uk
18/12/2012
Gerard Depardieu is the big star with plenty of gaul
SACRE bleu! He may seem more French than a Camembert but Gerard Depardieu has had it with his native land and spat “pah!” in the face of the French prime minister. The reason? The prodigiously...
Express.co.uk
05/11/2012
John Nettles: 'Telling the truth about Channel Islands cost me my friends'
FOR many people John Nettles will always be Detective Jim Bergerac. The actor played him for a decade from 1981 and during that time he made Bergerac's island setting off Jersey his home. In return he was embraced as Jersey's adopted son. However, that mutual affection was disrupted two years ago when…
Express.co.uk
26/02/2010
Where have all the Brunels gone?
STEVE HOLLIDAY, chief executive of National Grid is sitting in his offices and asking me who invented the ipod. Before I can say “Apple” he goes right to the heart of the matter. “It was a British engineer,” he says. “And who is working today on solar and thermal power, finding solutions to our energy problems?
Express.co.uk
25/05/2012
Sherlock Holmes creator who was away with the fairies
WHEN Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bought his first ever house, he envisioned it as a forest lodge surrounded by firs, resembling something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales – or the type of place frequented by the fairies in which he remarkably came to believe. It was where he was visited by Dracula author Bram Stoker, Peter Pan creator JM Barrie and where.…
Express.co.uk
20/07/2011
How can we be so cruel to dogs?
THE Kennel Club calls them “cruel and outdated” and argues they inflict “pain and fear”. The RSPCA and the charity Dogs Trust says they are utterly “unacceptable” while Beverley Cuddy, the editor of the magazine Dogs Today, has labelled them “barbaric”. They are referring to…
Express.co.uk
13/07/2013
Help me save the Holy Land donkeys
When Lucy Fensom first visited Israel in the Eighties she was a 19-year-old British backpacker and simply intended to have a year abroad working in a kibbutz and travelling around the country. But when she witnessed at first hand the terrible conditions and cruelty faced by…
Express.co.uk
25/01/2013
Should Britain ever put women on war's frontline?
ACCORDING to at least one military expert, this is a watershed moment. Following a decision by the US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, women are to be allowed to assume combat roles in the American army, overturning a 1994 ban. It means that hundreds of thousands of frontline positions and elite commando jobs could be opened up to them…
Express.co.uk
18/05/2013
How the Coronation maids of honour survived the biggest day of their lives
AS THE QUEEN prepared to enter Westminster Abbey on the morning of her Coronation on June 2, 1953, she paused for a moment and turned to her six immaculately dressed maids of honour. “Ready, girls?” she asked before taking the historic steps through the abbey’s imposing doors to be crowned…
Express.co.uk
06/05/2013
How the original Star Trek series almost didn’t take off
IN 1964, a former Second World War pilot and Los Angeles cop had an idea for a new TV show he was trying, in a rather rambling pitch, to sell to a well-known producer. He had written a few westerns in the past but this was to be something different.
Provisionally called Wagon Train To The Stars it was a futuristic adventure story featuring a swashbuckling Captain April aboard a spaceship called the SS…
Express.co.uk
27/04/2013
The one and only Delia Smith
HAS it really been 40 years? In a way it seems longer. It’s hard to imagine a Time Before Delia when the only television cook to turn to was the usually inebriated Galloping Gourmet or the domineering Fanny Cradock who lashed her husband Johnnie with her acerbic tongue even as she whipped up such unappetising fare as purple and green blancmange…
Express.co.uk
05/03/2013
Why Vivien Leigh was never made a dame
Astonishingly beautiful yet emotionally fragile, Leigh was one of the most talented actresses of her generation, winning Oscars for her performances as the feisty, wilful, Southern belle Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind and as vain, fading beauty Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire…
Express.co.uk
19/12/2012
Mean Victoria: Queen revealed to loath her 'ugly, frog-like' children
WHEN Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Vicky, wrote to her mother to reveal that she and her husband, Frederick of Prussia, were delightedly expecting their first child, the Queen’s response was to thunder off a harsh letter detailing how “the horrid news has upset us dreadfully”.
Express.co.uk
11/27/2010
Marvel at America's wild west
"What do you say, folks, shall I pronounce them husband and wife?" It was rather a strange question, given that the more obvious one would have been "do you want fries with that?" It was just two hours since...
Express.co.uk
09/10/2012
The tragedy of legal highs: Why have so many fallen victim to substances that can't be ban
ACCOMPANIED by a picture of a mushroom-shape atomic bomb explosion, a drug called Annihilation is being advertised on the internet as a "headblowing herbal incense" that has "EXPLOSIVE strength" and has arrived "with a BOOM!" Pricing the product at £25 for 3g, another site uses similar language and promises…
Ronald Searle 1920-2011: Tribute to the man who created St Trinian’s
WHEN people think of the English cartoonist Ronald Searle, many will jump to one of his most famous creations: those spiky, spindly St Trinian’s schoolgirls armed with hockey sticks, dynamite and malevolent intentions. The artist, however, did not want it to be this way.
Express.co.uk
03/03/2011
Desert Island Picks
The strangest songs, bizarre luxury essentials and the most startling interviews. As Radio 4 opens its Desert Island Discs archive we recall the highlights...
Express.co.uk
29/10/2010
The stig: How dare Clarkson call me greedy
FOR almost eight years he was the mysterious man in the white suit and helmet who never raised his darkened visor or spoke a word but, on the BBC programme Top Gear, could whizz around a racing track faster than Nigel Mansell (0.2 seconds faster to be precise) and pull off all manner of daredevil stunts…
Express.co.uk
15/04/2013
Ben Fogle: my dream to live on a deserted island
BEN FOGLE has certainly packed some action into his 39 years. Take the time he rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic with Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell. Or the gruelling 495-mile race to the South Pole during which he braved temperatures of minus-50C. Or the time he trekked across 200 miles of desert under the Saharan sun.
It turns out though that…
Express.co.uk
15/02/2013
Murder on the Victorian railway
After the 9.45 train from London’s Fenchurch Street shrieked to a halt at Hackney Wick station on the evening of July 9, 1864, two young bank clerks got into an empty first-class carriage and sat down. As they did they felt something unpleasant on the seats under them and summoned a guard.
He swung his light into the carriage and the trio were met with a grisly sight…
Express.co.uk
11/01/2013
Daniel Day-Lewis: The actor who literally lives the role
IF Daniel Day-Lewis walked nonchalantly on to a film set and announced to the assembled cast and crew that he was “just going to wing” his part, it’s just possible that the world might end. For the one fact that everyone knows about Day-Lewis is that he is the most method of method actors, appearing to follow the Jane Fonda mantra that if there’s no pain, there’s no gain…
Express.co.uk
15/06/2011
Return of the lost little rich girl
GIANNI Versace doted on his niece, Allegra. The flamboyant designer called her his “little princess”, read to her, shared his love of art and design with her and took her to galleries and catwalk rehearsals. According to Gianni’s brother Santo, Allegra was “the daughter Gianni never had” while Donatella, Allegra’s designer mother, freely admitted their special…
Express.co.uk
31/03/2012
Secrets of the crown jewels
IT WAS late one January afternoon in 1905 when Frederick Wells, the manager of the Premier Diamond Mine in Transvaal, South Africa, was alerted to a shiny object that was glinting in the wall of the mine, just reflecting the sun’s last rays. Thinking a practical joker had embedded a piece of glass there, he scaled the wall and duly pulled out the biggest rough diamond that he, or anyone else, had ever seen.
Express.co.uk
26/12/2007
Aled: Not such a choirboy
This time last year, Aled Jones nearly died as a result of a freak accident while rehearsing in pantomime. One moment he was imbuing the yuletide spirit and practising a jig for Jack And The Beanstalk, the next his co-star had accidentally plunged her stiletto heel through his Achilles tendon. “I thought ...
Express.co.uk
17/03/2011
Karren Brady: Believe it or not football isn't sexist
KARREN Brady, I’m told in a slightly metallic voice, “has joined the conference” – and so I am in the rather strange position of being on a conference call with one of Britain’s leading businesswomen.
Express.co.uk
23/07/2010
Claire Young: My quest to inspire the best new Apprentices
ENERGETIC and tenacious Claire Young, runner-up in Alan Sugar's Apprentice show, is the sort of entrepreneur who's getting Britain moving again.
Express.co.uk
05/02/2013
The day Britain got its sweets back
AN OLD black and white Pathé News reel shows a little boy in a checked jumper, sitting cross-legged and ripping apart a huge bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk. Chocolate is smeared all over his face as he crams in each creamy square. Elsewhere in the country a huge throng of excited school children pour into a sweet shop where glass jars are filled to the brim with penny chews. For a generation of wide-eyed British schoolchildren this was the day
Express.co.uk
17/07/2009
Little white lies behind little black dress
IN A moment of rare candour Coco Chanel once confessed that she “invented” her life because she didn’t much like it. Chic, gamine and the epitome of understated elegance, the iconic designer liberated women from the corset, popularised the little black dress and created the world’s best-selling perfume but she was intent on portraying herself as an enigma…