Features

The artist Christo, known for wrapping buildings including Berlin’s Reichstag, and also swathing areas of coast and entire islands in fabric, has died aged 84. The news was confirmed on his official Facebook page, which said that he died of natural causes at his home in New York.

All this from an island of just three and a half million souls, plus the other five million Puerto Ricans who live in the US. How did they become such a colossal musical force? “Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything,” says Bad Bunny, AKA 24-year-old Benito Ocasio, who is touring in the UK for the first time this summer and whose tracks regularly score more than 500m YouTube views. “It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.”

Simon Pegg was the first person I’d ever met who was as obsessed with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as I was. One evening, I was round at Simon and his pal Nick Frost’s flat for drinks when I said we should make our own zombie movie, a horror comedy. It would be from the point of view of two bit-players, two idiots who were the last to know what was going on, after waking up hungover on a Sunday morning.

The books chosen by the panel are those that have made a personal impact on them, and are divided into 10 categories. These include “love, sex and romance”, which features titles ranging from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals to Judy Blume’s Forever; “identity”, which moves from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; and “adventure”, which includes Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Malek told the Guardian that taking the role was a “kind of the gun-to-the-head moment”. “What do you do? … The scariest endeavours that I’ve chosen to take in my life have been the most fulfilling and rewarding. And this has proven to defend that equation.” His rise to Oscar glory has been meteoric. Before Bohemian Rhapsody, Malek was best known for the lead role of the hit TV series Mr Robot. As “vigilante hacker” Elliot Alderson who is dealing with a social anxiety disorder, Malek starred alongside Christian Slater and won an Emmy for best actor in a drama series in 2016.