poolside

Lugubrious, laborious and ridiculous – this movie version of Deborah Levy’s celebrated novel Swimming Home is frankly uncomfortable in the most wrong way possible. Film-maker and artist Justin Anderson has established himself as a creative visual talent but for this feature debut he has somehow conjured awful, torpid performances from his excellent cast, perpetually crowding up to them with pedantic, over-determined closeups. His film insists on a bafflingly unsexy and uninteresting type of erotic tension and conflates…

Dua Lipa recently sets the temperature soaring as she shared some poolside photos on her Instagram. The singer shared a series of photos in which she looked sizzling hot in a sequinned swimsuit. Dua flaunted her sensational figure in her swimsuit which featured an eye-catching flame design as she bathed by the pool. The singer went makeup-free and let her naturally flawless complexion shine. She accessorises her look with statement silver earrings. In the images, Dua has her long dark locks hanging loosely around her…

One of the problems with having a runaway success with a side project is that it tends to cast a shadow over the rest of an author’s work. You feel that John Banville may sometimes resent the way that people have rushed to embrace Benjamin Black (although I’m sure his bank manager isn’t complaining). Joyce Carol Oates’s mysteries written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith outsold all but a handful of the (many) books published under her own name. Stephanie Merritt (also an Observer critic) has written a series of superior…