Ruth

I must have been 20 when I first learnt of Ruth Vanita. She was the co-editor, along with the historian Saleem Kidwai (d 2021), her “hamdil, hamraaz, hamdaastaan”, of the monumental Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000). I don’t remember precisely when I first got hold of the book but I remember its lightning strike. I remember how its cheap photocopy became one of my most precious student possessions. It was like some strangers had handed me — someone then gingerly stepping into his own…

Actor Ruth Wilson has claimed that Hollywood puts pressure on female actors to have cosmetic procedures. Although Wilson, 41, hasn’t got any enhancements, she admits to being afraid that not having any treatments could leave her looking older than her peers, an international portal reported. She told an international daily, “As an actress, everyone does it. Very few resist. I haven’t done anything yet. But it’s in my head. Do you decide not to, and therefore potentially look older than your peers?…

Ruth Wilson hitches the skin by her ears to demonstrate how she’d look if she had “those little wires” sewn into her face, by which she means a thread lift. “Just that would make the world of difference,” she says. She is 41 and “everyone” around her talks about Botox “and what to fill their face with”. This is not in response to any question of mine. This is Ruth Wilson freewheeling on how confusing she finds the notion of “female empowerment” in 2023. “As an actress, everyone does it. Very few resist. I haven’t done…

EA Sports has officially announced Super Mega Baseball 4, and it sounds like it's changing things up in a big way for the humorous and lighthearted baseball series.Super Mega Baseball 4 is now a licensed game, featuring more than 200 real-life baseball players. Retired Red Sox slugger David Ortiz is on the cover, and the roster also includes baseball legends like Jose Bautista, Babe Ruth, and Hank Aaron. These real-life players will hit the field alongside a roster of fictional characters. The game…

Ruth E. Carter is the first Black woman to win two Oscars. In 2019, she became the first Black person to win the Oscar for costume design for her work on Marvel`s `Black Panther`. At the 95th Academy Awards, she was once again recognised for the film`s sequel, `Wakanda Forever`, reports `Variety`. Carter, according to `Variety`, beat out Catherine Martin, who won the BAFTA and Costume Designers Guild awards for her work on Baz Luhrmann`s `Elvis`. She also beat Mary Zophres for `Babylon`, Jenny Beaven for `Mrs Harris…

...More than the Japanese, the men of the subcontinent proclaimed the richness of their spiritual heritage, and the delegates included Buddhists, Jains, theosophists, the most orthodox of Brahmins, Brahmos, and of course Vivekananda. At the Parliament, they hid their divisions to stand together. Christians, and especially missionaries, were the common enemy, traducing eastern religions as “those barren, vague, meaningless abstractions in which men babble nothing under the name of the infinite.” ...The South Asians…

As you prepare to be in India to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival, what are some of the thoughts running through your mind? Have you been to Jaipur, or other parts of India before? I am very excited! I have never been to Jaipur, but so many friends have told me about how beautiful it is. When I was a college student, I spent a year travelling through Asia. This included several months in India, visiting Calcutta, Varanasi, Agra, and Delhi. I was 19 years old then, so this was a very long time ago but I have never…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeKate Winslet has revealed why she felt it was “really important” for I Am Ruth to be set in “a middle-class world”.Winslet stars as concerned mother Ruth, in Channel 4’s newest instalment of director Dominic Savage’s I Am anthology series, whose daughter Freya slowly retreats into herself as the pressures of social media begin to weigh on her.Freya’s played by Winslet’s real-life…

In the Jim Crow South of the 1930s and ‘40s, in poor, rural Georgia, forbidden love struggles up through the briars. The teens, Bayou and Leanne, find they can be together only in the dead of night, signaling each other with paper planes. The message received, they head for their spot — a tree away from prying eyes.“You are the song that I long to hear once more / You are the light that I keep looking for,” sings a velvety young female voice after the story’s over: “And I’ll spend my lifetime / Sending paper airplanes to…

The bare bones of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel sound a little unprepossessing: it begins shortly before the first world war with a young boy, James Ramsay, asking his parents if they can visit the lighthouse near the family’s summer house on the Isle of Skye, after which a discussion about the weather ensues. It goes on to chronicle a day in the life of the Ramsay parents, their eight children and their gaggle of house guests, who include a young artist, Lily Briscoe, who is painting Mrs Ramsay’s portrait; a prickly young…