All posts tagged: Pale

‘Petulant’ Harry statement after Mail hacking trial was ‘beyond the pale’

‘Petulant’ Harry statement after Mail hacking trial was ‘beyond the pale’

Published by Sam Flores

Nicole Lampert and Louis Charalambous. Pictures: Submitted. A leading media lawyer called on Prince Harry to apologise after the estranged royal impugned the integrity of the UK’s leading media law judge. Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all 97 claims of illegal newsgathering brought against Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers by Prince Harry, Sir Elton John, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, David Furnish, Liz Hurley, Sadie Frost and Sir Simon Hughes after a four-year legal battle costing at least £50m. In a statement issued hours after the 436-page judgment was published last week, Harry and Lawrence noted that Mr Justice Nicklin represented Mirror Group Newspapers in previous hacking litigation and that the ruling was “a complete and obvious whitewash”. They also said that the judgment was “inconsistent” with the Mirror case which they said allowed “generic findings about various private investigators”. A separate case brought by Prince Harry against Mirror Group Newspapers, which did not involve Nicklin, resulted in a 2023 finding that the publisher’s journalists used 11 private investigators and their associates “very substantially… in connection with extensive …

A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are simple and unadorned – no wonder they’re easy to turn into films

A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are simple and unadorned – no wonder they’re easy to turn into films

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter I try to write unfilmable novels,” Kazuo Ishiguro has said, which suggests he’s doing something very wrong. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day was converted quite beautifully into a Bafta award-winning picture. His acclaimed sci-fi tale Never Let Me Go was duly made over as an acclaimed sci-fi thriller. He’s the most cine-literate, film-friendly British author on the scene, a man whose unadorned prose translates serenely to the screen. So his efforts are in vain; he’s cursed with success in both fields. I’m guessing he tries to write unfilmable novels in the same way he tried not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. For a brief spell, it looked as though 2026 might contain a logjam of splashy Ishiguro productions. Then Taika Waititi’s much-touted adaptation of Klara and the Sun (featuring Jenna Ortega as the “Artificial Friend”) stalled …

The Pale Sovereign by G Z Mathews

The Pale Sovereign by G Z Mathews

Published by Jenni Sidey

There are thrillers that entertain, and then there are thrillers that burrow beneath the skin like shrapnel, refusing to be dislodged long after the final page. G Z Mathews’ debut novel, The Pale Sovereign, belongs unequivocally to the latter category. This is literary noir at its most precise and devastating, a globe-spanning narrative that dissects the anatomy of power with the clinical detachment of a surgeon and the moral gravity of a war crimes tribunal. The novel introduces us to Dr. Annika Ravn, a Norwegian trauma surgeon whose life shatters when she is drawn into the Garden, an elite and secretive society operating in Berlin’s shadows. What unfolds is not merely a story of captivity and escape but a profound meditation on agency, survival, and the instruments we forge from our own suffering. Mathews refuses to offer readers the comfort of simple rescue narratives. Instead, he presents something far more unsettling and, ultimately, more honest: a portrait of reclamation that acknowledges the permanent marks left by trauma while insisting on the possibility of transformation. The …