Sommaire pour Winter 2023 de Esquire UK

Tagliatelle al ragù The classic meat sauce (ragù or sugo, depending on where you are) is debated and discussed endlessly. Beef or pork? Both? Herbs or not? Garlic or not? Red wine or white? Milk or no milk? There is no right answer and there will never be a consensus. It sparks fierce passion and disagreement. Brutto’s senior sous chef Alan Williams worked in Bologna for three years, and we make his traditional Emilia-Romagna version. He insists that you can’t do justice to this recipe in under six hours, but I’ve adapted it for a domestic kitchen. It’s the best ragù I’ve tasted. For four: 30g pork fat (or lard)200g beef mince200g pork minceFlaky sea saltBlack pepper300ml white wine1 large onion, very finely diced2 medium carrots, peeled and very finely…

IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN FISHING, the works of great writers from Hemingway to Ted Hughes amount to a glowing review on Tripadvisor. But for a long time, I struggled with what might be called the lived experience of the sport. There was a bright trout stream in Devon where my brother and I tried our luck with a fishing rod, his latest nine-day wonder. And there were day trips on wallowing boats with their restful perfume of diesel and mackerel guts. Kids from around our way spoke of a place called the Stewponds. It didn’t sound very enticing: perhaps it was the faint echo of Stig of the Dump about it. Newsagents carried titles devoted to angling. The front page always showed someone smiling tightly and holding their…

“WHAT A FANCY PAD,” SAYS BONO, gazing around him from behind the old bug-eyed “Fly” shades he’d put on, with no little theatricality, a couple of songs earlier. “Look at all this… stuff!” the singer exclaims as he stands on a stage modelled on an artwork designed by Brian Eno (“Turntable”, 2021, acrylic, LED lights). Packed below and above the 63-year-old in a well-behaved moshpit and steeply raked bleachers, 18,000 fans — tickets currently available from $400.21 — roar their agreement as the world’s biggest LED screen shimmers and hums. Just wait till they see the cascade of AI-generated Elvises and the vertigo-inducing torrent of binary code that makes the stage feel as if it is plummeting away from them. Rock’n’roll’n’algorithms. On Friday 29 September, as U2 kicked off their…

A SEPTEMBER MORNING IN DAGENHAM, where east London edges into the Essex hinterland. Roundabouts, bus shelters, roadworks. Shopping parades offering ready-made narratives: take-away, pharmacy, funeral director. Rows of houses putting brave faces on it. Weather that can’t make up its mind. Outside the Sydney Russell School on Parsloes Avenue, two small groups have assembled. A soundbite of news reporters. A ribbon of local worthies. And, in green blazer and yellow polo shirt, a teenage boy who has been selected from among more than 2,000 students to welcome today’s special visitor. Word goes round: he’s only five minutes away. A respectful hush. A shuffling of feet. Right on time, from the direction of the staff car park, he approaches. Blue suit, white shirt, black shoes. Short grey hair persuaded into a…

Popular culture, I am by no means the first to point out, has become so atomised that the term is now an oxymoron. I’ve never seen your unmissable binge-watch. You can’t name a single song by my favourite new band. The last film you loved at the cinema completely passed me by. The book I’m currently captivated by would bore you stupid. The other day, on a Teams call, a cherished colleague suggested that, for Esquire’s next cover, we should photograph the rapper Dave. I gave her one of my small but, I like to think, devastating selection of disapproving looks: Withering Incredulity, I call this one. “Dave?” I said. “No, we won’t be doing Dave.” I may even have waved my hand in front of my face, as if…

The US Open tennis tournament has a more lenient dress code for players than Wimbledon’s all-white requirement. That relaxation trickles down to the Grand Slam’s guests: witness the actor Rami Malek courtside in a striped green pyjama shirt. Nightwear as ready-to-wear was being promoted on the catwalks — at Gucci, Valentino, Etro — long before the enforced domesticity of the Covid lockdowns made the idea appealing in real life. But now stylish men are taking their pyjamas outside the home, too. Birkenstock, the German footwear giant, has recently paired up with Scandi sleepwear brand Tekla — its first venture into clothing. “People are more invested in their homes [since Covid],” says Christoffer Lundman, Tekla’s senior product designer. “There’s a desire to take those feelings of comfort and security with you…

I DON’T LIKE TO BOAST, BUT, WHEN I TAKE IT INTO MY HEAD, I can throw dinner parties the way Zeus used to throw lightning bolts. I just raise a hand, emit a giant, self-satisfied roar, and a hundred delightful canapés drop onto a starched tablecloth, followed very quickly by a perfectly roasted lamb, potato gratin so rich it refuses to pay its own taxes, a bowl of my own mint sauce, a steaming plate of crunchy green beans, and the sort of trifle that would make ambrosia taste like ashes in the mouth of your average Athenian mortal. Indeed, if dinner parties were an Olympic sport, as opposed to a sport on Mount Olympus, I’d be Michael Phelps doing the butterfly stroke. I can run a placement like Usain…

AT THE VERY START OF MY WRITING CAREER, I WAS a published academic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer studies. My first piece of published writing was a co-authored paper — you can still find it online — called “Para-sites of the soul”. The first lecture I ever delivered was on madness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its links to depictions of madness in Greek tragedy. I was an eager reader of the journal Slayage. This hadn’t been part of my plan. I’d always been what you might call an academic-labels snob. I went to Oxford, did a degree in PPE. I’d really wanted to do a degree in English and Philosophy at, let’s say, Manchester University, but Oxford had the better academic brand name and they didn’t do English…

You know that moment when you emerge from a side road hoping to join a queue of traffic only to realise that, no matter how sweetly you smile, no one is going to let you out? It’s hard enough to appeal to your fellow driver’s good nature if you’re driving a battered Vauxhall Corsa, but if you’re in a gleaming supercar that does 14mpg with a private number plate and a carbon body pack, you may as well just switch the engine off and check your food supplies. Simply put, people would rather drive into the car in front than acknowledge your existence. Eventually, desperate and possibly dehydrated, you’ll be forced to shove your oversized bonnet into the thorough-fare to a hail of horns, so cementing the pushy and entitled…

All hail the return of Michael Fassbender. The Oscar-nominated actor and X-Men star is back on our screens after a four-year hiatus (drove racing cars, moved to Portugal, had a child) and, wow, what a statement rebirth! He fills almost every frame of David Fincher’s The Killer and is dominant throughout as a top-tier assassin with a penchant for yoga, telescopic sights and the dulcet tones of Morrissey: the soundtrack, filtered through our protagonist’s headphones, is non-stop The Smiths, from opening to closing credits. Fassbender’s no-name hitman opens the film in grand style, in an empty Parisian office block, where he assembles a powerful sniper’s rifle, performs some impressive downward dogs and ruminates on the central philosophies that have made him, thus far, the best in the business. “Popeye the…

“New York City Misses You Too.” Presumptuous but effective, as advertising slogans go, in that it prompted in me a nagging question: did I miss New York? If so, how much? Enough to do something about it? The above legend was emblazoned across an illuminated billboard, skyscraper-tall, backed by a photo of Manhattan by night, lights atwinkle. I passed it on each occasion I took the Westway into central London and back home again — several times each week, during the months and, now, years following the peak of the pandemic. I had plenty of time to stare at it, to register the fact that circumstances in the travel industry remained so grave that even the second greatest city in the world was reduced to pleading, presumptuously or not, for…

IN MY MID-TWENTIES I WOKE up from a seven-year hangover sat in an office. Apparently, I was an administrator. I was working at a software start-up, having tried catering, a corner shop, advertising, the job centre, an internship at Zoo magazine, background acting in a Jude Law movie, flyering, marketing and, through it all, writing fiction. In hindsight, I was asking the world to tell me who I am. In reply, my manager at the start-up asked me, “Have you checked your Slack?” I swivelled to my left. “No,” I said, opening the tab. On Slack my manager had sent me a message asking, “Have you checked your Asana?” I hadn’t checked Asana either. I opened up another tab. On Asana, a task-management system, my manager had assigned me the…

“LOOK AT THAT FACE,” says New York photographer Kate Simon, still apparently in disbelief, as she examines a black-and-white portrait of Bob Marley, smiling at something just up and out of shot. It’s the one that she took by the side of the pool at the Sheraton hotel in Jamaica in 1976, that ended up on the cover of Bob Marley and The Wailers’ 1978 album Kaya, not to mention T-shirts and posters the world over ever since. “There’s no way… I don’t know… How can you take a bad photograph of Bob?” Simon, certainly, never managed it. We’re looking through photographs selected from her seminal book, Rebel Music: Bob Marley & Roots Reggae, first published almost two decades ago and re-issued this month. Here’s Marley on stage at the…

When the photographer Kate Simon, whose book Rebel Music: Bob Marley & Roots Reggae we extract in this issue, was invited to accompany Bob Marley and The Wailers on their 1977 tour of Europe, though she was still only in her twenties, she had already seen… some things. “I was at the beginning of my photography career, and had been on these rock tours with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who… It was fun. But then Bob was a whole different flavour.” Travelling on the bus with them through France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, culminating in three legendary shows at The Rainbow in north London, Simon was able to shoot quietly intimate portraits of the legendary Jamaican musician and his friends and collaborators. These, alongside…