Esquire UK Autumn 2021

GREG WILLIAMS’ candid portraits of movie stars have appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair. His photographs, films and many other activities can be accessed at gregwilliams.com. ‘TOM HARDY IN PIECES’, PAGE 92 RICHARD DOWKER has taken pictures for Interview, Dazed and 10 Magazine, among many other publications. ‘TEENAGE DREAMS’, PAGE 136 MICK BROWN is a writer for The Daily Telegraph and the author of books including Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector. ‘TEENAGE DREAMS’, PAGE 136 ANDREW O’HAGAN is editor-at-large for the London Review of Books. His most recent novel, Mayflies, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize, is out now in paperback. ‘ALL FAITH AND WONDER’, PAGE 81 JOSHUA FERRIS is the author of Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. His new novel, A Calling for…

Is it odd, or lazy, or even negligent, to ask a journalist to interview the same subject on numerous occasions, for multiple cover stories, for different issues of the same publication, each article appearing at a distance of a few years? And, meanwhile, to commission a photographer to take that same subject’s picture, repeatedly, to illustrate those separate stories? It’s not something we make a habit of. It’s typically felt, in the case of the celebrity interview — oh, little esteemed journalistic endeavour! (I write as a veteran practitioner) — that once is enough. Maybe next time, get a fresh perspective from a writer new to the subject, a different angle from another photographer? As in so many respects, Tom Hardy’s is a special case. This issue marks the fourth occasion on…

In late 2019, the writer and director Andrew Haigh found himself on a boat off the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the northern edge of Norway and the North Pole, having a dark thought. On board with him were a production crew and a bunch of actors, some of them really quite famous (Jack O’Connell, Stephen Graham), and one of them extremely famous (Colin Farrell). They would be spending the next few weeks on the Arctic Ocean journeying up into the polar ice floes in order to film The North Water, a five-part TV drama about a doomed whaling voyage set to air on the BBC in the coming months. “I remember on the first night we sailed up the coast of Svalbard it was pretty rough weather. We’re all in…

The world of high-fidelity audio isn’t known for its larger-than-life characters or maverick entrepreneurs. You’d struggle to name an Elon Musk of amplifiers or a Reed Hastings of record players. But there is one. Paul W Klipsch was an American engineer who designed radios for General Electric, worked on locomotives for the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Corporation railway, became a geophysicist for a Texan oil company and served as a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army. He was also an accomplished pilot, gun enthusiast, photographer, film-maker and cornet player. An inveterate tinkerer, visitors to Klipsch’s home in Hope, Arkansas recall sitting around the pool in his backyard being served cans of beer on a model steam train, of which he’d built every piston, cylinder and wheel. He’d shown an interest in audio early on,…

Perceived wisdom says that owning a convertible sports car in Britain is an act of, at best, naïve optimism, at worst, clinical madness and yet, when you’re behind the wheel of one, the world in panorama overhead, it’s all the other hunched and grimacing drivers in their sealed up tin cans that come across as crazy. The weight of this realisation hit me when I was sitting in the Lexus LC 500, fabric roof down despite the grey clouds, waiting at temporary traffic lights that seemed stuck on red which normally would have caused a significant blood pressure spike. I barely noticed. I was lost in the bluebells. You often see old boys driving around in convertibles, their silver hair buffeting in the wind, chortling with their co-driver or just to themselves.…