Sommaire pour Spring 2025 de Esquire UK

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea. His most recent book, The Drowned, was published last October. Cameron Bensley is a still-life photographer. His commercial clients include JW Anderson, McQueen and Juicy Couture, and his work has appeared in Elle and Wallpaper*. Matt Blake is a features writer for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and Time Out. His first book, Hearth of Darkness, will be published in October. Mick Brown is a writer for The Daily Telegraph and the author of many books including, most recently, The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West. Lucas Burtin is an illustrator and cartoonist for publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde and Berliner Zeitung. Ed Caesar is a contributing staff writer…

If you follow Thomas Straker on Instagram — and with 2.6 million followers to his name, there’s a not-insignificant chance you do — you can trace the London chef’s burgeoning empire from his bio. There is Straker’s, the Notting Hill restaurant he opened in 2022 (two years later and still a tough reservation), as well as All Things Butter, his company that makes, you guessed it, butter (Straker has a wildly popular video series of the same name, in which he makes quenelles of compound butters, from Marmite to shrimp). And now, a tantalising new project: Acre. Straker calls Acre, which opens later this spring, “multifunctional”. There will be a deli on the ground floor serving fresh pasta, soups and salads, while a restaurant upstairs will be open from morning…

The story of rejection — any rejection — is typically one that ends before it can begin. Whether the knockback arrives via a dating app or a failed job application, it stubs out possibility and preserves the status quo. But for the perennial losers in Tony Tulathimutte’s darkly comic new book Rejection, that’s where things get started. The 41-year-old Thai American author’s collection of short stories is focused on an interconnected line-up of internet-poisoned millennials whose romantic and interpersonal failures gradually curdle into hopelessness, hate and depravity. The deep-seated impact of rejection is the book’s organising theme. It is far more fun than it sounds. In the first three stories, a bilious trilogy of sorts, we meet a “pornsick” gay virgin with an unfulfilled fetish for monster-based sadism; a tryhard…

IN APRIL, 1984, I FOUND MYSELF sitting in a hotel room in Madrid, waiting for Bob Dylan to call. Well, not Dylan himself perhaps, but an emissary of Dylan — his manager, his road-manager, his assistant. Anybody. Please, just call. It was a time when Dylan was emerging from his born-again-Christian phase, which had begun five years earlier with the album Slow Train Coming, where Dylan, so often hailed as the prophet of a generation, whose 1960s songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” had become anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and the nascent counterculture, establishing the blueprint for what became known as “protest” music — a term that Dylan himself loathed — had confounded his fans by emerging in…

Into the unknown Like all sensible people, I have a moderate to severe allergy to those “some personal news” announcements one comes across on social media, in which bumptious self-promoters issue quasi press releases on their own behalf, congratulating themselves on their latest career moves — and, with mortifying presumption, expecting the rest of us to care. This editor’s letter, I fear, is going to resemble one of those impositions, so apologies in advance to fellow sufferers: I hope you have some soothing ointment within reach to rub into your rash while you indulge me, this one last time, in a spot of mortifying presumption. Recently, I read an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, the maverick genius behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and half a century of other cinematic bedazzlements…

“It’s always been a conscious decision to take jobs that wouldn’t make me too famous,” says 35-year-old British actor Malachi Kirby. “Because I’d seen other people do it and it didn’t seem that fun. You know?” He pauses to ensure I know. “So much of your life gets taken away.” If avoiding big roles is Kirby’s career plan, he’s been sorely ill-advised. Today, he’s in the hands of an army of publicists at a central-London hotel, thanks to his lead role in A Thousand Blows, the new Disney+ series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, in which he stars alongside a beefedup Stephen Graham. Kirby plays a sharp-witted Jamaican émigré slaying past traumas with his fists in Victorian London. Based on the (somewhat) true story of a forgotten boxer, the…

No one really seems to know quite why it took them so long. Only that it did. “It was long overdue,” Alexandre Ghotbi, deputy chairman of watches at Phillips auction house, and the former editor of an online forum dedicated to Vacheron Constantin, told Esquire recently. “Collectors have wanted a new 222 for many years.” Like movie buffs and fans of classic rock, horologists hold a special place in their hearts for the 1970s. It was a decade when “luxury sports watches”, timepieces like Patek Philippe’s Nautilus and Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak, models with geometric designs, industrial aesthetics and bumped-up prices, were launched. These watches continue to define those brands and remain highly collectable to this day. Vacheron Constantin launched its own “luxury sports watch” in 1977. Known as the…

In search of lost time Hockney and me by Simon Garfield THIS IS A STORY ABOUT DAVID HOCKNEY, his first art dealer, a fish and chip shop in Bradford, desire, insomnia, financial conflict and marital jeopardy — and it begins in the coffee bar of a London auction house. To accompany the previews of its big sales, Christie’s in St James’s sometimes offers free coffee to its staff and clients. It’s always expertly made, and anyone may walk in off the street to enjoy this hospitality before perusing the works in upcoming auctions. Last September, suitably caffeinated, I toured a display of highlights from its imminent print sale, a gallery brimming with wonders: Picasso, Warhol, Haring, Freud, Hockney. There were six Hockneys in all, and one of them affected me…

In 2014, for an article in this magazine, Max Olesker transformed himself from schlubby everybloke into muscle-bound superhero. The idea: to investigate, first-hand, the phenomenon of the “spornosexual”, at that time the latest buzzword in mediated masculinity — describing those young men hopelessly in thrall to the images of male beauty supplied by sport and pornography. What, we asked, does it do to mind and body to put that much effort into looking fit and strong? What are the impulses that push men to reinvent themselves in such a way? Ten years later, Olesker returns to the subject, and to the gym. What happened to the spornosexual in the decade since? Do young men have a healthier relationship with their bodies, and with exercise? Or has a niche concern gone…

When Manchester punk pioneers Buzzcocks released their seminal (for once the word is apt) single “Orgasm Addict” in 1977, not the least of its power to shock and thrill came from the 7” sleeve design: superimposed on a yellow background with blue text, a black and white photo of the naked, oiled torso of a young woman, each of her nipples covered with a toothy, lip-sticked mouth, her head replaced by a Morphy Richards iron. The graphic designer was Malcolm Garrett. But the artist responsible for the provocative collage of the girl with the domestic appliance at the top of her neck was Linder Sterling (in her work she goes by Linder), then in her early twenties and embarking on what would develop into one of the most compelling careers…

One hundred years ago, photography involved wooden cameras, metal tripods and glass plates. Then along came the Leica 1(A), a device that repurposed 35mm movie-film negative for a camera that was portable, lightweight and allowed users to take more than one shot without changing the film. It was dismissed as a toy. “Professional photographers didn’t trust it,” says Stefan Daniel, executive vice president of technology and operations at Leica, from the company’s headquarters in the city of Wetzlar, near Frankfurt, Germany. “It’s the typical reaction when something revolutionary comes up. But it really made photography much more mobile, much more agile than before.” Early adopters — including street photographers, explorers and members of the Bauhaus movement — did trust it, seeing the potential after it launched at the 1925 Leipzig…

The obituary for the necktie has been written many times over the decades, only for this most traditional of adornments to prove surprisingly resistant to redundancy. But in recent years, as even those men most loyal to the classic formal combo of suit and tie — business executives, politicians, chat-show hosts — have joined the ranks of the open-collared, it really has seemed as though the tie might be going the way of the monocle, the Homburg and the pocket watch. Lately, however, salvation has arrived in the perhaps-unlikely shape of trendsetting streetstyle aficionados (the rappers Travis Scott and A$AP Rocky have recently been photographed in an array of ties) and hip fashion houses. When the casual brand Kith collaborated on a capsule collection with Giorgio Armani last year, the…

IT’S WEDNESDAY IN NEW YORK CITY; Donald Trump has just been elected 47th President of the United States and British theatre director Rob Hastie is explaining the word “bollocks” to an American actor, who he is auditioning. “It means balls,” Hastie offers, perched on a folding chair in the brightly lit but sparsely furnished Ripley-Grier rehearsal studios on 8th Avenue. The rest of his casting team — producers, actors, choreographers — watch on. “I thought it meant, like, bullshit?” the auditionee queries, unsure how to deliver their lines. Bullshit, it’s decided, will absolutely do. It’s an unseasonably (and to half of the population, inaptly) sunny day in Manhattan. Though all of the votes aren’t yet counted, it’s apparent Trump has won. Today — 6 November 2024 — is a date…