The Rake December 2021 - Issue 79

I am sitting in my hotel room in Geneva writing these words, having finished my duties as a jury member of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie (GPHG), the watch industry’s most notable awards ceremony. I wanted to take a few moments to talk to you about Nick Foulkes, who has been appointed the president of the jury and is the reason I am back on it after 15 years. The GPHG’s appointment of Foulkes is an inspired and intelligent choice. As I have always said, Nick is the luxury watch industry’s most gifted and prolific journalist and author, an extraordinary man who is fiercely independent and utterly incorruptible. And he commands unparalleled respect. During Singapore’s Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition, he was swarmed by a legion of fans who wanted…

Despite Christmas having been in the diary a while now, it usually catches me unprepared. This year has been different, and like a supermarket chain, or any business that loves to offer a bargain, I have been feeling the Christmas spirit earlier than usual. My eldest child has been discussing it as though football were actually coming home, constantly asking if we have carrots for the reindeers. His enthusiasm for Christmas has been the kindling I needed to burn off the misanthropy and cynicism that I store up during the year. It’s pretty wholesome content at our place: every room is filled with scents of chocolate, peppermint, oranges and ginger. The humidor is stocked with goodies out of the reach of my little ones; I have a fridge dedicated to…

KATHRYN BOYD BROLIN Kathryn Boyd Brolin is a photographer, designer and business owner based in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Georgia. She studied photojournalism at the University of Georgia’s prestigious Grady College of Journalism in Athens, Georgia, and photography at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence before graduating in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UGA. Shortly thereafter, she began working in Atlanta’s growing film industry before moving permanently to L.A., where her creative talents would eventually collide, resulting in the genesis of her business, Midheaven Denim, for which she serves as founder, head designer and photographer. Kathryn is now an ambassador for Leica, and she joined us in South Carolina, Leica in hand, to capture Paul Bettany for the cover, taking the assignment by the scruff of…

It’s just about possible to date the point at which Charlie Watts became everyone’s favourite Rolling Stone. In the sixties, Mick Jagger had been the focus of attention as the skinny, hyperactive frontman with an almost cartoonish beauty. In the mid seventies he gave way to Keith Richards as the embodiment of wasted rock cool, a position the guitarist occupied for around two decades. But in 1997, when the four remaining members of the band gathered to announce their Bridges to Babylon tour under Brooklyn Bridge, it was as if everyone simultaneously realised that actually Charlie had been the one all along. This was a photo opportunity, so it’s no shame that the deciding factor was appearance. While the others were dressed in the firmly established uniform of the millionaire rock…

Emmett J. Scanlan appears with an intense stare, a warm Dublin accent, and a dark beard so perfectly formed that he looks like one of Leonidas’s mighty Spartans. The actor is speaking to us from his home in Cheshire, where he is proudly describing his one-year-old son. “Look at him there,” he says, showing a video on his phone, a wide grin over his face: “… that’s my boy, Ocean-Torin. It means ‘Chief of the Ocean’!” Having finished filming the next season of Peaky Blinders, in which Emmett plays an even bigger role, as well as the police drama The Tower (written by Homeland scribe Patrick Harbinson) and the Irish gangster series Kin, the actor is looking forward to spending more time with his family. “There’s nothing as important,” he tells…

The best actors disappear into their roles; the most transcendent come to embody the archetypes they portray. Thus, John Wayne became inseparable from the image of the granite-jawed, bow-legged, morally righteous cowboy, and Joe Pesci’s bug eyes and tightly wound demeanour inevitably come to mind whenever the spectre of a homicidal mobster is summoned. And the down-on-his-luck samurai, equal parts arrogant and bemused, who wanders into a lawless village and sets matters right? Look no further than Toshiro Mifune. Look no further, in fact, than the scene in 1961’s Yojimbo, one of the many samurai epics that Mifune made with the towering Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, where Mifune’s man with no name, sword poised in his kamishimo, stares down a bunch of goons on a dusty street before dispatching them in…