1. 31 guide 28 Jan-3 Feb 2017
Deliciously Ella London
Spiralising your greens, ditching
gluten and laying off lactose may
have been all the rage in recent
years, but the wheels appear have
come off “clean eating” of late.
As well as mental health experts
and eating disorder charity
Beat raising the alarm about the
restrictive food trend, a recent
programme in the BBC’s Horizon
strand highlighted the flimsiness
of health-related claims made
by its figureheads. “Deliciously”
Ella Mills – perhaps the most
The wheels have come off ‘clean eating’ of late, with
even Deliciously Ella distancing herself from the fad
well known of the shiny new
breed of foodies – was shown
looking visibly uneasy as her
plant-based diet was critiqued.
Even so, she trundles on, keen to
distance herself from the clean
tag (indeed, she told the BBC that
it was a “fad”). In support of her
latest cookbook, Deliciously Ella
With Friends, Mills hosts this talk.
Whether she chooses to broach
any inconvenient truths remains
to be seen. Hannah J Davies
Whole Foods Market, High Street
Kensington, W8, Sat
The Noise Of Time sees
Barnes continuing to
muse on the precarious
nature of memory
Julian Barnes London
Black humour and retrospective
anguish prevail in Julian Barnes’s
latest novel, the cold war-
infused The Noise Of Time. This
tale of fragmented memories
explores the life of Russian
composer Dmitri Shostakovich,
whom we meet awaiting his
fate from the secret police. It’s a
fictionalised biography, exploring
Shostakovich’s conflicted
experience as an artist whose
music was both celebrated and
condemned by the Soviet state,
and sees Barnes zoom in on his
life with an almost pedantic
precision while simultaneously
conveying the collective mood
of a nation anxiously awaiting
their fate. Here, journalist Rachel
Cooke will quiz Barnes on the
ecstatically reviewed novel,
which continues the musings on
the precarious nature of memory
that have characterised his
four-decade-long career.
Lara Enoch
Waterstones, Tottenham Court
Road, W1, Wed
Michael Portillo: Life – A Game
Of Two Halves Beckenham,
Salisbury
In some ways, the second half
of Michael Portillo’s public life
has felt like an elaborate (albeit
presumably lucrative) act of
penance for the first. In 1997,
his stock – as a freshly unseated
Conservative MP who had come
to personify the self-satisfied
sense of lofty entitlement that
seemed to epitomise the party in
the pre-Blair era – couldn’t have
been much lower. The relish
with which Jeremy Paxman
asked if he was going to miss his
ministerial limo on election night
seemed not only appropriate but
almost obligatory. And, to his
credit, Portillo himself seemed
to realise that he might, just very
slightly, have had this fall from
grace coming – one of his early
forays into television saw him
attempting to live on benefits
in Liverpool and rather stagily
concluding that, actually, it was
harder than it looked. Redemption
achieved (and after another brief,
abortive flirtation with politics) he
settled down to his true calling,
which appears to have been
making documentaries about
trains and hanging out with Diane
Abbott on This Week. At this
event, he’ll be talking about all
this and more – expect some focus
on the US as one of his recent
train journeys had him travelling
through Trumpland. Phil Harrison
Langley Park Centre For The
Performing Arts, Beckenham,
Sat; Salisbury Arts Centre, Sun
After his spectacular fall from political grace,
Portillo found redemption via a career in television
SophiaSpring
talks