Sunday Times Magazine 27th September 2009
in excellent condition
THE SUNDAY TIMES magazine
27.9.2009
Regulars
7 Did You Know?
The fearless mountaineer who saved five fellow climbers from a grisly death; a respected craftsman by day, a womanising gangster by night — the real man who inspired Keyll and why Tom Carver, he realised they were closer to each other in death than in life
8 Relative Values
The award-winning journalist and novelist Zoë Heller, and her “enormously efficient” older sister Emily
11 Open Minds
While writing his late father’s wartime memoir, says
58 Short Story
In this coming-of-age tale from the late playwright Arthur Miller, published in the UK here for the first time, a 13-year-old boy yearns for a puppy and ends up with a scantily-clad seductress
66 A Life in the Day
Kelly Osbourne, of the infamous family, on horrifying hair experiences and why she’s not a spoilt brat
Spectrum
31 Ten pages of arresting images from around the world. This week: inside an operating room as a woman undergoes cosmetic surgery; Africa’s biggest slum, where over a million people live in less than two square miles; “re-enactors”, the men and women who dress up in historical clothes for fun; a Lennart Nilsson portrait of a foetus in the womb
Features
14 COVER STORY – Leader of the pack
On the eve of Labour’s 2009 conference, we join their top dog Peter Mandelson in China, where he speaks about spin, sworn enemies and whether he’d work for the Tories
22 To the manor porn
Sex parties in the drawing room, pornography in the parlour and bondage in the basement: how cash-strapped owners of Britain’s stately homes are catering to kinky business
42 Cool hand Hopper
Dennis Hopper once drank half a gallon of rum and 30 beers a day. Now he plays golf and dotes on his daughter. But, the former Hollywood hellraiser tells us, one thing hasn’t changed: his passion for taking pictures
50 Airport lounge
A secret obsession with airports meant Alain de Botton leapt at the chance to be Heathrow’s writer-in-residence. Here he describes the hustle, bustle and “beauty” of Terminal 5
Contributors
Bryan Appleyard
“Peter Mandelson is new Labour’s last man standing. And he holds Gordon Brown’s fate in the palm of his hand. He also gets the Chinese angry, by, er, the Chinese get him” (p14)
Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
“Some stately-home owners are so desperate for funds, they don’t care where the money comes from. If it’s from sex parties or porn shoots, their line is, ‘We’re open-minded’” (p22)
Alain de Botton
“If you asked to take a Martian to a place that best captured all that’s peculiar, beautiful, terrifying and plain distinctive about the modern world, you’d have to take them to an airport” (p50)
Cover photograph: James Mollison
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