Latest news with #Razors
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Hangovers I have known
Photo by Robert Norbury/Millenium It is now Wednesday, which means I am on Day Three of the hangover from lunch in London on Sunday. On the whole, things are much better than they have been. The nausea is largely gone, as is most of the trembling. The first day, though, was horrendous – as bad as anything I can remember in a life that has had a few belters in its time. The worst one ever was in 2005 in Umbria, when my friend D— came up from Rome with a couple of bottles of grappa which, he assured me, was the good stuff, and not the liquid made from battery acid, fermented twigs and rats' carcasses that gets fobbed off on tourists. To this day, I still feel slightly queasy when I hear the word 'grappa'; even typing it in full makes the stomach lurch. I can certainly never drink it again. As in that case, the excessive drinking last Sunday was the result of meeting up with a friend I hadn't seen in years. It was my old flatmate and partner in crime Razors, with whom I shared the original Hovel in Marylebone. I do not use the term 'partner in crime' entirely facetiously, but I am not going to say any more because that's all the self-incrimination I'm going to be doing for now. Razors, which is not his real name, escaped the clutches of Blighty and moved to Los Angeles, where he has been making lots of money doing something related to films. Occasionally I have asked him to explain to me what it actually is, but my heart is never in it when listening to the answer, and my mind wanders over to the important bit, which is that he earns a lot more money than me – a fact that he, too, is happy to return to. A few years ago family business called him back to the land of his birth, and he offered to buy me lunch at Rules, the venerable and incredibly expensive restaurant in Covent Garden. That was a washout: the night before, I treated myself to a kebab from what had up until then been my favourite gyro place on the Western Road: honestly, they were so good you could actually eat them sober. However, on this occasion, there had been some kind of breakdown in their health and safety regime, and I spent the next day and a half in agony in the bathroom; I was in no fit state to go to the chemist's for some Dioralyte, let alone get on a train to London to eat roast pheasant and spotted dick. So this time I was careful. For a couple of days beforehand, I ate nothing but dry bread and tinned soups, sterilised all my glasses before drinking from them and even took care not to go out in the wet in case I slipped and broke something. Rules was off the menu, though: some bean-counter has decided that you can't sit down for more than two hours at lunch, and two hours is no time at all for a decent meal when you have a lot to catch up on. So in the end he decided on Hawksmoor on Air Street, which we heard does a good Sunday roast, and that was what Razors was craving, because apparently in Los Angeles the only thing they eat is sushi. Quick food review: the roast beef was divine, with a nice smokey flavour, the roasties were acceptable, the gravy wasn't as good as mine but then no one's gravy is, and the Yorkshire Puddings… well, let's just say they need to go back to the drawing board with them. But the barman who made our pre-dinner Martinis knew what he was doing, so much so that we had two each, and this may be said to be where our problems began. By the way, when I said above that we had a lot to catch up on, that's not really the correct phrase. We do not really give a monkey's about what the other person has been up to. We just want to have a laugh, and Razors has a somewhat robust sense of humour that does not always go down terribly well in well-heeled circles in LA. A mutual friend of ours who happens to be female asked me, after our last meeting, how his children were doing (he has two sets, from two marriages). I replied that the question had simply not arisen, on the grounds that a) I didn't care and b) he had not flown several thousand miles across desert, mountain and sea to talk about child-rearing. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'The thing is,' he explained, generalising terribly but with perhaps with a grain of truth, 'when women have a conversation, it's about information; when men have a conversation, it's about entertainment.' Well, it was jolly entertaining, and my eldest child, who, along with their siblings, got to see a lot of him on alternate weekends, joined us for a bit, and that was delightful. The evening then got a bit ragged: we went to several pubs in Soho, I think, having large and expensive Islay malts in each one; maybe these, along with the bottle of Malbec each that we had at lunch, and the brandies after it, contributed to my lack of well-being for the next three days. I finally got back to Brighton after midnight. Then I thought it would be a good idea to have a nightcap. It was not a good idea. Since then, I have signed the pledge: not a drop of liquor will pass my lips again. Well, maybe a little one. But not just now. [See also: Thought Experiment 11: The Harmless Torturer] Related
Economist
13-05-2025
- Business
- Economist
Why the MAGA economy is thriving
Imagine the perfect morning. After sleeping between sheets from MyPillow—a company established by Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist—you drink some Black Rifle Coffee, which 'serves coffee and culture to people who love America'. You shave with Jeremy's Razors ('built for rugged feelings'). Then you eat some bacon from Good Ranchers, which pledges to 'make the American farm strong again', before going for a spin on your Harley-Davidson.
Otago Daily Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Obituary: P.H. Moriarty, actor
P.H. Moriarty attends a drinks reception celebrating the new co-production agreement between Anchor Bay Films and Richwater Films at The Groucho Club on September 26, 2013 in London, England. Boxer and docker turned actor, P.H. (Paul) Moriarty always said the camera was good to him. A Londoner, he was discovered by a film crew filming at the dock where he worked. Having followed the producer's suggestion he try acting, Moriarty made his film debut in Quadrophenia, the 1979 drama based on The Who's rock opera of the same name. Moriarty often portrayed violent characters, perhaps most famously, Hatchet Harry in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Razors in Long Good Friday — both characters were named after their preferred weapons. Moriarty also appeared in Jaws 3 and Patriot Games, as well as several television dramas. P. H. Moriarty died on February 2 aged 86. — APL/agencies
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
PH Moriarty obituary
PH Moriarty, who has died aged 86 after suffering from dementia, came late to acting as he approached 40, but made an indelible impression, most chillingly in two British gangster films. The simmering menace he brought to the screen led one critic to observe that he could 'make Hannibal Lecter look like Noddy'. Distinctive for his moustache, smart grey suit and tie, he was ever present in The Long Good Friday (1980) as Razors, henchman to Bob Hoskins's brutal underworld property developer, Harold Shand, who seeks to build his empire through the regeneration of London's Docklands. Moriarty is seen driving Hoskins around on a quest to discover who is threatening this ambition (it turns out to be the IRA). After placing the barrel of a pistol in the ear of a police informer interrogated by Shand (played by Paul Barber), Razors reveals the source of his nickname. As he lifts his shirt to display endless scars on his torso, patched up by what he describes as '65 inches of stitching', Hoskins says he is known as 'the human spirograph'. Picking up a machete, Razors tells Barber: 'Now you're going to feel what it's like, boy.' Several slashes follow in what proves to be just one of the violent scenes that, combined with Barrie Keeffe's intelligent script, made The Long Good Friday a high-water mark in the history of British gangster films. Moriarty is also alongside Hoskins when rival gang bosses are suspended upside down on meathooks in an abattoir. The film set him on a career largely typecast playing such characters, but on both sides of the law. 'A guy in America saw it just after it came out, rang me up, the next thing, I was over there and starring in Jaws 3-D,' said Moriarty, who played the cockney sidekick to Simon MacCorkindale's British oceanographer and photographer in that 1983 film. At the end of the following decade, he appeared in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), the writer-director Guy Ritchie's acclaimed gangsters and gamblers drama, as 'Hatchet' Harry Lonsdale, a porn seller who bludgeons his enemies to death. When a criminal played by Nick Moran loses £500,000 in a card game rigged by Harry, he is given a week to pay up. The agent Simon Drew said of Moriarty: 'The actor in him could make you fear for your life. If you knew him, the scowl quickly changed to a wry smile.' Paul Hugh Moriarty was born in Deptford, south London, the son of William Moriarty, a lorry driver, and his wife, Mary (nee Griffin). On leaving St Joseph's Roman Catholic school at 15, he trained as a cooper at the Admiralty's victualling yard for six years – while boxing as an amateur – before becoming a stevedore at Surrey docks, Rotherhithe, where he lost the sight of his left eye in an accident. When the TV producer Tony Garnett was filming there for a 1978 episode of Law & Order, Moriarty's brother-in-law, GF Newman – the writer of the gritty four-part drama questioning the judicial system – suggested him for a part. As a result, he played a prisoner in the final episode and, as there was already an actor called Paul Moriarty, he took the professional name PH Moriarty. He was then cast as a pub bartender in the cult mods and rockers film Quadrophenia (1979) before growing a beard for the big-screen version of the banned TV play Scum (1979) to play Hunt, the borstal warder checking in Ray Winstone's young offender in a manner that suggests the staff are as unpleasant as the inmates. 'You have heard of us, Carlin, aye?' he asks as his colleague roughs up a teenager who has assaulted an officer at a previous institution. In a similar vein, Moriarty played one of the prison warders giving a beating to Jimmy Boyle in A Sense of Freedom (1981), based on the Glaswegian gangland murderer's autobiography. He became a regular on television and was clearly cast to type when he was credited as 'Evil Jim Dalton' in a 1990 episode of The Paradise Club. Later, he brought menace to the Sci-Fi Channel series Dune (2000) and its sequel, Children of Dune (2003), as Gurney Halleck, a character distinctive for a whip wound on his jawline. The producers saw that the scar, combined with the actor's damaged eye, made his face incredibly expressive, angry and sad at the same time. Moriarty's later films included Evil Never Dies (2014) and Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins (2021). In 1961, Moriarty married Margaret Newman. She, their son, Mark, and daughter, Kathleen, survive him. Another son, Neil, died at three days old. PH (Paul Hugh) Moriarty, actor, born 23 September 1938; died 2 February 2025
