101 Faces - 6

26 to 30 of these interesting people

MARIAN REJEWSKI

I read up on him this year. Though I said at the start it wasn’t the unseen heroes I was necessarily drawn to, I can make exceptions. Just a Polish Maths student who did so much of the work to crack the Enigma codes, then went back to being an accountant.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZIE ADICHIE

A great writer and also a great icon, a voice on a Beyonce album and a prized interviewee and spokesperson. It seems an obvious, perhaps reductive, thing to say, but it is surely important that one of the world’s most famous and acclaimed authors is an African woman.

On a personal note, a book-within-a-book in her great novel ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ (not to mention many of the themes within it) triggered what I felt for a long time was the truest thing I ever wrote …

THE WORLD WAS / SILENT WHEN WE DIED

The world was silent - all the bombs had faded

and I died quietly, as I'd always wanted

The fireworks had been unimpressive, and I

walked home alone as the crowds shouted dry

then, in silence, chose my last memories.

The world was silent, you say, when you died

Looking elsewhere, at its shoes, shamefaced

Too busy flitting through its own little tiffs

While you screamed in rage and pain

Disbelieving that no one was listening

And when you died, I, I was silent

Because sometimes my nothing's not enough

And grief and horror need meeting in kind

But i could muster no words when you died

Just dodged through crowds, deathly, dull,

Innocent or ignorant, both or neither.

The fireworks fire, the choirs sing,

There's beauty in places, why deny?

And the world groans, and I'm dancing

with my friends, and we're laughing

And I walk home alone and free to go

And I fall silent and you fall silent

And there's silence as the world dies.

JOHN CUSACK

Pair of Cusacks. I love John Cusack because he’s an iconic film star who starred in a huge run of great films which inspire not just admiration but love, also because he’s genuinely really tall and doesn’t pretend to be, also because he has managed to not let people into his personal life extremely successfully, while also, conversely, being constantly on twitter getting into arguments with stupid people and being nice to nice people.
PS... aah ... bollocks ...

JOAN CUSACK

I love Joan Cusack because she’s one of the best scene-stealers of all time, she’s brilliant opposite John Cusack, and generally ought to be one of the biggest stars on Hollywood. Also because she’s the voice of Jessie, and Jessie is the best thing in the Toy Story films I’ve had to watch relentlessly in the last year.

JOHN BARNES

Barnes never really made it as TV presenter or as a manager – he just seems like he thinks a bit too much for that. This interview he did recently is so compelling and so brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f4rVvpmzJ0

You realise what an unsettling presence he must have been in the unambiguously dark ages of English football - the best, the smartest, the most phlegmatic - just subverting all those prejudices.

He was such a great footballer, underrated because his greatness was in an era with not much football in TV, and perhaps because people mistook his occasional unpopularity with England fans for anything but racism.