‘Gripping’ and stylish Netflix show with Claire Danes

Claire Danes’ “unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis” continues, said Mike Hale in The New York Times. In Netflix’s new eight-parter, the “Homeland” star plays Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author grieving the loss of her son, who was killed in a drink-driving accident four years earlier. Consumed by guilt and estranged from her wife, she is living alone in a large house on Long Island, struggling with writer’s block, when Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) – an infamous property developer suspected of killing his ex-wife – moves into the house opposite her. Aggie is initially appalled, but soon senses that “a new book may have fallen into her lap”.

Jarvis is “very wealthy and very unpleasant”, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. Aggie is warned that he is dangerous, a psychopath. Yet the two strike up an uneasy rapport and, in a somewhat implausible development, he hires her to write his biography. The drama appears to be heading towards “the big reveal” of whether or not Jarvis murdered his wife, and whether Aggie might be next on his list. But somehow the tension fails to develop fully and, ultimately, it makes for a “dour” and “unconvincing” watch.

It may be “silly”, even “ludicrous” at times, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times, but Danes and Rhys are superb, whether “hanging out and putting the world to rights” or pitted against each other in “increasingly unsettling stand-offs”. “Gripping” and often “genuinely scary”, this “gleefully horrible story” is a lot of fun.

by Julia Ioffe 

In 1921, a Bolshevik pamphlet proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a “fairy-tale country” for women. “That was, of course, an exaggeration,” said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times. Nonetheless, women were granted sweeping rights during the Revolution (including to abortion and equal pay) and, from the early Soviet era on, many received a “formidable education”. The result was that the Soviet Union was packed with “strong” professional women: doctors, scientists, judges, professors.

In this “brilliantly executed” book, the Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe “examines the lives of the women of her country” over the past century. Her subjects include Alexandra Kollontai, who in 1917 became the “world’s first female cabinet minister”; the “hotshot Second World War sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko”; and Yulia Navalnaya, a prominent economist and the widow of Alexei Navalny.

Ioffe, whose family moved to the US in 1990, when she was seven, herself comes from a line of extraordinary “ordinary” women, said Viv Groskop in The Guardian. Two great-grandmothers were doctors; her grandmother “oversaw the plant that supplied the Kremlin’s drinking water”.

This heritage meant that when Ioffe returned to Moscow in 2009, she “expected a city filled by women brimming with intellectual and professional ambitions”, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “Instead, she met women whose highest goal in life seemed to be to attract a man.” She wonders how a “country of women freedom fighters became a country of aspiring housewives”, and suggests the blame lies with Russia’s men, who made women shoulder too much during the Soviet era – so that they yearned for a return to “traditional values”. Her “enthralling” book has a “bleak” conclusion: that Russia’s “efflorescence of emancipation” is gone.

Controversial biologist who helped solve the ‘secret of life’

In 1953, a brash young American biologist named James Watson and his older British research partner, the physicist Francis Crick, burst into a pub in Cambridge and declared that they had discovered the “secret of life”. It was no exaggeration, said The Observer. Their work – revealing the double-helix structure of DNA – solved a fundamental mystery that had preoccupied scientists for centuries: how inheritance occurs; how genetic information is stored and passed down generations. Watson and Crick’s findings revolutionised biology and medicine, and paved the way for a huge range of major scientific innovations – the elimination of disease-causing genetic mutations, the design of genetically modified crops, the mapping of serious diseases, the development of the gene-splicing Crispr technology. Their work ultimately made it possible for adopted children to establish their parentage, for scientists to show that humans interbred with Neanderthals, and for the police to trace suspects from strands of hair and flakes of skin left at the scene of a crime. 

In 1962, the pair shared the Nobel Prize with the King’s College London biophysicist Maurice Wilkins. Six years later, said The Daily Telegraph, Watson, who has died aged 97, wrote a book about his and Crick’s project – which made him yet more famous. “The Double Helix” was an instant bestseller, but it also caused a scandal, owing to Watson’s scathing comments about his colleagues and others. He depicted Crick as a loudmouth; and he characterised Rosalind Franklin – the crystallographer whose findings had provided the basis for much of his and Crick’s work – as “dowdy and uncooperative”. This led to Franklin – who had died of cancer in 1958, aged 37, and who had thus been ineligible for the Nobel Prize – being characterised as a “wronged woman”, and Watson as an ambitious, “credit-stealing misogynist”. 

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago in 1928. A socially awkward but clever child, he was admitted to the University of Chicago aged 15. Having inherited from his father a love of birdwatching, he started studying zoology. But then in 1946, he read Erwin Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” – in which the quantum physicist argued that the problem of heredity would be solved with recourse to atomic science and information theory. Schrödinger theorised that the mechanism of heredity was an “aperiodic crystal” – a non-repeating structure, perhaps a molecule, that was capable of storing a vast amount of genetic information, carried in a “code-script” for the organism’s development. “Watson was captivated”, and decided to dedicate himself to the study of genetics instead. In 1951, by which time DNA had been confirmed as the mystery molecule, he was offered a postdoctoral position at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and seized it as an opportunity to pursue his research. 

There, he met Crick, who was 12 years his senior. Crick shared his fascination with DNA; and the pair duly began their race to get ahead of the great American chemist Linus Pauling, who had also been inspired by Schrödinger’s work. Meanwhile, at King’s College London, Franklin and Wilkins were pursuing the same answers via X-ray crystallography. They were on the wrong path, as it turned out, but their data – and in particular an X-ray diffraction image of DNA called Photo 51, taken by Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling – proved pivotal to Watson and Crick’s work. It suggested a helical structure and its dimensions, and when they saw it, they rushed back to adjust their models. The two proposed that DNA was shaped like a twisted ladder; its “rails” were formed of molecules of sugar and phosphate, and each of its steps by two of DNA’s four chemical bases. This ladder could be spliced down the middle by enzymes in the cells, and create two new DNA molecules from one.

Franklin had not shared her findings with them, and when Watson and Crick published their paper they did not acknowledge her contribution in its main text. Watson was later more gracious about Franklin and her research. But his work continued to be overshadowed by his public statements. In 2007, he gave an interview with The Sunday Times in which he said that he was “gloomy” about the prospects of Africa, because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. Other scientists said that “the testing” had established no such thing; Watson apologised, and resigned from his job at the Cold Spring Harbour Lab. But then, in 2019, he insisted that his views on race remained unchanged. At this point, the lab cut all remaining ties with him. 

In 2014, having lost his paid positions, he put his Nobel medal up for sale. It was bought for $4m by a Russian billionaire, who then handed it back to him. Watson is survived by his wife Elizabeth (née Lewis), whom he married in 1968, and their sons.