Outside Guns Direct in Burbank, California, 21-year-old Elliott Smith is waiting to buy his first firearm. He’d been debating the decision with his family for some time before finally being convinced by the scenes from the Capitol. “It’s just my precautionary tool,” he says. “My personal belief is that I wouldn’t use it unless there was a civil war.”

Behind the counter, James Janya, a 41-year-old former Marine, says he’s noticed an “uptick in customers”, though nothing like the scale of the early days of the pandemic, when lines frequently snaked around the block.

By his estimate, around 80 per cent of customers over the past year have been first-time gun buyers, and the number of women has also sharply increased. “Everybody is scared right now,” he says. “Businesses are closing down. Crime is on the rise. People are saying: ‘Defund the police.’ Well, then who’s going to protect me? That’s why people are buying guns.”

Things are quieter at nearby Burbank Ammo & Guns, which employee Eric Fletcher attributes to record sales in 2020. “I think everyone who was looking to buy a gun has already done it,” says the 34 year-old. “The supply of guns and ammunition is still low because of the extreme demand last year.”

This demand is being driven by both sides of the political spectrum. “We see a diverse mixture, including people who come in wearing clothing that says things like: ‘BLM’ or ‘FTP’ [F— the Police],” says Fletcher.

Additional reporting for The Telegraph.

Angela Lansbury lives a few miles west of Beverly Hills, in a house that looks as if it’s been uprooted from the Home Counties. The moment I arrive, she bustles me into her living room like a no-nonsense headmistress. Immediately, I glance a photograph of her with the Clintons, then the awards that cluster around her bookshelves – five Tonys and six Golden Globes, for roles as various as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running crime series Murder, She Wrote and Mrs Lovett, the pie-making accomplice of Sweeney Todd in Stephen Sondheim’s musical. On her mantelpiece sits her honorary Oscar, engraved with the words ENTERTAINMENT ICON. “Pick it up,” she says. “Isn’t that the heaviest thing you’ve ever felt?”

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On a bright, clear afternoon in Hollywood, Philip Glass is considering why it might be that, aged 80, he has outlasted his younger friends and collaborators, David Bowie and Lou Reed. He traces it back to the excesses of the Seventies, an era whose hedonism he deliberately observed from the sidelines.

“I didn’t have the money to corrode my body as some of my friends did,” he says wryly. “When I was a young man I was afraid of that lifestyle and I stayed away from it. I hate to put it so crudely, but I gained an extra 20 years of life.”

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Before he was the eponymous tortured detective in Luther, before he was a regal Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, before he was even The Wealth of Nations-toting drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire, Idris Elba was a schoolboy on a bus in east London being pelted with eggs by racists.

“My school, Trinity, was just off the Barking Road, which would take all the National Front supporters to the football at West Ham,” he remembers, leaning forward on a sofa in a production office, in London’s Holborn, that smells of expensive candles and industriousness.

Continue reading at The Telegraph.