Culture lane

‘I have made myself a hate magnet’

Roseanne Barr has given an emotional interview, saying she feels remorse for the racist tweet that prompted ABC to cancel the revival of her show Roseanne. Barr recorded a podcast interview with her longtime friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. On Sunday, he published an edited transcript and recording of the conversation, in which Barr says she “never would have wittingly called any black person a monkey.” She has since blamed the tweet, aimed at former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, on the sleeping drug Ambien and deleted it.

ABC swiftly announced the cancellation of the top-rated show, and has recently announced a spin-off, with working title The Connors, which will star most of the cast, although not Barr. Barr spoke through tears for much of the interview with Boteach, her first since the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot. The pair spoke about theology and Barr’s study of the Torah, and Boteach invited her “to set the record straight”.

“How do you, someone who looks at Martin Luther King as an idol and loves the Torah ... how did you write something that people feel is in complete contravention of that values system?” he asked. “I didn’t mean what they think I meant. And that’s what’s so painful. But I have to face that it hurt people,” Barr said. “When you hurt people even unwillingly there’s no excuse. I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses. But I apologize to anyone who thought, or felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I, in fact, did not mean. It was my own ignorance, and there’s no excuse for that ignorance.”

Diversity row: Shriver replies to critics

Lionel Shriver has responded to the vituperative row that followed her recent comments about Penguin Random House’s diversity scheme, saying that it was not diversity but quotas that she was objecting to and calling out what she described as the “malicious misinterpretation” of her original essay. In a piece for the Spectator this month, Shriver objected to the publisher’s goal for its staff and authors to represent UK society by 2025. “Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’etre as the acquisition and dissemination of good books,” she wrote. “Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision.”

Authors including Hanif Kureishi and Meena Kandasamy hit back at Shriver for her comments and she was dropped as a judge for a short story competition set up by the magazine Mslexia.  — a project set up by PRH to support writers from minority backgrounds — said that “Shriver seems to view diversity and quality as mutually exclusive categories”.

She has now replied , saying that she supports a similar diversity programme at HarperCollins and that “such proactive outreach is exactly the approach I endorse for helping to vary the voices on our bookshelves”. She had not taken exception to the WriteNow programme, she stressed. What she objected to was PRH’s quest to have its staff and authors mirror the UK population by 2025, because she dislikes “diversity quotas, in publishing or anywhere else”.

Weird exhibits at Horniman Museum

The Horniman Museum’s new director is surrounded by more than 3,000 objects collected over a century ago to show the English how fascinating, different and frankly weird the rest of the world was, but the object he loves most was made in the past year. The “eco-warrior’s helmet”, covered in spikes of sea shells, was created by the New Zealand artist Chris Charteris as an emblem of the resourcefulness of the Kiribati nation, whose archipelago homes are imminently threatened by climate change and rising sea levels.

“That is just such a cool thing. I really want to try it on,” says Nick Merriman.The new displays, which have transformed the largest gallery of the Victorian museum, located in Forest Hill, south London, also turn an anthropologist’s eye on western Europe and the English. They include a large collection of healing charms assembled by the intriguing Alfred William Rowlett, who worked variously as a farmhand, dustman, antiques dealer and traditional healer.