People
VATICAN CITY — Bob Dylan came knockin’ on Pope Leo XIV’ s door Wednesday, as the American singer-songwriter and poet visited with the American pope at the Vatican during a break between concert dates in Italy.
The Vatican said the encounter was brief, with Leo giving Dylan a rosary and Dylan presenting the pope with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Leo had quoted from an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb,” in his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.”
Leo was warning against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons and quoted the lyric, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.”
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo; and Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo, and the two met in private for a few minutes. In an essay in L'Osservatore Romano, he recalled that the former Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan's music.
He also noted that Dylan was very familiar with St. Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration of Leo's spirituality and Augustinian religious order, penning “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
LONDON — The former Prince Andrew has been called to testify as a witness in a civil fraud trial, marking what is believed to be the first time in more than 150 years that a member of the royal family has received a witness summons, British media reported Wednesday.
The summons comes after a judge at the High Court in London gave the green light last month for the former prince, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, to be called to testify about payments he allegedly received from the parties in the case. Mountbatten-Windsor may apply to have the summons set aside, so there is no guarantee he will testify.
The lawsuit was filed by Turkish national Nebahat Evyap Isbilen, who alleges that her former adviser Selman Turk misappropriated tens of millions of pounds of her money. As part of the case, she says Turk misled her about a 750,000-pound $1 million payment he arranged for her to make to Mountbatten-Windsor in 2019.
Mountbatten-Windsor, a younger brother of King Charles III, repaid the money in 2021 and he is not a party to the suit.
Turk claims that Isbilen authorized the payment in hopes that Mountbatten-Windsor might be able to use his connections to help her husband, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 2015. Isbilen alleges that her husband is the victim of political persecution.
NEW YORK — In Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” John Malkovich plays an itinerant CIA officer, Chris, weary from his travels. But Chris has got nothing on Malkovich's miles.
Over his 50-year career, Malkovich has performed live in 47 countries, by his count. He’s played a serial killer in Hamburg. He’s directed “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” in Paris. He’s done George Bernard Shaw in Bulgaria.
“It’s probably not by an accident that the first film I ever developed was called ‘The Accidental Tourist,’” Malkovich says, chuckling. “It just kind of happened and I went along with it. It’s a big world.”
Malkovich is best known for his screen credits, including “Empire of the Sun,” “Of Mice and Men,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Being John Malkovich” and the new“Wild Horse Nine,” in which he plays a dying CIA man on Easter Island who, after a lifetime of toppling governments and carrying out assassinations, is increasingly eager to spill the beans. The performance — mordant, droll, elegiac — is a big-screen apogee for Malkovich. He's favored to win what would be his first Academy Award.
But if Malkovich is experiencing a moment of public celebration at 72, it’s also a reminder that he has, if not eschewed the spotlight, seldom sat still long enough for it to linger. Instead, Malkovich has preferred an ever-moving, endlessly curious life on the road.
“I’m a worker, and this isn’t part of my work,” Malkovich said in an interview on his way through New York. “I rarely go to openings. I rarely see a film I’m in. I’m rarely asked to promote because I’m already gone.”
