As Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights gets a boost from a new film adaptation, we survey the surprising, seditious and sensual ways in which prose has influenced pop

The oeuvre of Katy Perry occasionally has some profoundly unexpected inspirations: California Gurls is spelt in homage to Big Star’s September Gurls, while Firework was based on, wait for it, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, specifically the line about how his favourite people “burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.

To help combat the impact of screen-time creep, the Countdown word supremo has a few suggestions

• Children’s vocabulary shrinking as reading loses out to screen time, says Susie Dent

Children’s vocabulary is shrinking as reading loses out to screen time, the Countdown lexicographer Susie Dent has suggested, as she urged families to read, talk and play word games to boost language development.

Dent, who also co-presents Channel 4’s Secret Genius with Alan Carr, is fronting a new campaign – working with an unexpected partner, Soreen malt loaf – aimed at boosting children’s vocabulary at snack time.

Reading.

Listening to audiobooks.

Sharing word stories and routinely going to the dictionary to find out where words come from.

Playing word games and puzzles, in print, online, with board games, or in the car.

Having conversations while doing active tasks with your child such as cooking or walking.

Asking your child to invent a new word, or to share the latest slang in their class.

Learn another language.

kerfuffle One of Soreen’s choices, kerfuffle is from Scots that describes a commotion or fuss. Children love it because of its sound, but it also adds a touch of humour to an otherwise tricky situation.

mellifluous Not only does this word have a pleasing sound, fulfilling the very quality it describes, but its etymology is also gorgeous – mellifluous comes from the Latin for flowing like honey.

thrill I chose this one because of its secret life. Something thrilling today is always positive, but in its earliest incarnation, to thrill meant to pierce someone with a sword rather than with excitement. The literal meaning of thrill was a hole, which is why our nostrils began as our nose-thrills, or nose holes.

apricity This is one of the many words in the Oxford English Dictionary that were recorded only once before fading away like a linguistic mayfly. Apricity, from 1623, means the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day. The word is as beautiful as the sensation it describes.

susurrus Say this word out loud and you will know its meaning instantly. Susurrus comes from the Latin for whispering and describes the rustling of leaves in a summer breeze.

bags of mystery This Victorian nickname for sausages always makes me smile. It was inspired by the fact that you can never quite know what’s in them.

snerdle English has a vast lexicon for snuggling, from nuddling, neezling and snoozling to snuggening, croodling and snerdling. Each of them expresses the act of lying quietly beneath the covers. Mind you, if you lie there a little bit too long, you could be accused of hurkle-durkling, old Scots for staying in bed long after it’s time to get up.

splendiferous Another of Soreen’s picks, this word has a distinct touch of Mary Poppins about it. In the middle ages it meant simply resplendent, but since the 19th century it has been a humorous description of anything considered rather magnificent.

ruthful The historical dictionary is full of lost positives – words whose negative siblings are alive and well while their parents have faded away. As well as being gormless, inept, unkempt, uncouth and disconsolate, you could in the past be full of gorm, ept, kempt, couth, and consolate. Best of all is surely ruthful, the counterpart to ruthless which means full of compassion.

muscle Another word with a hidden backstory, and this one often makes children laugh. In ancient times, athletes would exercise in the buff in order to show off their rippling muscles (the words gym and gymnasium go back to the Greek for exercise naked). To the Roman imagination, when an athlete flexed their biceps, it looked as though a little mouse was scuttling beneath their skin. Our word muscle consequently comes from the Latin musculus, little mouse.

After a week when it seemed all but over for Keir Starmer, John, Pippa and Kiran unpack how the prime minister survived – and what it means for Labour in the long run

Everything you need to know about buying ski gear: our fashion expert’s top budget brands for goggles, gloves, salopettes and jackets

• How to dress in cold weather

Skiing is expensive. From your lift pass to your equipment hire, transfers, travel and accommodation, it’s not a particularly accessible sport. Luckily, there are ways to curb your spending if you’re heading to the slopes – one of which is your choice of ski gear.

There are several reasonably priced brands that provide quality for a fraction of the price of luxury labels. Sure, you won’t be buying the most technologically advanced gear – if you’re a seasoned skier tackling extreme weather off piste, a high-street jacket probably won’t cut it – but if you’re a touch more fairweather, like me, these products will do the job just fine. And some brands offer a high spec for a relatively reasonable price, too – the North Face and Tog24 always put performance first, for example.

From Yoko Ono to Frida Kahlo, from Louise Bourgeois to Artemisia Gentileschi, women have long been capturing the unvarnished truth about their own bodies – and that’s why my novel Female, Nude weaves them into the plot

‘If you want to paint, put your clothes back on!” That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: “What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?” Or as she put it: “Both image and image-maker?”

The female nude, as depicted and objectified by the male artist, has dominated western art for centuries. Despite decades of feminist efforts, that interaction between the great male genius and his female model – sometimes muse – remains a subject of perennial fascination. To enter a gallery, or to open a university textbook, is to be confronted with a parade of idealised naked females by male artists from Rubens, Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and De Kooning.

Capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much as a wolf cares about a lamb’s. But democratise our economy and a better world is within our grasp

We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.

What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.

Chris Wormald steps down ‘by mutual consent’ after a year in post with Antonia Romeo expected to succeed him

Keir Starmer’s attempt to shake up his top team after the disastrous Peter Mandelson scandal began on Thursday, when he forced out his most senior civil servant with a view to replacing him with Antonia Romeo.

The prime minister announced that Chris Wormald was stepping down “by mutual consent” after just over a year as cabinet secretary, with Romeo almost certain to succeed him as the first woman in the job.

Exclusive: in 2025 briefing to Wes Streeting, officials warned reputation of tech firm behind US ICE operations would hinder rollout of data system in UK

Health officials fear Palantir’s reputation will hinder the delivery of a “vital” £330m NHS contract, according to briefings seen by the Guardian, sparking fresh calls for the deal to be scrapped.

In 2023, ministers selected Palantir, a US surveillance technology company that also works for the Israeli military and Donald Trump’s ICE operation, to build an AI-enabled data platform to connect disparate health information across the NHS.

Seamus Culleton has been held for five months despite having valid work permit and being married to US national

An Irish court apparently issued a warrant for the arrest of the Irish man currently embroiled in controversy with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been ramping up detentions and activity around the United States since last year.

Seamus Culleton has spent five months in US custody and faces deportation despite having a valid work permit in a case that has attracted widespread publicity. His lawyer called him a “model immigrant” with no criminal record.

Inquest concluded Robin Windsor was ‘vulnerable to rejection’ which was among ‘contributing factors’ that led to death

The family of a Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer have told of their “profound sadness” after an inquest jury concluded he took his own life.

Robin Windsor, 44, was found in a hotel room in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, in February 2024.

Rollback of government’s ability to limit climate-heating pollution will make families ‘sicker and less safe’, environmental advocate says

• US politics live – latest updates

The Trump administration has revoked the bedrock scientific determination that gives the government the ability to regulate climate-heating pollution. The move was described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” at the expense of Americans’ health.

The endangerment finding, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.

UK charity warns against excessive academic pressure and suggests reducing the number of high-stakes tests

Exam stress at age 15 can increase the risk of depression and self-harm into early adulthood, research suggests.

Academic pressure is known to have a detrimental impact on mood and overall wellbeing, but until now few studies had examined the long-term effects on mental health.

Spending watchdog says state-owned bank exposed taxpayers to ‘unacceptable risk’ as cost spiral to £3bn

An attempt to modernise the state-owned savings bank NS&I has been a “full-spectrum disaster”, parliament’s spending watchdog has concluded in a damning report.

NS&I (National Savings & Investments), which runs a popular monthly cash-prize draw for premium bond holders, has been criticised by a committee of MPs for exposing the taxpayer to “unacceptable risk” owing to the spiralling costs of its £3bn modernisation programme.

Dispute about rules elevates from insults to fisticuffs, with as many as 20 players becoming involved

A dispute over a rule led to a brawl during a pickleball game at a central Florida country club, authorities said, with one player hitting his opponent in the face with a paddle and punching him on the ground before others got involved.

A 63-year-old man was charged Sunday with two counts of felony battery on a person 65 or older, and his 51-year-old wife, who joined the fight in Port Orange, was charged with a single count of felony battery on a person 65 or older, according to an arrest affidavit.

Skeleton racer sacrificed his dream of winning a medal and succeeded in putting the horrors of the war in Ukraine back on the agenda

To be an Olympic-class skeleton racer requires extraordinary guts and impeccable nerve, as the corners loom and then whoosh past at frightening speed. So did anybody really believe that Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych would lose his when the world’s eyes were upon him?

Not the International Olympic Committee, who flipped between threats of expulsion and sweet talk over the past fortnight, without coming close to changing his mind. And certainly not those of us who have spoken and messaged Heraskevych, and found a man utterly prepared to sacrifice his dream of winning a Winter Olympic medal for a higher purpose.

The Monaco-based billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has said he is sorry that his ‘choice of language has offended some people’, after growing outrage over his comments that the UK was being ‘colonised by immigrants’.

The Manchester United co-owner has faced a mounting backlash since making the remarks, which have been labelled hypocritical and reminiscent of ‘far-right narratives’.

Lucy Hough speaks to the sports writer and columnist Jonathan Liew.

From his public persona to a sense that he sold the country a pup, many factors seem to feed a sense of ‘great dislike’

• UK politics live – latest updates

In yet another confusing and chaotic period for British politics there is one thing on which just about everyone can agree: Keir Starmer is unpopular. Very, very unpopular.

His net favourability rating, the difference between those who have a generally positive or negative view of the prime minister has been, depending on the pollster, anything from -50 to -57, a nadir only beaten by Liz Truss. Recent focus group descriptions of Starmer include a “jellyfish” and a “doormat”.

Doubling of fish biomass and rebounding of endangered species shows government measures starting to work, biologists say

The Yangtze River in China, which has been in ecological decline for 70 years, is showing signs of recovery thanks to a sweeping fishing ban.

The ban was made more effective by the implementation of “evolutionary game theory”, which included finding alternative employment for fishers.

Sadler’s Wells East, London
The all-male French troupe Chicos Mambo mix parody and pointework in a fast-paced comic celebration of dance’s high art and sillier side

When the curtain goes up here in east London, just across town there’s another opening night: fans gathering to worship the late dance theatre icon Pina Bausch, whose Sweet Mambo is at Sadler’s Wells. Whereas on this stage, six men send up Bausch’s choreography and signature style, skewering its cliches. Not that everyone in the audience will know the reference. If you’re not a regular dance-goer, you may just see a bunch of men in long flowing gowns processing around the stage and flinging their long wigs about. But still entertaining.

A lot of Tutu, after all, is just about raising mirth through silly dancing and silly costumes. All-male comedy dance company Chicos Mambo, directed by French choreographer Philippe Lafeuille, have been performing this show for more than a decade, and it seems to be a camp crowd-pleaser. Certainly the costumes are fun: puffy, flamingo-coloured tutu trousers, like a cross between a powder puff and a frilly toilet roll cover; hats that look like vegetables (Why? Why not!).

At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 15 February

There’s fun to be had in Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski’s satisfyingly tech-fearing adventure – but some restraint wouldn’t have gone amiss

Despite directing a phenomenally successful franchise starter (Pirates of the Caribbean), two of its sequels (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End), a smash-hit horror remake (The Ring), an Oscar-winning animation (Rango), and films starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts (The Mexican) and Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine (The Weather Man), Gore Verbinski never quite broke through as a name the average cinemagoer would instantly recognise. There are some through-lines in his work – a dark sense of humour, an ease with pushing megastars past their limits – but he was mostly there in service of something or someone else, whether it be IP or an A-lister.

After both consumed him in 2013’s loathed flop The Lone Ranger, Verbinski went away and returned three years later with an extravagant “one for me”, the ambitious throwback horror A Cure for Wellness. I ultimately admired what he was trying to do (a gothic, exquisitely crafted original chiller with a real budget) more than what he actually achieved, and with another box-office disappointment under his belt, he disappeared again. A longer wait of almost a decade followed, and now he’s back with an even bigger swing, the sci-fi comedy adventure Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

American actor best known for his role in the television drama Dawson’s Creek

For a worldwide generation of young television viewers in the 1990s, James Van Der Beek, who has died aged 48 after suffering from cancer, provided the role model of a sensitive male teenager. As the fresh-faced Dawson Leery in the American drama Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003) – shown in the UK on Channel 4 and then on Channel 5 – he starred in a series portraying friendship, first love and the trials and tribulations of adolescence in the fictional coastal town of Capeside, Massachusetts.

The nerdy Dawson’s idealism and habit of over-analysing often give him unrealistic expectations and a tendency to make long emotional speeches. “It’s not about the kiss – it’s about the journey and creating a sustaining magic,” he reflects in an early episode.

Theatre503, London
Olga Braga’s award-winning play captures the suffocating tensions of a household as war looms – finding flashes of tenderness amid the rising threat

Olga Braga’s stark new play, the winner of Theatre503’s international playwriting award, is a grim portrait of war in Ukraine. This smartly wrought and tightly packed production clings to the moments before Russia’s full-scale invasion of the Donbas in 2022, as Braga conjures a bleak microcosm of war in a cramped Ukrainian home.

Every element of this sometimes overloaded show works hard, with already high tensions within the household increasing as the external threat of Russian occupation creeps closer. Director Anthony Simpson-Pike makes ambitious use of the small stage in his first show as artistic director, while Niall McKeever’s set feigns simplicity only to rip itself impressively apart when invasion strikes.

For many years the prevailing debate about the Maya centred upon why their civilisation collapsed. Now, many scholars are asking: how did the Maya survive?

As a seven-year-old, Francisco Estrada-Belli was afraid all of history would have been discovered by the time he was old enough to contribute. The year was 1970 and he and his parents had come from Rome to visit relatives in the Central American country of Guatemala. On the trip, they visited the ancient Maya ruins at Tikal. “I was completely mesmerised,” Estrada-Belli told me recently. “It was jungle everywhere, there were animals, and then these enormous, majestic temples. I asked questions but felt the answers were not good enough. I decided there and then that I wanted to be answering them.”

Fifty-five years later, Estrada-Belli is now one of the archaeologists helping to rewrite the history of the Maya peoples who built Tikal. Thanks to technological advances, we are entering a new age of discovery in the field of ancient history. Improved DNA analysis, advances in plant and climate science, soil and isotope chemistry, linguistics and other techniques such as a laser mapping technology called Lidar, are overturning long-held beliefs. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to Maya archaeology.

Tax exile has already proven himself a terrible club owner; now his ill-informed diatribe about immigration has poured fuel on wider flames

Well I, for one, am shocked. Shocked to learn that a tax-exiled English expat who made his billions squeezing chemical plants doesn’t have liberal, let alone accurate, views on immigration. Or at least, in public anyway.

It seems highly likely Sir Jim Ratcliffe knew what he was doing in the course of his now semi-recanted Sky News interview. And it is above all vital that at least one part of his empire of influence – football, sport, Manchester United – rejects it, as the club have done to some extent in their statement.

It is not just this doomed government but the Labour party itself that is disappearing before our very eyes

When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the disease. No, what is turning the guy elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow realisation among ministers, colleagues and voters of one essential truth about the man: there is less to him than meets the eye.

His promises get shrunk in the wash. A green new deal is jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act has a large watering can poured over it, a bold manifesto pledge to end Britain’s feudal leasehold laws suddenly grows caveats.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

New proposals that would force poorly paid migrant workers to wait longer for earned settlement are nothing more than an assault on working-class people

• Andrea Egan is the general secretary of Unison

Billionaires and politicians fan the flames of hate, but without migrant workers, Britain would grind to a halt. That’s especially true when it comes to health and social care: more than a fifth of the NHS workforce is made up of migrant staff. The same proportion of care workers nationally are migrants, rising to half in London.

Yet these workers, many of whom are members of Unison, have increasingly become a punchbag for politicians. In particular, they have become a scapegoat for this Labour government, which has sunk to a new low with its proposals on earned settlement. These changes could see low-paid public sector workers, including carers, forced to wait 15 years before being granted indefinite leave to remain, instead of the five years they were promised before they made the decision to come here. These changes would entrench and worsen the environment of fear and exploitation that defines the current system.

Andrea Egan is the general secretary of Unison

As ‘the pressure of the haircut’ enters the game’s lexicon, the extent to which football revolves around winning and losing games appears to be fading

“I don’t care about his haircut at all,” Matheus Cunha said this week. “I don’t really look at other people if they need to go to the hairdresser or not,” Bruno Fernandes said at the weekend. Michael Carrick, for his part, said he was aware of the haircut issue. But the Manchester United coach insisted it would not factor into his team’s preparations for their game against West Ham on Tuesday night.

And so, here we are. Many games of football end up being remembered for reasons far outstripping their original significance: the 1914 Christmas Truce, the 1962 Battle of Santiago, the 2020 pandemic curtain‑raiser between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. To these we can add the Haircut Game: a mildly arresting 1-1 Premier League draw at the London Stadium that posterity will nevertheless recall as the game when a man did not get his hair cut at the end.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The firm remains confident even as the market flips from seeing it as an AI winner to fearing its profit margin will implode

As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market. It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.

This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.

Her comments have been put through Britain’s culture war meat-grinder, but sexuality and gender is as fluid and interesting as we want it to be

Pity Olivia Colman. She didn’t want it to become the headline that she sometimes thinks of herself as a gay man – but clearly forgot how neurotic and demagogic much of the British press becomes if you say anything mildly provocative about sexuality and gender.

Here’s what happened. In an interview last week with the American LGBTQ+ publication Them, when asked about her penchant for taking roles in films featuring LGBTQ+ characters (say, The Favourite or Heartstopper), the actor said that she feels that she has a foot in various camps. “Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always felt sort of nonbinary … I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I get that.’”

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

A report detailing how the careers of female presenters are curtailed should be a clarion call. The problem has endured for too long

As the BBC closes in on a new director general, the possibility again arises that it could be a woman. The talk is of the former BBC One controller Jay Hunt, the former Channel 4 boss Alex Mahon or the former BBC chief content officer Charlotte Moore.

At this point in the BBC’s history, almost everyone would applaud a woman at the top – but clearly the institution needs a lot more than a woman, however pioneering and accomplished, at the helm. We know from the excoriating report commissioned by the broadcaster itself that it has a grave problem with dwindling numbers of “older women” presenters. Trevor Phillips, 72, still shines at Sky, while David Aaronovitch, 71, is deservedly a fixture on Radio 4: they’re just older men, experienced journalists, doing their thing.

Comments on the ‘colonisation of the UK’ by the co-owner of Manchester United were erroneous, crass and a gift to divisive forces in British society

In 2020, the year Sir Jim Ratcliffe moved his huge fortune to Monaco, migrants in the United Kingdom made tax contributions estimated to be worth around £20bn. Sir Jim, by jetting off to a tax haven on the French Riviera, saved himself an estimated £4bn. It took some brass neck for the expat owner of Ineos and co-owner of Manchester United football club to lecture the country, using inflammatory and offensive language, on the perils of immigration.

Where to begin? The statistics used by Sir Jim to back his claim that Britain was being “colonised” by migrants, in an interview with Sky News, were flatly wrong. They were also astonishingly crass, coming from a man who presides over a sporting institution famous for and proud of its global fanbase and international connections.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

A campaign of ethnic cleansing and ‘tectonic’ new legal measures are killing the two-state solution to which other governments pay lip service

Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Physics research drives technological innovation, from medical imaging to data processing, write Dr Phil Bull and Prof Chris Clarkson; plus letters from Tim Gershon and Vincenzo Vagnoni, and Prof Paul Howarth

Your article (UK ‘could lose generation of scientists’ with cuts to projects and research facilities, 6 February) is right to highlight the serious consequences of proposed 30% funding cuts on the next generation of physics and astronomy researchers. The proposals also risk a generational destruction of the country’s ability to produce skilled graduates, retain specialist knowledge, and support physical science in industrial and educational settings.

This comes against a backdrop of wider threats to university finances, from rising costs to declining international student numbers. An estimated one in four UK physics departments are already at risk of closure, and recent cuts and delays to Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grants have further depleted finances and will result in the loss of some highly skilled technical staff.

Government action is needed before it is too late, writes Jill Fitzgerald-O’Connor

Re Larry Elliott’s article (How can Britain regain its manufacturing power?, 5 February), the basis for the revival of our manufacturing industry requires first a shift in attitude that brainwork is superior to manual labour.

Changes to the curriculum are needed so that technically oriented students can pursue courses that are a first option rather than second best. Part of my training as a designer-pattern cutter involved a placement in a factory, an experience now rarely available to fashion students. In the 1980s, the government set up the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to encourage innovation, but there was no follow-on support to encourage production; successful entrepreneurs had to apply for personal loans from banks, limited to the value of their houses.

Conservation efforts to improve red squirrel numbers in mid Wales are being undermined by developers, writes Lorna Brazell of the Cambrian Mountains Society

I was interested to read about the efforts being debated to conserve England’s embattled red squirrel population (‘On a knife edge’: can England’s red squirrel population be saved?, 6 February). In view of the inexorable spread of the greys across Great Britain, it was actually a surprise to learn there are still reds anywhere as central to the island as the Lake District. But it was also a disappointment to find that the article overlooked Welsh red squirrels entirely – despite the significant success of efforts to conserve them on Ynys Môn and the presence of a significant, genetically distinct population here in the Cambrian Mountains.

Reds are, as you mention, the most-missed threatened mammal species of Great Britain, so we cannot afford to ignore any of their few remaining fastnesses. Ideally, we would also be taking concrete steps to protect those places from further erosion of habitat or human disturbance.

Bar blockers | Unlikely book recommendation | Ask AI | The proliferation of potholes | Divine intervention

Queues in pubs (Letters, 6 February)? Hallelujah! Now perhaps elderly women of 5ft 1in will be able to get a drink. I’m not sure which are worse, the big blokes who wave their £20 notes over your head or the ones who, having bought a drink, just stay leaning on the bar. Queueing? Bring it on. Mine’s a large house red, please.
Rosemary Chamberlin
Bristol

• Paul Dacre’s characterisation of a certain book as “written to appeal to a certain section of the Guardian readership” was presumably intended as a put-down, but I took it as a recommendation (Flashes of anger but Paul Dacre keeps his head before court cut-off, 11 February). Can we get more of the same from this unlikely source of advice?
Mark de Brunner
Harrogate, North Yorkshire

• Choi wins snowboard halfpipe title with third run

• American star takes silver behind strong first round

The snowfall coming down on Livigno Snow Park on Thursday night helped produce one of the bigger Olympic upsets in snowboard history, as Chloe Kim’s bid to become the first rider to win three consecutive Olympic halfpipe gold medals fell just short.

Kim finished with a best score of 88.00 from her opening run, settling for silver behind surprise winner Choi Gaon of South Korea, whose heroic third run after an early fall earned 90.25 and rewrote the Olympic record books. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono took bronze with 85.00.

Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron’s Olympic competition is set against backdrop of assault and abuse allegations involving their former partners

The American duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the reigning three-time world champions contentiously missed out on Olympic ice dance gold on Wednesday despite a flawless skate. But the controversy surrounding the event is not merely a debate over artistic and technical merits.

Gold went by a narrow margin to the French duo of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. It was a stunning achievement for a partnership that is less than a year old. But the union was forged after the fallout from sexual assault allegations levelled at Fournier Beaudry’s boyfriend and former ice dance partner, while Cizeron is the subject of allegations of abusive conduct from his erstwhile skating partner.

• American clips gate but given welcome surprise

• US teammates witness event at end of course

Olympic downhill champion Breezy Johnson didn’t add to her medal haul during the women’s super-G on Thursday, but she left Tofane with something precious anyway: an engagement ring.

Johnson, who won gold on Sunday in the downhill, crashed out of the super-G after she clipped a gate with one of her poles, sending her tumbling into the safety fence. However, there was some consolation: her boyfriend, Connor Watkins, proposed to her near the finish line. Surrounded by members of the US Ski Team, Johnson said “Yes!” and the two embraced.

• Igor Medved sent home by country’s Olympic committee

• ‘Alcohol was consumed in violation of our team rules’

Finland’s ski jumping head coach, Igor Medved, has apologised after being sent home for violating team rules by drinking alcohol at the Winter Olympics.

The news was confirmed by the Finnish Olympic committee, who said that Medved had left Italy due to “alcohol-related issues”.

• British racer poised for podium after opening rounds

• Sledder turned in back-to-back Cortina track records

This was the race that will always be remembered for the one man who didn’t make the start. Exactly 21 minutes before the men’s skeleton was scheduled to begin the International Olympic Committee put out its press release announcing that it had revoked the Olympic accreditation of the Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych after he refused to compete without his helmet decorated with the images of his fellow athletes who have been killed during the Russian invasion of his country. It was so late the two British competitors, Matt Weston and Marcus Wyatt said they didn’t even find out about it until after they had finished.

By then, the news had already spread around the world, and the one Ukrainian journalist present, Stanislav Oroshkevych, from tribuna.com, found he was suddenly surrounded by colleagues from Germany, Britain, Japan, and a dozen other countries, all asking him for public comment on what was going on. Soon, the Ukrainian press attache arrived to save him and announced that Heraskevych would come to give an impromptu press conference himself. The photos of Heraskevych standing behind the barriers near the finish, his helmet tucked under his arm, addressing a crowd of 30 journalists, will be one of the iconic images of these Olympics.

This was billed as a test of Arsenal’s mettle after Manchester City had picked themselves off the canvas against Liverpool at Anfield to reignite the title race. But having seen their lead at the top whittled down to three points since the weekend, Mikel Arteta’s side showed their fallibility as they were held by a dogged Brentford side who felt that they should have even claimed victory.

Just when they needed to put in a statement performance, Arsenal were edgy throughout and struggled to create anything of note until Noni Madueke opened the scoring. Keane Lewis-Potter’s equaliser that came from a Michael Kayode long throw was fully deserved as Keith Andrews’ side showed exactly why they are enjoying such a successful season since he stepped up to replace Thomas Frank last summer.

• Villarreal player charged in July with five counts of rape

• Former Arsenal midfielder denies all the charges

The footballer Thomas Partey has been charged with two new counts of rape relating to an additional woman who came forward to police with the allegations in August last year.

Partey will appear at Westminster magistrates court on 13 March in relation to the additional charges issued by the Crown Prosecution Service over allegations that date from 2020.

Manchester United took a big step towards the quarter-finals of the Women’s Champions League by sealing a comfortable lead in the first leg of their playoff against Atlético Madrid after goals from Elisabeth Terland, Melvine Malard and Julia Zigiotti Olme.

“I think it was [a professional win],” a delighted Marc Skinner, the United manager, said. “It was ­difficult for both teams on the pitch. I can understand it with the number of storms they had ... but I did think it affected the football. I thought we were ruthless. The three goals were fantastic. I felt like our defending as a whole team was excellent.”

• York Knights 19-18 Hull KR

• Hingano drop goal earns debutants comeback victory

The most incredible result in Super League’s 30-year history? There are certainly plenty of contenders but as North Yorkshire erupted in joy on the night rugby league’s big show rolled into town for the first time, it was hard to think of anything that measured up to this.

Super League’s decision to expand to 14 teams over the winter has drawn criticism, not least over concerns that the two extra sides may not have brought the sufficient quality to compete at the highest level. Yet York managed not only to get off the mark but to stun the defending, all-conquering treble winners of 2025.

Burnley have the chance of a Cup run, Leicester fear an unwelcome repeat and Brighton fans get a raw deal

Chelsea have kept two clean sheets in 10 games since appointing Liam Rosenior as head coach last month. Repeated doziness at the back has cost them. They have held commanding advantages against Charlton, Crystal Palace, Wolves and Leeds, only to give away silly goals. It is a bad habit and proved costly when a 2-0 lead was squandered during Tuesday’s draw with Leeds. Rosenior was livid afterwards, and is waiting for a consistent performance. Chelsea travel to Hull , Rosenior’s former club, on Friday night. They will surely advance against Championship opponents, but how they do it will matter. It is time for them to get serious. Jacob Steinberg

Hull City v Chelsea, Friday 7.45pm (all times GMT)

Burton Albion v West Ham, Saturday 12.15pm

Burnley v Mansfield, Saturday 3pm

Southampton v Leicester, Saturday 3pm

• Semi-final first leg: Atlético Madrid 4-0 Barcelona

• E García 6og, Griezmann 14, Lookman 33, Alvarez 45+2

You must always have faith, Diego Simeone had insisted and so it was. A biblical storm blew through the Metropolitano, leaving Barcelona in pieces and Atlético Madrid closer to a first Copa del Rey final in 13 years. “I’m not a wizard but I did believe that the team could play like this,” Simeone said at the end of a wild night, yet even he could not have imagined anything quite like this, 45 extraordinary minutes giving his team a 4-0 lead to take to the Camp Nou in three weeks’ time.

“This will remain in the memory however the tie ends,” Simeone said, careful to note that this is not over yet. Hansi Flick, meanwhile, vowed that his Barcelona team will fight, claimed they had been handed a “great lesson” that might yet be helpful, and outlined a plan for the second leg: 2-0 in each half. But an an own goal from Eric García and three more before half-time here from Ademola Lookman, Antoine Griezmann and Julián Alvarez, did the kind of damage that will be mightily difficult to fix. Barcelona could not begin that task here, a Pau Cubarsí effort ruled out after a seven-minute VAR check the only “goal” of the second half. Indeed, another VAR check made their second leg task even harder when Eric García was sent off in the final minutes.

If Tottenham are waiting for Pochettino part two, then season three of Postecoglou might bring the right survival vibes

It’s panic time at the bottom of the Premier League and, if the past couple of days are anything to go by, probably don’t go following Ange Postecoglou into a job any time soon. Others who have followed it more closely can do Nottingham Forest and their 4 (four) managers. This is a piece about Tottenham Hotspur, or as I like to call them, my big team who win things.

November 2023 feels like a lifetime ago. Spurs were top of the league. Angeball was at its peak. Dynamic free-flowing football – they were 1-0 up against Chelsea thanks to Dejan Kulusevski (injured). It’s the 14th minute, Spurs neatly play themselves out from the back down the right, it breaks to Pape Sarr who rolls the ball to Destiny Udogie (injured), and Brennan Johnson (Crystal Palace) steams down the left. He plays a perfect first-time ball with his left foot into the path of Son Heung-min (LAFC), who rolls it home. Tottenham are 2-0 up against a team they lose to at least twice a season.

Seamer was set to spend February helping at his father’s restaurant until late World Cup call – now he’s focused on another England upset

It is fair to say that England’s first two games at the T20 World Cup have not inspired much confidence – unless you’re one of their future opponents. For Scotland, last-minute call-ups after the decision to banish Bangladesh from the tournament last month, English travails have put some extra pep in their step ahead of the now-crucial Group C clash in Kolkata on Saturday.

“Definitely,” says the seamer Safyaan Sharif. “They’ll be feeling pressure because they know they have to win if they want to qualify. Obviously that’s the same with us, but I don’t think we have too much to lose. I think they have more to lose than us. Nepal gave them a good run and they were stressed in that game. They were panicking a lot – you could tell, the way they were playing in the final few overs. So it’s how they handle the pressure.

• Wigglesworth worked with Russell on the Lions’ tour

• ‘He’s one of those guys whose talent speaks for itself’

The England defence coach, Richard Wigglesworth, has admitted it is pointless trying to come up with a plan to stop Finn Russell after getting a closeup view of Scotland’s star fly-half during last summer’s British & Irish Lions tour of Australia.

England head to Murrayfield on Saturday favourites to defend the Calcutta Cup on the back of 12 straight victories while Scotland are reeling after last Saturday’s shock defeat by Italy. England have not won at Murrayfield since 2020, however, and only once since 2016 with Russell proving their nemesis on several occasions.

Elbridge Colby tells meeting in Brussels that US plans to reduce conventional forces in Europe but remains committed to Nato alliance

The Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, has told European Nato defence ministers in Brussels that they need to step up their combat capabilities and take the lead in protecting their continent from the Russian threat.

The influential undersecretary for war, sent by the White House in place of his boss, Pete Hegseth, said the US would reduce conventional forces in Europe but insisted Washington remained committed to the military alliance.

UK officials have seized almost 20m fake pills since 2021, many containing incorrect doses or toxic ingredients

Men have been warned against buying illegal erectile dysfunction pills online after nearly 20m pills – enough to fill two doubledecker buses – were seized in the last five years.

The “stigma and embarrassment” of erectile dysfunction is being “exploited by criminals”, according to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

Exclusive: TSSA general secretary wants Rayner to take over after Gorton byelection which she expects party to lose

The head of a Labour-affiliated union has called for Angela Rayner to replace Keir Starmer, warning that Starmer risks leading the party into a heavy election defeat to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Maryam Eslamdoust, the general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA), told the Guardian she wanted the former deputy prime minister to take charge after this month’s Gorton and Denton byelection.

Exclusive: Manufacturers tell European Commission proposed ban would cause unnecessary confusion

More than a dozen food companies have urged the European Commission not to ban the use of words such as “sausage” and “burger” for non-meat products.

Companies including Linda McCarney Foods, Quorn and THIS have signed a joint letter calling on commissioners to “let common sense prevail” ahead of a debate on the proposed ban, which they say would cause “unnecessary confusion” for customers “without helping anyone”.

• Ratcliffe claimed UK being ‘colonised’ by immigrants

• United say Manchester a city ‘anyone can call home’

Manchester United took the extraordinary step of publicly asserting their “inclusive and welcoming” values after their co-owner Jim Ratcliffe sparked widespread condemnation with his comments about immigration.

In a statement that did not name Ratcliffe but clearly referred to his claims that the UK is being “colonised” by immigrants, United affirmed their commitment to “equality, diversity and inclusion” and described Manchester as “a city that anyone can call home”.

Leaders promise to fight back with court challenges as Trump rescinds finding foundational to US climate rules

Climate leaders gathered outside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters on Wednesday to condemn the Trump administration’s plans to repeal the legal finding underpinning all federal climate regulations, and promised to fight against the rollback.

“This is corruption, plain and simple. Old-fashioned, dirty political corruption,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, senator for Rhode Island, at the rally. “This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters.”

Report by Tony Blair Institute urges government to drop some green policies amid criticism of decarbonisation goal

Tony Blair’s thinktank has accused Ed Miliband of driving up energy prices in his push to make Britain’s energy supply more environmentally friendly.

The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) published a report on Friday criticising the government’s green policies and urging the energy secretary to drop some of them altogether, including almost completely decarbonising the electricity system by 2030.

Continuing extreme weather has caused deaths of 16 people, evacuation of thousands and destruction of homes

• Europe live – latest updates

Portugal is under pressure to draw up plans to adapt to the climate emergency as the country continues to be lashed by an unprecedented series of storms that have killed at least 16 people and left tens of thousands without electricity.

More than 3,000 people were evacuated from the Coimbra area of central Portugal on Wednesday as the Mondego River reached critical levels, while part of the country’s main motorway, the A1, collapsed after a dyke on the Mondego gave way under the weight of flood water.

A pilot scheme in Brooklyn is giving businesses batteries to form an electricity storage network – part of a growing number of innovative DIY energy ideas around the world

In the back of Black Seed Bagels in northern Brooklyn is a giant catering kitchen filled with industrial-size containers of condiments and freezers full of dough. A tall, silver electric oven named the Baconator stands in a far corner, cooking thousands of pounds of meat every week to accompany Black Seed’s hand-rolled, wood-fired bagels. The Baconator is connected to a battery the size of a carry-on suitcase, which is plugged into the wall.

While the morning rush is under way, the 2.8-kilowatt-hour battery can directly power the commercial oven to reduce the company’s reliance on the electric grid, Noah Bernamoff, Black Seed’s co-owner, explained recently at the company’s Bushwick shop. Two more batteries are paired with energy-intensive refrigerators in the front.

Glimpse of sun after weeks of unrelenting rain marks end of longest sunless period in area since records began

Aberdeen has finally had some sunshine, for the first time in 21 days – marking the end of the longest sunless period in the area since Met Office records began in 1957.

Residents of the Granite city in north-east Scotland glimpsed the sun late on Thursday afternoon, with sunshine having been last recorded on 21 January.

Progressive Christians speak of pain and anger as issue is put in deep freeze after London meeting

• The General Synod debate on equal marriages – a timeline

The hopes of progressive Christians in the Church of England have suffered a big blow after years of bitter and divisive debate, with the C of E’s ruling body agreeing to halt work on LGBTQ+ equality.

At a meeting in London on Thursday, the General Synod backed a document from bishops concluding that consensus between conservative and liberal camps within the church could not be reached.

Exclusive: Countdown lexicographer urges families to read, talk and play word games to help language development

• Susie Dent’s tips and tricks to add muscle to a child’s vocabulary

Children’s vocabulary is shrinking as reading loses out to screen time, according to the lexicographer Susie Dent, who is urging families to read, talk and play word games to boost language development.

The Countdown star’s warning comes as the government prepares to issue its first advice to parents on how to manage screen use in under-fives, amid concerns that excessive screen time is damaging children’s language development.

Parents of one child say they fear long-term impact of abuse by London nursery worker, who has been jailed for 18 years

Parents of one of the victims of Vincent Chan have said they live in “constant fear” of the long-term damage the trauma will have on their child, as the paedophile nursery worker was sentenced to 18 years for sexual crimes spanning 14 years.

Vincent Chan, 45, abused young children in his care – engaging in physical sexual abuse, taking obscene photos of them and creating others using software – as well as taking obscene images of himself in a classroom. He also set up cameras to watch women changing or going to the toilet, and sexually assaulted a woman while she was asleep.

Scott Socha, whose company sued to claim trademark rights to Yosemite name, criticized by conservation groups

Donald Trump has nominated the hospitality executive Scott Socha – whose company once sued to claim trademark rights to the name “Yosemite National Park” – to lead the National Park Service.

The nomination of an outsider with business ties to the agency he’d oversee comes at a pivotal moment for the service, which lost a quarter of its staff under Doge’s civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to erase mention of historical events from NPS sites that portray Americans in an unfavorable light, such as slavery.

Ley says she will step away ‘completely and comprehensively from public life’ after losing Liberal leadership ballot to Angus Taylor

• Taylor becomes opposition leader after defeating Ley in Liberal leadership ballot

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Sussan Ley will soon quit politics, saying she plans on “stepping away completely and comprehensively from public life” after being defeated in a party room spill for the Liberal leadership.

The decision sets up a byelection for Ley’s seat of Farrer, which could result in the opposition’s parliamentary numbers dwindling further.

Canadian authorities seized firearms from the residence approximately two years ago but later returned them

Police have said they were called on multiple occasions to the home of the teenage suspect behind one of Canada’s deadliest school shootings after concerns were raised regarding mental health problems and weapons.

Six people, including a teacher and five children, were killed in a school shooting on Tuesday in the western Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge. About 25 other people were injured and two of them remain in critical but stable condition.

Many social media posts by Tesla CEO on his platform are indiscernible from those of white supremacists, say experts

Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.

“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.

Job losses and programming cancellations expected after Tim Davie tells staff broadcaster is not a ‘protected species’

The BBC is to pursue cuts of up to £600m that will result in job losses and the end of some programming, amid concerns at a decline in the number of households paying the licence fee.

Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, told staff that the broadcaster was not a “protected species” and that 10% of the BBC’s costs would have to be cut over the next three years.

CMA and Ofcom to examine DMGT takeover amid fears merger could curb ‘diverging editorial stances’ in press

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has referred the Telegraph’s proposed sale to the publisher of the Daily Mail to the competition and media watchdogs, weeks after she raised concerns about the consolidation of rightwing newspapers.

Nandy said she was using her powers to refer the £500m deal for the Telegraph titles, which include the Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister paper, to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the media regulator Ofcom.

GDP in last three months of 2025 also hit by weak consumer spending, with little momentum going into this year

• Analysis: UK economy limps along at 0.1% growth – but there are reasons for optimism in 2026

The UK economy expanded by only 0.1% in the final three months of last year, according to official data, as falling business investment and weak consumer spending led to little momentum going into 2026.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the economy grew at the same rate of 0.1% as the previous three months. This was less than a 0.2% rise that economists had been expecting.

Consumers and businesses are not yet taking the hint despite six interest rate cuts

• UK economy grows by only 0.1% amid falling business investment

• Business live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves has suggested 2026 is the year Labour can start to deliver on its economic promises; but 0.1% GDP growth in the final quarter of last year is hardly the springboard she was hoping for.

In the supportive message on X she sent on Monday as Keir Starmer’s future appeared under threat, the chancellor claimed “the conditions for the economy to grow are there”.

(Awal)
On her self-released debut, the singer-songwriter championed by Chappell Roan doubles down on the wonky charm that made her go viral on TikTok

We often hear about the damaging impact of social media on pop, from toxic fan culture to the way online gossip reduces lyrics to a treasure hunt for details about artists’ private lives. But it’s also worth noting its positive effects: how TikTok users can make improbable tracks from pop history go viral; how social media can transform the fortunes of an artist who probably wouldn’t have got past a record company’s reception in our current, risk-averse era.

Which brings us to North Carolina’s Isimeme Udu, better known as Hemlocke Springs, who rose to fame posting homemade videos of her songs on TikTok. There’s always a chance that a label might have gone all in on a bespectacled 27-year-old former librarian fond of neon-coloured wigs, purveying “awkward Black girl anthems” via a lo-fi take on 80s-influenced synth pop, but you wouldn’t bet on it. Self-released, her tracks have racked up millions of streams and attracted the attention of Doja Cat and Chappell Roan, both of whom took her on tour: cue a video of Springs supporting Roan at New York’s Forest Hills stadium last autumn, performing Girlfriend while most of the 13,000-capacity audience sings along.

From One Battle to Another to Marty Supreme, supermarket magnates, professors and special agents have been stealing scenes on screen

Striving for realism, Timothée Chalamet knew what the scene required. “I’m really getting in the guy’s face and I’m really trying to get him angry with me,” the lead actor recalled recently about the making of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “I was saying to Josh, ‘He’s not getting angry with me, he’s not getting angry with me.’”

But it turned out the unnamed extra had been paying attention. Chalamet added: “I did another take, and then the guy said, ‘I was just in jail for 30 years. You really don’t want to fuck with me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Holy shit, who do you have me opposite, man?’”

When old school friends reunite at a funeral, they suspect foul play. Cue this frenetic, witty caper from Derry Girls’ Lisa McGee – complete with a sensational performance from Saoirse-Monica Jackson

Three middle-aged women may be all you need for anything. To run a business, raise a village, end a war, retool a civilisation, empty the loft. Even more usefully, you can make a great murder-mystery caper with them, as Lisa McGee (a fourth woman! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) has done with her new series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.

McGee made her name, of course, with Derry Girls – a nigh-on perfect sitcom that followed the trials and tribulations of a group of Northern Irish Catholic schoolgirls (and a beleaguered English cousin) as they went about the chaotic business of growing up in the mid-90s at the tail end of the Troubles. The main characters of the new offering don’t map precisely on to the previous one but the DNA of Derry Girls as an entity remains gloriously alive (is DNA alive? I feel a curious urge to consult Sister Michael). How to Get to Heaven has all of the verve, acuity and havoc dancing on top of the immaculate plotting that you find in McGee’s masterwork. The only difference is that one of the schoolgirls is dead. Probably. Maybe. Perhaps not.

As fans mourn the death of James Van Der Beek, we look back at the show he made a teen sensation

• James Van Der Beek was so much more than just Dawson | Stuart Heritage

• James Van Der Beek: a life in pictures

James Van Der Beek has died at 48, leaving a Dawson-shaped hole in the heart of many a millennial TV fanatic. A role model to all of a certain age, Dawson Leery taught us how to break and enter, how to be a bad friend and, most importantly, how to yearn. His years-long pursuit of the girl next door is still, for some of us, the reason we keep sending late-night texts to people who absolutely do not want to hear from us.

So, as we grieve the floppy-haired man who became the less-hot lead as the series went on, let’s look back at some of the most iconic moments spent in Capeside.

Opening the Berlin film festival, No Good Men blends romance and rebellion, capturing love, humour and female agency in Kabul on the eve of the Taliban’s return

‘Afghanistan’s first romantic comedy” was not the easiest of sales pitches, director Shahrbanoo Sadat admits. But her long shot of a movie landed her the opening slot at the Berlin film festival starting Thursday, sending her in the red-carpet footsteps of the likes of Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers.

Sadat, 35, wrote, directed and stars in the daring, genre-bending film No Good Men, about a budding love affair in a Kabul newsroom on the eve of the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 and the west’s chaotic withdrawal.

Amy Berg’s arresting documentary delves into the early life and untimely death of the 90s singer-songwriter, with extensive contributions from his mother and girlfriends

Some moths are drawn to the flame and some butterflies to the wheel. The exquisitely beautiful, mercurial and prodigiously talented 90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley was drawn to the music business. And this contractually demanded endless touring and a multi-album commitment when he’d already poured his twentysomething-year-old life and soul into the first one, Grace, a hipster-critical smash whose commercial underperformance in the US caused execs to push him ever harder for a follow-up to recoup their investment. The business also created a world where he got to meet his heroes (such as Paul McCartney and Robert Plant), whose extravagant, good-natured praise for him sent this already highly strung young soul over the edge. He was as handsome as Jim Morrison in his sleek prime as well as – to my eye – Adam Ant with a touch of Neil Innes.

Amy Berg’s arresting documentary of a death foretold explains how young Jeff and his mother were abandoned when he was an infant by his father, Tim Buckley, a singer and counterculture figure who was to die of a heroin overdose in his late 20s. Jeff was to die at about the same age, in an accidental drowning in Wolf River Harbor, Memphis, Tennessee, in 1997, when he was just 30.

The film-maker and author narrates this vivid account of his wide-eyed adventures as a young music journalist in 70s America, hanging out with heroes from David Bowie to Led Zeppelin

The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.

Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.

Opéra Royal de Versailles/Angioloni
(Château de Versailles Spectacles)
Doubling as vocalist and conductor, Angiolini is joined by fine singers in this rarely recorded late work. Giacomo Nanni’s sonorous ‘Fra l’ombre e gl’orrori’ is a particular highlight

Premiered in 1732, Sosarme is a bit of a sleeper among Handel’s mature operas, with only Anthony Lewis’s 1954 recording in the current catalogue. That’s a shame, as it possesses emotional depth as well as a swag of memorable arias. Contemporary audiences gave it a warm welcome, though the composer’s last-minute attempt to avoid a diplomatic faux pas by switching settings from medieval Portugal to mythical Lydia hasn’t helped its reputation.

This lightly sprung performance from Opéra Royal de Versailles under conductor Marco Angioloni goes some way to rehabilitating the work, even if the engineered sound and edgy string tone are a little in-your-face. Rémy Brès-Feuillet is honey-toned in the title role, originally a vehicle for the great contralto castrato Senesino, with Sarah Charles suitably soubrettish as his beloved Elmira.

(Capitol)
Spanning 1974-77, this collection shows Wilson was capable of stunning pre-rock’n’roll homage – on the previously unheard Adult/Child – while also writing wayward songs about organic food

We Gotta Groove – The Brother Studios Years, a new 73-track box set, picks up the story of the Beach Boys at a deeply peculiar juncture in their career. On the face of it, they were back on top. Their commercial fortunes had been revived by the huge success of some timely compilations: in the US, 1974’s Endless Summer sold 3m copies, while 20 Golden Greats became Britain’s second-biggest-selling album of 1976. Their leader Brian Wilson was apparently, miraculously, match fit after years of addiction and mental health struggles. “BRIAN IS BACK!” ran the advertising slogan for 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to bear his name as sole producer since Pet Sounds, and the first to be made at their newly founded Brother Studios. Buoyed by a media campaign that included an hour-long TV special, it duly became their most successful album of new material in 11 years.

But, as ever with the Beach Boys, it was more complicated than it initially seemed. As a succession of features noted, Wilson didn’t seem to be terribly well at all. A Rolling Stone writer dispatched to meet him was startled when Wilson asked him for drugs midway through the interview, and expressed grave doubts about Eugene Landy, the controversial psychologist supposedly responsible for Wilson’s recuperation. A Melody Maker journalist who saw the Beach Boys live that summer declared that Wilson “shouldn’t be subjected to being propped up onstage”, noted that he looked visibly distressed and made no musical contribution. Rather than a triumphant return, 15 Big Ones was a hastily thrown-together mess of cover versions and wan new material, its sessions marked by disagreements, not least over whether Wilson was even capable of producing an album. The band’s members openly disparaged it on release: Dennis Wilson bluntly described one track as a “piece of shit”. The public who bought it seemed to lose interest quickly: the Beach Boys did not score another Top 10 album of new material for 36 years.

Whether making microtonal pop or playing Renaissance instruments with sheep bones, a crop of bold artists are making genuinely strange music go mainstream – but are they at the mercy of the algorithm?

Chloë Sobek is a Melbourne musician who plays the violone, a Renaissance precursor to the double bass. But instead of playing it in the traditional manner, she puts wobbling bits of cardboard between its strings or uses a sheep’s bone as a bow, and these weird interventions have become catnip for Instagram’s algorithm, getting her tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of views for each of her self-made performance videos. “Despite how it might appear, I’m a reasonably shy person,” she says.

When Laurie Anderson’s robo-minimalist masterwork O Superman hit No 2 in the UK charts in 1981, thanks to incessant airplay on John Peel’s radio show, it was a signal of a media outlet’s power to propel experimental music into the mainstream. That’s now happening again as prepared-instrument players such as Sobek, plus experimental pianists, microtonal singers and numerous other boundary-pushing solo performers, are routinely breaking out of underground circles thanks to videos – generally self-recorded at home – going viral on TikTok and Instagram.

Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

A portrait of the company whose ‘toymaker philosophy’ stands in contrast to the tech giants that rule our lives

What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?

Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.

Sixteen authors – including Lea Ypi, Lyse Doucet and Barbara Demick – are in contention for the £30,000 award, launched to address a historic gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism

In December 1941, the Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that, on his recent leave in Berlin, he had been thoroughly disgusted by what he saw. While his comrades were dying at the front, plenty of young men appeared to have dodged military duty and were now to be found carousing in Berlin’s packed bars. The women were no better: husbandless but flush with ration coupons purloined from soldiers on leave, they were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany,” huffed the complainant, “we would have lost this war years ago.”

Berlin had always been a case apart. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political radicalism, not to mention louche living – had continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiantly itself and, despite the efforts of high command, mulish about being told what to do. That, at least, had been the situation in 1941.

We explore the cosy world-building spin-off with Game Freak’s Shigeru Ohmori and his fellow developers – and learn how it began with a Pokémon-hunting dream

Pokémon is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, and everybody knows what to expect from these games by now. The concept is simple: head into a cartoonish paradise full of whimsical creatures, capture them in red-and-white balls and assemble a team of warriors from them, before battling other aspiring Pokémon masters. But the latest entry in the series is different – a game that’s more about building than battling.

In Pokopia, a refreshingly pacific twist on the series, players are dropped into a virtual world where Pokémon are freed from their spherical prisons and happily roam their natural habitats. There’s one minor caveat – you have to create those habitats by hand, building them from what you can find.

The YouTube gaming star’s weird and divisive adaptation of his obscure horror film is a game within a film about a game – and hints at new directions for storytelling

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Something weird struck me early on while watching the movie Iron Lung, which has so far taken $32m at the box office, despite being a grungy low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an independent video game few people outside of the horror gaming community have even heard of. Set after a galactic apocalypse, it follows a convict who must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he’s looking for relics that may prove vital for scientific research, but what he finds is much more ghastly. So far, so strange.

The film was also written, directed and financed by one person – the YouTube gaming superstar Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach – who also stars. But that’s not the weird part, either. The weird part is that watching the film Iron Lung feels like watching Fischbach play Iron Lung the game. Maybe it’s the fact that he spends most of the movie sitting at the sub’s controls, trying to figure out how to use them correctly – like a gamer would. Maybe it’s that, as the film progresses, he has to solve a series of environmental puzzles linked by various codes, computer read-outs and little injections of narrative – just like in a video game. Long periods of the movie involve Fischbach trying to decide what to do next, the camera close up on his confused face. This is incredibly similar to watching his YouTube videos about playing Iron Lung, an experience he often found bewildering. It was the most metatextual experience I’ve had in the cinema since The Truman Show – but I’m not sure this is what Fischbach intended.

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, PC; Grasshopper Manufacture/Marvelous Inc
After some dumb fun hacking at zombies, legendary developer Suda51’s first original game in a decade sadly only delivers a host of incoherent disappointments

Ever since he baffled GameCube owners with 2005’s Killer7, Japanese game director Suda51 has had a reputation for turning heads. From parodying the banality of open-world games with 2007’s No More Heroes to collaborating with James Gunn for 2012’s pulpy Lollipop Chainsaw, his games often offer a welcome reprieve from soulless, half-a-billion-dollar-budget gaming blockbusters. It was with considerable excitement that I fired up Suda’s first new game in 10 years.

The game kicks off with a slick cartoon that shows our hero, Romeo Stargazer, being eaten by a zombie. Hastily resurrected by his zany scientist grandfather, Romeo returns from the brink imbued with new powers – and then we’re off. Almost immediately I am bombarded by an impenetrable wall of proper-noun nonsense. It’s like this for the next 20 hours.

Trading social media for Pokémon battles and evolutions in Kanto on a Game Boy Advance has been surprisingly serene

Cutting back on doomscrolling must be one of the hardest new year resolutions to keep. Instinctively tapping on the usual suspects on your phone’s home screen becomes a reflex, and vast quantities of money and user data have been specifically employed to keep you reaching for the phone, ingraining it into our work, leisure and social lives. You’ll get no shame from me if you love your phone and have a healthy relationship with your apps, but I’ve found myself struggling lately.

This year, I’m attempting to cut back on screen time – sort of. I’m replacing the sleek oblong of my smartphone with something a little more fuzzy and nostalgic. In an attempt to dismantle my bad habit, I’m closing the feeds of instant updates and instead carrying around a Game Boy Advance. I’ve been playing Pokémon FireRed, a remake of the very first Pokémon games, which turn 30 this month. Even this refreshed version is more than two decades old.

Sadler’s Wells, London
Tanztheater Wuppertal’s dancers treat the audience like lovers in an entrancing show of seductive elegance

Pina Bausch had a pair of secret weapons in Matthias Burkert and Andreas Eisenschneider, who jointly sought out music to match her uncanny dance-theatre and make it so indelible. In Sweet Mambo, the German choreographer’s 2008 production for Tanztheater Wuppertal, their eclectic compilation complements the seductive elegance of set designer Peter Pabst’s huge, billowing white drapes and the sumptuous gowns provided by Marion Cito.

Track by track, an entrancing through-line is found in Sámi joiking, torch song, folk, electronica and ambient music. The mix extends to the unclassifiable party sound of Hazmat Modine’s Bahamut, harmonicas and tuba boosting a late burst of loosey-goosey abandon from dancer Daphnis Kokkinos while his colleagues are wrapped and spun upside down in those curtains.

Royal Festival Hall, London
George Benjamin conducted this meticulously programmed and beautifully executed concert of his own Palimpsests alongside music by Scriabin, Stravinsky and Ravel

Shimmering colours, translucent textures and illuminating shafts of light were the order of the day as the London Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence George Benjamin donned his conductor’s hat, bringing his trademark rigour and precision to a meticulously programmed concert of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ravel and Benjamin himself.

Sensuality ruled in Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy, a single-movement symphonic ode to joy. Languorous strings and woodwind indulged in voluptuous foreplay, spurred on by priapic brass, only to fall back repeatedly as if momentarily sated. Benjamin exerted an impressive control over his vast forces – nine horns, no less – refining the composer’s unrestrained textures before ramping up the adrenaline for a climactic explosion of hedonistic pleasure.

Hull Truck
In a stark modern staging, Mark Babych frames the tragedy as a story of ordinary lives spiralling into catastrophe

For a play that ends so bloodily, Macbeth starts like an improvisation. It is a tragedy of opportunism, of a moment of hubris that spins out of control. For a while, it could go either way.

That comes across in this staging, directed by Mark Babych in a three-way co-production with Bolton Octagon and Derby theatre. Macbeth strides on, fresh from the battlefield, a modern-day soldier with camouflage colours and an automatic weapon. Played by Oliver Alvin-Wilson, he is as tough as his country needs him to be: serious-minded and professional, but not self-seeking.

At Hull Truck until 28 February. On tour until 18 April

Courtauld Gallery, London
This quietly tremendous exhibition gathers more than half of the pointillist painter’s works, all depicting the Channel coast and sea, full of blizzards of light and a quivering sense of import

Georges Seurat died young. His two most famous paintings, both extremely large and innovative in their composition and technique, were completed while he was still in his mid-20s. As it was, Seurat painted approximately 45 paintings before his death, probably from diphtheria, in March 1891 when he was 31. More than half these works depict the Channel coast and sea and were completed on his summer trips between 1885 and 1890. Seurat and the Sea at the Courtauld is the first exhibition to be devoted entirely to these images. Twenty-three paintings and smaller oil studies, and three drawings hang in two rooms. It is a quietly tremendous exhibition.

Even if one takes on board the artist’s claims to science, objectivity and his adherence to theories about colour and perception which distance him from impressionism, Seurat’s paintings are peculiar and strange. Sometimes his line is very odd and stiff, yet his drawings themselves – tonal studies worked in conté crayon on textured, laid paper, are among the most marvellous I can think of. It is clear Seurat knew what he was doing; who knows what he might have gone on to achieve?

Actor pens emotional handwritten letter to remember late Dawson’s Creek co-star as show creator also shares his grief

• James Van Der Beek was so much more than just Dawson

• James Van Der Beek: a life in pictures

Katie Holmes has shared a handwritten letter to her late Dawson’s Creek co-star James Van Der Beek.

The actor, who played Joey in the era-defining teen drama series, posted a tribute on Instagram addressed to Van Der Beek, who died this week at the age of 48.

Early projections suggest Emerald Fennell’s adaptation could recoup its $80m production budget in its opening three days – with strong US and overseas takings expected

The titillating trailers and method-dressed promotional tour appear to have paid off: early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will earn back its $80m (£59m) production budget on the first weekend of release.

Projections estimate the three-day frame, which falls on Valentine’s weekend, should recoup around $50m (£37m) at the US box office – where it opens across 3,600 screens – and a further $40m (£29m) overseas.

Kasho Iizuka’s feature casts trans actors to revisit a notorious 1965 trial that made gender reassignment illegal for more than 30 years. He explains why the history remains unfinished

The so-called “Blue Boy trial” in 1965 was a landmark moment for trans visibility in Japan. Now it has become a landmark film, directed by Kasho Iizuka, a transgender man and one of very few queer film-makers working in the commercial Japanese film industry.

The original legal case concerned a doctor who was prosecuted for performing gender reassignment surgery on transgender women, amid law enforcement frustrations that female-presenting transgender sex workers could not be prosecuted for their profession due to their being legally male. The doctor was found guilty of violating Japan’s eugenics laws, which prohibited surgeries resulting in sterilisation if they were deemed inessential. “Blue Boy”was a slang term for transgender individuals assigned male at birth, and the verdict effectively outlawed gender reassignment surgery in Japan until 1998. Despite this, the case raised the domestic profile of transgender people.

The Complicité founder remembers his teacher’s wicked laughter, provocative demands and infinite generosity

• Philippe Gaulier dies aged 82

Many speak of a teacher in their childhood who changed them, someone who reveals knowledge about the world they carry with them for the rest of their lives. I didn’t have one of those. It wasn’t until I was 24 and living in Paris, where I stumbled into Philippe’s class almost by accident, that this happened. Provocative, demanding, deliberately inappropriate and utterly hilarious, Philippe taught me not to carry anything. No baggage, no ideas; knowing nothing is all you need. Because we are all ridiculous.

His mother was Spanish, and we would eat her meals with relish when she came to cook for him, or rather with him, in his appartement lined with his writings, many of which had “rêves” inscribed on the spine. He would refer to his father as “ce salaud bourgeois” (that bourgeois arsehole) and he delighted in telling me the story of being thrown out of school aged eight because he punched the gymnastics teacher who was trying to instil discipline into young boys by turning them into military martinets.

Stuart Vevers wants the luxury brand to keep championing upcycled materials and reduce landfill waste

Stuart Vevers, the British designer of the American mass luxury brand Coach, is working to keep sustainability in the spotlight at New York fashion week. Not an easy task, when environmental concerns are slipping down the global agenda and fashion, perennially a mirror to the world we live in, has reverted to putting profits first.

“I’m an optimist, but it’s not a blind optimism. There’s a lot of tension in optimism, because the world is challenging and I am not ignoring that. My optimism comes from believing that the young people of today are going to make this world better,” he said before Wednesday’s show, held in the historic Cunard building in downtown New York.

Kevin thinks wardrobes are there for a reason, but Mabel says hangers are a hassle for a woman in a rush. You decide who deserves a dressing down
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Mabel’s clothes mountain gets in the way and sets a bad example for our sons. I call it the ‘Monster’

Kevin is exaggerating the size of the pile. I like living in organised chaos and he should accept that

Sedentary lifestyles are bad for us, but which under-desk treadmills and walking pads are worth the cost? Our expert stepped up to find out

• The best treadmills for your home

Various guidelines suggest we all try to walk at least 10,000 steps a day to improve our health and wellbeing. Public Health England encourages a slightly more manageable target of just 10 minutes of brisk walking daily to introduce more moderate-intensity physical activity and reduce your risk of early death by up to 15%.

However, even squeezing in “brisk walks” can be a chore, with busy schedules and increasingly desk-bound jobs forcing more of us to remain sedentary for long periods. That is where walking pads come in, being lighter, smaller and often easier to store than bulky and tricky-to-manoeuvre running treadmills.

Best walking pad overall:
JTX MoveLight

Best budget walking pad and best for beginners:
Urevo Strol 2E

Our expert shares saucy gifts for every experience level and relationship status – from feather ticklers to Fairtrade massage bars

• The best vibrators, tested

I won’t beat around the bush (although I will suggest some devices that can do that for you very efficiently): Valentine’s Day is coming up, so you may well be looking for some saucy gift suggestions for your other half.

As an award-winning expert who’s worked in the sexual wellbeing and pleasure sector for more than two decades, I’ve trialled thousands of vibrators and stimulators, lotions and potions, and a whole A-Z of BDSM bits and bobs. In fact, I have an entire loft room in my house dedicated to storing all my X-rated testers, samples and prototypes. I’m a trustworthy source when it comes to sauciness, so here are my top Valentine’s gift suggestions, whether mild or wild – all tried and tested. From a turmeric latte massage bar to a crotchless teddy, let’s get stuck in.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? The Fundamentally author talks bodices, Chanel and regrettable heels in the Filter’s column

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Dr Nussaibah Younis is a peacebuilding practitioner and a globally recognised expert on contemporary Iraq. For several years, she advised the Iraqi government on proposed programmes to deradicalise women affiliated with Islamic State. She studied at Oxford, Durham and Harvard universities, and has a PhD in international affairs.

Younis has published op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and the New York Times. She was born in the UK to an Iraqi father and a Pakistani mother, and lives in London. Her debut novel, Fundamentally, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction in 2025 and is published in paperback on 12 February.

From capsule to bean-to-cup, espresso to filter, these are the coffee makers our aficionado rates the highest from his test of 29

• The best espresso machines to release your inner barista

When it comes to something as earth-shatteringly important as coffee, everyone has an opinion. Some crave a single perfect shot of espresso, while others seek the milkiest latte; some love Starbucks and others, well, don’t. This is why the idea of there being a single best coffee machine is fanciful – everyone’s idea of the perfect coffee couldn’t be more different.

As a selfless service to coffee drinkers everywhere, I’ve spent the past year researching and trialling coffee machines to produce a shortlist of tried-and-tested recommendations. The list spans all the main types of coffee maker: manual espresso, filter, bean-to-cup and capsule. (Not sure what all of this means? Read our dedicated guide to the different types of coffee machine.)

Best budget manual coffee machine:
De’Longhi Stilosa EC230

Best budget bean-to-cup coffee machine:
De’Longhi Magnifica Evo Start

Once thought of only for vodka and lager, Poland is in the midst of a wine-making revival that’s infiltrating restaurant lists, bars and independent suppliers

Swap the staid stereotypes of Żubrówka vodka and Żywiec lager for vineyards and vintages, because Poland is in the throes of a viticultural renaissance, the likes of which hasn’t been seen for centuries. On a road trip tracing Poland’s best terroirs back in the summer of 2023, I met winemakers going against the grain, unshackled by tradition and producing unpretentious, expressive pours that more than merit a place on your dining table.

Lately, Polish wines have been cropping up all over bar and restaurant lists: Niemczańska’s chardonnay at London’s most emblematic Polish restaurant, the borscht-fronted Daquise in South Kensington, say, while chic bar Spry in Edinburgh has started stocking my favourite producers, Dom Bliskowice, Kamil Barczentewicz and Nizio. But you won’t find bottles nestling between the neat rows of kabanos sausages of your local Polski sklep, nor lining the supermarket shelves. Or not just yet, anyway.

Victoria Brzezinski is co-author of Drinking the World: A Wine Odyssey, published by Pavilion Books/HarperCollins at £22. To order a copy for £19.80 go to guardianbookshop.com

Along with its crisp, earthy galettes – suitable for Pancake Day and, really, any time of the year – this French region has so many delicious things to eat

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Every February – or occasionally March – I get together with two friends to gorge on pancakes; I provide the pan, Caro does the cocktails and poor old Harry is invariably the chef because she never fails, even three ciders in. With two half-Frenchies in the room, we always start with buckwheat galettes, usually served complète with gruyère, ham and a fried egg (though the more we eat, the more adventurous the combinations become). Then we move on to softer, thicker British sweet pancakes with lemon juice and crunchy demerara sugar to finish. We rarely manage to meet on Shrove Tuesday itself, but apart from the year I went vegan for Lent, that’s no problem. After all, any cold, dark evening is improved by a pancake party.

I suspect we’re not alone in sticking with the classics, so I’m not going to suggest too many alternatives, but, given that pancakes are not just for the 47th day before Easter, I do like the sound of Nigel Slater’s ones stuffed with cheese and caramelised onion, I know I’d love Yotam Ottolenghi’s Austrian kaiserschmarrn and, though they’re as flat as they sound, Jimi Famurewa’s Nigerian-Dutch puff puff pancakes look incredible. Oh, and there’s Meera Sodha’s Indonesian-style salted peanut and chocolate pancakes, while Claire Ptak’s fluffy cardamom pancakes with thyme-spiked figs certainly aren’t just for Christmas.

Shaken and rubbed in a cloth, this simple Italian classic has never tasted better

Nightclubs, mechanics, restaurants, a theatre, a wholesale butcher and an Apostolic church occupy some of the network of caves and tunnels that, over the centuries, were burrowed into Monte Testaccio, an ancient rubbish dump hill in the middle of Rome that’s made entirely of broken amphorae. Some places make a feature of their situation, revealing sections of pots not dissimilar to the cross section of snapped wafer biscuits, while others have smoothed the curves with plaster.

A few use the caves as originally intended – that is, as natural warehouses offering steady low temperatures and good humidity. In short: the ideal temperature for storing certain foods and wine. Most recently, Vincenzo Mancini, whose project DOL distributes artisanal products from small agricultural realities in Lazio, has taken over a deep cave behind door 93, reclaiming it as an urban ageing space for cheese and cured meat. I visited a few months ago with the chefs from Trullo in London, to do a cheese tasting – and to eat an unexpected cacio e pepe.

A creative way to use up leftover gherkin brine that can be tweaked to suit your own tastebuds through experimental use of optional extras

Depending on country, region, household or restaurant, every cook makes tartare sauce in their own way. Inspired by Auguste Escoffier’s exceptionally simple tartare, I’ve given his recipe a zero-waste twist by using whole boiled eggs and swapping in pickle brine from a jar of gherkins or capers to replace the vinegar. Everything else is optional: tarragon, mustard, cayenne … add what you like or have in store.

Traditionally, tartare sauce is delicious with fish and chips, calamari or in a chicken sandwich, but I also like it tossed through potato salad with tinned sardines and radicchio. It’s also great as a dip with crudites and on top of a steaming jacket potato.

Being codependent is often seen as a bad thing. But a new book makes the case for ‘healthy dependency’

Many of us desire deeper relationships. What we don’t always agree on is how close is too close. Dating advice often casts intimacy as a tightrope – pull back too much, or push for more. Either move is read as a red flag. Between discussions of incompatible attachment styles, the importance of boundaries and the dangers of love-bombing, it’s easy to get the impression there’s a correct level of closeness to aim for.

In truth, intimacy isn’t one-size-fits-all and comfort levels vary – not just between individuals, but across their relationships.

I was quite spoiled and he could be a little dour. But on that terrible day, when he was just two blocks away when the South Tower exploded, I realised he was all I wanted

I met Chris in the college bar in 1997. I was part of a group of visiting American students visiting the University of Oxford – we kept ourselves to ourselves in the first few weeks of term – and he leaned over from the next table to talk to me. I saw his one-dimpled smile and the cocky way he tipped his chair back on two legs and I thought: “Uh-oh, here’s trouble.”

Despite the fact that I was only at Oxford for one term, we quickly became a couple – and stayed together. When he finished university and started working in London, I returned to North Carolina to finish my English degree. We visited each other when we could. He made a surprise appearance at my 21st birthday party; we spent a New Year’s Eve in Paris.

After a sexually frustrating marriage led to divorce, I chased increasingly extreme BDSM encounters. But I never felt truly satisfied. Had I been looking for the wrong thing all along?

To everyone else, it probably looked like a regular summer’s evening. Couples and families enjoying the beer garden, people playing cricket on the green – and I was being handcuffed in the passenger seat of a 4x4 by a man I barely knew.

My name is Leesa, and I’m a recovered sex addict.

She made a special night even more special for these two young people – and gave me something special too

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Adolescence leaves its mark on everyone but for my son the marks have been particularly obvious. I’ve lost track of how many casts he’s had. He loves electric bikes and at various times this has led to a broken arm, a broken hand, a broken leg, a wide variety of cuts and grazes, and terrifyingly close calls with much worse.

It also led to him getting a job as a delivery rider for the local Domino’s Pizza, which valued him for his speed (another broken wrist) and his ability to be cheerful in the face of unhinged customers. Once, after getting no answer when he buzzed a flat and phoned, he left a woman’s pizza on her doorstep. She called him “the scum of the earth” and promised he would lose his job and never get another one.

More young Americans are taking on side gigs to explore their passions and make extra cash while navigating an unstable job market

Aashna Doshi, a software engineer at Google, is constantly monitoring her headspace. “This way I don’t burn myself out,” she said. “And I stay a lot more consistent with my podcast and content creation work.”

On top of her day job in the tech giant’s security and artificial intelligence department, Doshi also publishes social media content about working in tech and her life in New York City, and records podcasts – sometimes all three in a day.

Whether you want the basic safety net or complete rescue package, the bill depends as much on what’s needed as what is included

It is not a legal requirement to have breakdown cover – it is a safety net to ensure you are not left on the roadside if something happens to your vehicle. But you should be aware of all of the policy’s limitations when you buy one.

We had to buy a new ticket after an air traffic control outage but the airline is giving endless excuses for not repaying us

The day before my easyJet flight to Budapest last July, a UK air traffic control outage caused significant disruption at Gatwick.

On my arrival at the airport check-in, easyJet staff refused to issue me with a boarding pass because a smaller aircraft, with fewer seats, had had to be substituted. This left 35 passengers unable to board.

Secure, noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds that shine for exercise and everyday use on Android and iPhone

Apple’s revamped compact workout Beats earbuds stick to a winning formula, while slimming down and improving comfort.

The new Powerbeats Fit are the direct successors to 2022’s popular Beats Fit Pro, costing £200 (€230/$200/A$330). They sit alongside the recently redesigned Powerbeats Pro 2 as Apple’s fitness alternatives of the AirPods.

This unofficial diagnosis describes the anxiety-driven, compulsive obsession with living as long as possible. While it might seem healthy to monitor your diet, exercise and biomarkers, it can come at a huge emotional cost

It was a pitta bread that finally broke Jason Wood. It arrived with hummus instead of the vegetable crudites he had preordered in a restaurant that he had painstakingly researched, as he always did, weeks before he and his husband visited. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry … I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it any more, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself.”

Today, Wood, 40, speaks calmly. Neat and groomed, he seems orderly by nature. But at that time, his attempts to control every aspect of his life had spiralled. He painstakingly monitored what he ate (sometimes only organic, sometimes raw or unprocessed; calories painstakingly counted), his exercise regime (twice a day, seven days a week), and tracked every bodily function from his heart rate to his blood pressure, body fat and sleep “schedule”. He even monitored his glucose levels repeatedly throughout the day. “I was living by those numbers,” he says.

It is one of the most powerful involuntary actions the human body can perform. But is a big sneeze a sign of illness, pollution or something else entirely?

How worried should we be about a sneeze? It depends who you ask. In the Odyssey, Telemachus sneezes after Penelope’s prayer that her husband will soon be home to sort out her house-sitting suitors – which she sees as a good omen for team Odysseus, and very bad news for the suitors. In the Anabasis, Xenophon takes a sneeze from a soldier as godly confirmation that his army can fight their way back to their own territory – great news for them – while St Augustine notes, somewhat disapprovingly, that people of his era tend to go back to bed if they sneeze while putting on their slippers. But is a sneeze an omen of anything apart from pathogens, pollen or – possibly – air pollution?

“It’s a physical response to get rid of something that’s irritating your body,” says Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist and professor at the University of Manchester. “Alongside the obvious nasal hairs that a few people choose to trim, all of us have cilia, or microscopic hairs in our noses that can move and sense things of their own accord. And so if anything gets trapped by the cilia, that triggers a reaction to your nerve endings that says: ‘Right, let’s get rid of this.’ And that triggers a sneeze.”

Experts say dangerous sleep apnoea affects an estimated 8 million in the UK alone, and everything from evolution to obesity or even the climate crisis could be to blame

When Matt Hillier was in his 20s, he went camping with a friend who was a nurse. In the morning she told him she had been shocked by the snoring coming from his tent. “She basically said, ‘For a 25-year-old non-smoker who’s quite skinny, you snore pretty loudly,’” says Hiller, now 32.

Perhaps because of the pervasive image of a “typical” sleep apnoea patient – older, and overweight – Hillier didn’t seek help. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he finally went to a doctor after waking up from a particularly big night of snoring with a racing heartbeat. Despite being young, active and a healthy weight, further investigation – including a night recording his snoring – revealed that he had moderate sleep apnoea. His was classed as supine, the most common form of the condition, meaning it happens when he sleeps on his back, and is likely caused by his throat muscles.

Americans are expected to devour nearly 280m pounds of avocados during Super Bowl weekend. Are they actually healthy?

Most American adults today didn’t grow up with avocados, but we’ve certainly developed a hearty appetite for them. In 1990, the United States imported 38m pounds of avocados; by 2023, that number was 2,789m, mostly from Mexico.

On average, each of us eats about 20 avocados, or 9lbs of the fruit, a year – a sixfold increase from 1998. Super Bowl guacamole alone fuels a staggering demand for the fruit; in the lead-up to this Sunday’s game, Americans are expected to devour nearly 280m pounds of avocados, a historical record.

The combination of denim with heels is more than a trend – it elevates both you and your look

On the Notes app on my phone, among the to-do lists and the half-drafted email replies, I have a random list called Things That Are Just Always Chic. Wearing a watch that only tells the time. Having a signature scent. Black Ray-Ban sunglasses. All-white flowers in a vase. Also: wearing jeans with high heels.

Jeans with heels gets me every time. The woman who walks into the room in jeans and heels looks as if she owns the place, in a good way. It is a style language that speaks to everyone, confident and direct, a woman who is on top of her brief but also fun. The impact is stronger than a casual outfit, more compelling than a formal one.

Whether it’s Zendaya in tennis-inspired shoes, Cynthia Erivo dressed in green, Margot Robbie as Barbie or Jenna Ortega in shredded black leather, today’s movie stars rarely disappoint on the promo circuit

‘Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?” Kristen Stewart said last year, the implication being that method acting is the exclusive preserve of a particular type of man, unburdened by caring responsibilities or needing to be agreeable. But what is available to all actors (without getting their teeth pulled, taking magic mushrooms or demanding to be spoon-fed on set) is method dressing: that is, promoting a film in an outfit inspired by their character.

Everyone seems to be doing it, particularly in the past few months as Wicked: For Good and now Wuthering Heights have hit the red carpet. Why? It’s a low-stakes way to offer an extra endorsement for the film the actor is promoting (they liked it so much they’re willing to stay in character) and to drum up column inches and excitable TikTok commentary. It can also be a knowing wink – a gift, even – to fans. Some actors (or their stylists) include subtler sartorial semiotics and Easter egg accessories in their outfits that only the hardcore fandom and fashion nerds can appreciate. Either way, there’s a lot of it about. But who are the Daniel Day-Lewises and Robert De Niros of promo tour dressing?

Unabashedly grand collection featuring velvet and beading is teamed with knits and loafers to reflect fashion in the real world right now

Ralph Lauren is the US’s poet laureate of style. His brand came of age in a gilded era of American charm, when Bill Clinton was president, the economy was booming and the twin towers glittered on the Manhattan skyline. His clothes speak to an America of sportsmanship and vigour, where everyone has a firm handshake and perfect teeth.

The US could use some poetry right now, and Lauren is still the man. In fact, at 86, he is the hottest designer at New York fashion week.

Surprisingly few products cater for people with a mixture of dry, balanced and oily skin. The ones that do shoulld be key to your regime

Given that combination is probably the most common skin type, it’s frustratingly under-served, especially when it comes to moisturisers.

In practice, day creams, lotions and gels marketed for those with a combination of dry, balanced and oily areas often only play to the latter condition. They add no oil and shine to the chin, nose and forehead, but offer only fleeting comfort to tight, parched areas around the cheeks.

Being a passenger in this vast country is ‘a full-blooded immersion in the local’, says the novelist whose latest protagonist is lured by the romance of the rails

I carry my train journeys in my bones, the juddering song of the Indian rail. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously likened India to a palimpsest, no layer quite effacing the one that went before. That’s how I think of Indian railway journeys. They inscribe on the mind our fellow travellers, our ways, our thousand languages, our landscapes, our climate.

I think of a rail journey I made in 1998 – that brutal summer of nuclear testing – setting out from Mumbai, in an ordinary three-tier sleeper, for Dehradun, 1,000 miles (1,600km) north. The frazzled train fell off any semblance of a schedule. The voyage grew longer, past 50 hours; hotter, past 50C. I remember the metallic burn on the window grilles; the hot, killing wind that blew through them; the sizzle of water drops splashed on the face when theyhit the uncovered platforms in the heart of the country; the melt of my rubber soles. A fortnight later, having trekked to the mouth of a tributary of the Ganges, completing my expedition from the Arabian Sea to a Himalayan glacier, it was possible to look back on the rail ordeal with affection.

As a teenager I wondered what I would have in common with this Nordic island. Then my teacher gave me a book of poetry

Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.

Sauðárkrókur, a fishing town in the northern fjord of Skagafjörður, was all mountain, sea and valley. There were no trees to slow the Arctic winds, and I had already been blown sideways into a snowbank while walking home from Fjölbrautaskóli Norðurlands vestra, my new high school whose name I could not yet pronounce. At night, my dreams were filled with a soundscape of weeping women. When I woke, their wailing continued in the gusts outside. That was when I wrote. I wrote to understand myself in this new place. I wrote to understand Iceland, its brutality and its beauty.

A transformative conservation project encompassing East Anglia’s large but secluded Fritton Lake has high-end hospitality and nature-rich experiences at its heart

The scene is entirely black, white, grey and silver. It is cold, unusually dark and a film of ice is forming on the lake. I’m sitting in an unlit wooden sauna, alone, in immense silence. The only noise is the soft ticking of the stove as the heat rises. Across the water are ghostly silver birches and dark pines. Above them, Orion’s Belt shines bright. This vivid experience feels like midwinter in Canada, Finland or anywhere else about 60 degrees north. So it’s bizarre to know I’m a few miles south-west of Great Yarmouth.

Fritton Lake is an anomaly. Like the Broads to the north, this deceptively big, sinuous lake was largely created by medieval peat-digging, but it’s nothing like its Norfolk cousins. Set in a sandy, hilly landscape of heaths and pines, the northernmost outpost of the wildlife-rich strip of sandy heathlands running up the Suffolk coast, the lake is deep and two miles long but so hidden by trees that many people don’t know of its existence.

Like many Alpine areas faced with declining snowfall, Villach had to make a difficult choice: bring in the snow cannons or reinvent itself

Walking up a winding trail in the Dobratsch nature park in Carinthia, surrounded by picturesque snowy slopes dotted with pines, we hear shrieks coming from round the corner. The path is as wide as a one-way street but Birgit Pichorner, the park ranger I’m taking a tour with, motions for me to move to the side, where we watch a couple with wide grins glide past on a wooden toboggan.

We have seen families out hiking with young children and speed walkers pacing for the summit, while on a trail above us, four skiers are zigzagging up one of the nature park’s designated ski touring routes. For residents of Villach, the southern Austrian town at the foot of Dobratsch, this is very much their Hausberg, a much-loved “locals’ mountain”, says Birgit.

It can feel overwhelming, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But ask yourself what sacrifices make the biggest proportionate impact

• Read more Leading questions

I’m finding it difficult living up to my morals – where is the line between compromising a little, versus becoming complicit in what I don’t agree with?

I’m one of those people who believes we can each take a role in solving big problems, and that we should try to make things better where we can. For this reason, I’ve ended up working in public service and try to reduce how much meat I eat. I’m vegetarian 60% of the time, which is not perfect, but I believe doing something is better than doing nothing.

Andreas Graf lived without screens and no idea of the date or time. The conditions were often brutal – but he found kindness and friendship as he rode

In April 2022, Andreas Graf set off on his bike from his home in Norway. His dream was to cycle to India. A week later, having reached Sweden, it was already becoming more of a nightmare. “It was pouring with rain and I was lying in my tent in my half-wet sleeping bag and I was like, I could be in my very cosy Oslo apartment,” he says. “I had this good life, a career, a partner, and I had left everything behind.”

He was 31. Friends were settling down. Graf had a well-paid job in industrial engineering, but was still renting in a houseshare. “I had started to think about whether to make a financially reasonable and sensible decision, or do something else. I went for option two.”

A limited-time collection of Ryan Gillett’s illustrations from the Saturday magazine series is now available to buy here, only until 23 February

The Guardian Print Shop presents a curated selection of works from This is how we do it – the infamous Saturday column where couples share the naked truth about their sex lives.

The Brighton-based illustrator Ryan Gillett creates hand-drawn, textured illustrations full of warmth and charm for each column. His signature characters reveal human foibles with humour and depth, while his imaginative approach brings playful, unexpected twists that highlight the delight and complexity of human nature. Buy your print here

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Welcome to the Thursday quiz, 15 questions designed to see whether you’re the one asking the questions this week, or whether you’ve been happily swaying along to someone else’s melody – or about to be yeeted out of Downing Street like an inept contestant on The Traitors. You will be tested on topical news, general knowledge and pop culture. There are no prizes, but you can let everybody know how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 234

As AI job losses rise in the professional sector, many are switching to more traditional trades. But how do they feel about accepting lower pay – and, in some cases, giving up their vocation?

California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university. Though she hadn’t been able to make a full-time living from her favourite pastime – fiction writing – post-university, she consistently got writing work (mostly content marketing, some journalism) and went freelance full-time when she was 26. Sure, content marketing wasn’t exactly the dream, but she was writing every day, and it was paying the bills – she was happy enough.

“But something really switched in 2024,” Bowman, now 30, says. Layoffs and publication closures meant that much of her work “kind of dried up. I started to get clients coming to me and talking about AI,” she says – some even brazen enough to tell her how “great” it was “that we don’t need writers any more”. She was offered work as an editor – checking and altering work produced by artificial intelligence. The idea was that polishing up already-written content would take less time than writing it from scratch, so Bowman’s fee was reduced to about half of what it had been when she was writing for the same content marketing agency – but, in reality, it ended up taking double the time.

The culture secretary talks about secret briefings, the need for solidarity and why the government must recognise its big moment of reckoning

It is the day after the night before. On Monday, Keir Starmer looked as if he was on his last political legs. At lunchtime, the Scottish Labour party leader Anas Sarwar called for his resignation, but by the evening, the troops had rallied, and the prime minister had survived the worst. At least until the Gorton and Denton byelection later this month.

Now it’s Tuesday afternoon and there’s a hush around 100 Parliament St, home to the government’s culture, media and sport department. It’s hard to know whether this is its natural state (it’s also the headquarters of HMRC), or whether the country’s politicians and civil servants are in a collective state of shock.

Warning: this video contains footage that may be distressing to some viewers.

In October 2025, 122 people were killed in what would become Rio’s deadliest police operation. ‘Operation Containment’ was designed to arrest members of one of Brazil's most powerful organised crime groups, the Red Command.

Three months after the police raid many questions still remain, but the Guardian's investigation found that at least one person killed was not a gang member. Police chiefs and conservative politicians have hailed it as a historic blow to organised crime but activists, security experts, the families of the dead, and even Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have called a disastrous and futile massacre.

A team of journalists across the Guardian has pieced together police body-camera footage, satellite imagery and pictures and video posted to social media to get the clearest picture to date of what happened that day.

• Rio’s bloodiest day: the untold story of Brazil’s most deadly police raid

Reform UK was voted into power in several English councils last May – we want to hear from residents about their experiences so far

Following the May 2025 English local elections, Reform UK won more than 600 seats and took control of 10 councils, including Kent and County Durham.

Reform campaigned on promises to cut waste, lower council tax and change how councils are run. Since taking office, it has said it is delivering savings and a new approach, while critics have questioned some of its claims and accused the party of breaking pledges not to raise council tax. The Reform-led Worcestershire county council is likely to issue England’s largest council tax rise this April.

We would like to hear from people about the impact of the wet weather conditions in the UK

Persistent rain and flooding is affecting farmers, builders, sports, wildlife – and damaging roads and homes across the UK.

Parts of Devon, Cornwall and Worcestershire have seen rainfall daily for the last 40 days, while provisional Met Office statistics show that Northern Ireland experienced its wettest January in 149 years. Wales has reached 39% of its February monthly average rainfall already.

Tell us about your favourite trip in Wales – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

From the vast sandy surf beaches of the Gower to the peaks of Eryri national park (Snowdonia), Wales has no shortage of world-class natural attractions. But we’d love to hear about some of your favourite under-the-radar discoveries, whether it be a perfect hiking or biking trail, an intriguing small museum or attraction, or just an unexpected diversion which turned into the highlight of your trip.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

We want to hear how the fall in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and ether are impacting people

Bitcoin sank to its lowest value in more than a year this week, faling to $63,000 on Thursday, about half its all-time peak of $126,000 in October 2025

It’s part of a wider shock to crypto prices. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, has faced losses of more than 30% this year alone.

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