I found being a Booker judge hugely rewarding. All the works on our shortlist will change how you see the world

• This year’s Booker prize shortlist

As a Booker judge, I think I have worked harder than I have ever done before. Reading 163 novels in six months, making careful assessments, being ready to argue for your judgment, going back to check you haven’t got it wrong … in some ways it took more energy than actually writing a book. But it was also hugely rewarding and fun. I shall never forget the discussions in our regular judging meetings, and the pleasure of discovering how we had sometimes reached almost exactly the same view of a book, and sometimes dramatically diverged. There were no big newsworthy squabbles, but a lot of discussion, a lot of listening and re-reading.

When each new batch of 30 or so novels arrived at home, through the spring, I plunged in and picked them out at random (only occasionally cheating by selecting a slim volume when I felt I needed to get my total up!) But so that you have more to go on, here is a quick guide to each of the books on the shortlist – in strictly alphabetical order.

This week, as the war in Gaza approaches its fourth year, the Guardian follows five ordinary Palestinians as they go about their lives. Each tells the story of their day, revealing the terrible toll of the conflict. Ramadan lives in a tent on the beach and works to support his family

As the war in Gaza approaches its fourth year, this week, the Guardian follows five ordinary Palestinians as they go about their lives. Each will tell the story of their day, revealing the terrible toll of the ongoing conflict.

The tent is pitched on a platform set in the sloping sand dunes, above a long expanse of golden coastline. Rats have chewed holes in its canvas sides, and tendrils of pale sand blow in through the gaps. Inside, on the torn mattress he shares with his siblings, 12-year-old Ramadan Ghaban blinks the sleep from his eyes. The sun has just risen but it is already hot.

I wake up every morning at 6.30am. Sometimes, the heat wakes me up, and sometimes it is the sound of the birds, which are everywhere because we live near the sea.

Amid genuinely touching passages about his sister, the earl can’t help but put himself and his grievances centre stage

Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, a memoir of his relationship with his sister, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer – perhaps more than we needed to know. If that sounds snarky, after 400 pages of score settling, chest thumping, wild indiscretion and some truly touching passages about his late sister, the reader is left with a head-spinning story of the world that created Diana and a certain sourness at the manner in which it is told.

Let’s start with the headlines in last week’s Daily Mail, the newspaper to whom Spencer sold serialisation of a book which includes a line describing tabloid journalists as “those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls”. Perhaps he meant a different set of hacks. Anyway the top line in the Mail was that, shortly after Diana’s death, King Charles insulted her in a phone call to Spencer: “‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.’” Your take on this quote will likely dictate how you receive the book, and here’s mine: I’m willing to believe the king behaved badly, but “hissed” is a red flag, one of those embellishments, like “snarled” or “flounced”, that writers tend to use to make those they’re writing about appear worse. Spencer, always the injured party, has so many axes grinding away in this book that at times it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying.

In her new book, The Case For Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out, Lindsay Crouse discusses the costs and traps of never giving up – and how she set herself free

Lindsay Crouse used to define herself as not a quitter.

She went to Harvard University, where she learned to become even more high-achieving and ambitious, then landed an assistant job at the New York Times and worked her way up to become an opinion writer and producer. On the weekends, Crouse ran marathons and did endurance sports, clocking new personal bests throughout her thirties.

The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse is out now

Our cartoonist on Manchester United’s billionaire joint-owner showing a startling lack of self-awareness

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In more than two decades in the Prison Service, Pia Sinha gained a reputation as a fixer. Now, as head of the Prison Reform Trust, she’s sounding the alarm about overcrowding and other problems

Pia Sinha has led the Prison Reform Trust since 2023. In that time, she has seen a Conservative government finally admit to an overcrowding crisis that had tipped over the edge. (It was in October 2023 that the early release scheme was devised; by May 2024, the Tories had also launched Operation Safeguard, using police cells as temporary housing.) She’s watched a change of government, then a change of prime minister, then Andy Burnham instantly assailed by negative headlines as the consequences of that early release scheme unfolded: prisoners had to actually be released early. “We’re a bit concerned about how [Burnham] has handled it,” she says, in the trust’s scruffy, un-corporate offices in central London, “but that’s in the knowledge that he had a bit of a hospital pass.”

To recap on Burnham’s handling: when he came in in July, he paused the scheme for an urgent review; in August he announced a series of exclusions, further crimes for which people couldn’t be released early, including manslaughter and death by dangerous driving. That solved an immediate problem, that the killers of PC Andrew Harper would otherwise have been released, but had the knock-on effect of reducing the numbers expected to be released by about a quarter. The conversation Sinha wants to have is what prison overcrowding looks like, what it does to prisoners and staff – and what it means for society.

US president says British PM has a ‘lot of assets on his side’ as pair meet at UN in New York

Donald Trump has praised Andy Burnham as a “natural businessperson” and said the UK was “more up” than under Keir Starmer. But he berated the UK for its decision to give up the Chagos Islands.

In their first face-to-face meeting, Trump gave a warm assessment of the relationship, saying he thought Burnham had a “lot of assets on his side” and would be a “great prime minister”, adding: “We talked about everything from Rolls-Royce to energy to immigration – we covered a lot.”

Counter-terrorism police say ‘long-running investigation’ disrupted alleged plot days after two men arrested on eve of the holy day Yom Kippur

Police believe they have stopped an imminent plot to attack Jewish communities in the Manchester area.

The announcement on Tuesday follows the arrest of two men on Sunday at 2.45pm in Manchester and comes during the Jewish holy month.

Charity’s head coach ‘shocked’ after Sunderland council leader says it will not support ‘politically charged’ groups

Anti-racism education in some schools will be scrapped after a city council now led by Reform UK ended its 30-year support for the charity Show Racism the Red Card.

Announcing the decision last week, the Reform leader of Sunderland city council, Christopher Eynon, said it would no longer support “politically charged organisations with an agenda”.

Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman delisted in what Ireland’s EU presidency calls ‘a difficult compromise’ for the bloc

The EU has agreed to remove two Russian billionaires, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, from its sanctions list, while extending restrictions on nearly 3,000 individuals and companies accused of supporting the war on Ukraine for the next three years.

With an end-of-Tuesday deadline looming to preserve the Russia blacklist, the EU’s 27 member states found a compromise that meant delisting the two oligarchs in spite of very few countries wanting this outcome. EU sanctions have to be approved unanimously.

Brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, says ‘accuracy is important’ as he responds to broadcaster’s threat to sue over claims made in memoir

Earl Spencer has apologised to Piers Morgan for incorrectly claiming in his new book about Diana, Princess of Wales, that the former tabloid editor was behind the publication of intrusive photos of the late royal in the mid-1990s.

Morgan had earlier threatened to sue Spencer over “fabricated inaccuracies” and “examples of brazen falsity” in the book, which was published on Tuesday.

South Carolina medical examiner says ‘no signs of trauma’ and ‘the manner of death has been ruled accident’

Hayden Panettiere died from a fentanyl overdose, according to the Greenville county coroner’s office.

Medical examiners in South Carolina confirmed the 36-year old actor’s cause of death on Tuesday, saying: “The cause of death has been ruled as toxic effects of fentanyl, 4-ANPP, Alprazolam, Methocarbamol and Quetiapine.”

Entire £233m budget for 2026 allocated in less than a day, leaving thousands of farmers disappointed

Thousands of farmers have been left empty-handed with the government’s 2026 nature funding spent in just six hours.

The £233m sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme opened for applications from farmers at 10am on Tuesday.

The two authors are in the running for the £50,000 award alongside a Pulitzer winner, a science fiction legend, a comic writer and a debut novelist

• Booker judge Mary Beard on this year’s shortlist

This year’s Booker prize shortlist features some very familiar names – previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running once more, along with Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout and prominent British speculative fiction writer M John Harrison.

Novelist and poet Luke Kennard and debut novelist Rebecca Perry are also in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on Monday 9 November.

James, the Jamaican writer who took home the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, was shortlisted this time for The Disappearers. Set in Aids-era Jamaica, the novel centres around an attack on a group of queer men rehearsing John Herbert’s prison-set play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Coming in at 640 pages, it’s the longest on the list.

Church, a prominent supporter of Palestinian causes, criticises Sheeran over removal of Macklemore from US tour

Charlotte Church has accused Ed Sheeran of choosing “consumerism and capitalism over doing the right thing” over the removal of his friend and support act Macklemore from his US tour.

Sheeran’s tour was thrown into crisis after Macklemore made “free Palestine” declarations on stage. After a significant backlash, including pressure from the owners of stadiums hosting scheduled shows, the rapper was removed from the tour. Shortly afterwards, Sheeran’s other support acts quit in solidarity.

As diet trends proliferate on social media, it can be hard to work out which are backed by science and which should be ignored. From paleo to keto, raw food to intermittent fasting, each attracts a tribe of ardent followers. Now Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological sciences at Harvard University, has written a book to try to cut through the noise. In Fed Up, he uses his background as an evolutionary anthropologist to scrutinise the evidence, turning himself into a guinea pig in the process and trying various diets. In this podcast, he tells Ian Sample which one has remained part of his routine

White House press coverage row continues while anchor-less channel of the administration’s ‘latest and greatest’ streams propaganda for the Maga faithful

Donald Trump’s previous television career centred on his role on The Apprentice, but the US president’s latest media venture is a rather lower-budget affair: the launch of Trump TV in the wake of his ban on several outlets from covering the White House.

With major US networks agreeing to not cover the president while the dispute continues, on Monday the White House announced the new 24/7 YouTube live stream, which it promised would feature “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place”.

Fifa president continues to lobby for re-election despite no other candidates coming forward to challenge him

For Gianni Infantino there is no international break. The Fifa president is widely expected to make an appearance at the United Nations general assembly this week in New York, where he will lobby heads of state for their federations’ support as he continues his campaign to be re-elected next year.

Infantino has not been idle during the lull since Fifa abandoned its World Cup sell-off plan last month, instead crisscrossing the globe on a private jet provided by Qatar Airways as part of its sponsorship deal with world football’s governing body.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The retired diver talks scrapbooking, cheap chargers, and trouser fails with the Filter

• How I Shop with Laura Jackson

Tom Daley OBE is a retired professional diver who has won five Olympic medals, including gold at Tokyo 2020. Since retiring from competitive diving, he has hosted Channel 4’s Game of Wool: Britain’s Best Knitter, while continuing to share his passion for knitting and crafts through his Made With Love brand and YouTube channel. He is married to US screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and the pair have two children.

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Alongside warnings about its ability to destroy humanity, artificial intelligence is also hailed for its potential to revolutionise health treatment. Just how far can it take us?

Her name was June. June would be the last month she ever knew.

I remember the way her bed made her so small, swallowed her up in the middle of the room, turned as it was to face the window. With her liver failing, her skin was a ghostly apricot. June – I called her Nan – had been stalked by the king of terrors, the emperor of all maladies: cancer. That son of a bitch.

It might seem a perfectly natural thing to do. But, on TikTok, a recruiter has expressed her dismay at gen Zs showing up with a takeout drink – and it’s caused a ruckus

Name: Iced coffee.

Age: Colonial troops in Algeria invented a sweetened cold coffee beverage known as Mazagran in around about 1840. However, in Japan, a cold brew was popular among sailors even earlier, in the 17th century.

When an athlete soiled herself at a hybrid fitness event, it sparked a debate about a culture that pushes people to ignore their body’s signals at real cost

How far would you go to secure an impressive marathon time, or a Hyrox personal best? Maybe you’d turn down a boozy night out in favour of eight hours’ kip the night before? Or perhaps you’d swap sugary treats for protein shakes, and commit to a gruelling training plan in the run-up? It’s not uncommon for athletes to want to give it their all come race day – but few of us would go as far as the Australian Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk, who continued to take part in the hybrid fitness event a little over a week ago, despite having noticeably soiled herself.

Wietrzyk’s immediate response appeared to be one of defiance. “Go hard or go home … a win is a win,” she said in a now-deleted Instagram post, having been allowed to finish and win the event in Beijing. Hyrox organisers initially seemed to back her position, posting a statement (also now deleted) which said: “We ask our athletes to push themselves to the highest levels. At times, they will go beyond what even we thought was possible.”

Videos of cats and dogs transfixed by Netflix kids’ show Sealook – or pawing at its characters – are everywhere. We tried to find out why … and asked a goldendoodle for its verdict

Ozzy the four-month-old goldendoodle isn’t normally allowed on the sofa. But today he has been granted special privileges because I’ve come round specifically to watch TV with him. We’re not watching Paw Patrol, Scooby-Doo, or even Crufts. We’re watching Sealook, the Netflix kids’ cartoon about a colony of seals that dogs and cats online are supposedly obsessed with. But is this really a thing? And will Ozzy care?

I hit play. A gang of wide-eyed pastel-coloured seals are in a slapstick scrape. There’s no dialogue: they mostly lie around on the ice, and try to annoy each other by doing silly things like making funny noises, throwing snowballs or keeping each other awake. Ozzy seems more interested in chewing his pizzle stick – which I discover, slightly too late, is the dried penis of a bull. Then again, perhaps this is just canine second-screening: Sealook on the telly, bull penis in the mouth.

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Drug gangs have moved off Britain’s streets and into vulnerable people’s homes. Addicts like my friend are easy targets, but the reality can be more complicated than it seems

Duncan is a good friend of mine. He looks like a Dickensian rock’n’roller: tall and skinny, long hair, retro clothes. He’s read the Flashman novels three times. We met in secondary school in west London in the early 1980s. We got drunk, smoked Rothmans and banana skin spliffs and played Dungeons & Dragons. At 14, we got into punk together and spent our teens playing music and seeing live bands. As we moved into our 20s, I trained as a journalist and Duncan, a talented songwriter and guitarist, carried on with music.

At the age of 23 he got involved in heroin. He found the lifestyle immediately seductive, his partner at the time, Lucy, told me. He would often befriend his dealers. “I remember more than once waiting in his car as he’d gone up some tower block to score, thinking where on earth is he?” Lucy said. “He’d be hanging out chatting. There were some genuinely fascinating characters with incredible stories to tell.”

Most stars, and especially women, are endlessly expected to explain the past: the lessons learned and all the regrets. But not Tom – it’s Hollywood’s free pass

There really is no press tour like a Tom Cruise press tour – which is why there have not really been any Tom Cruise press tours for a very long time indeed. We’re now at the stage of this one where even the interviewers have been forced on to the interview circuit to defend their interviews.

Anyway: Cruise. The guy has one child with ex-wife Katie Holmes who dropped his surname as soon as she was legally allowed, and two Scientologist children widely reported to be effectively estranged from their mother, Nicole Kidman. The divorces from Kidman and Holmes were clearly deeply strange and traumatic events for both women, and have remained shrouded in unusually watertight and presumably contractual secrecy. Yet you can currently find Tom Cruise promoting his latest movie not being asked about any of this stuff, or indeed any of his other extensive “stuff” – as always – but instead doing things like giving Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast a lecture on the benefits of VistaVision. Hate to say it, but a woman could never.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist. Her new book is What a Time to Be Alive! To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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.

Jake and Logan Paul were invited to give a motivational speech. Just don’t let them get involved with military policy

We’re now approaching month seven of a war against Iran that Donald Trump repeatedly assured us would be over in a matter of weeks. Prices are rising, troop morale is plummeting, and there is little evidence things will improve.

The situation is so desperate that the decision makers at the Pentagon have decided to bring out the big guns. I’m not talking about nuclear weapons, although Trump recently threatened to “blow the entire nation [of Iran] up”. No, I’m talking about influencers Jake and Logan Paul, who are famous for doing idiotic stunts on YouTube and getting hit in the face during boxing matches. Last Thursday, Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense or whatever they’re calling it these days (the Department of War Crimes?) welcomed the Paul brothers to Washington DC “to meet with our warriors” and deliver a motivational speech. In response, former Republican congressman and air force officer Adam Kinzinger wrote, “We aren’t a serious country at the moment.” That about sums it up.

The issue cannot be avoided any longer. Andy Burnham and his chancellor must face the fear of a pensioner backlash, and find a fair solution

There is always something oddly unreal about party conference season. In theory, everyone is getting away from Westminster to better reflect on the state of the nation. In practice, the whole circus just briefly relocates to the coast, to live off warm white wine and gossip for three days, before coming back with a streaming cold. But this year, reality seems more elusive than usual.

Everyone knows hard choices loom, but everyone is frightened to make them. Every serious party needs billions of pounds to fund their promises, and everyone knows there’s an obvious place to find the money, but nobody wants to be the first to say so. And so a deferential silence shrouds the pension triple lock, whose future will be vigorously debated on the fringes and in private conversation this autumn, but less so on the stage.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Mark Rutte has the right idea – go beyond Washington and make the case for the transatlantic alliance to the public. They may well have a willing ear

At a moment when Europe is focused on persuading Donald Trump to remain committed to Nato, it needs to convince Americans, too. So the presence this evening of the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, in front of a public audience in Des Moines, Iowa, is significant. This is the home town of Trump’s ambassador to Nato, Matthew Whitaker, and the visit brings the debate over Nato’s future directly to a midwestern audience in a red state that operates far from elite foreign-policy circles in Washington. Rutte’s appearance is long overdue.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and uncertainty over the US commitment to European security have forced European leaders to confront their dependence on Washington. While some are pressing for building European capabilities as a means to separate from the US, others see greater European defence spending as essential to keeping the US engaged. Either way, European governments can’t rely solely on meetings with Trump to secure the alliance’s future.

It’s becoming obvious to many Americans that corporations have been raking it in while workers take it on the chin

Last week, the unlikely duo of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon both spoke before a Washington group demanding a stop to AI and its datacenters.

Notably, both lambasted the corporate oligarchs behind AI.

I took him to university this weekend, and it reminded me of the exhilaration of suddenly having your own space, absolutely separate from your mother

When kids are small, and their expectations of an event diverge from yours in some important way, you feel terrible about it. You might be taking them to a play, and they thought that meant they’d be allowed to play, but actually it meant they had to sit still while strangers shouted things. You experience their disappointment as much as your own physical pain.

Then when they’re “adults”, your expectations diverge again. They thought you’d drop them at university and immediately leave, while you thought you’d unpack, and meet their flatmates, explore the city, and spin round a supermarket, then have a Nando’s, and maybe read a bedtime story, get chatting to the other parents and maybe all do karaoke? Well, then it’s time to manage your own disappointment, and the only thing to be said for that is that it’s way less bad than managing theirs.

I want him to start the fightback next week against extremists who peddle hate and those who despise this country. That would be true patriotism

“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urgent task is the cultural wildfire that needs extinguishing before it takes hold.

The rise of anti-migration neofascism is more threatening than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Shock tactics by a few hundred people in black shirts and balaclavas are designed to invade the national consciousness, their noxious hate bleeding into the mainstream – and they do.

The party leader offers social liberalism and lower taxes, hoping opposition to Reform UK will hold together voters with competing economic interests

Sir Ed Davey’s speech at the Liberal Democrat party conference was a calculated appeal to voters who recoil from a rightwing bloc associated with Brexit, nationalism and reactionary politics. That’s not a bad place to start. But he wants this message not to be lost in the headlines about his party’s £17bn tax giveaway aimed at disillusioned Conservative voters. To walk that line, his address sought to present Reform UK’s politics as an existential threat to Britain, appealing directly to left-leaning tactical voters. At the same time, he told moderate Tories that only a vote for the Lib Dems can reliably block both Reform and a Conservative-supported Nigel Farage premiership.

It’s a clever strategy. Too clever, think some in his party, who yearn for clearer dividing lines. Yet the Lib Dem leader is nothing if not ambitious. He claims that his party could have more MPs than the Conservatives after the next election. In 2024, the Lib Dems won 60 of their 72 seats from the Tories; they were also second in a score of Conservative-held seats. That electoral geography pushes the Lib Dems as replacing the Conservatives as the respectable, pro-market opposition, while Reform occupies the space of the nationalist right. The logic is that in a multiparty system under first past the post, it may no longer be necessary to be a national party. Sir Ed might become kingmaker as the parliamentary expression of a liberal southern tendency.

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.

As the chancellor, John Healey, ponders options ahead of his first budget, the playwright’s new work offers lessons from the past

Still only 44, James Graham has become a formidable chronicler of our national story. On themes such as the rise of Rupert Murdoch, social upheaval in post-industrial Britain and the neuroses of the England men’s football team, the playwright and screenwriter has made it his vocation to read the signs of our times and write them up for the stage.

Graham’s new play goes a bit further back in history, but its subject matter is characteristically of the moment. Opening this week in the West End, The Standard of Living offers a portrait of the sentimental and intellectual passions of John Maynard Keynes (played by Rory Kinnear), as the great economist makes his name between the first and second world wars. As Keynes rails against the laissez-faire ethos of the age, he seeks to devise a theory of growth that justifies state intervention on people’s behalf in the wake of the Great Depression.

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.

Readers respond to an article on women being less likely than men to be offered active treatment for the same conditions

As head of pharmacovigilance at a clinical trials technology company, I was not surprised that a review of global research found that women are less likely than men to be offered active treatment for the same conditions (Women with same health conditions as men ‘less likely to be offered active treatment’, 16 September).

This inequality costs lives. A British Heart Foundation-funded study found that women were less likely than men to receive recommended care after a heart attack. Research in 2018 estimated that more than 8,000 women’s deaths may have been prevented over 10 years had they received the same standard of care as men.

Providing psychological safety to Black, Asian and ethnic minority staff so they can raise concerns about patient care without fear would save lives, write Dr Jennifer Creese, Dr Joy Spiliopoulos and Prof Carolyn Tarrant

Your report (One in five black, Asian and minority ethnic NHS managers in England plan to quit amid racism, report finds, 15 September) rightly highlights racism, exclusion and blocked career progression in the NHS. But it also points to a wider risk: patient safety. Care mistakes already cost the NHS £14.7bn a year.

A March 2025 report by the NHS Race & Health Observatory notes that Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff, who make up more than 40% of the medical and dental workforce, still face harassment and discrimination in promotion, everyday work and disciplinary processes. This fuels stress, burnout and poorer mental health. Bullying and harassment are estimated to cost NHS England £2bn a year through staff turnover, sickness and lost productivity. In such environments, BAME staff are less likely than white colleagues to speak up about patient safety, fearing that their concerns will not be understood or taken seriously.

There has never been a real rebellion for the Kremlin to squelch, writes Mergen Mongush

To an old Russian like me, Rafael Behr is as wrong as sin, because he is watching (and describing) the smoke without seeing the fire (To understand the threat to our real democracy, watch Putin’s fake one, 16 September).

In their unqualified admiration for your democracy, our leaders have done a lot to emulate it: in 1861, Alexander II abolished serfdom; in 1905, Nicholas II allowed the creation of our elected parliament; in 1917, Kerensky allowed women to vote; in 1990, Gorbachev reintroduced a multiparty system; he, Yeltsin and Medvedev resigned in 1991, 1999 and 2020 respectively (like your Wilson, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Starmer in 1976, 1990, 2007, 2016, 2019, 2022, again 2022, and 2026 respectively).

Stephen Gillian says the super-rich could help guarantee a decent wage for low-paid people in return for some tax benefits. Plus letters from Les Bright and Steve Brown

I have a simple solution to help keep the super-rich happy with their tax bills while keeping their enormous wealth safely stored offshore and allowing them possibly to spend more time in the UK (Manchester United Muslim fans group calls on co-owner Jim Ratcliffe to quit, 19 September). They could insist that any company they earn their wealth from commits to paying all UK staff a decent living wage.

For this small compromise from the billionaires (who will still play the money markets and profit from others’ hard labour), the government could offer to reduce employers’ taxation costs by increasing the point at which low-paid people pay tax. Perhaps it could reduce national insurance payments for low-paid people, both employee and employer, thereby stopping the farce of the government paying income support to those on low incomes and then increasing taxation to fund it.

Donald Trump has praised the UK prime minister as a ‘natural businessman’ after their first meeting at the UN general assembly

Will Jacks starred with bat and ball as England proved too strong for Sri Lanka on a tricky Durham pitch

3rd over: England 16-1 (Root 0, Duckett 4) In comes Joe Root.

Poor work at deep fine leg by Madushanka, who goes for a one-handed stop by the rope but lets it slip away for four. Banton very nearly offers a return grab to Fernando … before a corker to hit the top of off! Brilliant from Asitha Fernando, who nips it away from the right-hander, beating the prod forward to take the off bail.

Manchester City produced a gutsy performance to fight back from 2-0 down and earn a draw away to Bayern Munich. A tough first half saw José Barcala’s side take the lead through Giulia Gwinn before a Kerstin Casparij own goal doubled their lead. But goals from Beth Mead and Carlotta Wamser saw the visitors take home a hard-earned point.

It was always going to be a challenging start for the English champions against a Bayern team who have historically thrived in the league phase of this competition. Barcala’s side came into this encounter unbeaten in their last 15 group-stage matches and having made a run to the semi-finals last season that, according to Gwinn, had left them “even hungrier and eager for more”. Not only that but the German outfit have kicked off the defence of their Frauen-Bundesliga title in stunning fashion, with five wins from five leaving them two points clear at the top of the table.

• Manager’s current deal to expire at end of the season

• Spaniard can expect big increase on £10m-a-year salary

Mikel Arteta has agreed a long-term contract extension with Arsenal that includes a hefty pay rise in recognition of his success last season and could take his reign as the manager beyond a decade.

The three-year deal he signed in September 2024 expires at the end of this season and talks have been ongoing since May when Arsenal ended their long wait to be champions. Negotiations were put on hold during the summer transfer window but the Spaniard has reached a ­verbal agreement to extend his stay for a second time.

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While Thomas Tuchel continues to gaslight his employers at the FA into believing he was in no way responsible for England’s comically shambolic semi-final exit at the hands of Argentina, not every head coach who underperformed at the Geopolitics World Cup is still in their job. A total of 17 different managers who took teams to North America have since left their roles, with safety-first’s Steve Clarke, failing-up’s Roberto Martínez and tyranny’s Marcelo Bielsa among them. In Europe, teams such as Portugal (Jorge Jesus), Croatia (Slaven Bilic), Scotland (Sébastien Pocognoli), Czechia (Santi Denia) and Belgium (Mark van Bommel) will go into the Nations League under new management, but it is towards the bigger dogs of the football pack where Football Daily wishes to turn today’s beady gaze.

Prize o’ the day to Barry Glendenning, surely, for mentioning Johnny Crumplin (football genius) in Monday’s Football Daily. As an Ipswich fan marooned in Sussex, I spent much of my teenage years at the Goldstone which, despite being a dump (I stood on the crumbling South Stand), held a certain magic for me. It still does, actually. Haven’t been to the Amex yet – hopeless nostalgia is undoubtedly a factor. The team weren’t much better than the ground for most of that time, but the 1987-88 promotion season was memorable. Garry Nelson was a bit special, Doug Rougvie had played under Fergie at Aberdeen and Gerry Armstrong had legendary status after *that* goal, but the rest of the team probably (and unfairly ) fall into the journeyman category. I loved them all. Keith Dublin dribbling his way into and then out of trouble, sleeves-up Kevin Bremner who grafted and worked the Albion into the promotion places, Deano (one of the Wilkins brothers) classy and, of course, Barry Lloyd, who never brought a sub on until the last four or five minutes, frustrating us beyond belief. And into this pantheon came teenage Johnny C who, to start with, was utterly hapless, hence the nickname football genius. Somehow, despite this, we took to him from the off and it was lovely to see how he grew into becoming an Albion legend in what were fallow years. Blimey, not sure where that all came from – you can probably tell I’m stuck out in the middle of the Fens on a slow-moving train. But thank you for bringing it all back to me!” – Jonathan Foulkes.

I know the powers that be have listened to Football Daily’s ‘Stop Football’ pleas and given us very little to do for the next three weeks but, as we are just five games in to the Premier League season, can everyone stop going on about the race for the Golden Boot and which team are going to bloody champions” – Nigel Sanders.

Judging by the photo of him sitting behind their ‘Life’s Good’ logo in yesterday’s Quote of the Day, LG could do a lot worse than appoint José Mourinho as a brand ambassador for their campaign. As football watchers have long known, he exudes the spirit of that exclamation from every single pore” – Andrew Parker.

So, Jonathan Wilson has a new book, about football in Eastern Europe, Behind the Curtain, while his take on Zidane as the new France manager will reveal the ‘wizard behind the curtain’. Brilliant effort from the subeditor and marketing team working in harmony” – Paul Vickers.

• ‘I’m happy. It’s an exciting place to be right now’

• Prem champions have moved to tie down huge asset

Henry Pollock has signed a new Northampton contract worth in excess of £400,000 a year, ensuring the back-rower will remain available for England beyond the 2027 World Cup.

The 21-year-old has roughly tripled his salary in a “multi-year” deal thought to extend until 2029. Pollock’s future at the club had come into question when his representative Eddie Hearn suggested he deserved a seven-figure salary but while the new deal is a long way short of that, he ends up as one of the best paid back-rowers in England.

• Defeats for Kartal and Boulter condemn Britain to loss

• Men will play Germany in quarter-finals of Davis Cup

Great Britain’s stay at the Billie Jean King Cup finals lasted only one match as they lost against Czechia in the quarter-finals in Shenzhen. Anne Keothavong’s side were bidding to reach the last four for the fourth time in five years but were considerable underdogs and defeats for Sonay Kartal and Katie Boulter sealed their fate.

Led by the Wimbledon champion Linda Noskova, the entire Czech team is ranked higher than any of Britain’s players, and it was Noskova who sealed victory with a 6-2, 7-6 (3) win against Boulter. That followed a lengthy struggle between Marie Bouzkova and Kartal lasting a minute short of three hours, which the Czech eventually won 7-6 (2), 4-6, 6-4.

• Defender has battled hamstring and groin problems

• Everton player credits Munich clinic for turning point

Jarrad Branthwaite has credited a “complex” rehabilitation programme in Germany, which analysed links between his injuries and his brain and movement, with his return to the England squad.

The Everton defender’s fine start to the season has been rewarded with a place in Thomas Tuchel’s squad for the Nations League fixtures against Spain, Czechia and Croatia. If selected, it will be Branthwaite’s second appearance for the England senior side having been blighted by hamstring and groin problems in recent years.

• Javier Tebas accused club of ‘permanent conspiracy’ talk

• Real Madrid hit back at president’s ‘intolerable’ behaviour

Real Madrid want a new La Liga president in light of what they called “intolerable” comments from the incumbent, Javier Tebas, ⁠who said on Tuesday that claims of officiating bias against the club belonged to “another galaxy”.

After losing 2-1 to Atlético Madrid on ⁠Sunday, Real headlined the ⁠match report ​on their website, “Terrible refereeing decides the derby.”

Billionaire owner of Ineos says company ‘cannot compete’ with global market despite efficiency of Humberside sites

Billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe is pausing production at three chemical plants in Hull, blaming the UK’s “ridiculously high” gas prices.

Ratcliffe’s chemicals conglomerate, Ineos, said on Tuesday it would “mothball” three chemical plants because the cost made it difficult to compete in the global market.

Lian Yunzhi solves 3x3 puzzle on several occasions in average time of under 4.5 seconds, according to state media

A six-year-old Chinese girl has set a new women’s world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in just over four seconds, state media reported.

“Speedcuber” Lian Yunzhi broke the women’s 3x3 average world record twice this month at two World Cube Association certified competitions in Wuhan and Guangzhou, according to state broadcaster CCTV on Monday.

Man’s lawyer says he accepted charge over toddler’s fall from window to avoid harrowing trial for himself and his family

A British man has pleaded guilty to “recklessly” causing the death of his son, 10 weeks after the toddler fell from a fourth-floor hotel window in Cyprus.

Josh Foster, 37, who appeared before the district court of Paphos on Tuesday, accepted the charge of causing the accident through a “rash, reckless and dangerous act” on the first day of a family holiday near Paphos on 12 July.

Officials say one pilot safely ejected as F-16 believed to have crashed on approach to Spangdahlem after training drill

⁠An F-16 fighter jet assigned to the US air ⁠base Spangdahlem ⁠in ​western Germany crashed on Tuesday, the US military said, ⁠adding that one pilot had ejected safely and was receiving ⁠medical treatment.

The cause of the incident ​is under ‌investigation, the military ‌said in a statement, with ‌emergency response personnel at the scene of the crash.

Brother-in-law went to check on Nicholas Brandram at his London home and found him unresponsive, coroner says

The man who was arrested on suspicion of being the so-called “Putney pusher” was found dead at his home after missing a family meal, an inquest has heard.

Nicholas Brandram, 44, was arrested in June in connection with an incident on Putney Bridge on 5 May 2017 in which a jogger shoved a woman headfirst into the path of an oncoming bus.

EVs with 90,000 to 120,000 miles on the clock are more likely to pass MOTs than petrol models of the same age

Motorists buying a secondhand car with a lot of miles on the clock are likely to find an electric vehicle (EV) ultimately more reliable than a petrol vehicle, according to a study.

An analysis of 47.4m MOT tests found that after cars were driven 90,000 to 120,000 miles, EVs were about 25% less likely to fail than petrol models of the same age (based on a failure rate of 16.5% versus 22.1%).

The risk to El Chaltén in Argentina has been known for years but recent findings and the Nepal disaster have brought planning for the worst-case scenario into sharp focus

The images from Nepal stopped Daniela Schmidt in her tracks. A geologist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, she watched the deadly flash floods on 26 August tear through everything in their path, people running for their lives as the water and debris swept over the landscape.

“I had never seen anything like it,” she says. “This was one of the most catastrophic events on a global scale related to these glacial floods.”

The aftermath of the Nepal floods in Nuwakot district, 26 August. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock

The Argiope bruennichi, spotted in Cheshire for first time, part of worrying trend that could threaten native species

She is an unlikely harbinger of the climate emergency: a venomous black and yellow spider who spins mysterious patterns in her webs and eats her mates for breakfast.

Native to mainland Europe, north Africa and Asia, the Argiope bruennichi – commonly known as a wasp spider – is rarely seen in the north and west of Britain. But a fully grown female has been spotted in Cheshire for the first time by conservationists from Chester zoo, who stumbled across the large, brightly striped arachnid in a rewilded field.

Forestry England invites people to help it create a record of when and how the season arrives across the country

The reds and golds of autumn leaves may be beginning to appear, but exactly when the season arrives is not always as predictable as the calendar might suggest.

Now, Forestry England is asking people to help track the changing colours of forests to create a record of when and how autumn arrives across the country.

One other person being treated in hospital after fire crews respond to early-hours incident at home in Bootle

A woman and three children have died after an overnight fire ripped through a semi-detached house on Merseyside.

The Merseyside fire and rescue service (MFRS) said crews arrived at the blaze in Bootle at about 3.45am on Tuesday.

Westwood, 68, accused of indecently assaulting teenage girl in 1991 and sexually assaulting 18-year-old woman in 2004

The former BBC DJ Tim Westwood has been charged with two additional offences dating back to 1991 and 2004.

The 68-year-old will appear at Westminster magistrates court on a date to be fixed accused of indecently assaulting a girl aged 16 or 17 in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in 1991, the Metropolitan police said.

MPs send out letter as Israeli government seeks bids for construction of large E1 settlement in West Bank

British banks and financial institutions are receiving written warnings from MPs that they should not invest in Israel’s E1 settlement project even though new UK laws banning trade with illegal settlements are unlikely to be in place for months.

A letter was sent to banks on Tuesday by the all-party Britain-Palestine group of MPs saying the onus was now on banks to review their obligations not to cooperate with new settlements.

PM says immediate focus is on rebuilding bridges with EU as he prepares for first meeting with Ursula von der Leyen

Andy Burnham has opened the door to fighting the next election on the UK rejoining the EU, but said his immediate priority was continuing to rebuild bridges with European allies.

The prime minister, who will hold his first meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Tuesday, did not rule out including reversing Brexit in Labour’s next manifesto – but suggested the country should focus on securing closer trading ties first.

The Massachusetts case is the latest in a series of legal woes for the influencer whose real name is Braden Eric Peters

The online influencer known as Clavicular – who has helped to fuel the rise of the extreme male appearance-improvement trend of “looksmaxxing” – has been charged with rape and drug offenses in Massachusetts.

The 20-year-old, whose real name is Braden Eric Peters, has been scheduled for a 14 October arraignment on Cape Cod, according to legal documents seen by the Guardian.

Thousands flee fighting as Iran-aligned group seeks to consolidate territorial gains against Saudi-backed government forces

• Middle East live – latest updates

As many as 169 people have been reportedly killed in Yemen in the last three days as Iran-aligned Houthis battle Saudi-backed government forces for control of strategic heights on the Red Sea coast, while thousands flee the violence.

Houthi military officials said at least 118 people had been killed in clashes as well as Saudi air and artillery strikes on Taiz, al-Jawf, Marib and Saada provinces since Sunday, Agence France-Presse reported. Yemeni government sources have said at least 36 people have been killed on their side of the conflict.

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,’ the progressive US representative says

• US politics live – latest updates

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman, has refused to rule out a potential run against the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer amid mounting speculation around her political ambitions.

When asked by the New York Times whether she would challenge Schumer in 2028, when his current term is up, Ocasio-Cortez declined to exclude the possibility – even if Democrats win back the Senate majority.

The hoard, buried south of Cologne in the second century AD, is the biggest coin treasure ever found in Germany from the time of Hadrian

An amateur archaeologist who discovered several Roman silver coins in a field in western Germany realised he had stumbled upon something much bigger when his metal detector kept beeping.

Oliver Riedl called the authorities for help and a group of experts who began digging immediately discovered a total of 934 Roman silver denarii. It is the biggest coin treasure ever found in Germany from the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian, the local office in charge of archaeological monuments said on Tuesday.

Some economists say it is now ‘inevitable’ that chancellor will need to raise taxes in the budget next month

The UK government borrowed a higher-than-expected £18.3bn last month, increasing the pressure on John Healey as he attempts to calm jittery bond markets before next month’s budget.

Some economists said it was “inevitable” that the chancellor would need to raise taxes on 28 October if he is to meet demands for extra spending on defence without further borrowing from investors on international money markets.

Some of continent’s biggest pharma firms write to national leaders calling for action to safeguard their futures

Some of Europe’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have said the continent is “losing ground” to rivals including the US and China in developing new drugs and attracting investment.

The chairs of nine companies, including Britain’s AstraZeneca, GSK and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, wrote to Andy Burnham and the national leaders of other European countries on Tuesday to call for action to “safeguard our companies’ future”.

Former chancellor, now senior figure at OpenAI, says UK needs datacentres to maintain ‘sovereignty’ over AI tech

• UK politics live – latest updates

Datacentre nimbys are holding Britain back, George Osborne has said in reaction to nationwide protests about the giant water- and energy-guzzling structures.

The former Tory chancellor is now the head of AI for countries at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. His job is to represent the company to governments around the world and he also has a role in enabling the building of datacentres and other infrastructure.

As animal behaviorists increasingly use AI in their research, they grapple with how to wield the technology responsibly

I’m sitting in a small boat in Shark Bay, Australia, eavesdropping on a conversation between some of Earth’s most intelligent beings. The motor is off, the turquoise sea is glassy, and Stephanie King and I are motionless, transfixed by the whistles, clicks and squeezy, whirring noises made by the dolphins swimming below us.

If anyone could tell me what these big-brained social mammals are saying, it would be her. Based at the University of Bristol, she co-leads Shark Bay Dolphin Research, one of the longest-running wild dolphin research projects in the world. She has spent thousands of hours watching and listening to this population.

Sick of her friends getting nowhere, she co-founded The Women in the Arts Foundation and they protested across New York. Ahead of a UK show, Roser talks about escaping wartime Shanghai – and still painting three a day

In January of 1971, the American art historian Linda Nochlin published a landmark essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? It was a provocation and a call to arms that was to send shockwaves through the arts establishment.

“It wasn’t just a problem for artists,” says Ce Roser, more than half a century on. “My older friends could not get shows, although they had had brilliant careers before, and that happened also to all of my friends who were poets or writers. Nobody seemed to be able to establish themselves as career artists. So we got together, we complained, and I decided we should have a meeting and really talk seriously about it.”

Osipova plays the wife of bisexual economist John Maynard Keynes in a new play. The ballerina talks about the allure of her Russian character, dismissed as a ‘frivolous foghorn of a chorus girl’

When Natalia Osipova started rehearsals for her first ever play, it didn’t go well. “I cry. I’m shaking. I’m stressed and completely lost on the first day,” she reports. “I think, ‘I’m a piece of shit!’ I want to take a taxi and run away.”

It’s the second week of rehearsals when we meet, and Osipova is still here. The Royal Ballet principal plays a Russian ballerina from a previous age: Lydia Lopokova, who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, then in 1925 unexpectedly married British economist John Maynard Keynes, who is the protagonist of James Graham’s The Standard of Living – a play about, among other things, taking risks and imagining a brave new future.

Acting is central to ballet’s appeal for Osipova. “Maybe I’ll never be super perfect for classical ballet because I love stories so much,” she says. Even so, she demurred when former colleague Edward Watson suggested she audition. “You’re stupid!” was his retort. “You need to try because it’s amazing opportunity.”

A delicate silver necklace shines beneath frank brown eyes. Osipova requested a translator in our previous interviews, but today speaks in an idiosyncratic gallop not unlike Lopokova’s own. Entering Nicholas Hytner’s rehearsal room, joining a classy cast led by Rory Kinnear, she felt like Lydia among Keynes’s sneery Bloomsbury friends. “I left rehearsal and cried,” she says, “because I feel, ‘Oh my god, I’m so bad.’ But you learn and listen and every day, step by step, I do better.”

Pitt and loyal hound Odin get stuck in remote Alaska in this serviceable adventure with hints of Jack London and Marley & Me

One man and his dog have an amazing adventure in this survivalist drama starring Brad Pitt, from screenwriter Cameron Alexander and director David Ayer, for which the first and last words of the title have been carefully chosen to signal a mix of sentimentality and thrills. It’s an entertaining anthro-canine-mance, with man and dog relating to each other on a deep level … kind of like Owen Wilson in Marley & Me, only without Jennifer Aniston, or Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz, only without the devastating melancholy.

Pitt, who last worked with Ayer on the second world war action thriller Fury, plays a US military special forces veteran called Belmont, tough, self-reliant and laconically good-humoured in the classic Pitt manner, now spending his retirement roaming the breathtaking remote landscape of Alaska in his seaplane. He is accompanied by his beloved service dog Odin, or Odey (played by four different German shepherds), who saw action with Belmont in various fuzzily imagined flashback combat sequences. Odin took retirement with Belmont and is now his best and only pal. Whether or not Belmont ever had a human partner is never revealed.

This brutal, hilarious new show about life as a fiftysomething is full of all the heart and humour of human life. At points it’s mesmerisingly perfect

There’s a moment in Sharon Horgan’s new show, Youth, when – as protagonist Alex (Horgan) is seeing her son off to university – she inadvertently begins to run after the car that’s taking him away. And then she catches herself, and slows. And then she starts up again. It was such a tender, vicious glimpse into the future that I found myself sobbing into the sofa and cursing her name.

All of which is to say: Sharon Horgan is back and she’s better than ever. Youth is the representation every woman who has ever slapped on an oestrogen patch after a divorce, looked around and thought “What the hell now?” has been waiting for. Horgan herself has described it in interviews as forming the third part of a loose trilogy that began with Pulling. Co-written with Dennis Kelly, Pulling was about three thirtysomething antitheses to Bridget Jones, whose dark chaos apparently scared the BBC so much they unexpectedly cancelled it just as it was truly getting into its stride. That was followed by Catastrophe, written by and starring Horgan, with Rob Delaney, as a couple who have a fling, find that she’s pregnant and end up making a brutal, hilarious go of things.

Youth is on HBO Max

The premise is an imminent attack on Britain by Russia in a world in which Michael Gove is prime minister and Nicola Sturgeon his deputy. It’s enjoyably terrifying – and the politicians’ stiffness is huge fun

Trigger warning: this review contains the phrase “Michael Gove cosplaying as PM.” There is no helpline.

The Wargame is mind-warping. On the one hand, it posits an imminent nuclear strike on Britain by Russia. Bad! On the other, it posits this happening in a world in which the government is composed of Michael Gove cosplaying as prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon as his deputy, Harriet Harman as home secretary, Sayeeda Warsi as attorney general and Penny Mordaunt as defence secretary. So, you know, there’s a competing “Come, friendly bombs …” vibe too.

Director Pepa Lubojacki’s heartbreaking film chronicles the lives of her brother as he struggles with drink and homelessness – and her own shame in the face of societal prejudice

Czech film-maker Pepa Lubojacki originally set out to make a film about pigeons. What fascinated the 39-year-old director was that the grey birds are clearly beautiful and highly intelligent creatures, yet human cruelty towards them is socially acceptable in the way it isn’t towards, say, crows or magpies. “You can spot kids kicking and chasing pigeons while their parents cheerfully look on,” she says.

The moral blind spot reminded her of the way that people looked at homeless people like her older brother and her cousins. “The public has learned to avert their eyes,” she says. “My cousin was declined care seven times with open wounds in the hospital, and finally, they had to amputate both of his legs.”

At 14, he heard Stravinsky and resolved to be a composer. As Reich approaches his 10th decade, the man revered by the likes of David Bowie reflects on a life that changed the soundtrack of modern living

Steve Reich is not yet 90 but the celebrations have already begun, with the world premiere of his new piece for large ensemble, In All Your Ways, at the Edinburgh festival last month and a late-night concert at the BBC Proms. But when I ask this most supremely influential of living composers how he feels about becoming a nonagenarian on 3 October, Reich is coy. “I haven’t quite got there yet,” he says. “I don’t want to dot the i before I even get there. I’ll let you know in due course …”

Born in New York in 1936, Reich has spent the last six decades producing music that has changed the soundtrack of modern life in Europe and North America, and inspired superlatives from a wide array of music critics. The New Yorker has called him “the most original musical thinker of our time”.

Creators of Post Script, made with vocals by the late Mark E Smith, defend it as ‘a great, positive record’, but fiancee describes it as ‘ethically wrong’

The fiancee and last manager of the late Mark E Smith, frontman of the Fall, has hit out against the release of an album being marketed as the band’s final official album, calling it “ethically wrong” and a “cash grab”.

When Post Script was first announced in June, several media reports assumed the nine-track album contained recordings that the final Fall lineup were working on before the singer’s death, in January 2018. However, it subsequently emerged that it contains unused studio vocals recorded between 2001 and 2014, to which longtime Fall associates Ed Blaney and Simon “Ding” Archer have posthumously added music.

Bestselling book The Good Immigrant launches a series of thoughtful explorations of race – starting with the hosts of Pod Save the UK. Plus, a look at an outrageous heist

Launching alongside a 10th-anniversary edition of the essay collection by writers of colour, this podcast sees its editor, Nikesh Shukla, reconvene with the book’s contributors. A series of thoughtful conversations about what has changed and what’s stayed the same when it comes to race in the UK starts with Nish Kumar and Coco Khan on England flags, and why humour is essential to their political podcasting. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Joe Hill-Gibbins’ claustrophobic staging of Bartók’s opera of dark symbolism is paired with his brand new production of Stravinsky’s psychological drama, with Peter Hoare superb as the tragic hero

Welsh National Opera might be marking its 80th year, but any feelgood factor is decidedly absent from their season-opener. Bartók’s only opera and Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio form a challenging double-bill: serial murders, patricide and incest, blood and more blood, but gripping performances made this a powerful experience.

Béla Balázs’s libretto for Bluebeard’s Castle transformed the Perrault fairytale and its happy ending into an intense psychological drama: the castle with its weeping walls and seven locked doors a metaphor for the secret inner workings of the male psyche, and Judith, Bluebeard’s new wife, his fourth, the archetypal woman, too curious for her own good.

John Green is probably as famous as an author can get. His 2012 young adult novel The Fault In Our Stars sold more than 20m copies, got adapted into a Hollywood hit film, and catapulted to a level of success that he’d always longed for. And yet, all that left him feeling empty. Now, after nearly a decade away from fiction, Green is back with his first novel for adults, Hollywood, Ending. In a very meta conversation with Carter Sherman, Green explains how interviews can be maddening, explores his own insecurities around fame, and argues that social media has trained all of us to sell our private lives as products. Carter and John also talk about his success as a pioneering YouTube creator alongside his brother Hank Green and Hank's recent dustup over his use of AI.

This recklessly ambitious doorstopper follows the 16 days of England’s medieval uprising from a vast array of viewpoints, and in startlingly rich prose

AK Blakemore’s third novel tells the story of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when commoners of all classes – not only peasants, but merchants, servants, smugglers, and some local lords and officials – rebelled at the imposition of a poll tax and rampaged through southern England, burning records of debts, killing their oppressors and laying waste to their homes. The book closely follows the events of the rebellion’s 16 days, employing a vast array of points of view, including the young king Richard II, several of his courtiers, dozens of elements of the rebellious Commons, a porpoise and a runaway horse. The title suggests the novel’s portrayal of these events as an inevitable reckoning; a “doom painting” was a picture of the Last Judgment on the wall of a medieval church.

As a book of this scope must be, it’s a doorstopper. As any novel by Blakemore will be, it’s dazzlingly rich in lexical glamour, and this is likely to be any reader’s lasting impression of the book. Sometimes it feels as if the author is out to use every word in the English language in a startling, aestheticised, puckish way that expands both the word and the world. The result can be joyously silly. Who else would give us slugs that “blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa”, or “lunar-brilliantined mud”? But there is also gravity and passion here, especially when she intimately imagines the lives of the commoners: “they rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to braid the manes of their draught horses; they rise, to count arrows; they rise, setting aside their glitchy dreams of hairy stars and blue-skinned devils; they rise, fearful and powerful, into the bright day.” The cheekily anachronistic appearance of “glitchy” in this medieval scene is typical of Blakemore’s method. All forms of language, high and low, archaic and modern, are here. Her use of detail to convey a historical scene is also extraordinary: the barber’s chair where “a crowd has gathered beneath the ribboned pole to watch the draining of a cyst”; the brewer with “a grotty beard, chlorotic with hops, [that] hangs down almost to his belt”; or “the horseflies waltzing over the liquefying flesh of severed heads”.

The author of Labyrinth on the turning of the seasons and the lore and landscape of her beloved Sussex

Kate Mosse’s new book is a love-song to West Sussex, part of a series designed to bring out its authors’ personal connections to a home landscape. It began last year, with Michael Morpurgo welcoming spring in Devon, where he has lived – at the farm that inspired War Horse – for over 50 years; and then Val McDermid celebrating winter in Scotland, where she grew up and still lives. Bernardine Evaristo will explore summer soon – but, meanwhile, we have Mosse, also deeply and endearingly rooted in her chosen patch.

Mosse grew up in the village of Fishbourne. She now lives in Chichester, where she got to know her husband when they revised for A-levels in the shadow of the Bishop’s Palace, and held hands when she turned 17 on the day of the city’s annual Sloe Fair. Twenty-three years later, they celebrated her 40th there, with their children. Today, they live with his 90-something mother Granny Rosie – also “Sussex to her bones” – who remembers watching cattle herded in fields where a supermarket now stands.

From an abstract portrait of an actor who might be Natalie Portman to a groundbreaking work of autofiction, we rate the best from the coolly controversial author

In Cusk’s headline-grabbing latest, a writer invents the biography of a film star who sounds very like Natalie Portman. Set in the now standard late-Cusk sans serif typeface (no frivolous flourishes!), Life of M serves up observations on fame in a light fictional coating. “To always be playing a part is to have no home.” Having made her name as a devilishly good creator of brainy social comedies, Cusk’s pivot to wintry autofiction since the Outline trilogy appears to have reached its logical conclusion in this flat, abstracted portrait of empty celebrity. The New York Times called it “rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious”.
Sample line: “Everything I did or said in her company was false. It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real.”

PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC; Remedy
A surprisingly conventional game from a famously weird developer, this sequel to 2019’s Control is accomplished but safe

This is an arthouse action game from Finnish developer Remedy, masters of exactly this type of thing. It’s a sequel, however, so not only must it clear the high bar that its strikingly distinctive predecessor has set – it must also ideally arrive with a bushel of new ideas. There are clear and valuable strengths here in character progression and the lustrous presentation of its paranormal world, but Resonant doesn’t feel as enjoyably recondite or expansive in its influences as 2019’s Control did. As you wander New York brandishing supernatural abilities against glowing orange foes, the sad sense creeps in that you might be playing any number of games.

As paranormal event survivor Jesse Faden, your journey through the original Control was like a sequence of playable Twilight Zone episodes, battling prosaic household objects with supernatural properties that teased and twisted reality inside an endlessly fascinating supernatural government bureau called the Oldest House. You’d navigate architecturally impossible spaces bridging the subconscious and the bricks-and-mortar world, in order to defeat a malevolent fridge. That’s broadly true again in Resonant, albeit with diminishing returns. This time you’re playing as Jesse’s brother Dylan, waking up after years of containment in the Oldest House to find its contents have escaped into downtown Manhattan. So you head out of the interesting place, and into a setting you’ve explored before in Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Division, Max Payne, and others ad infinitum.

PlayStation 5 (version played), PC; Screen Burn
Tragedy, and an apocalyptic fog, befall a fishing community. It is up to outsider Simon to offer some kind of closure

You spend a considerable portion of Silent Hill: Townfall in a kind of foetal position, cowering behind objects that will be eerily familiar to anyone who lived in the UK during the 1990s. Cars seem to be modelled on the era’s boxy Volkswagen Golfs; logos adorning phone boxes should narrowly escape the attention of copyright lawyers at BT Group. (For millennials, the deja vu will likely intensify the horror, as if stepping back into a childhood nightmare.) Simon, the nerdy, unassuming star of the game, pokes his head around corners to catch a glimpse of the demonic entities that wish to maim him, before shrinking back down again with a downwards motion of the analogue stick. In such moments, it’s easy to imagine him wrapping his arms around his knees, clasping his eyes shut and wishing himself away from this place.

The game’s setting, St Amelia, is based on the fishing communities of the East Neuk of Fife. The terror lurking here is wonderfully specific: absent lairds, island poverty, an oil-drilling corporation. Anguished beasts lumber down quaint streets lined with sandstone houses and fluttering bunting. This venerable horror series may have shifted to Scotland, yet we remain firmly in classic Silent Hill territory – weather and all. St Amelia finds itself suffused in supernatural fog and the vast majority of its inhabitants have vanished following some kind of mass tragedy. The artful, evocative presentation is such that you can almost taste the in-game air, the briny seaside tang diluted by rainy mist.

PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Arbitrary Metric
The latest work from the team behind Paratopic is part compulsive time-loop management sim, part eerie subterranean adventure

Fetch the chair from storage. Deliver a message that causes disgust. Clean vomit in the afternoon and pour another glass in the evening. In Roman Sands RE:Build, you provide concierge service to delirious, broken people who couldn’t care less about the sweat on your forehead and the bags under your eyes.

In this reimagining of the 2019 visual novel Roman Sands, crafted by the team behind the Americana horror road trip Paratopic, you’re trapped in a beach resort and tethered in a time loop. The task is deceivingly simple: fulfil menial directives from four gluttonous individuals, unlock tools and items to open more rooms and then do it all over again.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold much less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.

Gagosian Gallery, London
With his clever conundrums, the Belgian loved satirising both psychoanalysis and surrealism – and occasionally painted rubbish to annoy his family. What a dude!

René Magritte is the most inexplicable of artists. It’s much harder to get a handle on him than such supposedly difficult modern greats as Cézanne or Picasso. After all, cubism is a perfectly rational attempt to capture the complexity of reality. But Magritte? He confronts you with wilful mysteries. This show sets choice examples of his magic against modern art and is full of quirky, unexpected treasures that give your wonder at Magritte little twists in new and perverse directions.

A painting of puffy white clouds held me across the gallery and still floats ineffably in my mind. It’s a shock because it is so painterly and subtle. If you think Magritte fashioned his surrealist images in a deliberately flat, even banal style, think again. This simple painting of clouds in the blue is full of supple shadow and ethereal light, a brilliantly observed view of nature in the vein of Gainsborough, Constable or Hockney.

National Theatre, London
Tiago Rodrigues’s play has incensed audiences abroad with one character’s hellfire rightwing invective. But its combination of boredom and shocks ultimately feels confusing

What does it say about an audience who, while watching a character make a speech that has sparked screeching protests and angry walkouts in its run across Europe, sit politely listening until the end?

The booing does come, but only after the actor playing a far-right politician and kidnap victim (Romeu Costa) has finished a half-hour invective that takes in everything from the scourge of minorities to that of elites, homosexuals, and the far-left. It is a masterclass in rightwing rabble-rousing, with its appropriation of the word “freedom”. Yet on press night at its British premiere, all that is summoned in response is nervous laughter, a chorus of coughs and a few loud whistles.

Serpentine North, London
Making lyrical films for over 40 years, about everything from the end of empire to sexual brutality, Kanwar focuses on the parts of gruesome stories that are often missed

The exhibition begins in darkness. A darkness so complete, in fact, that I’m forced to wait at the threshold while my eyes adjust to it. To my left, images flash up on screens that seem to float in the gloom: a peacock preens its wet feathers; dried flowers in a wooden bowl; sunlight scatters on water. When the room has resolved to the point that I can identify a chair to sit on, I realise that these pictures are combined with snippets of text telling stories like parables: about a landlord punished for breaking a promise to a beggar; about two friends who survive a massacre because they are down by the river, arguing over the moon.

Welcome to the world of Amar Kanwar: if you want to find beauty and truth, you must be prepared to step into the darkness. Over 40 years making increasingly lyrical films about stories ranging from the collapse of empire to endemic sexual brutality, the Indian artist has developed a method that neither reproduces the violence of these histories as spectacle nor glosses it over. Instead he trains his focus on those parts of the story that normally escape attention: the shadows, the neglected, the blind spots. He does not find revelation there, at least not of the kind that suddenly lights up the world and makes sense of it. But there are enough flashes of light to guide us through the darkness.

Hackney Empire, London
There is real skill in making us laugh about things that are depressing. And the gags come thick and fast in the ex-Mash Report host’s touring show

Nish Kumar is angry. And why shouldn’t he be? The world is one big, damning catastrophe. So here the ex-Mash Report host is, in his trademark linguistically dextrous, mile-a-minute style, to run us through the current affairs and colonial-history hellscape. Yes, we get Donald Trump jokes. And yes, there’s more than one mention of how the internet has corrupted us all. But, God, does it feel good to hear someone, clearly enraged, scream the things this Hackney audience is, more than likely, also thinking.

He’s the UK’s leading lefty comedian – and for good reason. There is real skill in making us laugh about things that are, broadly, very depressing. Of course, Kumar knows he is preaching to the converted; he states plainly that his audience are a bunch of non-heckling, hand-raising “geeks” who are already on board with his views. Part of the show grapples with that discomfort; he believes passionately in standup as an art form – and it has made him big money – but for the first time, he’s wondered whether now is the right time for his usual political satire. Should we really be laughing when things are, well, this bad?

Touring until 27 November

Photographers from all over the world entered more than 24,000 images into the world’s largest bird photography competition, with an image of a northern gannet bursting through the ocean’s surface taking the grand prize

Cheyenne Roundtree, an investigative reporter at Rolling Stone, was as shocked as anyone when allegations of rape and sexual abuse were made against the music mogul. Then she began digging into his past life. In her first interview, she paints a horrifying picture of lost police reports, repeat behaviours, rumours and run-ins

For Cheyenne Roundtree, an investigative reporter at Rolling Stone, the civil lawsuit that dropped on Sean “Diddy” Combs in November 2023 seemed to come from nowhere. Filed by his ex-partner, the singer Cassie Ventura, it alleged that Combs had beaten and raped her, plied her with drugs and forced her into sexual encounters with male sex workers throughout their decade-long relationship.

Roundtree, along with much of the world’s media, was shocked. “I’d grown up in the era of Diddy and Cassie and viewed them as this power couple,” she says. “Her hit Me & U was my song. Diddy was this mogul – I knew him for the music – and she was this style inspiration, this beautiful, talented woman living an amazing life.”

Oscar-winning film-maker Barry Levinson’s docuseries Bucks County, USA examines the political divide in one town in a revealing and infuriating manner

Like many teenage best friends, Evi and Vanessa have a penchant for finishing each other’s sentences. Whether enmeshed on a couch or telling a story, one, a red-headed musical theater nerd with a personality nearly as boisterous as her signature puffy skirts, collides with the other, darker in hair and disposition, their speech bubbling with indecipherable affirmations and giggles. In a heady chorus of “duuude” and “no, you!”, it can be difficult to tell where one girl ends and the other begins.

Except, that is, at their respective homes. Evi’s mother, Lela, who like her daughter, espouses views considered left of liberal in the US context, speaks in support of LGBTQ students at local school board meetings and advocates for fact-based history lessons. Vanessa’s father, Paul Martino, is a right-leaning venture capitalist who likes to brag about installing school board members by spending $500,000 on local campaigns, an effort triggered by what he saw as unjustified school closures in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The comedian went from being discovered by Chris Rock to making Saturday Night Live history. Now his new Netflix special, Buy the Dip, tackles timely topics with optimism

There is a single minute in Buy the Dip, Nimesh Patel’s new Netflix comedy special, in which the comedian nimbly and hilariously goes from describing his wife in labour with their first child to complaining about a Rolex sporting doctor wearing “insurance payments on his wrist” to Luigi Mangione. “He killed one guy, allegedly,” Patel quips, arguing that the terrorism-related charge Mangione got stuck with (which a judge dismissed) was offensive to real terrorists.

The hilarious bit is impressive for how much Patel packs into a single minute and how much it all speaks to the comedian’s own experience, expertise and worldview.

Combination of Miuccia Prada with Belgian designer Raf Simons once again spins gold for fashion house

Miuccia Prada’s style formula is simple: begin with a great skirt. Her personal uniform is a knee-length skirt, A-line or pleated, most often with a plain sweater and kitten heels.

The Prada collection that opened Milan fashion week made a compelling case for her favourite outfit, with a skirt the star of every one of the 63 looks – no dresses, no trousers. It won the room over, so expect to see the personality skirt on a high street near you soon.

The country’s licensing laws mean the supermarket has opened a pub so it can sell alcohol, while campaigners are fighting to help other venues open and get people dancing

At first sight The Middle Ale in Dundonald, Northern Ireland looks just like any other pub. There is a big TV, an array of seating, and beer pumps behind the bar. Look a little closer, however, and you might ask why there are packets of fajitas and gravy granules on the walls.

That’s because the pub belongs to the supermarket chain Lidl, but the Middle Ale (like “middle aisle”, get it?) isn’t just a wacky marketing stunt. Northern Ireland has ultra-strict laws around licences to sell alcohol, whether as a shop, pub or nightclub. Lidl tried to get a licence to sell alcohol in its Dundonald store, and was refused, but after a court battle it did manage to get a licence for a pub – which it duly opened next door, selling alcohol to take away as well as serving drinks in the pub itself.

Readers and the Filter team share the best buys they still treasure, from charity-shop gems to Vinted bargains. Plus, the fashion experts’ guide to women’s basics

We love secondhand shopping here on the Filter – whether it’s Second Hand September or not. You can unearth one-off, affordable pieces, and feel good about not adding overconsumption to your list of things to worry about. So to inspire us, we asked you for your best-ever preloved finds, whether that’s furniture or fashion or more (and added a few of our own, too).

“An Ercol daybed I bought on eBay for £50, in need of some TLC,” reader Fiona told us. “Stripped, re-webbed and with a new cushion, it is now a thing of beauty and very comfortable.”

Which supermarket syrups ooze with potential? We put 10 of the finest, grade-A bottles to the test

• The best supermarket runny honey

Though today’s maple syrups vary dramatically in intensity, complexity and taste, they’re all of decent quality and have that classic and unmistakable flavour. I avoided blended or maple-flavoured syrups for this test, and instead tried only 100% pure, grade-A maple syrups, using Agriculture Canada’s flavour wheel and four-step tasting process as a guide. I poured a small shot into a glass to observe the colour. Then I followed the tasting process: I smelled the syrup with three quick sniffs, took a small sip and swirled it around my mouth before contemplating the flavours. Step four is to assess the flavour intensity. Alongside appearance, aroma, texture and taste, I awarded extra points for specific provenance and organic certifications, as well as for value.

Prices vary greatly, and although the dearest bottles taste divine, so do the cheapest. Each pure maple syrup is unique in flavour, with nuanced notes from mild clove tones to intense, woody and almost menthol-like piney flavours. Like wine, maple syrup has the tang of its terroir: it’s an artisanal product that tastes of the land.

Is an Oxford shirt the ultimate wardrobe staple? Are skin-tight fits ever a good idea? And what’s the perfect fabric for autumn and winter? Our menswear expert has all the answers

• The best white T-shirts for men

The photo above stopped me mid-scroll: Harry Styles, before his 30-show residency at Madison Square Garden, dressed in a big white shirt and smart tailored trousers. After a summer spent parked in front of three fans with ice packs on rotation, when wearing actual clothes felt like punishment, here was proof that normal service had resumed.

So, now the rain’s back and autumn’s creeping in, it’s time to follow Harry’s lead and reintroduce some structure to your wardrobe: coats, knitwear, tailoring, all the pieces that make you look forward to getting dressed in the morning. One staple that’s long overdue a comeback? Shirts.

Loop and tube bands are cheaper than a gym membership and take up less space than weights – our exercise buff put 18 to the test

• The best treadmills for your home

Movement breeds motivation, not vice versa. If you want a fast ticket to a regular training habit, you need to remove the friction between you and that first rep. When the sofa looks more appealing than getting a sweat on, it pays to have a simple, quick, convenient way to kick into workout mode. That’s where resistance bands come in.

Portable, lightweight, compact and convenient, the right set of bands could be the path of least, er, resistance to easy home workouts and reaching your fitness goals.

A rich Levantine fusion dish of sumac-spiced roast chicken, onion and flatbread with tahini yoghurt, and a simple, textured salad

Fattet musakhan, a celebration of two beloved Palestinian dishes, takes centre stage here, bringing together crisp bread, creamy yoghurt, sumac-spiced onions, tender chicken and fragrant olive oil in one rich and comforting dish. Alongside, the salad brings a welcome freshness, with crisp cucumber, creamy avocado and bright acidity cutting through the richness of the chicken. Together, they make a beautifully balanced meal, bringing the generous, communal spirit of Palestinian cooking to the table.

Scottish breakfasts are worth getting up for: think eggs and potato cakes in a freshly baked roll, or toasted barley bread laced with sticky plums and honey butter

I’ve long wanted a space to cook the food that really excites me, and Clementine, which opens its doors in north London next month, is exactly that. These two recipes capture what the cafe is all about. This is food that feels both considered and completely unfussy: crisp morning rolls stuffed with folded scrambled eggs and tattie scones, and griddled barley bannocks served warm with salted honey butter and roast plums. Breakfasts worth getting out of bed for.

Sometimes cooking is about celebration or indulgence, but there are other times when you just need a speedy but delicious midweek meal

Of course, the act of cooking can be many things – joy, ritual, nourishment, comfort, celebration, indulgence – but this fish pie pasta bake and tomato and feta lentils are strictly about speed. Because, in reality, these are exactly the kind of recipes we all need in our repertoire, ready to whip out on a Wednesday night.

From the blissful threat of ‘death by chocolate’, to a book made of sponge and the lemon drizzle to end them all, these are the bakes that left the biggest impressions

The Sorting Hat sponge I made for my son’s Harry Potter party is not the best cake I’ve ever tasted. That would be anything baked by my granny, or the coffee religieuse (a choux pastry puff) I ate in Boulogne-sur-Mer with my mum. But it’s the most surprisingly edible cake I’ve ever made – a vaguely Jamie-Oliver recipe with buttercream filling and tinned mandarin slices. It didn’t only work; it tasted great, and wasn’t quite as teeth-screechingly sweet as expected. My one regret is that I over-pimped the decoration: it looked so sinister in the fridge with its cold, Sorting Hat stare that the next day I stuck on googly eyes and further sparkles. This perhaps explains why everyone assumed it was a poo emoji cake, despite it being a Harry Potter party with heavy-touch theming. That people thought I actually wanted children to eat shit is a shame, but it still remains my greatest culinary success. Catherine Shoard

At 51, I want many more years of a healthy, happy sex life. So I decided to compile my own guide

When I got divorced after 28 years of monogamy, I was excited to be having sex again, but had concerns. I was 48, and the last time I’d been single was in the 90s; terrified of pregnancy and hyperconscious of HIV/Aids, I hadn’t considered condomless intercourse an option back then.

Now, at 51, I’ve been wondering how important barrier protection is for me. Though I haven’t hit menopause, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says that “by 45 getting pregnant naturally is unlikely”, and HIV/Aids prevention and treatment have improved significantly in the last three decades.

A Reform politician and an NHS worker had different takes on Nigel Farage, but could they agree on renewable energy or tax policies?

Chris, 42, London

Occupation Electrical supervisor of the maintenance team at an NHS hospital

Rory left the monastery after feeling lonely; with Orla, herself a Catholic, he’s been making up for lost time

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

We had sex after a week. I remember thinking afterwards wow, everything has changed

Anna Malos and Georgie bonded over their shared love of travel and horses. By their third date, an awkward encounter cemented their relationship

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

Georgie and I met at a kick-boxing club in London in 2004. We sparred together in a few beginner classes, just hitting soft pads. Although I didn’t pay her too much attention initially, I immediately recognised she was tall, elegant and very good looking.

It wasn’t until the club’s Christmas drinks that things kicked off between us. We started talking and couldn’t stop. We’d both travelled and worked in Latin America, and also loved horses – Georgie had volunteered with a horse-riding business for tourists in Ecuador. The sparks were flying all over the place.

In her weekly column for the Guardian, Anna Tims solves readers consumer problems – ranging from the devastating to the ridiculous. She answered your questions on AI chat bots, consumer protection and how companies keep getting away with terrible customer service

TLouis1990 asks: What are your tips for getting the best out of customer service? Are there mistakes we all make that make issues worse?

Anna: I like your question; too often we focus on what customer service agents owe us rather than vice versa. Remain calm and polite is my top tip. That’s not always easy, especially when you feel you are being messed about, but it’s essential. Temper and rudeness is not only unfair on call centre staff, it can backfire on you. Companies may refuse to deal with abusive customers. Occasionally, when I’ve contacted a press office about a reader’s complaint, I’ve been so horrified by transcripts of their treatment of agents that I’ve dropped the case.

When you complain, include all relevant information such as booking references, your address, screenshots of relevant bills or letters to save to-ing and fro-ing. You basically want to ensure that they can identify you quickly on their system and that they have evidence of the problem. If you’re phoning, have all that information at your side. Make a note of who you spoke to and when in case you have to follow up. And be reasonable in terms of timescales and redress. Demands for £500 in compensation when you report a burned Deliveroo may stop you being taken seriously.

Anna: Thank you for your thank you! If you mean companies I’ve dealt with professionally, there was a now defunct utilities company who offered a reader a spa day to help her recover from the stress its blunderings had caused her. Bagcraft, a luggage store in Essex is a stand-out. A customer had ordered two suitcases for a New Year’s holiday. One of them arrived from the manufacturer with a fault. The store owner reordered it and, worried that it would not reach the customer in time, set off the day after Boxing Day on a 820 mile round trip to deliver the cases in person.

Readers often write in to praise Le Creuset for its no-quibble lifetime guarantee which has resurrected the most ancient of steelware. And speaking as a customer, I was amazed when the online plant supplier Primrose informed me that part of my order was unavailable, sent a generous voucher unbidden as an apology and answered my subsequent questions about suitable alternative plants with prompt, personalised responses. And no, they didn’t know I was a journalist!

People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that cost up to £600. Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisis

A December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many people would be giving as Christmas presents: the electric toothbrush. For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end. The difference is that an electric one moves the brush head for you”. Progress indeed.

Nearly six decades on, electric toothbrushes can do a lot more than merely jiggle, offering multiple speeds and movement sensors for real-time tracking of where you’ve brushed – some even promise gum-massage or tongue-cleaning modes. Prices range from about £25 for a basic Oral B model to £599.99 for a Philips Sonicare model that gives “smart coverage feedback”. The latest super-toothbrush – a mere £419.99 – features a camera and a built-in water jet to clean between teeth, using AI to identify gaps. Created by Dyson, it’s still, essentially, a stick with a brush on the end (although there is another toothbrush on the market that’s shaped like a mouthguard, with individual brushes, that claims to clean your teeth in 20 seconds).

A 90-minute wait on a motorway hard shoulder was terrifying with lorries thundering past

My partner and I were among a group of passengers left stranded for 90 minutes on a motorway hard shoulder after our coach driver was arrested for suspected drug driving.

We had boarded the Cambridge to Brighton Flixbus service at Gatwick. The coach was an hour late, was visibly damaged on the outside and the driver set off without closing the luggage hatch.

Shortage of memory chips and other critical components reverses trend of electronics becoming cheaper

Apple’s recent product launch caused headlines around the world as it unveiled its first folding phone. But hidden in the slick technology showcase was a nasty surprise: a £100 increase in the price of all iPhones, including older models.

It is blamed on “RAMageddon”, which has reversed a decades-long trend of electronics becoming cheaper. It is the fallout from the AI gold rush hoovering up every memory chip available for vast datacentres. This has led to a severe shortage of the chips, and other critical components, for electronics, including phones.

Saddling up is only likely to be an issue for elite athletes – and those with low sperm counts

“Cycling isn’t big on the radar of fertility doctors,” says Prof Colin Duncan, a fertility expert at the University of Edinburgh.

For women, he says, the only time cycling is likely to affect fertility is when it’s done at extreme levels, such as the kind of training undertaken by elite athletes.

Modern lifestyles seem to be exacerbating the problem of bromhidrosis – an underresearched condition that is widely misunderstood and devastating for sufferers

If Hayat goes out to eat, she’ll choose a table far away from other diners, ideally by a door or open window. She likewise tries to avoid people at the cinema or on planes, even if it means paying extra – whatever it takes to avoid being too close to others.

She chalks it up to a persistent past insecurity. “I still have that paranoia … It’s just in my head, because of everything I went through.”

Claimants having to find decades-old medical records to prove they qualify for compensation despite inquiry’s recommendations

Suzanne Morgan will never forget the day her mother died. It was nine months after she had gone into hospital with gallstones, where she received a routine blood transfusion.

“She went downhill rapidly,” Morgan recalled. Her mother haemorrhaged in her liver, and the next day she was dead.

Since the ancient Olympics, athletes like Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk have experienced runner’s diarrhoea. What does the science say about extreme exercise’s ‘mechanical jostling of the intestines’?

Soiling yourself in public sounds like a bad dream. But the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has now apologised for doing just that at the Hyrox games in Beijing on Saturday.

Wietrzyk won the fitness race but not before using communal equipment with faecal matter visibly running down her legs – and muddying Hyrox’s reputation.

Textile designer brings florals, vines and smiley doodles to brand’s luxury checks for one-off paired collection

Burberry and Celia Birtwell are both national treasures of sorts. One is Britain’s grandest luxury name, the other the textile designer who dressed bohemian 1960s London in her prints and has a place in art history as David Hockney’s favourite muse.

Burberry’s designer, Daniel Lee, has always loved Birtwell’s prints. When the two met this spring, he fell for “her energy, and her zest for life”, and a one-off Burberry meets Birtwell collection that closed London fashion week was born.

Brand returns to its physical and unconventional roots as it battles undergoes stark restructuring

Back when a young Lee McQueen was showing at London fashion week, there was Dante, the show in a Hawksmoor church with a skeleton in the front row and a blaring soundtrack of organ music and gunfire. And there was Voss, where models were trapped inside a giant mirrored box set up as a psychiatric ward.

Twenty-five years later, the Alexander McQueen brand returned from the Paris schedule to a creepily beautiful subterranean 17th century London chapel, with steel harnesses, bulky ankle strapped heels that looked like electronic monitoring tags, and a chain mail dress of tiny silver skulls.

For his trek across New York City, the singer wore a pair of Prada slip-ons. I tried to do the same in my penny loafers – and soon found out why experts advise against it

Last month, just before his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, Harry Styles was spotted walking the streets of New York. According to the paparazzi who trailed him throughout his journey, he walked eight miles – all the way from Brooklyn into Manhattan – in loafers.

If, like me, you own a pair of loafers, your first thought is probably: that doesn’t sound like a good idea. On Instagram, Grazia called Styles’ shoes “perhaps the least sensible footwear for such an undertaking”.

To mark Oxfam’s Second Hand September, here are some of your best thrift discoveries and the stories behind them

Oxfam’s Second Hand September campaign encourages people to avoid buying new clothes for 30 days and choose preloved pieces instead. From £28 Prada skirts to £5 wedding dresses, we asked people to share their favourite fashion finds and the stories behind them.

A long-distance walking route in the south of France devised by the celebrated land artist offers intrepid hikers an opportunity to immerse themselves in nature and art

At 69, I had never hiked with a backpack and I had no idea what land art was. Nonetheless, when my friend Jackie, a nature documentary film-maker, invited me to join her and her friends Wendy and Sasha on a hiking trip to Refuges d’Art in the mountainous countryside of Haute-Provence, I said a resounding “yes”. We would be sleeping alongside sculptures by the renowned land artist Andy Goldsworthy.

First, I watch Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Goldsworthy’s work, and discover he has built exquisite ice sculptures and stone cairns in my own country, Canada. His work seems to speak to an older part of the soul. Then, I start walking up hills, gradually adding weights to my backpack until I can comfortably carry 9kg (20lb).

The Alpe Adria loop is an eight-day walking trail that crisscrosses borders, taking in dramatic peaks, glorious meadows and charming places to stay

‘Achtung! Staatsgrenze!” OK, the signpost marking the “state border” didn’t have exclamation marks but, with its no-nonsense Prussian font, it did feel quite shouty. The only thing was, no one on the Feistritzer Alm – a peaceful sweep of Alpine pasture at the meeting of Austria and Italy – was paying any attention to it at all.

Hikers hiked straight past. Mountain bikers used it to prop up their cycles. Cows grazed willy-nilly. And the patrons of the Schutzhütte Oisternig enjoyed their cold beers regardless of which country they were in. While official boundaries may have changed in these parts over the centuries, the magnificence of the mountains has not.

Beautifully situated refuges with superlative views offering sanctuary to intrepid hikers and climbers

A good mountain hut, I reckon, should be small and only accessible on foot after considerable effort. Throw in a bit of historical interest and I’m bound to be happy. In which case, Cabaña Verónica in the Picos de Europa is a fine start to this list. It sleeps six, and at 2,325 metres requires a two-hour trek from the nearest cable car station, never mind road. It has incredible views and a friendly custodian who keeps things in good order. Yet the real attraction is that this place was formerly a gun turret of a US navy battleship that was scrapped in Bilbao in 1960. An enterprising engineer, Conrado Senties, had it carried up on horseback and reassembled on a plug of rock in the middle of nowhere. Don’t ask why, just enjoy the eccentricity.
€15, reservarefugios.com

From the foothills of the Pyrenees to the peaks of the Dolomites, you share your top views, meals and adventures at altitude

• Tell us about a trip to Germany – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

No doubt your first thought on hearing the words “double-decker” is of a bus. But in the Swiss village of Stans, an old wooden funicular carriage ascends to the station, where a double-decker cable car awaits. Inside, a spiral staircase leads you to an open upper viewing deck. At the summit, the views back to Lucerne are superb, and there are alpine marmots to spot too. There was a wedding ceremony going on at the summit on our trip!
Martin

The theory is your plants will perk up if you reflect some extra light their way over the long winter months

Most houseplants are hungry for sunlight, which is in short supply during a UK winter. Plants on a shelf or coffee table often get insufficient light, so they stretch, lean and thin out. Not everyone can move their plant to a south-facing sill, so the hunt is always on to make the most of what little light there is.

St Dominic, Tamar valley: After just a few years, this rewilded plot of soggy land is home to voles and shrews and vigorously growing indigenous plants

At last, proper rain has greened the scorched pastures and washed shrivelled leaves and nut husks along the narrow lanes. Springs dribble and streams remain low; inspection of our well, dug more than a century ago by the legendary “Diver/Diviner” Cullas of Metherell, reveals a water level better than feared, but we remain cautious in our use.

On the exposed northern edge of the parish, overlooked by Kit Hill and the distant blue haze of Dartmoor, Larkrise’s rewilded 10 acres of poorly drained land shows ever more growth. The thorny boundary hedge, with purple sloes, blackberries, scarlet hips and masses of haws, encroaches on planted trees – extra protection from predatory deer. The mix of guarded trees are tall and vigorous, interspersed with open patches of seeding knapweed, grasses, plantains and rattle. The guelder rose, spindle, holly and buckthorn already produce berries, less than seven years after this project began.

I once asked a resident what she would do if she could do anything. She replied: ‘I’d run in a field’

In my 40s, I was beginning to wonder where I fit in the employment world. I had a variety of jobs including an improv instructor, actor and corporate facilitator, then Covid arrived and all those people-facing roles disappeared.

Living in Sydney, with my kids at school and a mortgage to pay, I took on some temp work through an agency.

Arthur Plummer got a bike when he retired at 65 and joined a cycling club as one of its youngest members. Now he is its oldest but still racking up 5,000km every year

When Arthur Plummer retired at 65, he bought a secondhand bicycle. His sister was a member of a cycling club for seniors in the Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario, where they lived, and Plummer joined, too, becoming one of the club’s youngest members. Now he is 92 and its oldest member – but he still cycles thousands of kilometres every year. His odometer for this year so far reads 4,270km (2,650 miles). After our conversation, he intends to cycle another 40km.

“I love cycling,” he says. “Wherever I go, even if I ride on the same roads, there’s something new happening. When I get on my bike, I feel great. I come home at about 3pm and I feel exhausted. However, it’s the nicest feeling. It’s exhilarating, and it’s resulted in me being extremely healthy.”

A teenager struggling with climate anxiety searches for hope in an unexpected place – writing letters to imprisoned activists. Max, 14, is on a quest to understand the human stories behind direct action and why so many climate protesters are in prison​. As replies begin to arrive, a dialogue bridging generations unfolds and connection transforms despair into purpose. ​When Max writes to the judge presiding over a high-profile trial​, he is surprised to hear the letter referred to in the judge's closing remarks

Alaa lives in a tent pitched on the ruins of her house, which was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike that killed all three of her children. In one month, she will give birth again.

As the war in Gaza approaches its fourth year, this week, the Guardian follows five ordinary Palestinians as they go about their lives. Each will tell the story of their day, revealing the terrible toll of the ongoing conflict.

Alaa Hessi takes each step deliberately: raises her foot to land heavily on the stair above, takes a breath, slides her hand up the railing. Resting atop an uneven mess of rubble, the wooden staircase judders with each motion. Her movements are slowed by the heavy melon of her pregnant belly.

The sound that wakes me in the morning is the buzzing of flies inside the tent, and the noise of our neighbours.

While global billionaires and multinational companies have been lured to its shores, many islanders feel left behind and priced out, with food bank use increasing

On a late Friday afternoon on the Channel Island of Jersey, tourists and locals are flocking to St Helier’s waterfront where the town’s sprawling beach has emerged at low tide.

In one direction, they face the calm waters of St Aubin’s Bay, ringed by a seaside promenade and punctuated with a tidal island hosting the 16th century Elizabeth Castle.

Tensions grow as Trump tells Fox News he is considering ‘wiping Iran out’ after attacks on Riyadh by Houthi rebels

Governments across the Middle East are bracing for an escalation of violence after Iran claimed it had received intelligence that the US was preparing for a renewed bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic.

In a potential sign of growing tensions before the UN general assembly in New York this week, Donald Trump cut short a weekend visit to the Camp David presidential retreat on Sunday with no official explanation, and a new security alert was issued by the state department to all US citizens in the Middle East.

We would like to hear from people working in tech industries about their views on joining a union

For the first time, Meta has agreed to give a trade union direct access to its UK staff, according to the FT.

It will mean that Prospect trade union will be able to speak directly to the social media company’s 5,000 UK staff about the benefits of belonging to a union.

Perhaps you want to know her favourite Shakespeare sonnet or what is was like working on Bond

This autumn, we’re giving you the chance to ask Judi Dench anything.

Over her extraordinary career, the actor has won an Academy Award, eight Laurence Olivier Awards and 10 Baftas – as well as the hearts of legions of fans.

Whether you’ve got a question about on-stage pranks, her favourite Shakespeare sonnet, working on Bond, her love of gardening, or her thoughts on the future of theatre, Hollywood or the world, share it with us here and we’ll put it to her as she releases her new book, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?

Perhaps you’ve ditched algorithmically curated playlists for vinyl and enjoy DVDs rather than streaming

Are you turning your back on hi-tech forms of entertainment to escape algorithmically curated content?

Perhaps you are enjoying listening to vinyl rather than the constant flow of music playlists. Or maybe you have ditched streaming services to watch DVDs instead.

From renting and troublesome landlords to buying or selling a home, send us your UK housing questions

Are you dealing with a problem with your landlord or tenancy, wondering about buying or selling a home, or facing another housing issue?

We’re planning to launch a new column answering readers’ questions about housing in the UK and helping them understand their options.

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