From the 47-year-old runner who needs a double hip replacement to the 27-year-old CrossFitter with a ruptured ACL, those who push their bodies too hard often regret it. What are the lessons for the rest of us?

Jonathan Price has always been active and exercise-focused. Growing up in south Wales, rugby was his first love. Through school, university and beyond, he also surfed, rowed, played squash and ran competitively – on track, in 10k races and cross-country. Career and family demands meant that much of this fell away in later years, but the running stuck. He found time for marathons, half marathons – “I’d run a half marathon every weekend just for fun,” he says – and, through the working week, regular 30- or 40-minute runs to manage stress and clear his head. “I travel a lot for work,” says Price, now 50, a company CEO. “With running, all you need is a pair of running shoes and you can do it anywhere.”

By his mid-40s, though, Price’s body was beginning to object. He wasn’t recovering so well. “I could run just fine but I’d be in pain for two or three days afterwards,” he says. On top of this, every six months or so, his lower back seemed to seize up completely. A physiotherapist thought it was “tight hip flexors” and pointed Price towards “hip opening” exercises, designed to reduce stiffness and increase range of motion. Someone else prescribed him muscle relaxants, but the pain only deepened, and his range of movement continued to dip. Finally, in the summer of 2023, a chance encounter with a hip surgeon led to the diagnosis of osteoarthritis and, at the end of that year, Price, then 47, had a double hip replacement.

Both left and right have it in for Britain’s capital. But is London a stabby wasteland, a den of faceless bureaucrats, or just a mess of overprivileged wokerati?

‘I’ve seen no evidence of Andy being anti-London,” the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, told the Evening Standard last week, which is quaint and adorable: evidence is so 2009. This is all about feels. Some feel that the prime minister disfavours the capital because he frequently mentions that neoliberalism hasn’t delivered a fair deal for the north of England; tacitly, then, someone’s deal has been unfair in the other direction, and that would be the south, which must be London. Where else would Burnham mean – Hastings? The institution of No 10 North gestures audibly towards there being some problem with the OG Downing Street, and the use of the words “Whitehall” and “Westminster” as anything but geographical denominations – connoting “faceless” or “out of touch” or “rigid” or “having contempt for the ordinary person” – gives strong anti-London vibes, since Whitehall and Westminster are, indisputably, in London.

You could group all that as leftwing shorthand. For those moments when you want to describe a shallow, mammon-worshipping society, lurching blindly from one shiny, meaningless prize to the next, empty of proper feeling for others or for nature, “London” pretty well covers it.

From Europe’s deadly heat to floods in Asia, it’s been a terrifying summer. Environment writers Jonathan Watts and Ajit Niranjan answered Reddit users’ questions about their work – and their sources of hope

Extreme weather supercharged by the climate crisis is fuelling an explosive wildfire season in Europe and extreme rainfall across Asia this summer.

Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather stoking wildfires at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year for the area of land burned.

At least 72 people have died attempting to reach the Spanish enclave of Ceuta after an estimated 50,000 migrants crossed from Morocco last week. The incident has triggered a political crisis in Spain and criticism from EU countries. Lucy Hough speaks to European community affairs correspondent Ashifa Kassam

Whether it’s budget barbecues or clever travel pillows, here are the favourites defining your summer

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July’s hitlist paints a picture of a month well spent. A barbecue and nifty wine cooler sleeve suggest alfresco evenings, while a bargain tent and cool box point to camping trips. Sensible but stylish walking shoes and a trusty water bottle also suggest time spent in the great outdoors.

All in all – despite the climate crisis-charged heatwaves and hosepipe bans – it sounds like you’re making the most of the summer. From a cooling mattress topper to a cheap-and-cheerful mascara, here are your favourite things from last month.

Daniel was working at a market in Lagos when he was given the chance to start anew in the UK. He had no idea what was expected of him in return

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

Daniel arrived in Lagos for the first time in 2016. He had come from a village in Ebonyi, a state in south-eastern Nigeria. He was 15 years old, the eldest of nine siblings, and his parents were farmers. When he was a boy, his father became sick and Daniel started working to assist his family, helping to cut trees and clear land. A few years later, he decided to seek his fortune in Lagos.

In Nigeria’s commercial capital, Daniel spent his days in the open-air Ikotun Market, where thousands of people shop every day for everything from tomatoes and fabric to suitcases and electronics. He sold cellphone accessories out of a wheelbarrow under a wide umbrella, making less than £10 a day. After living with a relative, he moved into a room with friends, including a young man named Chukwudi, who also worked in the market. Daniel had grown up in the same village as Chukwudi. A photo from their early childhood shows the boys together, Daniel in a red sportswear shirt.

Nigel Farage admits he discussed returning as Reform leader months before election, appearing to undermine previous claims

Nigel Farage has made his clearest admission that he was in talks to return to lead Reform UK months before the 2024 general election, casting fresh doubt on previous claims that he was not involved in politics when he received a £5m gift.

The admission will reopen questions about the nature of the gift – Farage has repeatedly insisted it was not linked to his political career since the Guardian first revealed it in April.

Juan Jesús Vivas says influx seen as ‘at least encouraged or permitted’ by Rabat, as Spain demands EU solidarity

• Explainer: why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint?

A growing chorus of voices has accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta, with the leader of the Spanish enclave describing last week’s border crossings as an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was seen as being “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”.

Spanish officials ⁠said on Monday that an estimated 69,500 people who had arrived late last week in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa, had returned to Morocco in recent days. About 2,500 people who had made the crossing were believed to still be in Ceuta.

Benjamin Lewis, who believed drinking blood would prolong life, will be kept in hospital for treatment

A man fascinated with vampires and graveyards who apparently believed he would live for ever if he drank blood has been detained in hospital after being caught dumping animal corpses outside churches in a British forest.

Benjamin Lewis, 48, left the bodies of sheep and deer on the doorsteps of churches in the New Forest in Hampshire, frightening parishioners and upsetting farmers whose livestock he stole and slaughtered.

US president claims talks are ‘not very complex’ as he speaks at White House as Iran’s foreign ministry says there are no talks taking place with US

• Iran in talks with Oman over shipping route but not US, says Tehran

People walk near a billboard depicting Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on a street in Tehran, Iran, earlier today.

Six Saudi-flagged supertankers have changed course in the Gulf of Aden in recent days amid threats from the Iran-aligned Houthis, Reuters reports.

• FAW says Fifa president has lost its confidence

• Pressure continues to build after doomed World Cup plan

The Football Association will formally withdraw its support for Gianni Infantino’s re-election as the Fifa president, adding to the mounting pressure on his crisis-hit tenure. In a significant development, the FA will write to Fifa confirming it no longer backs Infantino for a fourth term in charge, having previously offered its endorsement. Their move comes after the Welsh FA dropped its backing for Infantino’s candidature.

More European countries are expected to follow suit in an attempt to force his resignation. The Football Association of Finland became the first country to withdraw its support last week.

Ruling quashes Home Office policy to refuse asylum seekers’ right to have trafficking claims reconsidered after initial rejection

A high court judge has ordered the Home Office to bring an alleged victim of trafficking forcibly removed to France under the “one in one out” scheme back to the UK.

It is the first ruling of its kind and could lead to more people affected by the “one in one out” policy being brought back to the UK.

Hungary and Romania face energy crisis as record-low river levels force atomic power plants to reduce output

• Europe live – latest updates

Romanian naval forces carried out a controlled explosion to help redirect vital cooling water from the drought-hit Danube to the country’s last working nuclear ⁠reactor, while neighbouring Hungary ​said it may be able to eke out two more days of power from its only atomic plant.

Hungary and Romania have been forced to shut down nuclear reactors cooled by the Danube for the first time, as record-low water levels deepen fears of an energy crisis across the region.

The Home Office has made a fresh request for ‘back door’ access to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users

Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers’ highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request.

The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully.

England and Wales provisionally record driest July in nearly 200 years, Met Office says

July 2026 was the driest month in southern England since records began nearly 200 years ago, the Met Office has said.

England and Wales also provisionally recorded their driest July since records began in 1836. Wales had its joint warmest July on record for mean temperature, and England recorded its second warmest July.

Nigel Farage says he would use the military in the Channel but there are questions about whether the plan would work

The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, whose summer has been dominated by the Guardian’s disclosure of a £5m undeclared gift and his connections with a fraudster, emerged on Monday to claim that his party would launch the “largest military operation in the English Channel since world war two” to prevent small boat crossings.

Pointing to unrest at the Spain-Morocco border, he said the Royal Navy would be sent to the Channel to intercept all dinghies carrying asylum seekers should his party win power at the next general election.

Attieh Fard and Andy Erlam make their byelection pitch to voters, but Reform UK’s leader is conspicuously absent

In the town square in Clacton, in the blazing midday sunshine, some of the candidates for the upcoming byelection made their pitch to a scattering of potential voters, passing Deliveroo drivers and a giant gull.

But as the independent candidate Attieh Fard shouted into a megaphone that she would be a voice for Clacton, a passing youth shouted: “Where’s Binface?”

This detritivore – known by a range of colourful names – tidies up our world and can withstand toxic pollution

• Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year

Chucky pig. Slater. Monkey pea. Roly-poly. Boat-builder. Butchy boy. Cheeselog. Hobbling Andrew. Wood pig. If there were a prize for the range and joyfulness of a creature’s English-language names, the humble woodlouse would undoubtedly triumph over its million-plus invertebrate rivals.

Over centuries of easy cohabitation with humans, it has acquired more than 300 regional names in Britain alone, and many more in other languages (such as Gwrach y Coed, “witch of the wood”, in Welsh).

Three decades after he channelled his heroin addiction into the cult classic Trainspotting, the Scottish author has discovered the joys of yoga, breathwork and standing desks. But is he quite as ‘Zen’ as he claims?

By rights, Irvine Welsh ought to be photographed somewhere gritty, looking grumpy, he says: “That’s the brand.” Beside a graffitied wall or at the docks, with a beanie pulled low, and definitely not smiling. But here he is, clear-skinned and wholesome in shorts and a T-shirt, drinking tea and – it’s hard to think of anything more off-brand – talking about the health benefits of yoga. Given his reputation for having lived in the worlds his books portray, he should or could look a lot worse. He guffaws at this, eyes a delighted blue, and repeats the phrase as if he’s found a new personal tagline: “Could look a lot worse!”

Over the three decades since his cult debut, Trainspotting, was published in 1993, Welsh’s fiction has explored with humour the darker side of life. Drugs, clubs, alcohol, violence … often alongside psychological or social deprivation. Despite being 17 novels and four short-story collections into his career, selling more than 6m books globally, he remains best known for his first. It achieved, he says, “what most writers want to achieve in a lifetime – the big zeitgeist book that goes into the culture”.

‘We were swept up in the moment and full of testosterone. The 90s wasn’t a time when men were encouraged to be sensitive’

We were hanging out with the lovely producer George Drakoulias at Abbey Road. He said, “We’re going to bring in some instruments for you guys” – and replaced the fairly low-budget ones we’d been playing. I was given this beautiful 1960s Fender Jazz bass.

Designers share tips on creating a space you love, from mixing eras and colors to not getting in your head

Home is where you sleep. It’s also where you eat, work, cry, laugh, socialize and celebrate. It is a spatial extension of the self – which can make home decorating daunting to some.

“People get in their heads about decorating their space,” says Drew Michael Scott, interior designer and founder of the lifestyle and decor brand Lone Fox. It can be hard to know where to start, what you can afford or accomplish, or if you’re getting it wrong.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

How to start finding your personal style

American actor best known for his role as Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero in the US TV crime drama series The Sopranos

The character actor Vincent Pastore, who has died aged 80, made Italian mobster roles his speciality, most notably playing Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, one of the capos in The Sopranos. Although the character’s nickname came from his early career as a cat burglar, in a recent interview Pastore said the Soprano’s creator, David Chase, had written the part “for an actor who could play a tough guy but also could be sensitive. I saw Big Pussy as a man with a big heart.”

In the show, Pastore’s Pussy balanced the violent intensity of Tony Sirico’s Paulie Walnuts. “It was like sharing the camera with an elephant,” Pastore joked about the much smaller but intense actor.

The 50th anniversary is the perfect time to remember 50 of the most famous – and infamous – attempts at the Czech’s chip

It is 50 years since Antonin Panenka won the European Championship for Czechoslovakia with the most audacious penalty ever taken. His signature chip wasn’t instantly eponymous. A search of the British newspaper archives shows that it was barely mentioned until Francesco Totti dusted it off for the internet generation at Euro 2000.

It was at least another decade before Panenka was commonly used as a noun, and it did not have its own Wikipedia page until 2014, but in 2026 every football fan has an idea of what it means. The 50th anniversary is the perfect time to remember 50 of the most famous – and infamous – attempts.

Jimi Famurewa, restaurant critic and food journalist, discovers how American regional deli sandwich culture is being reinvented in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. From hoagies and subs to hero rolls, Jimi samples the upgraded sandwiches people are queuing hours for and learns how to make the everything sandwich and a meatball sub that’s so messy, you need to eat it alone at home.

Connection with voters on screen only pays off when it’s matched with bold policies in the real world – as it has for Zohran Mamdani in New York

Andy Burnham is having a good time. I can’t remember the last time a prime minister (or indeed any high-profile British politician) actually looked as though they were enjoying what they were doing. I saw a clip the other day in which Burnham remembered arguing with his dad about the point of an English degree, quoted poetry and discussed the importance of mastering words. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for Keir Starmer. In his entire time as leader of the Labour party and then the head of the government, Starmer delivered not a single unprocessed moment. No natural sentiment escaped the carapace. And here is his successor, practically oozing it.

It matters. It’s good and healthy to have a leader who looks as though they want to be where they are. Whose approach isn’t that of a scold or a receiver who has taken control of the premises, or someone whose sole aim is to tenaciously clamber up to the top job and hold on for dear life.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Around the world, these trains have boosted economies, development and prestige. The costs of missing out are high

• Christian Wolmar is the author of Fast Track: The Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail

With all our grumbling about trains – and it is close to a national pastime – it is easy to forget the successes. There is a tale to tell, for example, about high-speed trains, that goes beyond the endless wrangling over HS2.

If you look at the history around the globe, as I have, you find that high-speed trains saved the railways. An industry that was gradually sinking into oblivion, thanks to motorways and aeroplanes, has been revitalised by a technological revolution that means trains travel faster, more safely and more comfortably.

The EU’s panic and the lack of solidarity emboldens smugglers and the far right – and makes Spain even more vulnerable

For the European hard right and the White House, it seemed almost too good to be true: left-liberal Spain punished with a migration crisis of its own making.

The histrionics came right on cue. As thousands of mainly Moroccan citizens streamed into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the tip of north Africa, Spain’s far-right party Vox decried a migrant “invasion”, blaming Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s regularisation and leftist politics. The Trump administration did the same. A senior Israeli diplomat goaded Madrid over its “colonial” territories while Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen area. Denmark and Finland backed Italy’s move and, by the weekend, 22 EU leaders had penned a letter pointing an implicit finger at Madrid over its presumed failure to “relentlessly combat illegal migration”.

The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker’s flirtation with a grand combo with US group Bristol Myers Squibb is baffling

• AstraZeneca shares fall 8.9% over merger talks with US cancer drug firm

Sir Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, starts with huge credit in the bank, obviously. His long tenure has been a triumph, starting with the against-the-odds victory over Pfizer’s charmless accountants in 2014.

The $39bn (£29bn) purchase of Alexion in 2021 looked a little over-priced at the time, but you could see how it sat well with Soriot’s sermons on the importance of backing science. The deal got AZ into the field of medicines for rare diseases, which should offer decades of growth.

The hurdles for women who have to travel abroad to access abortion are considerable, but Hereditary Prince Alois says he will veto any changes

The first person Maria* called when she found out she was pregnant was her doctor. The second person was a lawyer. The single mother of one was in shock, and considering terminating the pregnancy. But she first had to make sure that she wasn’t about to do something illegal, because all she knew was that abortions were forbidden where she lived. “On top of the emotional mountain that was already there, I also had to deal with this,” Maria told me.

She also knew she wouldn’t get any information about abortions in her own country – that’s illegal too. After making her decision, she drove to a clinic across the border. It was a stressful, if short, 45-minute drive, at the end of which another hurdle was waiting: “Oh, you’re from Liechtenstein?” the receptionist said, according to Maria. “Then you have to pay immediately – 680 Swiss francs (£620) please.” She was taken aback and asked: “What if I can’t pay that right now?” The receptionist replied: “Then you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

Gabriella Alvarez-Hummel is a campaigner and journalist from Liechtenstein, focusing on reproductive rights

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

The new film extols the value of a rules-based world order. That’s far more radical than any casting decision

• Peter Swallow is Labour MP for Bracknell, and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on classics. Before his election, he was a classics teacher and academic

For years, a small but vocal corner of the extremely online right has looked to the ancient world to justify its polluted brand of politics. The classicist Donna Zuckerberg (sister of Facebook founder Mark) wrote a book about it way back in 2018 called Not All Dead White Men – a deep dive into the corners of the internet where misogynists pretend ancient philosophy can justify their hatred of minorities.

You would think that these self-appointed guardians of the ancient world would be excited about a blockbuster retelling one of its greatest pieces of literature, the Odyssey. Especially when Christopher Nolan’s film has been getting rave reviews, “the vast majority … written by men”, as the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard has pointed out. The Odyssey is an action-packed thriller with a fight scene every five seconds. In many ways (and I don’t mean this as a criticism of Nolan; I loved the film for all its flaws), it’s a movie designed to appeal to their tastes. And yet.

Peter Swallow is Labour MP for Bracknell, and the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on classics. Before his election, he was a classics teacher and academic

Social media has supposedly ramped up our impulse to judge each other on the most trivial grounds – but is this really a new thing?

‘Are we living in an “era of microsnobberies”? Writing in the Washington Post last week, the lifestyle influencer Victoria Wolff asserted that we are, claiming that the fragmentation of American taste facilitated by, and expressed through, social media had created a new phenomenon of “hundreds of tribes” judging each other on highly specific sets of status signifiers.

Wolff cited a few – “your children’s lunch boxes, whether your roses are native and if your olive oil has a story” – that left me feeling like a grubby little peasant with my narratively inadequate oil, but also relieved not to live in Amagansett in the Hamptons, as she does. It sounds like a Nancy Meyers meets Edith Wharton hellscape. Indeed, I was reminded of reading earlier this year about the tiny-batch $80 (£60) fruit pies you’re supposed to bring as a “hostess gift” in those parts (etiquette specialists advise Hobnobs remain an acceptable hostess gift in the eastern suburbs of York).

An undertaker’s trial has exposed a regulatory blind spot. The public, as well as trade bodies, should be involved in shaping reform

There are few more vulnerable moments in life than the days before and after the loss of a loved one. The rituals of farewell surrounding a funeral matter deeply. Hence the horrified public reaction to the crimes of Robert Bush in Hull. Bush was sentenced last week to 20 years in prison for 67 offences including 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial.

When his business, Legacy Independent Funeral Services, was searched, police found multiple bodies decomposing on racks. Bush had returned the wrong ashes to families, stolen money donated to charities and spent more than £42,000 on holidays over 12 years. In court, relatives revealed the distress caused; David Gorbutt, who scattered a stranger’s ashes in place of his wife’s, described feeling “abused”.

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.

Instead of finger-pointing at Spain, mainstream EU leaders should be showing solidarity with its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez

At least 72 people are believed to have died late last week, most of them drowned or crushed as they joined tens of thousands of others in attempting to swim from Moroccan waters to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Yet the scale of that human tragedy has barely registered, as Donald Trump has decried an “invasion” while European politicians exploit the crisis to serve their own agendas. If further evidence were needed of the way that the radical right increasingly distorts the terms of the migration debate in the EU, the last few days have furnished it.

More needs to be understood about the drivers behind a shocking episode. Misinformation on social media – orchestrated or otherwise – appears to have played a big part, following a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily turned back. Moroccan authorities seemingly did little to prevent the chaotic exodus, which echoed previous smaller incidents and focused international attention on a territory whose sovereignty Rabat contests. If there were online indications that such an incursion was a possibility, no alarm was sounded.

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

A genuinely competitive market would prevent any single company’s decisions from putting the system at risk, says Prof Erika Denton

Your article on the TPG/Optum UK deal, over the patient record system used by most GP practices in England, highlights a specific issue that is symptomatic of a much bigger problem (Alarm at NHS patient records being put under control of US private equity firm, 27 July). I’ve spent years working across the NHS, both in clinical radiology and in national policy roles, and this deal follows a pattern. Systems holding patients’ most sensitive data keep ending up with a small number of large suppliers.

The real opportunity now is to build on the progress already under way, so that ownership of any single system carries less risk regardless of who holds it. NHS England’s own steps, from guidance on AI-enabled tools to the health bill’s proposed provisions on the single patient record, point in the right direction. What should follow on from that is straightforward: data hosted in the UK, a clinician signing off before anything changes in a patient’s record, and an audit trail that regulators and patients can actually check.

Readers respond to an article on the swarms of houseflies people are having to cope with in hot weather

My experience of flies is that during the past 20 years or so there has been a significant decline in numbers – Highland midges not included of course (‘It makes you feel you’ve got a really dirty house’: what’s behind the UK’s plagues of flies?, 30 July).

Memories of childhood summers in the 1950s and 60s are of endless sticky flytraps, typically placed near doorways in the house. Any foodstuffs left out on a counter would immediately attract a variety of coloured flies within seconds.

Andrew Keeley will never forget Brian Moore and Alan Clarke’s commentary on BBC radio

Garry Richardson (England’s 1966 World Cup heroes were fun, humble and unlike today’s stars, 30 July) appears to make the assumption that everyone watched the 1966 World Cup final on television with Kenneth Wolstenholme’s iconic commentary. As a football-mad 10-year-old, I had the misfortune on the day of the final to be on our family summer holiday in the then sleepy village of Goathland, staying in a house with no TV.

Hope rose when my dad was invited to watch the final at a neighbour’s who had one of the few TVs in the village and he asked if he could bring his children. When the neighbour learned that there were seven of us, he not surprisingly drew the line at a still very generous three, but as the fourth in line I missed out.

Readers respond to an editorial about the threat to research funding, including plans to close the Jodrell Bank Observatory

Your editorial rightly criticises the decision to cease funding the Lovell telescope from March 2028 (The Guardian view on the Lovell telescope: budget cuts to physics are bad science and worse politics, 31 July). There are additional reasons why this decision is so shortsighted. Modern astronomy is no longer simply physics. It brings together physics, chemistry, biology and computing to understand how the universe evolved and where we came from. The universe is an inexpensive laboratory in which we can study the interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes under conditions that can never be reproduced on Earth. Understanding how galaxies formed and evolved requires complementary observations across the radio, optical and infrared spectrum. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As a PhD researcher at Jodrell Bank in the 1960s, I saw first-hand how its innovations transformed radio astronomy. Jodrell played a pioneering role in the development of long-baseline radio interferometry, which links separate telescopes together to create virtual telescopes thousands of miles across. Removing the Lovell telescope from this network would weaken its ability to produce pictures of the radio universe with a sharpness comparable to that achieved by billion-pound space observatories such as Hubble.

Glasgow proved that a streamlined programme could hold the key to reviving the prospects of a seemingly doomed event

How good are you at judging a sun salutation or scorpion pose? I ask because yoga is under consideration as a sport at the next Commonwealth Games in India. Less surprisingly, so is kabaddi. But if Amdavad 2030 really wants to find experts in landing seemingly impossible manoeuvres, or holding their breath in tricky situations, they should take the next flight to Scotland.

Let us be frank. Glasgow 2026 has saved the Commonwealth Games, at least for now. After Victoria pulled out in 2023, the event was in limbo. Some feared it would never find a way out. Then Glasgow stepped in, less a knight in shining armour, more one that was a little dented and rusty, to put on an event from scratch in barely 20 months.

• 2021 US Open champion out with stress fracture in leg

• Raducanu also missed Wimbledon through injury

Emma Raducanu will miss the US Open because of the stress fracture in her right leg that she sustained during the grass-court season and forced her to pull out of Wimbledon.

It is understood that following consultation with her medical team, Raducanu has concluded she will be unable to play in New York this month.

• Chalobah to join Cesc Fàbregas at Como for £27.5m

• Henderson adds experience to Xabi Alonso’s squad

Trevoh Chalobah’s long association with Chelsea is to end after Como agreed a deal worth an initial £25.7m. The England World Cup defender’s departure was agreed on the same day the club completed the signing of Jordan Henderson.

Chalobah made 105 Premier League appearances for Chelsea and established himself as a first-team option during a number of turbulent periods for the club. The move will be seen as a coup for Como’s head coach, Cesc Fàbregas, with the former Chelsea midfielder pushing to bring the centre-back to Italy.

• Norwegian breaks clear in stage three to take overall lead

• Haugset: ‘I never thought it was possible, it’s unreal’

Sigrid Haugset, the Norwegian national champion, shocked the established order in the Tour de France Femmes, breaking away alone for 90km, to take the overall lead after winning stage three to Poligny.

“I never thought it was possible,” she said, after realising she had taken both the biggest success of her career and the overall lead in the sport’s biggest race. “It’s unreal. I was so dizzy at the end. I know my boyfriend would be so angry at me for not celebrating, but I couldn’t. I could not lift my arms off the bike. It was impossible.”

Mikel Arteta’s team and the Brazilian star could be a perfect match. It also could be a risk that ends in disaster

Sometimes what is needed is something different.

There is a long history in football of counterintuitive thinking being successful, of the benefits of creative tension, of adding grit to the oyster to generate the pearl, but even so, the news that talks between Vinícius Júnior and Arsenal on personal terms are progressing comes as something of a shock. Mikel Arteta’s great followers of a blueprint adding a free spirit like the Brazilian? Really?

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• Irish golfer one of four wildcard picks for Europe

• Rookies Ramirez, Nadaud and Rhodes also selected

Leona Maguire has retained her place in Europe’s Solheim Cup team despite a disappointing 2026, with the Irish golfer one of four wildcard picks named by Anna Nordqvist on Monday. Maguire joins three rookies – Julia López Ramirez, Nastasia Nadaud and Mimi Rhodes – in completing the European side who will attempt to reclaim the trophy in the Netherlands next month.

A missed cut for Maguire in the Women’s British Open last week meant the 31-year-old had failed to play in the closing 36 holes of four from a possible five majors in 2026. In the one where she made the cut, the Women’s PGA Championship, Maguire tied 53rd. She started this week ranked 83rd in the world.

He divided opinion but made the most of a small budget – his successor must work with youngsters not big signings

“If we want to compete at this later stage, we’ve seen what we’ve got to do, as a club. It’s our choice now, isn’t it? We have to look at what we seriously want to achieve … It takes, sometimes, a punch in the face to wake up.”

Those were the words of the Manchester United head coach Marc Skinner after his side went out of the Women’s Champions League with elimination by Bayern Munich in April. Just over four months later, the bruise from that punch has faded, but so, it would seem, have the club’s ambitions to compete in the transfer market, and Skinner has decided not to get into the ring for another round.

Fire department continues to tackle blazes across the country, including the islands, as fires are fed by gale-force winds

Tributes paid across industry to provocative journalist who died after short illness

The writer and broadcaster Rod Liddle, a prominent columnist for the Sunday Times and the Sun, has died after a short illness. He was 66.

Liddle, whose provocative style attracted praise and criticism, also wrote for the Spectator magazine and earlier in his career edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Family update on GoFundMe page says child, who was six when badly injured in 2019 incident, is now back at school

A boy thrown from the viewing balcony in London’s Tate Modern art gallery has a “smile back on his face” after being discharged from hospital, his family have said.

The French youngster, whose name remains undisclosed for privacy reasons, was six when he was badly hurt in an attack by then teenager Jonty Bravery at the London attraction on 4 August 2019.

NatureScot refuses licence for hunt on Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir in which up to 2,000 gannet chicks are killed

A controversial Scottish seabird hunt will not go ahead for the first time in 400 years, in what campaigners have called a “victory for common sense”.

In the annual guga hunt, up to 2,000 gannet chicks are killed over a 10-day period on the uninhabited Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir, 40 miles north of Lewis and Harris.

Nathan Owen drove his electric Jaguar at up to 86mph and lied to police it was malfunctioning and out of his control

A man who drove his electric Jaguar at up to 86mph on motorways falsely telling police the car was malfunctioning and out of his control has been jailed for four years and three months.

Nathan Owen fabricated not being able to brake in a “frighteningly stupid” ploy to avoid paying car finance, Liverpool crown court heard.

Farms and rooftop panels contribute 14.4% to the grid – and figures reveal a surge in new installations

Solar energy supplied more power to Great Britain’s grid in July than in any previous month as households turned to rooftop panels to cut their energy bills.

Solar farms and rooftop panels provided 14.4% of the country’s electricity after some parts of the UK recorded almost twice the average sunshine hours for the time of year.

PM has long history of speaking out on realities of global heating but political opponents remain unnmoved

Just over four years ago, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, visited a small town in the south-western region of Extremadura that had been affected by one of the wildfires devouring tens of thousands of hectares of land across the country.

That summer’s blazes had left two people dead in the northern region of Castilla y León and another man there fatally burned after the excavator he was using to try to dig a firebreak to protect his town was swallowed up by the flames. A street-sweeper in Madrid had collapsed and died from heatstroke while on shift in soaring temperatures that summer. The paramedics who tried to save him noted that his body temperature was 41.6C (107F).

Council leaders say crumbling infrastructure and lack of water are jeopardising government’s plans for new homes

The government’s housebuilding agenda is hitting the stark reality of a lack of water and crumbling infrastructure across the east and south-east of England.

Half the country was declared to be in serious drought this week, for the second consecutive year, with the Environment Agency warning of dire consequences for the economy, environment and wildlife.

Growers in dismay after scorching weather and lack of rain affect yields, sending wholesale prices rocketing

Pubs, restaurants and supermarkets are having to buy lettuce and broccoli from Spain at what should be the height of UK growing season, as drought and extreme heat hit crops.

The wholesale price of tomatoes is up by more than 60%, iceberg lettuce by 90% and potatoes by more than 40% as a number of farmers struggle to grow in consistently high temperatures. Even those with irrigation systems and reservoirs on their farms say water is running low.

Christopher Phillips, who had been his mother Sylvia’s primary carer since 2008, given two years and four months in prison

A man has been jailed for keeping his dead mother’s body in a freezer at their shared home for almost three years, during which time he received more than £70,000 of her benefits and other funds.

Christopher Phillips, 60, stored the body of Sylvia Phillips, a retired company secretary, in the chest freezer in the living room of their house in the south Wales seaside town of Porthcawl.

His family friendly style made the comedian a household name in the 80s and he was awarded a papal knighthood in 2015 for services to charity

Jimmy Cricket, the northern Irish comic who became a regular fixture on British television throughout the 1980s, has died aged 80.

Known for his catchphrase: “And there’s more!”, Cricket fronted his own ITV series of the same name on which he rocked his signature look of tailcoat, short trousers and wellington boots marked clearly with “L” and “R” on the wrong feet. He also appeared at the 1984 Royal Variety Performance as well as in the BBC’s long-running light entertainment vehicle The Good Old Days.

Pupils who open accounts aged 11 to 12 score lower in some subjects than those who wait a few years, study finds

Children who open social media accounts at the start of secondary school appear to perform worse in tests than those who delay, with researchers suspecting that the constant checking for updates is a major distraction for many students.

Pupils who opened their first social media account aged 11 to 12 scored lower in mathematics and reading tests than those who waited a few years, with scores at age 16 differing between the groups by the equivalent of about six months of learning, the study found.

Staff at 5 Live told he will not return following claims about his previous career at Sullivan’s Sport newspapers

The BBC radio presenter Tony Livesey has left the broadcaster after allegations were raised about his previous career as the editor-in-chief of David Sullivan’s Sport newspapers.

Staff at 5 Live, where Livesey had most recently presented the 10pm to 1am show four days a week, were told he would not be returning to the station, having stepped away from the role after the allegations first emerged.

Boris Nadezhdin, who gained prominence after standing against Putin in 2024, says he is now in France

The prominent Russian anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin has fled to Paris as Moscow tightens its grip on dissent before parliamentary elections later this year.

Nadezhdin, a veteran liberal politician, gained international prominence during Russia’s 2024 presidential election when his long-shot campaign against Vladimir Putin unexpectedly gathered momentum before electoral authorities barred him from running.

Decision to stage solo exhibition comes 15 years after conviction over racist and antisemitic remarks

The controversial designer John Galliano is to get an unvarnished retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York next May.

Galliano, who is widely considered to be one of the most influential designers of the past four decades, was exiled from the industry in 2011 after he was filmed making a series of racist and antisemitic comments. He was fired from his position as creative director of Dior, a post he had held for 15 years, condemned by the media and later convicted and fined by a French court.

US sees first fatalities due to intestinal illness, though both had significant ​underlying health conditions

Two people have died from cyclosporiasis in Michigan, the state’s health department said on Monday, marking the first fatalities in the largest US outbreak ⁠of the intestinal illness.

Both ⁠individuals had significant ​underlying health conditions that may have been affected by cyclosporiasis and dehydration, according to medical records.

Foreign ministry accuses Kyiv of carrying out attack reports say may have been aimed at air force chief

• Europe live – latest updates

Russia has blamed Ukraine for a bombing at a restaurant in central Moscow that killed five people, amid growing speculation that a senior Russian military commander was the intended target.

The explosion occurred on Saturday evening near the entrance to an upmarket Italian restaurant in one of the city’s seven Stalin-era skyscrapers on Kudrinskaya Square.

Factories in upbeat mood despite fears over economic impact of US war on Iran, poll finds

• Business live – latest updates

UK manufacturers ramped up production last month for the fourth consecutive month and at the fastest pace in almost two years, according to a leading survey of the industry.

The S&P Global poll of manufacturers found them in upbeat mood in July, though anxious about the prospect of a long war in the Middle East that would block supplies of oil and gas, and raise the cost of production.

Proposed $400bn tie-up with Bristol Myers Squibb would create world’s fourth-largest drugmaker but analysts question rationale

More than £17bn was wiped off the value of Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, on Monday after a report that it was in discussions to take over its US rival Bristol Myers Squibb in a deal that would create a near $400bn (£300bn) pharmaceutical group.

AstraZeneca, run by Pascal Soriot, its longtime chief executive, had been worth nearly £196bn before the news broke. BMS, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, and known for its cancer treatments, was worth $133bn (£98bn).

Investors scramble to make sense of a shock Chinese challenge to the dominance of western chipmakers

Even for the rollercoaster world of AI, last week was particularly volatile as investors scrambled to keep up with developments that threatened the dominance of the largest western chipmakers.

It began with a double whammy. On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn).

New AI models, advanced robots and specialty computer chips are unsettling markets and the US tech industry

Over the past month, a series of advancements in China’s artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond.

Silicon Valley has long pointed to China’s tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China’s progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.

In a career spanning six decades, photographer Gered Mankowitz has nurtured trusting relationships with many of the twentieth century’s defining artists. As he celebrates his 80th birthday, Mankowitz opens up about the stories behind iconic images of Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Annie Lennox and others that have have become indelible parts of pop culture history. These images are taken from Gered Mankowitz: Photographs, out now via ACC Art Books; much of his work is also displayed at Iconic Images Gallery, London

It has 12 movements, 200 musicians and aims to unite America. The great US trumpeter and composer talks about his All Rise symphony, his jazz great mentors – and learning humility from his wife

At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is hard to spot. When he first played this venue, in 1984, he was the prodigious 22-year-old soloist out front, blowing Haydn’s trumpet concerto under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Tonight he is embedded in the machinery: half-hidden behind ranks of strings and woodwind, a black-suited figure in the heart of his own symphony.

It’s a strange way for a composer to behave – especially one whose public persona has long been associated with certainty, polemic and the upright authority of a man who can make any argument sound like a moral law. Yet Marsalis seems almost pleased by his disappearance. “It’s my piece,” he says, as we talk in his hotel room the next morning, “but it’s not my show.”

Now you’ve seen the new Spidey, let’s talk about new baddies (or are they goodies?), X-Men alumni, painful relationships and a potential Spidey-pig

• This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day

There was a danger that Spider-Man: Brand New Day might amount to little more than a palate cleanser between the multiversal excesses of No Way Home and the all-star chaos of Avengers: Doomsday. Why not just keep it small: a more grounded tale of New York crime-fighting, to keep the Marvel machine rolling before the inevitable return of world-ending stakes? Instead, the studio, once again in partnership with Spider-Man rights holder Sony, has produced a gamechanging comic book epic whose effects will continue being felt for years to come.

The film’s biggest twist is significant enough on its own, but Brand New Day keeps widening the implications long after the initial shock has started to wear off. Characters who seemed to exist for one purpose gradually reveal another. Throwaway conversations acquire unexpected significance. New gadgets, strange abilities and apparently routine subplots all hint at much broader shifts taking place beneath the familiar web-slinging adventure. By the time the credits have rolled, the film has answered some longstanding questions, raised several more, and left audiences with a surprisingly clear idea of where the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) could be heading next.

The latest in our ongoing series of writers picking their most beloved comfort films is a tribute to David Lynch’s gentlest movie

What was your gateway into the Lynchian empire? Maybe it was the elliptical horror of Mulholland Drive, with its labyrinth of dream and deceit. Perhaps it was the small-town banality of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, the gee-whiz vernacular and cherry-pie dispositions hiding a malice so pure behind those white picket fences. Or was it Wild at Heart, that nightmarish road movie where oddballs and deviants lurk at every bend, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern tearing through America with unbridled passion and violence?

Weirdly, it was none of those for me. In fact, my introduction to David Lynch contained not one drop of sexual depravity or grisly malevolence. The film was The Straight Story and I was 15. Released in May 1999, it tells the real-life tale of Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old second world war vet who rode a lawnmower 300 miles across the midwest to reconcile with his ailing brother. While the title obviously names the main character, it also invites you to take Lynch at his word: that this is that fabled chronicler of the demented and the macabre playing it straight(ish). Think of it as Lynch does Disney: a family-friendly hymn to Americana, sparse and only a little bit strange, finding a gentle poetry in the everyday.

Pleasingly potboilerish tale of a woman trying to make sense of a traumatic fall that left her comatose slightly loses track of its toxic mind games

It is fair to say that spending your time doodling ouroboroses and picking open your surgical scar probably indicates you are not in a fantastic frame of mind. These are coping mechanisms for Mia (Simone Ashley) after she wakes up, at the start of this capable psychological thriller, from a coma resulting from falling several storeys of an airport building. A safety net is luckily there to catch her – but she remains in mental freefall. Assaulted by stray fragments of memory, she is unable to say whether husband, Jake (Austin Stowell), who is currently in jail, was the one who pushed her over the parapet.

As Mia tries to piece together shattered body and mind, her family, led by solicitous brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma), try to persuade her to cut Jake loose. But she dithers, held back by guilt about how seriously she took his own unravelling, the spiralling paranoia that made him quit his job as a New York actuary and led them to start a new life in Los Angeles. When she finally visits him in jail, is Jake gaslighting her – intent on further manipulation – when he suggests that Ajay is gaslighting her for his own ends by pushing her to break up with him? Or she gaslighting herself by giving him the benefit of the doubt in the first place? This is a Mexican standoff of gaslighting.

The hit survival show returns with a group of famous faces. Plus: Sally Magnusson remembers Mastermind. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 4

Royal Albert Hall, London
The intricate concerto was paired with the world premiere of Dani Howard’s likable Concerto for Brass and a lush Scriabin symphony, all admirably led by Paavo Järvi

London will be seeing a lot more of Paavo Järvi when the Estonian conductor takes the reins at the London Philharmonic in 2028. Here, on the podium with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he proved a model of calm, control and clarity as well as the most sensitive of accompanists, shepherding a breathtaking account of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto by Leonidas Kavakos.

The Russian composer struggled for three years to find a soloist brave enough to take on the work’s premiere, yet Kavakos was clearly undaunted. The Greek violinist’s exceptional dexterity and pinpoint intonation at the very top of the range made light of fiendish passagework that has foxed some of the finest. The first movement’s intricate variations were exquisitely decorated, while the intensity of his playing drew spontaneous applause mid-cadenza. Järvi, for his part, was alert to the soloist’s generous rubato, keeping the orchestra in soft-shoed lockstep. As the simple eloquence of the canzonetta gave way to a helter-skelter finale, Kavakos let fly, his bow skimming the strings with unerring accuracy. A Bach encore was dispatched with similar poise and precision.

Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for natter with no rules. Plus, the viral red phone is back on the bridge

Comedians Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for a second series of comically chaotic chat. Expect plenty of wildly pinballing discussions with no theme other than what pops into their heads. Topics so far include Robert De Niro’s much younger partner, podcasts about nuns playing ultimate frisbee – and Brady on how “so many of Bonnie Blue’s views are so close to mine”. Business as usual, then. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

The singer and actor is partial to Mozart and once did Édith Piaf at karaoke, but to which musical showstopper does she owe everything?

The first song I fell in love with
I used to sing All I Have to Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers with my schoolfriend who lived over the road, when I was 11 or 12. I sang the harmony and she sang the melody.

The song I do at karaoke
The only time was on holiday in Nice with a friend. We’d been out for a lovely supper and had far too much rosé, and I was about to play Édith Piaf in the West End. I ended up singing Hymne à l’amour, and he did Fools Rush In.

Royal Albert Hall, London
An acted prelude by Jane Mitchell teased out the composer’s motivations for his engrossing First Symphony before the orchestra assayed the work from memory

“Ridiculous,” “offensively trivial”, “a complete disaster,” just some of the critical barbs hurled at Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony following its Budapest premiere in 1889. A babel of such invective echoed around the Albert Hall launching the ingenious theatrical presentation – in effect, a staged programme note – that preceded Aurora Orchestra’s performance of the work in all its maverick majesty. Over an hour, actors and musicians took us on a light touch, deep dive into the circumstances surrounding the genesis of a symphony that frankly baffled its first audience.

“For those that listen closely, everything about me is explained in this music,” declared a beguiling Jack Bardoe, perfectly encapsulating Mahler’s combination of frenetic energy and artistic neuroses (“A bomb encased in razorblades,” is how one-time friend Ferdinand Pfohl put it). The setting was a psychiatrist’s office, with Sarah Twomey a forthright Sigmund Freud (“Tell me about your mother”) linking the composer’s compulsion to write music with a need to re-enact childhood trauma. Paternal cruelty, eight siblings lost in infancy and a disastrous love affair fostered a deeper understanding of what made Mahler tick.

London’s 90s art scene forms the backdrop to this tale of a complex relationship between two artists whose identities become entangled in their creative collaboration

For all the wrong reasons, Damien Hirst’s Shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) has a claim to being the most prescient British artwork of the last half-century: a grim parable of neoliberalism. In 1991, it was still possible to mistake the predatory violence of that system for a kind of animal vitality. But today, open-mouthed, dead-eyed and decayed, it speaks only of a regime preserved far beyond its natural lifespan, lauded exclusively by institutions that can profit from its ugliness.

Alex Hyde’s second novel, an elegant Künstlerroman which plays out during a lightly fictionalised version of the YBA explosion, explores the resonance of that particular cultural inflection point: a moment when the collapse of the postwar cultural settlement, municipal culture and public institutions was transfigured decisively and ubiquitously into individualised, confessional artistic capital.

This brilliant account of attempts by the old guard to take back control captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully

Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour and former possession, Ukraine.

Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight? Because that’s how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow largely unopposed; Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.)

With smartphones stealing our attention, we’re picking up fewer books than ever. A novelist shares her eight-week scheme to get you back into the habit

Do you feel that it’s harder to read than it used to be? Not harder to read emails, texts and social media posts, of course. We’re reading those all day long. Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? How long is it since you even sat down with a weekend newspaper and read it cover to cover? Do you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit, everything from fun popcorn novels to serious nonfiction, classic and contemporary, many genres and writers, but somehow it’s gone away? It doesn’t feel like a decision that you made. It just happened.

I feel like that. At least more like that than I’m comfortable with. I’m a novelist and I present programs about thinking on the BBC, and yet even I am finding that I’m reading less than I used to. It seems more of an effort and less of a consistent, persistent habit than it was. I hate this feeling. I still have the habit of acquiring books, buying them, getting them from libraries, being sent them. And I do still read. Compared with many people, I probably read an enormous amount, but I know it’s not as much as I used to read. And I know where the time has gone.

The Pulitzer-winning author of Less and Villa Coco explores the art of writing humour – plus 10 of the best novels to make you laugh

In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco instructed all citizens to remain in their houses due to a pandemic, the first thing I did was order all the books of Agatha Christie. I was not alone; I think many of us immersed ourselves in reliable narratives to drown out the chaos. It did not matter if it ended in marriage or murder; the reliability was what mattered. Later when I realised I would need to hole up for some time, my reading shifted to a different kind of novel. And because, like Christie, our world has an endless supply of new terrors, it is the comic novel that still fills my reading hours.

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. Most would agree, of course, that Wodehouse wrote comic novels, but I turn to books hardly anybody would classify that way – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, for instance – that yet seem to me to be a hoot. I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.

Online multiplayer changed the trajectory of games, but the cost of keeping servers running means every virtual world is doomed to die – sooner or later

Nevan Hagarty had an idea. If he and other Halo 3 players stayed online the night of 13 January 2022, they could delay the impending server shutdown. Players knew this was coming: it had happened to Halo 2 when its Xbox Live servers were turned off in 2010, and a group managed to stay logged into the multiplayer servers for weeks.

And so, players gathered online before the server shutdown to pay homage and to mourn the game they loved so dearly. And, maybe, to keep it online for a little longer. “I must have played ’til about 4am the night of the shutdown, trading stories with so many players about their love of the game and their experiences over the last 15 years,” says Hagarty, 22. “It was a really wholesome experience I won’t forget.”

Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games

As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!

Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’

The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.

From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.

Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you

It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.

In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.

Drew McOnie skipped school to audition for the original. It launched his astonishing career. Now he’s getting his claws into a no-pussyfooting version of the classic hit

At the age of 17, Drew McOnie was so determined to be in the musical Cats that he snuck out of school to audition. Four days later, he was on a flight to Germany to join the international production. (Luckily, he was at a performing arts school and they forgave him.) It was a life-changing moment: at that point, McOnie’s stellar career as a dancer, Olivier award-winning choreographer and director began – and, 23 years later, it’s all about to come full circle. McOnie has created his own version of the musical he’s been obsessed with since childhood.

For any dancer growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Cats was the musical: dance wasn’t just an accompaniment, but instrumental to the show. Gillian Lynne’s original choreography is iconic – much copied by local dance schools and student shows of the era. Lynne was a force of nature, still doing the splits at 88, four years before she died in 2018. For McOnie, artistic director at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre and famed for his blazing choreography in Jesus Christ Superstar, it takes some nerve to remake it.

Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth
For the festival’s 150th anniversary, the creative team have turned to AI to generate visuals reflecting Wagner’s tetralogy’s past, present – and future. The hyperactive result is a dismal, mindless mess

Unveiled the same week in which tech company Anthropic admitted that its AI model Claude had gone rogue during testing, Bayreuth festival’s new AI-generated staging of Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelungen is at least timely. But anyone who assumes that the cycle’s obsession with knowledge, power and possession might make it an ideal forum for reflection on AI as a major contemporary frontier will be disappointed, as will anyone hopeful about AI’s creative potential within opera.

Commissioned to mark the festival’s 150th anniversary, the production is “curated” – emphatically not “directed” – by a team led by German stage director Marcus Lobbes. He apparently spent weeks in dialogue with AI models about possible interpretations of the Ring. According to the programme book, “power structures, capitalism, mythology, gender roles, nationalism”, all came up. So far, so mainstream Wagner reception. But if these human-machine exchanges were revelatory, you wouldn’t know it from the resulting staging, which uses AI “as an extension of a cultural memory that is never complete”.

London Coliseum
A quartet of conjurors, calling themselves the Horsemen, perform fine feats of escapology and mentalism that are undermined by smoke, lasers and pomposity

Is there an opposite of close-up magic? If there is, it would look a bit like the magic in Now You See Me, which must be visible (and audible) from space. This new spectacle, heading later this year to its spiritual home of Las Vegas, spins off from the movie franchise of the same name and features a quartet of conjurors (identifying, rather awkwardly, as “the Horsemen”) performing feats of escapology, mentalism and even time travel amid much bombastic son et lumière and self-promotion.

It could scarcely be more pompous – but happily, there are plenty of entertaining tricks to keep pomp-phobes like myself onside. The Italian Andrew Basso has arguably the stoppiest showstoppers, including his recreation of Houdini’s water torture stunt, and another where he extricates himself from padlocked chains while harbouring something very undesirable in his mouth. His French counterpart Enzo Weyne delivers an arresting number with a paper bag and a lightbulb, and there’s a fine audience participation set piece inviting us all to shred, shuffle then – as if by magic! – reassemble the playing cards we were given on the way in to the theatre.

In this week’s newsletter: ​H​idden creators ​reveal how invisibility can be a shield and spotlight in an era of relentless self‑exposure

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In 1985, an anonymous group of women disguised in gorilla masks burst on to the art scene in New York. At night, the Guerrilla Girls, as they named themselves, fly-posted around the city: funny, eye-catching posters highlighting gender and racial biases in museums and galleries. (“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” read one now-famous poster.) “Of course, we were afraid that if we blew the whistle on some of [the art world’s] most powerful people, we could kiss off our art careers,” a founding member explained in an interview for their 1995 book. “But mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work.”

The collective is still active; 55 members have come and gone over the years. When giving interviews, they use pseudonyms borrowed from dead women artists: Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Käthe Kollwitz. Only a handful of their true identities have been revealed over the years, mostly after their deaths or due to lawsuits. But this week, a Guerrilla Girl made headlines when she chose to unmask herself on her own terms. “I’d had a pact with another Girl that whoever died first, the survivor would bring her out,” said the 83-year-old artist Joyce Kozloff (codename: Liubov Popova). “But I suddenly realised that if I were dead, I couldn’t tell the story my way.”

Hardy, a Bafta-nominated film-maker, has died aged 61, having completed a sequel to the cult 1973 folk-horror made by his father Robin Hardy

British film-maker Justin Hardy, the son of The Wicker Man director Robin Hardy, has died aged 61. He had recently completed Wrath of the Gods, a second sequel to the fondly regarded folk-horror film, inspired by a story idea discovered in his father’s archives.

In a statement, the director’s family said they are “devastated to share that Justin Hardy passed away [on Friday]. He was so full of life right to the end, and incredibly energised to be working towards premiering his latest film this month. We are all so proud of him and heartbroken he won’t be with us at his premiere. He was a man of family, of boundless creativity and of devotion for everyone he held dear.” The BBC reported Hardy died after a heart attack.

Warner Bros faces losing rights to the blockbuster sequel if deals with the film’s stars and director are not agreed by December

The comedy mega-hit Barbie made an estimated $1.5bn (£1.1bn) at the box office, was nominated for eight Academy Awards and – alongside the biopic Oppenheimer – dominated the culture during the summer of 2023. A sequel had seemed a foregone conclusion. However, the development of Barbie 2 has stalled over salary negotiations, putting the entire project in jeopardy, according to a report in the New York Times.

Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the first film’s stars, and its director and co-writer Greta Gerwig, are yet to agree on terms. Gosling, who was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance as Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, is reportedly asking for $20m (£14.8m) to return to the role. All three are represented by the same talent agency, CAA.

Pop and rock legend tells Sunday Times of drinking problem and ill health after final Genesis tour in 2021

Phil Collins has said that he suffered life-threatening alcoholism in recent years.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, the pop and rock legend, 75, said that his drinking began after he stopped taking Antabuse, a drug that causes illness if alcohol is consumed, which he had been using since an earlier period of alcoholism.

Thousands of budding US novelists enlist in courses each year, hoping to gain credentials that often influence who gets published

Thomas Pynchon was known to avoid the press and refuse interviews. There are only two official photographs of the Gravity’s Rainbow author available publicly – one taken at high school, the other during his time in the navy. He is the embodiment of the American image of a great writer: a mysterious recluse who works in a turret alone.

These days, the writerly lone wolf is more a myth than it is a reality. Most of today’s celebrated authors are trained in the profession and their qualification is the MFA (master of fine arts). Percival Everett received his from Brown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie studied at Johns Hopkins University, and Jhumpa Lahiri went to Boston. Great writers, now, are less rare animals discovered in the wild and more elite thoroughbreds, meticulously trained and set up for the race ahead.

It took a heatwave to get me to shed my shame and my sleeves, but now there’s no stopping me. Life is cooler in every way

‘Aren’t you hot in that?” was the question that plagued my summers as a teenager. I would never bare my arms; instead, I would cover up with a trusty black cardigan. Even T-shirts felt too revealing, too tight on the arm, too clinging to the body. I needed layers to feel comfortable. Well, comfortable isn’t the right word. I was never comfortable, despite telling everyone: “No, I’m not hot. I don’t really feel the heat.”

In my 20s and 30s, I collected a hot-weather capsule wardrobe of T-shirt dresses in various sizes, all baggy and sleeved. But why? I’m someone who should know better. I’ve read the books, I’ve shared the memes. I know, from body-positivity activists, that you don’t have to deny yourself the joy of being at the beach or pool just because a magazine tells you you have to get yourself “beach-body ready”: slimmer, hairless, perfect.

We put 10 tinned and jarred varieties to the test to see which anchovies are the best catch for your cash

• The best supermarket tinned sardines

To taste these anchovies, I invited a friend, the food journalist and author Sudi Pigott, to join me. Arriving with a packet of Pujadó Solano anchovies and her new book, Consider the Anchovy, in hand, she and I tasted 10 brands of anchovies straight from the tin or jar with sparkling water and cucumber to cleanse the palate. According to Pigott, the best anchovies are “juicy, plump and velvety, with a sweet, nutty taste of jamón!”

The anchovy supply chain has been heavily affected by El Niño, which caused abnormal weather events in Peru, where the most economical anchovies in our test were fished. But premium anchovies sourced from the Bay of Biscay (the Cantabrian Sea) have also faced external pressures. A lack of supply, among other factors, has increased prices and left some supermarket shelves bare.

Our writer spent the hottest weeks of the year churning through the top ice-cream makers, from compressor models to the cult favourite Ninja Creami. Here’s the scoop

• Kitchen gadgets top chefs can’t live without

I love a scoop or two of the good stuff, even more so when the mercury hits 30C and ice-cream starts feeling less like an indulgence and more like an essential survival tool. This is why owning an ice-cream maker has always made sense to me. I’ve been using the original Ninja Creami for years now, but before that I was spending a small fortune on gelato, fruity sorbets, frozen yoghurt and other such desserts from the frozen aisle.

Some might argue that the best ice-cream makers are a luxury, but if you’re a true dessert devotee, I believe they can earn their keep in no time. A tub of Häagen-Dazs will set you back almost £6 nowadays, which is an expensive habit if you’re getting through a pot a week during the hottest months of the year.

They promise clearer, younger-looking skin, but is your money better spent elsewhere? Dermatologists and experts weigh in

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

Countless faddy products have crossed my desk over the years I’ve been reviewing beauty tech, from app-connected toothbrushes to AI-powered hair dryers. Few, however, have held such sustained interest as LED face masks.

At first glance, I assumed these scary-looking, space-age skincare devices would fizzle out of favour as quickly as they appeared. Instead, they’ve become a staple in some people’s skincare routines, including my own.

Stick vacuums are a convenient alternative to corded designs, but which model wins for overall cleaning prowess? Our expert reveals all

• The best robot vacuums
• How to make your vacuum last longer

Choosing a cordless vacuum isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. You’re likely to keep a vacuum cleaner for years, relying heavily on its ability to suck up dust, crumbs, mud, pet hair and any other dry spillages or sheddings that end up on your floor. Choosing the right model can be the difference between an effective cleaner that’s a delight to pull out of the cupboard and a dud that you dread having to unblock, detangle and clean after every use.

In this review, I took 16 of the leading cordless vacuum cleaners from a range of manufacturers and at various prices and inflicted the same cleaning tests on each one. That takes all the guesswork out of picking your next cleaner: I can tell you exactly which ones picked up the most mess.

Best cordless vacuum cleaner overall:
Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251

British cheesemakers have struggled to find a use for the 95,000 tonnes of salty whey they produce every year. But researchers may have come up with a solution

Name: Whey.

Age: As old as milk.

Enjoy this big bowl of refreshing noodle soup with turmeric and coconut milk spiked with a kick of chilli

This is exactly what I want to eat when I’m under the weather: a big bowl of Thai-inspired, soupy noodles with turmeric and coconut milk, all spiked with chilli. It’s a soup base that adapts perfectly for vegetarians (add cubed tofu) or leftovers (shredded roast chicken). This makes a lot of broth (hydration is important!), so serve it in your best ramen or soup bowls. The choice of noodles is yours: rice noodles (flat or vermicelli) work well for a gluten-free option, but I inevitably use my favourite straight-to-wok thick udon.

Perfect for cooking in the heat, these light, fresh dishes that are bursting with flavour will have you falling hook, line and sinker

Summer is my favourite time of year to cook fish. There are so many fantastic seasonal species available and, so long as they’re properly fresh and of good quality, they need very little intervention. I often look for lightness, freshness and acidity to bring balance and lift to a summery fish dish, whether that comes from citrus, herbs or a sharp dressing, because those elements enhance the natural flavour of the fish, rather than masking it. These recipes are ideal for relaxed summer cooking: full of flavour, yet straightforward enough for a midweek meal.

Chez Rose offers a sort of hospitality that feels centuries old, but when done well, will never be old hat

Chez Rose has just appeared on Pollen Street, Mayfair, but to the casual passerby, it looks as if it could have been established in 1974. This is, of course, poudre aux yeux; until recently, this was Jason Atherton’s Little Social. Yet, with some strategically placed tables en terrasse, vintage mirrors, thoughtfully scattered doilies and, later, bread baskets, and what you have is France in the eye of the British beholder. Not the full ’Allo ’Allo-ification, but that elegant, sexy pastiche of everyday French dining that adult Brits gobble up like school kids devouring Milka chocolate. Crepes Suzette, poulet rôti with vin jaune and morels, dover sole meuniere with Menton lemon… Ooh là là. If you can’t get into Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, go here instead.

Chez Rose is by Spencer Metzger, whose CV is an embarrassment of edible riches: The Ritz and Row on 5 were his culinary sandpit, until Chez Rose allowed him to model a whole place in tribute to his late grandmother, Rosemary. There are framed photos of the Metzger family around the room, and some items from her house, if diners would stop stealing them. Rosemary wasn’t French, and neither is Metzger, but within one mouthful of the first snack of red prawn and tomato on a crisp crostini, zinging with a mouthy lemon, which arrived on a pretty doily, it feels churlish to quibble. In fact, if Metzger’s non-Frenchness upsets you, it just leaves more 70% chocolate souffle with vanilla ice-cream for the rest of us.

He could seem judgmental, even moody. But the whole neighbourhood mourned when this remarkable moggy went to meet his maker

When my cat Eric passed away from stomach cancer in 2001, I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready to have a pet again. But a few months later I was given another cat, Karl, by an old friend from Camberwell College of Arts in south London, who was moving back to Germany. I had known Karl when I was a student there, where he had been mates with Eric. Karl, an unassuming brown tabby with a judgmental glare, took me back to living in student halls in the 90s.

Karl was perhaps the most average-looking tabby in south London, but on my quiet street he became a legend of sorts. He accompanied my children and me on school runs. He would walk ahead with his belly swinging and take us to the top of the road. There he would wait until I dropped off the children and escort me back home.

Vivian and Thomas both left physically unfulfilling marriages and are rediscovering their sex drives in later life

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

Since menopause and being with Thomas, my interest in sex is much higher

A prospective Restore Britain voter and a Green-supporting Chinese immigrant found some common ground over small-boat crossings, but where did they land on foxhunting?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Phill, 58, Hertfordshire

Occupation Stairlift surveyor

Rachel forked out £700 for beauty treatments, Kojo confessed to a £25 cigarette habit, and Jake indulged his love of fancy timepieces. Were their other halves forgiving or furious?

Rachel and Kojo, Northampton

Reader expresses consternation after enforcement officer issues penalty notice outside station in London

I was outside London Waterloo railway station and was looking for a bin to dispose of an empty coffee cup.

The only bin I could see was completely full, but there was a plastic bag containing rubbish at the base.

Criminals hope by using threats of enforcement action, people will panic and click link to bogus parking app site

You use parking apps a lot – you have several on your phone – but it is not always straightforward. Sometimes there is a lack of reliable mobile signal, or the app crashes or behaves oddly, or it does not seem to want to accept your bank card.

Also, it is sometimes hard to keep track of which apps you have used when. So when you receive a text from RingGo saying you owe it money, you are not totally surprised.

From melted electric sockets to shabby alternatives, readers tell of dealings with platform when things go wrong

Jane Ripley* spent some time researching the best apartment to stay in for her family’s trip to Batumi in Georgia, eventually settling on one with an “exceptional” rating on Booking.com.

But when the Ripleys arrived at 11pm on the first day, they were directed to another property that was shabby and had stains on the furniture and ceiling.

Whether it is SpaceX or a bank, getting the right facts about a firm can offer vital insights before you invest in it

When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched on to the stock market, tens of thousands of Britons clamoured to buy a stake, putting the spotlight on DIY investing.

Going it alone and buying shares in individual companies can be rewarding, but also risky. Unless you have a huge amount of cash, you are likely to end up investing in far fewer companies than if you invested in a fund. This means you are more exposed to the ups and downs of those companies’ fortunes.

Want to lower your temperature and drift off to sleep quicker? An ice-cold shower might seem the best solution, but the truth is more complicated

It’s another sticky summer evening. You’re too hot to sleep. Surely an ice-cold shower is the best way to cool off and drift away quicker? Not really, says Mike Tipton, a professor of human and applied physiology at the University of Portsmouth.

“If you’re trying to go to sleep, the last thing you want to do is go into a freezing cold shower,” he says. The shock of cold water immersion causes the body to produce adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones designed to keep us alert. “That’s just about the last thing you want before you go to bed.”

Menstrual and digestive discomfort often coincide, and a researcher who has been looking in to it for a decade tells us what she learned

Every period, right on schedule: the cramps arrive, and right behind them, the urgent need to poop.

If this is your experience, you’re in good company: in one study, 73% of healthy premenopausal women reported at least one significant gastrointestinal symptom in the days before or during their period. Abdominal pain and diarrhea were the most common complaints, but women reported nausea and constipation too.

Avoid espresso martinis and wear the right pyjamas: experts give tips on how to sleep when it’s hot outside

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

Getting a good night’s sleep when it’s hot out can feel impossible. Unfortunately, worrying about not being well-rested doesn’t help.

Experts say worrying about sleep in warm weather will inevitably make you feel worse. “When people cannot sleep because they are too hot, it often becomes both a physical and a mental challenge,” says Dr Shelby Harris, founder and director of NY Sleep and Psychology, and author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia. “They may start watching the clock, worrying about how tired they will be the next day, or trying harder to force themselves to fall asleep.

Women and men exhibit different heart attack symptoms. Knowing these lesser-known factors can help save your life

A few months ago at work, when I rose from my seat and walked a few steps, something felt off. There was a strange pressure in my chest and rib cage, but I ignored it, took my water bottle from the kitchen and returned to my desk.

The next day it happened again. There was no pain and my breathing was fine. But whenever I stood up and took a few steps, the odd squeezing would return. I work at a hospital as a neurosurgery coordinator, and the wall was lined with posters about stroke and heart distress signs. I barely glanced at the pictures, having memorized them years ago.

Whether you’re in full summer mode or quietly planning for autumn, our fashion expert’s monthly picks will carry you stylishly between the two

• How to create the perfect women’s holiday capsule wardrobe

August: do you buy for the holiday you’ll be melting through this month, or the one you’ll be pretending to enjoy in a jumper come October? Answers on a postcard, please! The key to staying (relatively) sane in silly season is to embrace the contradictions.

Read on for the holiday-coded necklace I’ve fallen in love with and the elegant leather handbag I’m dreaming of when I hang up my straw basket. Plus, a lace camisole and a cosy jumper – and the absolute sweetest grip socks for my pilates girlies.

Private White VC’s James Eden says PM should not be criticised for wearing a high-quality British-made brand

It has not yet been two weeks since James Eden, the founder of the Manchester men’s clothier Private White VC, saw one of his best-known customers move in to No 10 Downing Street.

In any sane world the man who makes the prime minister’s jackets would be popping open the champagne. His garments have been seen by millions of people and described by journalists all over the world writing about Burnham’s buttoned-down style.

Celebrities including Charli xcx and Gabbriette and avant-garde brands honour tradition while also rejecting it

If a wedding day brings to mind a bride dressed in a big white dress, the styles coming down the aisle in the near future may strike you as a little different. Whether it is through celebrity references, or new brands, wedding gowns are entering a more experimental era.

For Charli xcx’s marriage to the 1975 drummer George Daniel last year, the bride wore a minidress and sunglasses.

Minty fresh flavours are out, gold plated toothbrushes are in, and dental experts are sceptical

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First it came for handwash. Then deodorant. Now, the fancification trend has claimed its next victim: dental products. From £20 toothpastes to bottles of mouthwash that sound more like a perfume than a breath freshener, a new wave of oral care is blurring the lines between function and fashion.

Rather than being shoved in an old tumbler on the back of the shelf, today’s iterations of toothbrushes and pastes are at the forefront of social media sink shots, proudly displayed alongside a three-wick candle and curated pile of skincare.

From Blackpool to Bournemouth, these quintessentially British institutions celebrate a lot more than fish and chips and amusement arcades

Perched in our glass-fronted eyrie, 300 metres out to sea, we watch a murmuration of starlings rise and fall and swoop around us. When the show is over, we turn our attention to the food. I have a bespoke vegan menu based on the best early summer ingredients: jersey royals, asparagus, strawberries. My boyfriend orders off the weekly changing à la carte: slow-cooked beef dumplings followed by butter-poached halibut.

We are at Ebb, a restaurant at the end of the pier in Worthing, West Sussex, which opened in May. Its art-deco design and fine-dining dishes are a far cry from the fish-and-chip shops and ice-cream parlours more commonly found on seaside piers. But traditionalists need not despair: downstairs at Perch on the Pier, fish and chips – as well as tofish (tofu) and chips – are always on the menu, with a knickerbocker glory to round things off in fine retro style.

Falling in love with a novel motivated these five travel writers to immerse themselves in locations from the Yukon and Kyrgyzstan to the Côte d’Azur

Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

Rabat is a gorgeous seaside city with great food and culture, but for book lovers there’s an added incentive to go this year

The first book I read willingly was Bridget Jones’s Diary. I was 19. Up to that point, I hadn’t been much of a reader. I’d been more into football, or Baywatch, or Robin Budd in the year above – anything really. Given the choice between reading a book and staring at a wall, I would have plumped for the latter.

After finishing my A-levels, I worked in a barbecue restaurant in Portsmouth – which is where I found Bridget Jones. The book was lying around in the staffroom. I picked it up and read a few pages, and then a few more, and then a few more. It felt exciting. Like I’d met someone. Like I was suddenly in a relationship. Over the next few days, I remember cancelling nights out so I could go to bed and read. My mum thought I was depressed.

From Dervla Murphy’s Northern Ireland to Elena Ferrante’s Naples, readers share the stories that inspired them to travel
• Tell us about a trip to Europe’s lakes and mountains – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Inspired by Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart

The solution to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I set you the following puzzle, suggested by Briton Alex Chui, the most successful ever candidate at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Last month Alex, who is a pupil at Tonbridge School in Kent, became the first person to win a medal at the olympiad for seven years in a row. Bravo!

Some reassurance that our puzzles are created by flesh-and-blood setters – and your clues for the name of Brockwell’s dog

The world of crosswords is generally a happy and sensible place. The human mind being what it is, though, we are not immune to entertaining ideas that are less than true.

Our equivalent of the conspiracy theory that humankind is being controlled by 5G phone masts is that puzzles are appearing that have not been created by people.

For hours we hobbled back, until we were close enough for him to place me down and run for help

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We had heard there was an incredible waterfall somewhere deep in the Thai rainforest. Seeking it out almost killed me.

In 2003 I was travelling solo through south-east Asia when I met Paul, an American with an easy-going, natural warmth. We were the only two people bunking at a youth hostel somewhere in southern Thailand and got chatting one morning. When the staff told us about a beautiful waterfall not far from where we were staying, we made plans to hike there together.

Pencil marks in the margins of books gathered over a lifetime was proof of a life lived. So when it came time for Andrew McKean to move into aged care, leaving his books behind made the self thinner

My wife, Patricia, and I came to our nursing home with little more than clothes, a few photographs and some books we could still carry. The shelves we left behind still stand in the emptied rooms of the house we called home for 30 years. Those shelves once groaned under the weight of books we had gathered, page by page, year by year.

Our books told of who we were, or who we thought we might become. There were the novels Patricia read in the long evenings after the children slept, their spines cracked from her hands. There were the histories I brought home from the library sales, dusty volumes of wars and voyages that filled the quiet hours when rain beat on the roof. Poetry too, slim books with thin paper, marked where a line struck true. We kept them not only for the stories printed inside but for the story they made of us.

People among the more than 50,000 who entered Spanish enclave this week describe the journey and their prospects

Four days ago, Youssef El Abbas saw an opportunity to reclaim the life he had lost seven years earlier. News was circulating that about 400 people had swum from Morocco to the neighbouring Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the north African coast, approximately 12 miles (19km) across the strait of Gibraltar from mainland Spain.

Here was a chance for the 44-year-old Moroccan father of four to return to Spain, from which he had been deported when his residency expired after the loss of his job in Bilbao in 2019.

Jason Arday was regarded as an academic superstar, but then questions about his work prompted scrutiny of his backstory and counterclaims of racism

When the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

We would like to hear from people who have recently installed renewable energy sources in their home, or considered doing so

Great Britain has recorded more new solar power installations in the first half of this year than in any six-month period since 2011, with most of the new panels going onto household rooftops rather than large-scale solar farms.

The government’s data also shows a rise in households turning to other low-carbon technology: applications to the boiler upgrade scheme, which offers grants for replacing gas boilers with greener alternatives, reached 4,512 last month – up 21% on June last year – with demand for heat pumps expected to climb further in the months ahead.

We would love to hear about your workhorse appliances, why they’re so impressive and how long you’ve had them

An elderly couple in Gloucestershire are reportedly still using what is believed to be Britain’s oldest working fridge.

The Electrolux appliance was built in the 1930s and bought second-hand by their family in 1949, with the owners telling SWNS that it is “still going strong”.

We would like to hear your experiences of accessing, providing or relying on adult social care in England

Andy Burnham has said he is prepared to use his “political capital” to reform England’s adult social care system, with the new prime minister arguing that fixing social care is essential to easing pressure on the NHS.

Whether you receive care yourself, support a loved one, work in social care or are an unpaid carer, we want to understand what adult social care in England is really like for the people who rely on it every day.

Whether you’re part of a volunteer group or go out on solo clean-ups in the UK, we’d like to hear from you

Across the UK, people are getting together to clean up their local environments. Whether it be maintaining parkland, beaches, waterways or roadsides, we want to hear from the volunteers who are getting involved in the maintenance and preservation of their local areas.

Do you take part in weekly litter picking outings? Are you part of a group taking on the responsibility of keeping our beaches or rivers clean?

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