After hopping between country, disco and soft rock, Tyler found her groove with Jim Steinman-penned epics, shining through even the most overblown backing tracks

• News: Bonnie Tyler, 80s pop legend known for Total Eclipse of the Heart and more, dies aged 75
• From Swansea clubs to worldwide fame: Bonnie Tyler – a life in pictures

Bonnie Tyler had a peculiar career: two bursts of global success that seemed to have almost nothing to do with each other beyond the name that appeared on the records. Her first big British hits, 1976’s Lost in France and 1977’s It’s a Heartache, were superior examples of what writer Pete Paphides subsequently dubbed “medium wave pop”, the largely forgotten stuff that actually filled the charts and Radio One’s playlists at a time when reductive rock histories would have you believe the entire nation was gripped by punk. They were a little bit soft rock, a little bit country, a little reminiscent of reliable mid-70s hitmakers Smokie, and so catchy that no one seemed to notice that somewhere between their respective releases, Tyler’s voice had changed dramatically: possessed of a rather sweet tone on Lost in France, an operation to remove nodules on her vocal cords had caused her to develop a striking Rod Stewart-like huskiness by the time of It’s a Heartache.

It looked like It’s a Heartache would turn Tyler into a huge star: it sold 6m copies, and the accompanying album made the Top 3 on the US country chart. But said success proved difficult to sustain, compounded by the fact that her record label seemed bizarrely unsure what to do with her. Get her to cover Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as on Louisiana Rain? Aim her squarely at the easy listening market via a version of Sometimes When We Touch? Encourage her to go disco, as on the fabulously camp (The World is Full of) Married Men?

As the all-inclusive holiday has a revival, I recall honing my buffet talents at the Pizza Hut salad bar in the 1980s. It's skill and science: exhilarating

School’s almost out and the holidays are here, which means for millions of Britons we have arrived at the start line for what might be called our biggest annual event: Wimbledon and the World Cup are one thing, but the all-inclusive and all-you-can-eat buffet olympics remains, I would argue, this country’s strongest competitive sport. Arriving at Luton airport before dawn last year, my children walked past the bars and with the innocence of the American-born said, owl-eyed, “Are they drinking … alcohol?” They are, my darlings, and will continue to do so from first light in the terminal until the last coach leaves the resort.

This is how it is now. Since Covid, vacation trends in Britain have skewed increasingly towards formalising this country’s latent maximalist instincts when it comes to enjoying our holidays. Between 2023 and 2024, bookings for European all-inclusive resorts rose by 30%, and the latest figures from Abta suggest that a quarter of British holidaymakers will now opt for the all-inclusive – meaning bottomless canteen-style food and drink, which, no matter how much we paid for it up front, I defy any of us not to experience as “free”.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Guardian sportswriter Tumaini Carayol was at Wimbledon yesterday to watch the quarter-finals, including Briton Arthur Fery’s spectacular win against Flavio Cobolli. He’ll be online at 12PM BST to answer all your questions about the Championships so far, the state of British tennis, and to share his predictions ahead of the final weekend

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After 10 days of high drama in SW19 we’re approaching the final weekend of the Championships. First-timers, seeds and favourites alike have fallen like dominoes, setting the stage for an intriguing set of semi-finals and guaranteeing us a brand new ladies’ champion. We’ve seen Djokovic roll back the years, Serena hold back the tears and a Fery-tale play out to a backdrop of cheers.

Tumaini Carayol has been our witness throughout and he’ll be sitting down with us today to answer your questions on all things Wimbledon from 12pm. Post your questions in the comments now and he’ll answer as many as time allows. In the meantime, here are some talking points:

I didn’t see being a couple of years away from technically qualifying for an 18-30s jaunt to be a problem. But the booze, humiliation and a ‘mystery pooer’ made me rethink my entire life

‘First the bad news,” yelled our lairy Irish club rep as the coach drove us from Ibiza airport to our hotel. “All the great clubs: Amnesia, Space, Pacha … they’re CLOSED!”

A confused silence descended. “But the good news?” he yelled. “We’re gonna have a fucking amazing time anyway!!!”

Armed with a new album inspired by ‘dead English blokes’, the revered musician discusses writing nasty songs about his neighbours and how he’s finally made it in Nashville aged 73

‘I owe a lot to a dead man’s cock.” So begins the first song, a propulsive piece of Lennonesque powerpop called I Am This Thing, on The Confuser, the latest album by the 73-year-old English gentleman survivor of the 60s/70s frontline, Robyn Hitchcock. The album has been recorded by a crack team of session guys in Nashville, where Hitchcock lives and runs a boutique record label with his second wife, the Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift.

“I’m not just some sort of old public school dilettante floating around the South Bank or whatever,” Hitchcock protests, unbidden. “Making it work in Nashville means I actually am a real musician songwriter in the real musician songwriter town. And I think, ‘OK, I actually did do this!’ I wanted to go to Nashville when I, as a 13-year-old boarding school boy, heard those Dylan records he made here. And a mere 60 years later, here I am!”

Intensive farming has all but destroyed England’s ancient woodlands and freshwater wetlands. On a farm in Lincolnshire a radical aristocrat hopes to show there’s money in protecting nature

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

In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire but across Britain and beyond.

Burrell, known by everyone as Charlie, led the group on a walk from the barns beside the unlovable modern farmhouse, a red-brick behemoth with small windows like piggy eyes. We began by crossing a field of broad beans. Less than a century ago, it had been a patchwork of 10 fields. As we walked over the hard, cracked ground, we encountered not a single insect. Later, by a verge, a couple of butterflies flew. As for humans, we didn’t meet a single other person in our two-and-a-half-hour stroll across a range of footpaths and field edges. “This is a ruined landscape,” said one of the guests, the architectural historian Matthew Rice. “Not because of the soils. Because there are no people here. I’m sorry there are not enough stoats but I’d like there to be some children here, too.”

Interim truce looks increasingly precarious as Iran carried out retaliatory strikes on US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar

Kuwait’s foreign ministry has issued a statement condemning the Iranian attacks against the country. It reads almost identical to the statement issued yesterday, although emphasises Kuwait’s sovereignty is “a red line”.

“The state of Kuwait reserves its full rights to take all necessary measures to protect its security and preserve its sovereignty,” it said.

Two women who alleged they were raped by Tyrion Davis in Suffolk had to testify at an invasive court martial on a US base

Minutes after fleeing the home of an American airman, Rebecca called 999 in tears to report that he had raped her. She recalls vomiting at a police station in Suffolk as she described being repeatedly and violently attacked.

Officers took her to a sexual assault referral centre for an intimate examination. There, a nurse measured and photographed her injuries, including bruises and bite marks on her neck.

Welsh singer and Eurovision entrant’s other hits included Footloose soundtrack smash Holding Out for a Hero

• Alexis Petridis on Bonnie Tyler: She totally eclipsed her power-ballad peers, and created an astonishingly wide variety of pop
• From Swansea clubs to worldwide fame: Bonnie Tyler – a life in pictures

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer whose husky yet commanding voice made songs such as Total Eclipse of the Heart into 1980s classics, has died aged 75.

A message on her Facebook page reads: “Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for.”

Neso asks for extra supplies from electricity generators to cope with added demand on Thursday night

Great Britain’s energy system operator has warned that “extreme temperatures” could hit power supplies on Thursday night, as the UK entered its third heatwave of the year.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso) issued a notice overnight asking for extra supplies from power generators to cope with the added demand from households turning on fans and air conditioners to cope with the high temperatures.

Reform UK leader also tells the Daily Mail he did not anticipate main parties would not stand candidates in Clacton byelection

• Reform activists urged to switch focus from Manchester to Farage’s Clacton contest

• The untold story of why Reform figures face NCA scrutiny

Reform UK activists have been urged to divert from the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection to support Nigel Farage’s “fake” contest 250 miles away in Clacton, Josh Halliday reports.

Nigel Farage’s difficulties got a lot worse at the weekend when the Sunday Times splashed on a big investigation saying that, before he had become an MP, he had received donations, including funding for staff to manage his social media accounts, from George Cottrell, a friend and adviser who has been convicted of a fraud offence in the US. These donations were not declared.

Prime minister in waiting looks to address frustrations backbenchers had with Keir Starmer’s style of party management

Andy Burnham has promised MPs that he will never use party discipline to “stifle debate” and says they should raise problems and policy ideas “without fear or favour”.

Nominations for the Labour leadership will open on Thursday, and Burnham is expected to be the only candidate. On Wednesday night the former armed forces minister Al Carns confirmed he would not seek to enter the race to replace Keir Starmer.

GVI shuts down without refunds for students booked on volunteer programmes with overseas conservation projects

UK students who paid thousands of pounds for summer and gap year placements on overseas conservation projects have lost everything after their eco tour operator shut down.

GVI, which offered volunteer and internship placements on wildlife and marine projects across the world, was continuing to advertise trips until it went into liquidation and removed its website on 1 July.

Prime minister understood to be poised to give England a day off should the nation’s team bring home the trophy for first time since 1966

Keir Starmer is planning to announce a bank holiday if England win the World Cup, the Guardian understands, to celebrate the men’s national team finally bringing football home.

The prime minister stopped short of announcing a date, saying he didn’t want to jinx England’s progress towards lifting the famous trophy for the first time since 1966 – but it would most likely be on Friday 24 July.

Author argues symbols such as daisy wheels are no more than the working marks of stonemasons

Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses.

Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings”.

The French far-right leader’s presidential campaign is clouded in uncertainty under the shadow of an embezzlement conviction

Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for French president in 2027, despite her legal woes, has drawn comparisons from her opponents to Donald Trump.

Just as the US president felt his voter base cared little about legal investigations against him, the French far-right leader shrugged off the leftwing protesters who shouted “criminal!” as she launched her presidential campaign at a market walkabout in western France on Wednesday. The previous day, an appeal court had upheld her conviction for the embezzlement of European parliament funds.

Experts say rise in social media attacks on players such as Kylian Mbappé needs to be viewed in wider political context

• World Cup live – latest updates

As players in the World Cup shore up their tactics and hone their teamwork skills ahead of the quarter-finals, a chorus of voices have warned that the rise of divisive political rhetoric is translating into an intensifying challenge for players on the pitch: a surge in racism.

“There’s a huge issue,” said Samuel Okafor, the chief executive of Kick It Out, a UK-based organisation that seeks to tackle discrimination in football. “The political climate that we’re facing is clearly finding its way into football. And it’s making a huge difference in the levels of abuse we’re seeing – people are certainly being emboldened now more than ever.”

The meltdown in Maine’s Senate race risks the Democrats’ opportunity to turn Trump into a lame duck president.

Two years ago Democrats had one job: stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House. It was the only thing that mattered, but with breathtaking political malpractice, they imploded.

This November Democrats have two jobs: win the House of Representatives and win the Senate to turn Trump into a lame duck president for his final two years. But once again the party, fond of warning that the stakes are existential, is in grave danger of blowing it.

The gates of Jinwar are guarded but inside is a peaceful refuge created by women escaping war and hardship. Photographer Matteo Trevisan documents life here and at other female-led communities in the country’s north-east

A mother carrying a rifle on her shoulder and gripping a walkie-talkie stands guard at the entrance to Jinwar, a women-only commune in Syria. Beyond the gate, about 30 mud-brick houses dot the desert landscape, their gardens filled with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees.

The village, just outside the city of Qamishli in Syria’s predominantly Kurdish north-east, is a burst of colour amid the dust. Opened in 2018, Jinwar has become a refuge for women from across the region – Kurds, Arabs and Yazidis among them. Some residents arrived after losing husbands to Islamic State (IS); others left abusive marriages in search of safety and independence. It describes itself as “a place for women who want to live a free life with other women and children, women who do not want to get married, women who lost their husbands in war or who were facing violence in their families”.

Vegetable harvest in Jinwar, where the women cultivate much of their own food, growing aubergines, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions and garlic

As a series of star-studded events celebrates Ginsberg’s centennial, the keeper of his estate weighs the genius poetry – and provocative views – of the iconic writer

In 1985 Allen Ginsberg sat his 17-year-old friend, an out gay man named Peter Hale, down and gave some advice: “Get a wife, settle down, and have kids.” At the time, Hale was enrolled in a summer program at Naropa University, a Buddhism-inspired college where Ginsberg, 59, ran the writing program.

“He told me not to live the life of the itinerant poet going around heartbroken, forever unfulfilled,” Hale tells me via video call. Ginsberg was, in Hale’s words, “very much a traditionalist”.

Gary got a free festival ticket and agreed to go halves on a full-price one for Rita, but now he won’t stop going on about it. He says calling it a favour is simply a fact. You decide who the party pooper is

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

The way he presents it makes me feel as though I’m being a burden or that I now owe him something

Reputation for frumpiness is over as M&S wins over younger audience with shows at Silverstone, Ibiza and now LFW

This autumn’s London fashion week boasts plenty of familiar labels, from Burberry to Alexander McQueen, ready to show off their wares. But on Wednesday there was an unexpected addition: Marks & Spencer is joining the luxury lineup.

The British high-street retailer will celebrate its 100th anniversary in the fashion industry by staging a catwalk show in September highlighting its latest women’s and menswear collections.

The South African photographer, whose images arise from being embedded in queer and rural communities, has been named the winner of the James Barnor prize

⚽ All the latest as we look ahead to the quarter-finals
⚽ Player guide | Bracketology| Golden Boot | Email us

Our very own Jonny Weeks has been doing clever things with photos from across the World Cup.

Check them out!

With the World Cup down to eight teams, our writers assesses who’s left, identify the biggest remaining threats to France and make calls on who will lift the trophy

Lionel Messi. As he proved in thrilling style against Egypt, Argentina’s No 10 still has magic in his boots even at the age of 39. While his penalty record of four from eight attempts is much worse than you’d expect, he is clinical when it matters most. EA

For Egypt this World Cup was about more than football – it was the first glimpse of collective joy that Egyptians have enjoyed in 15 years

For nearly 15 minutes on Tuesday it seemed Egypt were about to complete one of the great World Cup upsets. The Pharaohs were up 2-0 against Argentina, the world champions. The goalkeeper, Mostafa Shobeir, had earlier saved a penalty to deny Lionel Messi an equaliser. Then, late in the second half, Argentina staged a remarkable comeback. Inspired by their talisman, they scored three goals in 13 minutes to book a spot in the quarter-finals, ending Egypt’s magical run.

The dramatic match transformed Egyptians’ triumph into heartbreak, and then into anger over what many regarded as a refereeing decisions that favoured Argentina. Yet amid the frustration, there was also a kindling sense of pride. When the Egypt team returned to their hotel in Atlanta, they were greeted by legions of fans who gathered to show their appreciation. It was an emotional reception, the players standing and applauding in a shared moment of gratitude – a reminder that, despite the heart-wrenching end, this team had given Egyptians their first glimpse of collective joy in 15 years, dating back to the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

One of the Bayern and France playmaker’s early coaches tells the story of how a move to Reading kickstarted a career

If Michael Olise wins the World Cup, there will be a corner of a Hayes housing estate that is for ever France. It is Olise’s corner, a scrap of parkland grass among the west London suburban homes where a seven-year-old practised his football with his brother, Richard. “Football in these conditions, it’s just freedom,” Olise told L’Équipe last month. “It’s not really learning in the strict sense. It was simply the pleasure of playing football. I just loved it.”

Sean Conlon, one of Olise’s early coaches with Old Isleworthians in west London, recalls: “I would go over to his house and he would be practising outside with Richard. That little estate probably really aided him; there weren’t a lot of cars but it had quite a lot of concrete open space and then a small green. He’d just be practising out here all the time, obsessed with football.”

Using a digital flat-bed scanner, our picture editor Jonny Weeks adapts some of his favourite images from the tournament and explores the trend of alternative photography

Although I’ve edited thousands of football photographs over the years, I’ve never attended a World Cup match. I envy those who get to be pitchside with their cameras for such big events. Yet, as I’ve discovered during this tournament, you don’t have to be there to create experimental images of the tournament.

Slit-scanning is an alternative photographic process that I first tried many years ago. Using a narrow slit inside an analogue camera, the photographer winds a roll of film past the aperture to record the flow of time. It’s a tricky and laborious technique which produces curiously distorted results – almost like celebrating the problem of “rolling shutter”, which has vexed photographers for generations.

Whenever major reform is proposed the media, big business and Westminster quickly conclude it’s too expensive and disruptive. This doesn’t bode well for Andy Burnham

In an old, often anxious and conservative country, the perception of risk is a potent political weapon. If a policy or a project for reforming the UK seems too risky, or can be made to seem so by its opponents, then it can usually be quickly killed off. It can be added to the pile of possible futures that never occurred.

In politics as in life, riskiness is sometimes real. To see that Brexit or Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not end well did not require huge foresight. Yet often the perception of risk is politically constructed: a reflection of powerful forces, their self-interest, and what they do or don’t want to happen.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The president is behaving as if the battleground is the same, but it isn’t. Iran has leverage and knows it

And so to war. Again. After a ceasefire and a hiatus, Donald Trump is now into the second day of a new phase of bombing Iran, with the US military claiming to have struck 170 Iranian targets in the past 48 hours.

This is no surprise. Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara this week, Donald Trump said he believed the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was “over”. He described Iran’s leaders as “evil, sick people” and threatened renewed military action and even a new blockade of Iranian ports, while also leaving the door open to further negotiations.

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues

Marine Le Pen is a convicted criminal. But now she’s running for office and there is still no credible candidate to oppose her

As the judge read out the verdict in Marine Le Pen’s appeal trial for embezzlement, the same conversation was playing out in living rooms and WhatsApp groups across France. What? Does this mean she can run for the Élysée after all? But what about the prison sentence? And the electronic tag (which Le Pen had promised she would not campaign wearing)? And what about her protege Jordan Bardella?

For a few hours, it looked as though the court of appeal had unexpectedly played a masterful hand by unequivocally upholdingthe far-right National Rally (RN) figurehead’s conviction for misappropriation of public funds. It handed her a fine of €100,000 (£85,000) and a commuted prison sentence, the remaining year of which would be served by Le Pen being electronically tagged.

Catherine Fieschi is a visiting scholar with Carnegie Europe and the author of Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism

As the family travails worsen, it’s a wretched time to lose face and maybe millions of pounds to his tabloid tormentor. Epic battle, epic fail

It really hasn’t been a very good week for Harry. The fifth in line to the throne will retire to Montecito, his gated California fastness – not, as seemed at least possible a week ago, having visited his mother country to public sympathy and applause, mending a few broken fences and seeing his old dad again. Now instead it will be a retreat in confusion, not having stayed in a palace, or seeing his busy pater, and worst of all, bested at huge cost by the Daily Mail, the bete noire of all bete noires.

The prince might reflect that he has brought many of his troubles on himself. He will leave with the rightwing press chortling that, for a crusader for personal privacy, he has outed himself much more comprehensively than they ever managed with his rancorous TV interviews about how horrible his family has been to him, his glutinous Netflix series and, most of all, his memoir Spare, with its revelation, among much else, about his frostbitten penis.

Reform keeps Tice on the bench, sending in attack specialist Yusuf in effort to take back control as byelection stunt unravels

You can often tell when Reform is running scared and losing control of the political narrative, because that’s when Richard Tice is put back in his box. Everyone but Dicky knows that Dicky is a halfwit. A man whose very life force is dependent on Nigel Farage’s continued existence. Without Nige there would be no Dicky. He is the tick with no autonomous nervous system. Just a kneejerk response with too much money. Dicky likes to boast of his small fortune. Mainly because he started with a large one.

At times like these, Reform goes for its pet rottweiler: Zia Yusuf. No Nige-like temper tantrums for Zia. That’s because he lives in a constant state of extreme perma-rage. It must be as exhausting for him as it is for us to experience. There is nothing that doesn’t make him angry. Most politicians do a nice line in passive aggression. Zia’s USP is active aggression. He is the aggressive’s aggressive. The self-made millionaire who is always unhappy and feels let down by others. The man with so much money that he can afford to do politics as a hobby. He longs to be a professional politician but will only ever be an amateur.

With marriage rates in decline, the appeal of a big wedding that we can live vicariously is stronger than ever

Finally, after decades, I have something in common with Taylor Swift. It feels great to say that out loud, in public. No, I’m not famous, rich, particularly attractive, or a woman. I really, really can’t sing. Like, not even my karaoke is tolerable for human ears (dogs seem to be fine with it). No, our sole point of connection in the cosmic swirl of life is that we’ve both been married. I can’t compare this achievement to winning a Grammy or selling out Crypto.com Arena 16 times, but it has to be on the list somewhere.

My wedding did not come close to the upwards of $50m floated by People Magazine as the cost of Swift’s. We got the venue for free because my wife’s family owned it, which is its own sort of privilege. Lena Dunham didn’t attend, but I certainly sent enough invites. Still, getting someone to agree to tolerate you “till death do you part” is no small feat. Did we get divorced three years later? Of course. I can’t believe she dealt with me even that long. Will Taylor and Travis Kelce beat our record? Depends on how often he forgets to put the toilet seat down in one of their numerous homes across the country. That guy just seems like the sort to make that mistake regularly. Don’t ask me how I came to this conclusion. I trust my own eyes.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead

The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.

Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Plans for a mega-resort, backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have spurred broader questions about who politics is serving

For more than a month, thousands have taken to the streets of Tirana to protest against their government, in the biggest outbreak of unrest in Albania since the collapse of communism more than three decades ago. What began with environmental concerns about protecting a nature reserve and the more than 2,500 species it hosts has become the flamingo revolution, questioning the very direction of the country.

Albanians are angered that multibillion dollar luxury developments backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump threaten one of the last wild areas on the Adriatic – Zvërnec, its lagoon and the nearby island of Sazan – and are furious at the lack of transparency surrounding the projects. The government says that deals are not finalised. But videos of bulldozers on beaches triggered the mass protests.

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 far-right leader has reached for the Trumpian playbook in plotting a possible path to the Élysée. The consequences are alarmingly unpredictable

Back in 2013, when a Socialist minister was accused (and eventually convicted) of tax fraud, the righteous fury of Marine Le Pen knew no bounds. Any politician found guilty of financial misconduct, she fulminated, should be ineligible for office for the rest of their lives. That was very much then. Although a court of appeal on Tuesday upheld her own conviction for embezzling European parliament funds, Ms Le Pen announced the same day that she would be the candidate for her far-right National Rally party (RN) in next year’s presidential race.

Confounding speculation that she was preparing to hand the baton on to Jordan Bardella, her young protege, Ms Le Pen has thereby made the biggest gamble of her political career. The court’s ruling enabled her to make a fourth bid for the Élysée by reducing an eligibility ban to a length of time already served. But it also insisted that she wear an electronic monitoring tag, restricting the hours in which she could campaign. That sanction has been circumvented by her appeal to France’s highest court, the cour de cassation – which may or may not be heard before the presidential election’s first round in April.

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

Readers respond to a report that disadvantaged white children have lower reading fluency than other groups, leading to disengagement and school absence

The critical issue of secondary school reading fluency is not a new problem (Third of disadvantaged white pupils in England leave primary school without being able to read properly, 4 July). A fundamental inability to access the curriculum due to poor reading and comprehension has always been the case for a significant cohort of students entering secondary education, although this has increased over time.

As a secondary school teacher, I am frequently left wondering about the exact nature of the literacy instruction occurring in some primary schools. Year after year, pupils entering year 7 lack the basic decoding and automaticity required to engage with secondary-level texts.

Prof Philip Leach and Prof Başak Çalı say governments must take action to give teeth to the European convention on human rights

The repression of free speech in Turkey worsens by the day, especially for anyone who is critical of the government or the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey intensifies crackdown on public life in run-up to Nato summit in Ankara, 6 July). It is right to suggest that other governments’ silence encourages authoritarianism. The human rights philanthropist Osman Kavala (whom we represent) has languished in jail since 2017 in spite of legally binding orders for his release issued by the European court of human rights, which has recognised that he is the victim of a political prosecution. European states have repeatedly balked at putting any real pressure on Turkey to free Mr Kavala.

Instead of paying lip service to upholding the integrity of the European human rights system, governments must take concerted action to give it some real teeth.
Prof Philip Leach Middlesex University
Prof Başak Çalı Oxford University

Readers respond to a letter about the challenges facing families where their adult children are not able to lead independent lives

I was moved by the letter (3 July) from a parent whose child is not in employment, education or training (Neet). As a parent of a neurodivergent late-teenager who struggles with social communication and with making relationships beyond the family, I have found the prospect of his entry into adulthood a daunting, unsettling one.

As your correspondent makes clear, it’s easy to slip into the habit of comparison and begin to see your adult child as falling “behind” their peers who have now found places for themselves in the wider world – in work, but also in romantic relationships. Perhaps as a man it is most difficult for me not to make comparisons with my own teenage years, which now seem to me to have been marked, like those of so many, by experimentation, recklessness and a general disregard for order, routine and safety. All of which, I suppose, add up to a specific manifestation of the independence that we so often value in our children.

Readers respond to an article by David Batty about the postwar removal of babies from unmarried mothers, and his call for proper redress for survivors like him

I gave up my child for adoption in the late 1960s. I was just 20. It was my choice, but no choice at all (Britain’s apology for the scandal of forced adoption won’t – on its own – heal the wounds of survivors like me, 2 July). The circumstances were such that unless you had parental or a partner’s support, or a trust fund, it was practically impossible to keep your child. I have discovered through coverage of the government’s apology that some state funding was available. It was never mentioned to me.

I had planned to give up my child because I believed the propaganda: as an unmarried mother I could not give her a proper home. What I had not expected was the love I felt. When her father offered to marry me, I jumped at the chance and took the child away from prospective adopted parents. Three days before our wedding, the child’s father left me. My mother had not let me into the house once my pregnancy became obvious, so going home was not an option. I called the adoption agency and said goodbye to her in a small room somewhere near Baker Street.

Updates from the 186.2km stage from Pau
Stage-by-stage guide | Stage five report | Mail Andy

Bold bicycle placement by Rod in that photo below. A strong gust of wind away from his steed ending up at the bottom of a ravine.

The bunch is bimbling south-east, about to start stage six. Christian Prudhomme waves the flag from his car.

• Second time in 2026 that inquest has been adjourned

• Sheffield United midfielder died in 2023, aged 27

An inquest into the death of the Sheffield United midfielder Maddy Cusack has been adjourned again, nearly three years after she died on 20 September 2023, aged 27. The coroner explained to the court that the inquest would not restart until 7 December at the earliest and apologised to the family.

The hearing, which began on 29 June and has heard eight full days of evidence, had been scheduled to conclude listening to evidence on Friday before the coroner would return to Chesterfield coroner’s court to deliver her conclusions on 27 July, but on Thursday it was confirmed the proceedings had been delayed. It is understood this relates to additional documents having been lodged.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The 23-year-old may not stand out by many metrics, but his excellence goes deeper than numbers alone

How about we all agree on Arthur’s Seat? I’d love to claim it but the honour belongs to a quick-witted friend of a friend, the literary agent Geraldine Cooke. Maybe it doesn’t have the same alliteration as Henman Hill or Murray Mound but you would say Fery’s Foothill does him an injustice given how high he has risen this week.

With his straight-sets victory against Flavio Cobolli, Fery has become the first wildcard to make the men’s Wimbledon semi-finals since 2001. He is, even more extraordinarily, only the fourth player to do it at any grand slam tournament in the open era, after Goran Ivanisevic, Henri Leconte and Jimmy Connors.

Five days after T20 World Cup final misery tickets are selling fast for India clash in a rare fixture at the home of cricket

England’s historic first Test at Lord’s, which begins on Friday against India, will be the swansong for at least one great of the game, after Tammy Beaumont announced her retirement from international cricket on Wednesday.

It is possible that more retirements may follow at the end of the summer; after England lost last Sunday’s T20 World Cup final to Australia, head coach Charlotte Edwards said that “a lot of younger players are now staking a claim” and that she planned to review the situation after The Hundred. Beaumont, though, has chosen to get ahead of the pack and go into the forthcoming Test with the certain knowledge that it will be the last time she pulls on an England shirt.

Tottenham’s strategies have changed over the years and this summer’s transfer splurge marks a sharp turn away from the Levy years

A couple of weeks ago, Sotheby’s in London concluded one of its biggest art auctions. In all, the sale of 25 modern and contemporary works raised almost £300m. Seated Nude With Necklace, by Modigliani, went for £41.5m; La Belle Promenade, by Magritte, went for £13.5m. And amid all the feverish commentary on the resilience of the London art market and the enduring appeal of post‑war pieces among the younger generation of collectors, one question above all presented itself: was this all for the benefit of Roberto De Zerbi?

Naturally, it would be premature to link the sale of a significant portion of Joe Lewis’s art collection to the lavish summer transfer spending of the football club he owns. But of course money is money, and in a summer where Tottenham Hotspur are spending an unprecedented £230m in the transfer market, funded in large part through cash injections from the Lewis family, the connections make themselves. Are Tottenham’s owners selling off the family heirlooms to pay for Jan Paul van Hecke? And on a wider level, what exactly are the Premier League’s 17th-best club playing at here?

• Prince Abdullah asserts he is still owed £35m

• Shares allegedly transferred to new company

The English Football League is investigating allegations that Sheffield United’s owner, the American investment group COH Sports, has formed a new parent company for the club to avoid paying £35m owed to the previous owner, Prince Abdullah.

COH Sports, led by Steven Rosen and Helmy Eltoukhy, agreed a deal to buy United from the Saudi Arabian for about £100m in December 2024 and paid the first instalment of about £30m shortly after, but is alleged to have been late in paying the second instalment and missed two subsequent payments due this year. Abdullah’s investment vehicle, United World, issued a winding-up petition in the high court against COH Sports this week and has taken its concerns to the EFL and the Independent Football Regulator.

Britain’s Paralympic dame is quitting after a stellar career that began in the swimming pool as a 14-year-old before five Games hoovering up cycling gold medals

“This is the first time that I will speak about the next chapter,” Dame Sarah Storey says in a quiet corner of a busy cafe in Macclesfield as, after a remarkable career in which she won 74 world and Paralympic medals as the most successful British athlete, she prepares to announce her retirement from elite competition. It’s a seismic moment for Storey and for Paralympic sport but the 48-year-old is in a relaxed and cheerful mood.

“I’ve always shied away from the word ‘retirement’ because as an athlete you have to plan for the next chapter,” she says. “It certainly isn’t doing nothing and sitting with your feet up. I started planning for what life might look like as soon as I became an international athlete.

Interim report into Pip found process had systematic and deep-rooted problems and required bold and radical overhaul

A landmark government review of disability benefits has warned “challenging discussions” remain on how to overhaul and pay for a system it concludes is unfit for purpose and too often leaves vulnerable claimants dehumanised and degraded.

The Timms review of the personal independence payment (Pip) concluded the benefit, claimed by nearly 4 million people in England and Wales, suffered from systematic and deep-rooted problems that had undermined public trust in the benefits system.

Extension comes as government encourages first nuclear power projects in a generation to meet UK’s growing need for electricity

Britain’s most recently completed nuclear power plant will continue generating electricity until 2055 after the government granted the power plant a 20-year life extension.

Sizewell B in Suffolk was due to shut down within the next decade, but under a deal with the government its lifetime will be extended to 60 years to help meet the UK’s growing demand for low-carbon electricity.

MPs demand publication of full report that outlines catastrophic consequences amid concerns for food security

Members of parliament have demanded full publication of an explosive report by the UK’s spy leaders that found the collapse of ecosystems overseas would have catastrophic consequences for the UK’s national security, warning that the UK has “no future” if the findings are not urgently acted on.

Despite growing concerns for the UK’s food security, likely to be worsened by the third heatwave this summer currently afflicting the UK and swathes of the northern hemisphere, the government has refused to publish the full report, which has circulated among defence officials for more than a year.

Demonstrations at 18 sites set up as radical transformation plan put to board of Europe’s biggest carmaker

Volkswagen’s proposal to slash up to 100,000 jobs and close factories faces a major test on Thursday as they are formally put to its supervisory board, with protests planned at all plants in Germany.

IG Metall, the influential staff union, has organised demonstrations involving shop stewards and union council members at 18 sites at Europe’s biggest carmaker, including its headquarters. It told the chief executive, Oliver Blume, that he cannot “pass the buck for failures of recent years on to the workforce”.

Local media in Hengzhou report king ratsnakes and cobras among hundreds in flood waters caused by typhoon Maysak

Hundreds of snakes, including cobras, have escaped from flooded breeding farms in southern China as severe storms continue to batter parts of the country.

State media reported that a snake farm in Hengzhou, in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, was hit by flood waters after days of heavy rainfall caused by typhoon Maysak, prompting warnings for nearby residents.

Low-emissivity windows also keep houses warm in winter, but use on bowed glass can have magnifying-glass effect

Low-emissivity or low-E window glass is a useful green technology for keeping buildings warm in winter and cool in summer … but a rare side-effect can set the neighbours’ property on fire.

The glass is coated with a thin layer of metal or metal oxide which lets visible light through but acts like a mirror in the infrared. Heat from the interior is reflected back in, retaining warmth in winter, while unwanted solar radiation is repelled in summer.

Ynys Enlli, Gwynedd: A stroll down this island’s one road provides clues to its past – and it has nothing to do with the 20,000 saints apparently buried here

In 1938, the Welsh naturalist Ronald Lockley described Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) as a mountain “crudely cemented to a lowland valley, and the whole thing thrown into the middle of a violent tide-race”. Much has changed since then, but that vivid picture holds true, as I wander it today.

Certainly there’s a lovely simplicity to Enlli being a sort of linear settlement arranged along the length of a single road. Having only two directions of travel – north or south – makes the lane a movable town square, where those travelling in opposite directions or at different speeds are bound to meet, greet, make dinner invitations or trade sightings and finds.

Experts warn that some marine species are at risk of ‘mass mortality events’ in ever-warming oceans

UK waters are being hit with an “extreme” marine heatwave, the Met Office has said, as scientists warn that high ocean temperatures globally could result in “mass-mortality events” for some species.

The forecasters said these elevated temperatures have developed rapidly because of last month’s heat dome, during which most of Europe sweltered in its worst ever heatwave that scientists said would have been impossible without the climate crisis.

Climate crisis prompts calls for workplace temperature limits and rights to heat breaks and adjusted working hours

As Europe’s sweltering summer continues, trades unions are mounting a push for new laws to counter deadly heat stress that is linked to an estimated 230 workplace deaths a year.

This year’s toll may be even higher, with 1,300 excess European deaths already connected to the June heatwave by the World Health Organization, and other estimates running as high as 20,000.

Ministers also considering licence requirement and regulator to try to cut bills and increase choice

UK vets may have to have a licence and cap prescriptions for pet medicine at £21 under plans being considered by the government.

Ministers are also considering establishing a regulator for the veterinary sector, including inspections, a mandatory licensing system and published compliance reports to improve accountability and choice. Every vet practice could need an official operating licence – similar to GP surgeries and care homes – under proposals in a white paper.

Met confirms inquiry after elections watchdog referred allegations that donations in 2024 were from foreign source

Police have launched an investigation into £37,500 of donations to Robert Jenrick’s campaign to become Conservative leader in 2024 after a referral from the elections watchdog.

The Metropolitan police confirmed on Wednesday they were undertaking an inquiry after the Guardian revealed in April that they were assessing the evidence about donations to Jenrick, who has since joined Reform UK.

Ethics and integrity commission chief says overhaul is crucial to help restore trust in standards

All lobbying of government ministers, aides and senior officials should be publicly declared – from WhatsApp chats to party conference meetings – in a fundamental shake-up of transparency laws, the government’s ethics watchdog has said.

A review led by Doug Chalmers, the head of the ethics and integrity commission, has called for a new register to highlight who is lobbying, which policies they are seeking to influence and who in government they are meeting.

Richard Tice’s NCA leak claims are not first time Reform has gone to the Telegraph in relation to a problematic story

Late on Tuesday afternoon, as the British media was absorbing Nigel Farage’s shock decision to hold a byelection amid scrutiny over his finances, his Reform UK party supplied the Telegraph with a different story.

The article revealed that Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, had accused the National Crime Agency (NCA) of leaking financial information to the media. Both he and Farage had been the subject of the claimed leaks, Tice said.

Senate pick announced his withdrawal in angry video accusing party and media of acting as ‘judge, jury and executioner’

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Sophie Sullivan and Pablo Iglesias Maurer

The French men’s national soccer team, whose star Kylian Mbappé is one of the world’s most outspoken athletes against far-right politicians, has been using a charter airplane company that is at the heart of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Licence would be diplomatic coup for Kyiv but process of making munitions would likely be expensive, complex and long

Donald Trump has told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine may be allowed to manufacture Patriot missile interceptors to counter Russian ballistic attacks. It would be a diplomatic coup for Kyiv, which has been struggling to counter Moscow’s increasing missile threat.

The US president’s commitment, however, was vaguely framed, and he admitted he had not spoken to the US defence and aerospace companies Lockheed Martin and RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon) that produce the Patriot system. It also remained unclear how quickly manufacturing of the expensive and complex munitions could be stepped up.

Georgia’s tea industry collapsed alongside the Soviet Union but is now reaching a luxury market

Rainclouds shroud the Caucasus mountains as the day’s harvest begins on a rural estate in western Georgia. A tea picker moves quickly between bushes with confidence, her hands plucking only the greenest, most recent growth on each plant.

When Pati began picking tea leaves as a teenager this was a collective farm in the Soviet Union – following its collapse it was abandoned and the bushes swallowed by the surrounding forest until new growers began cutting them free in the 2010s.

Mohamed al-Wahidi died when a missile struck his taxi shortly before Egypt played Argentina in their last 16 match

• Gaza’s World Cup screenings – in pictures

A Palestinian aid worker who had organised screenings of World Cup matches in Gaza was killed by an Israeli missile strike just before the game between Egypt and Argentina on Tuesday evening.

Two brothers aged eight and 10 and another man who was in the street near the site of the attack were also killed.

Brent crude dips slightly below $78 a barrel; most Asian stock markets bounce back

Volkswagen’s proposal to slash up to 100,000 jobs and close factories faces a major test on Thursday as they are formally put to its supervisory board, with protests planned at all plants in Germany.

IG Metall, the influential staff union, has organised demonstrations involving shop stewards and union council members at 18 sites at Europe’s biggest carmaker, including its headquarters. It told the chief executive, Oliver Blume, that he cannot “pass the buck for failures of recent years on to the workforce”.

Dow down 1.09%, or 500 points, as S&P 500 sees a small loss and tech-heavy Nasdaq rises slightly

• Middle East crisis live

US stock markets fell on Wednesday as the US continued strikes on Iran and the Federal Reserve flagged concerns that would warrant higher interest rates.

Donald Trump’s declaration at the Nato summit in Ankara that the Iran-US ceasefire is over sent oil prices sharply higher on Wednesday. Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped more than 5% to crest $80 a barrel. US stocks fell in step, with the Dow down 1.09%, or 500 points, at closing Wednesday afternoon. The S&P 500 saw a small loss while the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose slightly. Global stocks had fallen earlier in the day, with the UK’s FTSE 100 down 1% as Japan’s Nikkei fell 2.1%.

Brent crude benchmark rose to more than $80 a barrel, its steepest increase since ceasefire began

Oil markets have recorded their sharpest price rise in nearly two months after a series of attacks on fossil fuel tankers near the strait of Hormuz led Donald Trump to declare that the ceasefire deal with Iran was over.

At the same time, UK short-dated bonds suffered their worst day since the end of March as the prospect grew of a Bank of England rate rise to cope with the renewed inflationary pressures.

FCA clashes with Consumer Voice, alleging lack of transparency and conflict of interest

The City regulator is trying to get the only consumer group arguing for higher motor finance scandal payouts thrown out of court, alleging that its co-founders have not been transparent about their funding and potential conflicts of interest.

The accusations, laid out in legal filings on Wednesday, are the latest controversy in the long-running saga surrounding mis-sold car loans, with fears of large payouts having resulted in heavy lobbying by banks and a controversial intervention by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

As his bold yet delicate sculptures fill the glass buildings of Brussels for Ireland’s turn at the EU presidency, the Wexford artist discusses working with Björk, his decorator father – and one noisy horse

‘Just so you know,” says Richard Malone before we begin talking, “if you hear any neighing, it’s not me!” The Irish artist is speaking to me from an unusual studio space: a farm in Stradbally, County Laois. It may have the odd equine intruder, hungry for press coverage, but it also boasts huge lambing sheds – the perfect location for Malone to construct his latest five-metre sculptures.

“There’s lovely lambs everywhere and about 20 dogs running around,” he smiles. “Exactly what I’d choose to have around me.”

She was a member of the influential rap collective, then the alt-R&B hitmakers – but struggled to find her own voice. Now, after realising she ‘didn’t like anybody else’s beats’, she’s made a solo album that is truly hers

There was a time when Sydney Bennett really wanted “something to show for all of my hard work”. The 34-year-old singer-rapper-producer-engineer was a member of Odd Future, the anarchic Los Angeles rap collective that also included Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean and Earl Sweatshirt. In 2011, that group birthed the Internet, the indie-R&B band Bennett formed with her best friend, Matt Martians. Since then, Bennett has released two acclaimed solo records, collaborated with Beyoncé and Kehlani, and been nominated for a Grammy, alongside the Internet.

Still, around the time of her last album, 2022’s Broken Hearts Club, she started hoping for an award or public recognition. But then she bought a house – a nice spot on the same street she grew up on in Mid-City, LA – “and now I’m happy”. I look at her quizzically, sitting across from me in a private room in a hotel in east London, as she takes a sip of pineapple juice. It was as simple as that, I ask? She lets out a guffaw, flashing a set of perfect teeth. “I’m afraid it was,” she says, grinning conspiratorially.

Like tradwifery for children, this revamp of the 19th-century settlers show is a precision-tooled and well-oiled machine. It’s a cosy world full of faith, hope and the American way

I never actually watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie, though it bestrode my late 70s-early 80s’ childhood like a ginghamed colossus. This is for the simple reason that Michael Landon’s bouffant hair frightened me. Bouffant hair is such a bad thing. But so great is the power of both the cultural cringe and osmosis that even the most militant Britisher of a certain age has absorbed to some degree the story of the pioneering Ingalls family and its on-screen aesthetic. For the younger folk – it’s tradwifery for children.

The series was of course based on the books (and named after the third in the series, which was published in 1935 and hasn’t been out of print since) by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They in turn were an account, shaped for a young readership, of her childhood spent moving across the American West in the 1870s and 80s, settling and resettling in different states as her parents sought their manifest destiny.

This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewees. Why?

What do we do about a country in which the richest 56 people in the UK have as much wealth as the poorest 27 million? What do we do about a world that has just witnessed the birth of its first trillionaire? What do we do about an era in which you can interview the owner of a telecoms company in his multi-million-pound Hyde Park apartment and a frontline ambulance worker who is having to live in his van, parked on a suburban Bristol street?

Gary Stevenson knows what to do. He is evangelical about what to do. Gary was vouchsafed knowledge of exactly what to do after making a fortune in the city betting against an early economic recovery for the country after the 2011 financial and ongoing Eurozone crises. The UK needs a wealth tax – he recommends 2% on everything anyone owns above £10m. This would bring in around £24bn a year that could be spent on the NHS, affordable housing or (Gary’s preferred option because it would represent a more direct redistribution of the wealth those 56 and their wannabes have hoarded) tax cuts for “ordinary people”.

The one-woman phenomenon is typically outspoken in her new documentary series. But don’t expect much in the way of insight from this carefully manufactured show

‘In 10 years’ time,” muses 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy as he watches his employee Kenneth the page walk back to his desk, “we’ll either all be working for him or dead by his hand.” I have always felt much the same way about Katie Price, AKA Jordan, née Katrina Infield, the 90s glamour model turned celebrity turned businesswoman turned cultural behemoth who has dominated headlines, airwaves and, increasingly, television documentary slots over the last 30 years. Her ruthless commodification of herself and others around her, the vaulting ambition, the fortunes earned and spent, the battles fought, the sloughing off of abuse that would have broken any lesser being, the belligerence, the keen intelligence, the dead-eyed stare down any camera lens presented to her, the bizarre vulnerability when it comes to men, the flat monotone voice daring you to poke the basilisk … all of it together is as terrifying as it is fascinating. If she ever chooses to slip her tabloid bonds and turn her attention to wider world domination – well, I for one shall be the first to swear fealty and avoid a much more fatal kind of fate.

The latest documentary about the Price phenomenon is called Katie Price: Nothing to Hide. The Beckhams have done one each since Price’s last major outing, the Vardys have a reality show, Coleen Rooney is on the up and up – the correct pecking order must be restored. So here is Price again, on a giant sofa, vaping or chomping through snacks with her luminous giant veneers, swathed in a giant sweatshirt and pants, 10 days after her latest facial surgery and avowing honesty. “You can talk to whoever you like,” she tells the film-maker Paddy Wivell, who generally focuses on non-celebrity subjects (most recently, in Hell Jumper, on volunteers in the war in Ukraine).

Alan Cumming oversees a murderous, OTT climax. Plus: proud Mancunian actor Ruth Madeley discovers her roots lie to the south. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Three
The American version – with its OTT celebrities and host Alan Cumming in some outlandish wardrobe choices – has proved a fun watch. As we reach the climax, “Housewife Slayer” Rob is hoping to introduce singer Eric to his murderous ways, while former figure skaters Tara and Johnny reveal the friendship they have kept hidden. And can ex-Love Islander and pride of Ireland Maura Higgins wise up about the identity of the Traitors before she becomes one of their last victims? Hannah J Davies

As the Bayreuth festival turns 150, we look at the composer’s huge and enduring influence, and wonder what might have happened to classical music in his absence?

One hundred and fifty years ago this summer, Richard Wagner wanted to change the world. Not only the musical world, but nationhood, political thought, even the idea of what it means to be human. The inaugural Bayreuth festival opened on 13 August 1876, with the first complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen staged in Wagner’s custom-built Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. The first audience included kings, emperors, aristocracy and politicians as well as Europe’s musical and creative elites (Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Bruckner and Liszt among them). Wagner, who had been a revolutionary on the streets of Dresden in the 1840s, intended the Ring’s four operas to usher in a new world, one redeemed and made wise by this epic story of power, love, redemption, betrayal and renewal.

The titanic impact of Wagner is almost impossible to grasp today. Stage design aside (having the orchestra entirely hidden in the pit and darkening the auditorium were two of his innovations at Bayreuth) his legacies are felt across the arts from the way Wagnerism gripped German philosophers and Paris’s painters and poets in the 19th century, to the seismic changes he wreaked in cultural politics, and the toxicity of the antisemitic bearers of the Wagnerian flame after his death in 1883.

Norah Jones hosts the legendary rock stars as they return to the studio for a new album. Plus, mindfulness meditation with the Getty Museum

This official Rolling Stones podcast is hosted by Norah Jones and released across six weeks, with each chapter charting the making of the band’s upcoming studio album, Foreign Tongues. Unsurprisingly, it’s a polished exercise in PR for one of the world’s biggest acts. Its first episode is also something of a tribute, as it considers how Mick, Keith and Ronnie returned to the studio following the death of drummer Charlie Watt in 2021. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Adams’ maximal minimalism was framed by Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower’s parallel feminist statement, with Florence Price’s The Heart of A Woman adding a Broadway flourish

Orchestras have thrown themselves on this year’s anniversary of American Independence (or “Freedom 250” as the marketers are catchily dubbing it) with an eagerness born of a repertoire of big names and broad appeal. A year of Gershwin, Barber and Bernstein, Adams and Glass? Full halls all round. You can even throw in John Williams and Duke Ellington (just go easy on the Carter and Crumb) and you’re on to a winner. Just ask Kazuki Yamada and the audience of Friday night’s generously filled Symphony Hall.

Harmonium – John Adams’ 1980 landmark experiment in maximal minimalism – was the advertised centrepiece (and will travel down to the Proms with the CBSO later this month), but the framing was the curiosity here: conceived by Yamada as two facing musical panels.

The England and Arsenal player grew up with Enrique Iglesias on repeat, and knows the Bridget Jones soundtrack by heart. But what football song gives her goosebumps?

The first song I fell in love with
I used to have a cassette player with these fuzzy foam headphones, and only two cassettes: Hero by Enrique Iglesias and How Do I Live by LeAnn Rimes. I would play them over and over.

The first single I downloaded
Michaela Strachan by Scouting for Girls. I thought it was fascinating that they’d written a song about her, even though I wasn’t quite sure who she was until I saw her on telly.

A young boy and his two siblings stay with their aunt in the West Country, in this haunting debut set over the long, hot summer of 1976

The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under the kind of pressure that fuels fiction. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s first novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by that heatwave with its attendant, escalating water shortage; the escalating marital and mental health crisis of the mother of three young children; a remote farm in the West Country. Though in some ways the pace is slow– not a criticism, the pace of school holidays with nowhere to go and nothing to do is also slow – the novel’s engines thrum from the first page.

Edwardes has taken the risk of a first-person child narrator, primary-aged Frank. Such figures are necessarily precocious – there’s a reason full-length novels by nine-year-olds are rarely written and never published – and tend to make demands on our suspension of disbelief, but in this case it’s convincing and compelling from the outset. The use of past tense helps, allowing both strikingly immediate observation and the feeling that the prose is in the steady hands of a remembering adult. Through the gap between Frank and the reader’s comprehension, the book conveys what the reader needs to understand about the adults’ lives. We know that most of the adults are also adulterers, that his mother’s mental illness is hereditary as well as situational, and that her efforts to fob off social services are just about adequate.

From Desiderius Erasmus to Luis Rubiales, a cultural history of this most intimate of gestures

If, on a European holiday, you get flustered greeting people – should you kiss? how many times? – spare a thought for Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus. Visiting England in 1499, he found a nation of enthusiastic kissers. “Wherever you go, you are received on all hands with kisses; when you take leave you are dismissed with kisses,” he wrote in surprise, or possibly, alarm. On the continent, the fashion for greeting with a peck on the lips had long fallen by the wayside (probably because of sexual propriety), but the English held firm. It didn’t matter if the other person was of the opposite sex, everyone puckered up.

Whether you like to snog, smooch, suck face or osculate (the scientific term), kissing seems so natural and instinctive, it’s hard to imagine it having a history at all. But just as kissing is not seen in all cultures, so, historian of emotions Katie Barclay writes, its meanings have changed across time too. From foot-kissing knights to baby-kissing politicians, to the “shut-up kiss” of Hollywood romcoms, this rich and fascinating history reminds us that kissing is, and always has been, a contested public gesture as well as a private pleasure.

The chills are genuinely spooky in this haunted-house tale about contemporary precarity – a debut that speaks to our times

There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence as a PA at a dilettante arts charity called Hodgepodge (strapline: “for ideas”). She types emails, makes tea and increasingly finds herself running personal errands for her monstrous boss Jeannie. Jeannie seems to see no difference between working for the charity, and working for her.

After a horrible breakup, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no savings, no bank of Mum and Dad, and no room left in her overdraft, she winds up staying alone in Jeannie’s ancestral home, a rambling pile in the middle of nowhere. “We could do with somebody to take care of the place,” Jeannie says, as Danielle bursts into uncharacteristic tears. “You’d be doing us a huge favour.”

Collector of dream stories from across continent finds ‘surprising consistency’ in the way they are structured

A young woman discovers in a dream that she is responsible for the Holocaust and tries to come up with schemes to make amends – and then gets distracted by a business meeting. Another woman dreams she is being chased by murderers – and ends up chilling in front of the TV with them. A man gets to advise Emmanuel Macron on social policy – and talks to him about haircuts and dog training instead.

Dreams can turn our innermost fears and darkest fantasies into miniature dramas. But an anthology of recollected dreams harvested from online forums across Europe shows how the story arc of the subconscious often bends towards anticlimaxes.

Sony’s announcement spells the end of a whole ecosystem built by superfan collectors – and signals a troubling shift in the industry

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Sony’s decision last week to quietly announce the end of physical games production for the PlayStation in 2028 is one of the most perfect PR disasters in recent gaming history – and considering what has been happening with Xbox, that’s saying something.

First, there was the timing. Sony posted the news of its decision on the PlayStation blog, less than a week after admitting that it would be deleting 550 movies from the digital libraries of PlayStation owners due to the end of a licensing deal – thereby perfectly illustrating the dangers of purchasing digital products. (Surprise! You never actually owned them!) The move is in stark contrast with the company’s stance on this very issue back in 2013. When Microsoft was attempting to push Xbox One as a digital-first console with strict controls on the sharing and reselling of its games, Sony brilliantly mocked its rival with a short video on how easy it was to lend physical games to pals on the PS4. Oh dear.

PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S; Ubisoft Singapore/Ubisoft
Ubisoft has removed all the boring parts of pirate life from its fantasy RPG, creating something more focused and fun

Edward Kenway isn’t your dad’s Assassin’s Creed protagonist. Neither sworn to ancient oaths nor given a noble destiny, he’s just a guy who likes coin, dislikes rules, and whose gold-chasing, rule-dodging lifestyle sees him embroiled in an ancient war between Templars and assassins quite by accident. After he’s shipwrecked with a man named Walpole who turns out to be a Templar, Edward assumes Walpole’s identity in the hopes of securing the bounty he mentioned.

Edward wears life lightly. The world around him is violent and chaotic, and those in his vicinity are more obsessed with double-crossings than a Mission:Impossible movie writers’ room. Ed just smiles, undeterred by it all, and gets on with plundering. It’s all just fun and games to him, and he is set on conquering the Caribbean on his own terms. He is a brilliant extension of the player, in that way, and that’s what this remake of the 2013 pirate-themed Assassin’s Creed does so well: the sense of freedom.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game has grown into a virtual social space and part of daily life for thousands of players

In a small stone chapel, on the edgelands of a medieval wilderness, two women are getting married. The attenders are draped in rainbow capes, glowing armour and top hats. A scantily clad, muscular man with angel wings officiates the ceremony. Over the heads of the two brides hover the words “I do” in bright yellow text. This is RuneScape, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (or MMO) set in the Tolkienesque realm of Gielinor. Turning 25 this year, it has, over its lifetime, become a crucial virtual social space and part of daily life for thousands of players.

Lancashire-born Amelia, one of the pixelated newlyweds, met her wife on a dating app but first bonded through their love of the game. “Our first and second date was pretty much exclusively talking about RuneScape,” she recalls. Four years later they were married, shortly followed by their in-game ceremony. Morgan – a 26-year-old from the Midlands – is one of Amelia’s closest friends. They met through the game and run UWU Girls together, a RuneScape clan that Morgan founded in a bid to cater to players across the gender spectrum. “We do IRL meetups, and for a lot of these women, it’s been their first meetings with strangers online – and that’s the same for me.”

With players leaving EA’s series once life there felt like a grind beset by ethical concerns, this quirky new sim promises a better life elsewhere

For 26 years, the life-sims genre has been dominated by one series: The Sims. Originally designed by Will Wright, creator of Sim City, EA’s virtual dollhouse series has grown into a $5bn [£3.8bn] empire with the constant release of new games, expansion packs, and collaborations cementing its place among the bestselling video game franchises of all time. But things are beginning to change. New contenders are emerging and turning the heads of even loyal players in The Sims community.

The most recent, and promising, of these is Paralives, once the solo project of indie designer Alex Massé, who is now employing a small team of developers. Released on the PC games platform Steam in May 2026 as an early access title (meaning it’s technically unfinished and looking for user feedback), it sold 250,000 copies in just eight hours. On that first day, the concurrent player count hit 78,603 – not far off The Sims 4’s all-time peak of 96,328 in 2022. While Paralives is a small project, this success is understandable. Following the news of EA’s controversial acquisition by a Saudi-backed business consortium, some simmers are looking for what they see as a more ethical alternative. But this is only part of the game’s appeal. The real draw is the game’s focus on creativity over realism: the quirky details that made many fans fall in love with The Sims in the first place.

Theatre503, London
Mixing naturalism and fantasy, Katie Đỗ’s debut is conceptually inventive but flawed by over-short scenes and scant emotive appeal

This debut by Vietnamese-American playwright Katie Đỗ travels across realms. It begins in the afterlife, with a whimsical scene of heaven as a place that is built out of a character’s happiest moments on earth.

The play spans several decades in the life of one family, and mixes naturalism with dreams, fantasy and interior life. That makes it formally inventive but the switches render the drama diffuse, leaching its emotive power rather than adding layers.

London Palladium
The Eurovision star leads a glittery production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s blockbuster but this booming show lacks context and clarity

This amped-up version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera is presented by the same triumvirate who near enough blew the critics – and crowds – to heaven with their 2016 revival. Tim Sheader is again director, designer Tom Scutt’s set has a similar scaffold structure (but with some audience members standing around it this time) and Drew McOnie is once more the choreographer.

The production, in spirit, goes back not just to the first century when Jesus of Nazareth rises to become an inspiring preacher, radical tearaway and thorn in the side of the temple clerics, but also to the 1970s era of hippy-dom and flower power from which the original show arose.

Swansea Grand theatre
School locker room banter has a sinister edge in Jonathan Houlston’s shrewd debut, which pairs the toxic tropes of Adolescence with the group dynamics of Laura Wade’s Posh

In Jonathan Houlston’s strikingly astute and utterly gripping debut play, a school’s locker room is a retreat for its pupils. Here, hypermasculinity is performed en masse, first dates are held in secret and reputation-threatening confessions are whispered cautiously.

We first meet the boys as a pack, and collectively they play up to the tropes we’ve been on high alert about since the TV drama Adolescence. Banter sprinkled with “your mum” jokes flows, chat about sex reduces their female classmates to goals, and nude pictures are shared around like trophies.

This late-night escapade became a word-of-mouth festival favourite. The show’s creators discuss the method behind its madness – and why you’ll laugh without knowing why

Deep within the cavernous Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, robed monks stand ominously on stage after midnight. It’s 2024, halfway through the Edinburgh fringe, and nobody really knows what’s happening. But in this dungeon-like sweatbox we’re about to experience a work in progress that is equal parts joyous and utterly unhinged.

Two years on, Underground Monk Show is back. While some shows arrive at the fringe with a clear elevator pitch, this one is still impossible to define. “It’s so funny because that’s constantly what we ask ourselves,” laughs co-creator John Norris, also the brains behind the absurdist comedy gem Mr Chonkers. If you were to attempt to explain what happens, you might say that the show follows the whimsical monks who, over the course of an hour, each experience a spiritual awakening of sorts, spurred on by a magical body of water that turns their visions into reality. There are flashbacks, dream sequences and a portal into another world as the performers shuffle up and down the aisles, moving together as one unit.

This year’s nominations saw a huge showing for Apple breakout Widow’s Bay but Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer follow-up and the final Stranger Things season struggled

• The Pitt, Hacks and newcomers Widow’s Bay and Pluribus lead 2026 Emmy nominations

• Emmy nominations 2026: the list of key categories

This year’s Emmy nominations have just been revealed in a colossal 118-category megadump. So with this in mind, let me be the first to say that Survivor was absolutely robbed blind for outstanding sound mixing for a reality program. Its lack of a nomination deserves nothing but scorn, and the 26,000 members of the television academy deserve to hang their heads in shame.

But, on the slim off-chance that you didn’t come here for an explosive 800-word screed about the injustice of failing to recognise a 26-year-old television programme in a category I didn’t know existed until about 15 minutes ago, the Emmys fortunately managed to ignore a wealth of bigger shows, too. Chiefly I’m talking about Stranger Things here.

The live-action remake of Disney’s hit animation is out this Friday and meme-makers have been speaking bald truths about The Rock’s nylon mop

Disney’s new live-action Moana remake might not have a lot to recommend it – like so many of its ilk it carries a creepy unreality that makes the whole thing look like a liminal ChatGPT hallucination – but it does boast one element that may very well carry it towards the gates of immortality. I am, of course, talking about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s wig.

Some context. The biggest draw of the live-action Moana is that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson reprises his role from the original, as the egotistical shapeshifting demigod Maui. And this presented something of a problem. You see, Maui is characterised by many things – his tattoos, his exuberance – but none more so than his hair. Maui has the long and flowing hair of a being unencumbered by the onset of male pattern baldness. The hair is where Maui gets most of his personality. It makes him the personified spirit of virility itself.

Moving to the UK in the 1950s, the Trinidadian musician endured racism and built his own instruments from waste. After his death aged 96, his widow recalls his patience and positivity

Wearing rusty steelpans hewn from oil drums around their necks, Sterling Betancourt and his 10 bandmates faced a sceptical crowd as they stood outside the recently opened Royal Festival Hall in London in 1951. Jokes about “black magic” were heard. Then they began striking their pans with mallets and those watching were stunned by the beautiful music that emanated.

The Trinidadian musicians were playing at the Festival of Britain – the government-funded jamboree celebrating British and Commonwealth cultural excellence as the country shook off the trauma of war – and that day they introduced a mellifluous style of music to the UK that has since been passed down from generation to generation. When Betancourt died on 3 June, aged 96, there was little fanfare. As a musician, he was never “famous” in the sense of having hit records or headlining festivals. Yet this warm, humble nonagenarian – and MBE recipient – was among the last of the Windrush-era musicians who changed the DNA of British music. Later this month, his steelpan music will return to the Royal Festival Hall for Steel Scenes, a festival marking the 75th anniversary of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), the group he played with in 1951.

With strong showings for newcomers Pluribus and Widow’s Bay, nominations for the 78th Emmys, hosted by Mariska Hargitay, are out ahead of the 14 September show

• Emmy nominations 2026: The Pitt and Hacks lead in an impressive year for HBO

• No to Half Man, yes to Matthew Rhys: this year’s biggest Emmy surprises

The 2026 Emmy award nominations have been announced. Here is the list of the key categories.

No more warm beer or sweaty cheese: these are the cool boxes that keep their chill when it matters

• The best (and worst) wine coolers

Whether you’re heading to a festival or pitching up at a campsite with the whole family, nothing spoils a trip faster than a bottle of sour milk and a warm can of beer. A reliable cool box is your best defence against such disappointments, and today’s models are designed to keep your provisions frosty, long after you’ve lost your phone signal. But which ones are actually up to muster?

From insulated picnic bags to heavy-duty ice chests, I’ve tested 18 of the best coolers and rounded up the ones that should keep you (and your hummus) fresh. Because no one should have to settle for tepid wine after the effort of pitching a tent.

Best cool box overall:
Coleman Pro cooler box

Best budget cool box:
Campingaz Icetime Plus

Bishop Auckland is abuzz with culture and family fun, thanks to the vision of Auckland Palace’s owners – and the new Kynren show featuring birds of prey, Viking raids and mythical beasts, which opens next week

Booming Hans Zimmer-style cinematic music reaches a crescendo, shaking my bones. Two turquoise macaws swoop within an inch of my hair and join a sky filled with nearly 250 birds. Hawks, kites, pelicans, and an owl soar and swoop around a pagan-looking wooden circle. Peacocks fuss at the makeshift river below, coaxed by two actors telling the story of humans’ relationship with nature. Grey clouds roll in, dark with rain. After all, we are risking an open-air performance in north-east England. I’m at a preview of Kynren: the Storied Lands, the latest gloriously unrestrained project in the market town of Bishop Auckland, 12 miles south of Durham.

I grew up near Bishop Auckland, which was once an important coal-mining and railway town. Last time I was here, its centre was dominated by discount stores. If, in 2003, you’d told teenage me that the high street would become an ode to art, history and culture, I would have laughed. Well, I would have grunted and turned up the Nu metal on my MP3 player.

You don’t need to be a super athlete to take part in parkrun. Whether it’s pacing yourself or picking the perfect shoes, here’s how to find your feet at the UK’s favourite 5k

• The best running shoes for every runner

I have a gym membership and walk everywhere, but I’m not what you’d typically picture when you think of a fitness writer. Compared with the Guardian’s running experts, I’m a not-particularly-enthusiastic amateur.

But what I lack in speed, stamina, and gazelle-like grace, I make up for with dogged persistence. Since 2014, I’ve run 355 parkruns in 63 locations. That’s a lot of hours – especially given my finishing times.

Too hot to sleep? From temperature-regulating mattress toppers to a fan quiet enough for the bedroom, here are our best buys for sweaty nights – and what to avoid

• The best fans, tested

If there’s anything more uncomfortable than enduring a heatwave in Britain, it’s sleeping through one.

But hot nights are only going to get more common if the climate crisis continues its long march. While Britons are already accustomed to poor sleep – with the average adult getting just three days a week of good kip, according to the Mental Health Foundation – heat doesn’t help. Dr Allie Hare, consultant in sleep medicine and co-president of the British Sleep Society, says: “Being too hot during sleep can significantly reduce sleep quality and duration. In particular, it can reduce slow wave (deep) sleep, the stage of sleep that helps us awaken feeling rested.”

Snack packs, swim fins, and a foundation brush for applying sun cream … we asked you for the one thing worth making suitcase space for

• The best suitcases – tested

Counting down until your next getaway? We thought so. It’s peak holiday season, so to help you get in the mood (and get a head start on packing), we asked you for the essentials that always make it into your suitcase.

From tried-and-tested luggage and day-to-night sandals to long-journey entertainment for kids, our reader recommendations and Filter favourites will provide lots of inspiration for your next trip.

Spacious enough to cook two pizzas at once and simple enough for beginners, Gozney’s gas-and-wood-fired oven is an impressive piece of kit – if you have the budget

• The best pizza ovens – tested

Whether you like yours thin-crust, deep-dish, simply margherita or loaded with extras, for pizza-lovers everywhere, there’s nothing more satisfying than making your own. And while a compact or mid-size pizza oven will more than suffice for a weekly family pizza night or casual entertaining, if you’re serious about pizza – and I mean super-serious about pizza – you’ll need a big oven, such as the Gozney Dome Gen 2.

Spacious inside, back-strainingly heavy, and complete with an all-singing, all-dancing display and control panel, the Gozney Dome will cook two 10in pizzas at once (or a single 16in one). Its size allows it to handle full meals, too: an included pair of meat probes means you can roast anything from a whole chicken or fish to lamb chops or a joint. More versatile than its first-gen gas-only predecessor, the Gozney Dome Gen 2 can cook with hybrid fuel. Add the optional wood-fire control kit (£174.99), as I did in my testing, and even smoky, authentic flavours are at your fingertips.

This Napoleonic classic is all too often overcomplicated, but this ode to the French-British author’s version is both simple and stunning

A few weeks ago, as part of the British Library’s food season, the novelist Michèle Roberts, biographer Francesca Wade, writer Eli Davies and food writer Rebecca May Johnson were brought together for a discussion on women’s culinary lives, and on the kitchen as a space of creativity, resistance and intellectual life. I couldn’t be there, but by all accounts it was a brilliant discussion, which I hope was recorded.

I have, though, read all four authors’ recent books. Davies’ perceptive and funny The Spinster Cookbook, which explores what it means to shop, cook (or not) for one in a society designed for couples and families; Wade’s tremendous and deeply researched exploration of the making and remaking of Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (was Stein a genius or the high priestess of the cult of unintelligibility? We are left to decide); May Johnson’s welcoming, challenging and tomato sauce-filled Small Fires; and Roberts’ slim, second cookbook, French Cooking for Two.

Reboot your surplus zucchini as a condiment to complement just about any savoury plate

Mountain Feed is a super-cute garden nursery and store in Ben Lomond, California, with a blog I’ve followed for years (it teaches everything from bee-keeping to cheese-making) and which answers that age-old question, “What should I do with all this zucchini?!” in my favourite way – namely, through lacto-fermentation. Lacto-fermented courgettes are a great alternative to fermented or pickled gherkins, and perfect as a condiment alongside just about any plate of savoury food, especially when they’re spiced with lots of chilli.

This comforting dish gives all the pleasure of stuffed vine leaves without the hours of labour. Serve alongside a lemony salad that’s rich with toasted seeds

I wanted the comfort of dolma without spending hours coring, stuffing and rolling. Traditionally, for this Iraqi dish of vine leaves, various vegetables are filled with fragrant rice and often with meat, too, making it a true labour of love. This pie captures all those familiar flavours but, by layering everything instead, the vine leaves become silky and tender. A bright, lemony spinach salad adds freshness and contrast.

Electronic scales are a non-negotiable, say connoisseurs. Add a pinch of patience, some trial and error, and you, too, can master the French press

What’s the best way to make coffee using a French press? Mine always ends up too watery or too strong.
Yoanna, St Andrews, Scotland
“Coffee is one of those rabbit holes where it really depends how much money and time you want to spend,” says Ben Kovar, head of coffee at Campbell & Syme Coffee Roasters in north London and Hertfordshire, but a little investment goes a long way. “A grinder will make a big improvement. If you’re just brewing for you and, say, your partner, I’d recommend a hand grinder, because you’re not then paying for the electronics – you’re just paying for a good set of burrs.” (Comandante is Kovar’s go-to.) Of course, adjusting the grind size allows you to make coffee in a host of ways, but if Yoanna plans to stick with a cafetiere and has a good local cafe, Kovar would be inclined to head there instead. “Obviously it’s nicer to grind fresh at home, but they’ll most likely be using a top-end grinder, so that’s probably going to taste better so long as you use up a bag every two weeks. Plus, it’s nice to have a dialogue with your local barista.”

The water you use will dramatically impact the taste of your coffee, too, Kovar says: “Filter coffee is 98% water, after all. You might have spent a lot on a grinder, but if you’re using London tap water, say, it’s going to be too hard and not very nice.” A filter jug is a good starting point, but the main thing is to soften the water slightly. And don’t use the kettle straight off the boil: “Wait 30 seconds, then use the very hot water.”

The other bit of kit you’ll want is a set of scales. “You need to know what the main variables are, so how much coffee you put in, how much water, and use a timer for the brew – if you buy bespoke coffee scales, they usually have one built in,” Kovar says. (If you don’t want to fork out, though, standard kitchen scales will work just fine.) Kovar uses 60g coffee for each litre of boiled water: “So, if you’re brewing 250ml, which is typically one cup, use 15g coffee.”

James Hoffmann, barista and author of The World Atlas of Coffee, then lets the coffee brew for four minutes. “Now grab a tablespoon and stir the crust that forms on top of the coffee. A lot of it will start to fall away, and you’ll be left with a few bits on top – some foam, some floating bits. Scoop those off and discard.” Then he does nothing at all for at least another five minutes. “When you do eventually push in the plunger, don’t plunge all the way to the bottom, otherwise you’ll stir up the sediment all over again.” You want the plunger to sit just on the surface of the coffee, then pour it gently. Ideally, decant the entire cafetiere in one go, Kovar adds, because, that way, you’ll get a consistent brew.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

As a child, enduring break after break, I thought of myself as simply unlucky. Truth was, I needed to tune in to my aches, pains and well-founded fears

It was the first day of spring this year. I was topless, face-down on a foldaway travel table, as the masseuse uttered six words that brought my attempt at relaxation to an abrupt end: “I think your arm is haunted.”

I have broken my right arm seven times: seven breaks on seven separate occasions. Some years, my arm was in a sling more than it was out of one. The novelty of getting your mates to cover your cast in that 00s grafitti “S” and the relief of missing the bleep test at school quickly wore off.

My daughter’s scruffy little pet would fall asleep with me on the sofa, stilling my racing mind. And then he changed my life in an even more significant way …

I never wanted a hamster. My eight-year-old daughter, Lily, on the other hand, had folders. Habitat drawings and wheel specifications – a case for ownership of such rigour it bowled me over. As a boy I’d had a hamster, Jerry, and remembered him as fine – but nothing more than that. So I went to a Cardiff pet shop on a cold January morning in 2021 with no plan whatsoever to fall in love.

At the back of the enclosure was a scruffy one nobody else wanted. Skinny. A bit unkempt. When the staff member lifted him out, he yawned and looked at Lily as if he’d been expecting her. She named him Popcorn Sushi and took him home in a pink carrier.

An English Democrats voter and a retired university tutor had different ideas about whether it’s OK to fly flags, but could they find something to agree on?

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

David, 70, York

Occupation Retired modern foreign languages tutor at a university

One immediately called an ambulance, another went looking for my younger son. And I still remember the small face of the girl who held her arm around me

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

I was at the park with my two young boys, aged five and seven, riding scooters along a wide path that looped around the grass. My eldest has cerebral palsy, so my husband had modified a scooter with a large base so that we could ride it together. My son stood at the front and I stood behind him. It meant he could join in just like other kids, and he loved it.

When you have boys, you need to run them like dogs – the goal is to burn as much energy as possible every time you’re out of the house. So even though it had started to drizzle, we set off on another loop of the park on our scooters. But when we hit a puddle coming round the bend, the scooter slipped out from under me. We fell sideways, landing on the ground. I realised my son wasn’t conscious. In that moment all I felt was sheer terror.

Nearly a quarter of market traders now hold master’s degree, PhD or medical doctorate, research shows

One in five young market traders now holds a master’s degree, PhD or medical doctorate, according to exclusive figures shared with the Guardian, in a sign of how Britain’s markets are attracting an unexpected new generation of highly educated entrepreneurs.

Separate data from Kerb, the street food collective behind some of London’s best-known food markets, points in the same direction. Almost three-quarters of its founders have university degrees, including one in four with postgraduate qualifications. About 95% work in their businesses full-time rather than treating them as weekend side hustles.

You can keep temperatures down without the cost – or environmental price – of air conditioning. Here’s some tips and tricks

• The best fans to keep you cool in 2026 – tried and tested

In the UK we are used to worrying about our homes being warm enough, but after struggling to cope with high temperatures in May and June the race is on to cool them down before the next heatwave hits.

And while it might be tempting to swap your desktop fan for a portable air conditioner, there are lots of low-cost, more sustainable ways to stop rooms overheating.

My elderly parents’ home was left uninhabitable, and they are owed £3,300 for repairs they had to fund themselves

My elderly parents spent much of last year dealing with what should have been a straightforward insurance claim after a dishwasher installation by John Lewis caused a leak.

Instead, it became a year-long ordeal, marked by repeated failures and an almost total absence of accountability.

‘Home fee’ qualification ends in 2028, leaving those hoping to study in UK not now eligible for British loans

British teenagers living in the EU could be priced out of UK universities in two years’ time as a Brexit rule change means they face the double whammy of paying costlier international fees, while losing access to student finance.

British passport holders living in the EU still qualify for “home fee” status at UK universities. But this will no longer be the case when the grace period ends in 2028, meaning the first wave to be affected are starting their A-levels, or equivalent, this autumn.

For young people, flaunting eye bags and bed rotting has become a cheeky rebuttal of body optimization culture

Picture a typical hangover: a morning spent curled under a comforter, chugging Gatorade and shame spiraling about what you might have said at the bar the night before.

Not so for the young people who are “romanticizing” their hangovers on TikTok and Instagram. Instead, they are flaunting their dark eye circles and raging headaches as the aftereffects of a good time, broadcasting their bad decisions to the world with a glowy sheen.

There are more than 3,000 conditions in dermatology, experts warn – and chatbots’ recommendations can be flaky

• Read more in the Antiviral series

Who among us has not, in a moment of panic or curiosity, consulted the internet in search of solutions to a medical ailment?

Increasingly, people are turning to AI for health advice, and skincare is no exception. Purpose-built apps promise to identify that rash, while people are sending selfies to AI chatbots seeking “full skincare analysis” and personalised regimens of treatments. On Reddit forums, people post before and after shots of the results from their AI-recommended skin routines.

Yes, digesting food requires energy, but you need to do more than snack for a meaningful impact

It helps to understand what people mean when they talk about “metabolism”, says James Betts, professor of metabolic physiology at the University of Bath. Usually, they’re referring to metabolic rate; the amount of energy your body burns in a given time. This is largely determined by factors such as your size, age, sex and body composition.

Your daily energy expenditure comes from three main sources: your resting metabolism (the energy needed to keep your organs and tissues functioning), the calories burned processing food, and physical activity. Of those, exercise and movement are by far the most variable.

Study finds those who speak two languages have brains that appear around six years younger than those who speak one

Learning another language could slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years, according to research.

People who speak more than one language seem to have younger brains and the more languages you speak and the earlier you speak them, the better, according to findings from a study being presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference in Barcelona.

It’s my job to unpack beauty culture – but I’m still not immune to it. Plus, it’s a particularly strange time to be a bride, beauty-wise

My 91-year-old grandmother had her 1954 wedding album out on her lap when I visited the other day. “I wanted to remember how beautiful I used to be,” she sighed.

Every time my mom comes across a photo of her own 1984 nuptials, she says the same thing: “Look at how skinny I was!” (Or, sometimes, “Can you believe Daddy wore a white tuxedo with tails?” Which I cannot.)

Love them or hate them, the versatile sandal is back – just choose the right ones and wear them the Copenhagen way

The flip-flop is an essential text of summer style. The Dalai Lama wears flip-flops. Surfers wear flip-flops. They are a beach classic, a staple of campsite shower blocks, non-negotiable after a pedicure. Like a pair of blue jeans or a cloth tote bag, they have a utility that transcends fashion.

But when flip-flops step out of their lane – when they become a fashion shoe, a public-facing shoe – rather than a shoe you leave by the back door – they raise hackles. Every single time we get a heatwave, a lively debate about whether flip-flops are acceptable in the office follows, without ever being resolved. When Jennifer Lawrence wore flip-flops under her Dior gown on the Cannes red carpet in 2023, there was an outcry over the perceived flouting of the film festival’s “elegant footwear” policy.

Italian designer brings sculptural silhouettes and playful palettes to storied house, while it is hats off to Giorgio’s niece at her second Armani Privé show

The house of Balenciaga takes haute couture very seriously indeed. Cristóbal Balenciaga was so horrified by the rise of mass-produced clothes that in 1968 he abruptly shuttered his brand and retired to his native Spain, announcing that “high fashion is mortally wounded”.

So Pierpaolo Piccioli, who now helms the house, approached the brief of his first Balenciaga couture collection conscientiously, despite having 25 years of experience at Valentino. At a preview, the haute couture war room where he worked on the show for nine months was plastered with images that ranged from a 1961 Balenciaga dress to Spanish golden age art – Zurbarán’s chic saints, Velázquez’s doll-like infantas – and a monumental Hepworth pierced megalith.

I have a bagful of brushes but if I had to pick, these are my must-haves

My girlfriends have a habit of rifling through my makeup bag when we’re together to see what’s new, and last month one complained about how much precious space was taken up by brushes. These are very boring, I do understand, and I consequently rarely write about them. And yet, whenever I post a makeup application video online, they are invariably the products I’m asked about most.

My friend made me wonder which brushes, if I were allowed only, say, five, would I regard as must-haves? It has been a game only I would find enjoyable, but here is where I have landed:

The owners of Teffont House are aiming for modern rural hospitality that puts guests at the heart of village life

Walking into the Orangery at Teffont House during the golden hour, the restaurant is glowing. Sunlight falls across cocktails the colour of spun sugar, spills on to a terrace trailing constellations of fleabane, and bounces off spoons sinking into raspberry trifles. What really gives the room its sparkle is none of these things, however, but the fact it’s packed with local people. On a warm June evening this new hotel, 10 minutes’ drive from the Wiltshire village of Tisbury, already feels embedded in village life.

It’s the latest venture of the Beckford Group, which runs a small clutch of West Country inns and restaurants, including the Talbot Inn in Mells and the Beckford Canteen in Bath. The company has carved a niche in modern rural hospitality, teaming unflashy furnishings (all chalky pink and moss green paintwork framed by antiques and contemporary art) with menus designed for greedy locavores and pricing that delivers an unstuffy demographic. Underpinning all of this is an ability to tap into local communities to create soul. With this, the Beckford Group’s first hotel, it is making that connection more explicit by labelling it as a village, rather than a country house, hotel.

The island has a culinary tradition as old as its ancient olive trees. Our writer savours its family-run tavernas, village bakeries and local produce

As someone with Cypriot roots and distant Greek heritage, I’m often asked the question: which is the best island? People lean in, expecting a secret – some tiny, untouched haven, known only to locals. My answer is always the same: Crete. With its fiercely proud identity, warm communities and exceptional food, it feels both deeply Greek and entirely itself.

For our anniversary weekend, my husband and I head to Lassithi, in the island’s far eastern corner. As a chef and food writer, I’m drawn to the area’s reputation for exceptional produce: Sitia extra virgin olive oil, creamy xigalo cheese, mountain honey and an abundance of excellent tavernas.

In his new book, Jack Thurston cycles the quieter roads and forgotten hill tracks of Scotland, exploring Britain’s most remote and rugged terrain

There aren’t many roads in Britain where you can pull over to cook breakfast and finish it without seeing a single car. While my friend Ben got the stove going, I wandered around the ruins of Dun Dornaigil, an iron age broch (stone roundhouse) more than 2,000 years old. Above us, low cloud drifted across the dark cliffs of Ben Hope. This was exactly the kind of lost lane we’d come to Sutherland to ride.

Our journey had begun the day before, in Lairg – the traditional “crossroads of the north”. With its Spar shop, hotel, train station and a population of about 800, Lairg is the largest inland settlement in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Europe. Sutherland – literally, the “southern land” of the Vikings, who held sway over the far north of Scotland from their stronghold on Orkney – tests life to its limits: bare mountains, impassable peat bogs and one of Britain’s wildest coastlines.

Discover where supplicants consulted Apollo in Delphi, the infant Hermes hid stolen cattle and where Poseidon created a love nest for a sea nymph

Some stories never get old. The poems and songs from Greek mythology – tales of tragedy, love and loss, war and revenge, jealous gods, magic and monsters – have been retold through the ages for good reason. Like all stories that really resonate, they deal in the flawed nature of humankind.

To the ancients, though, they were far more than legends; they explained the universe. From the Earth’s origins and the stories of constellations to ideas of justice and morality, they shaped the arts and sciences, and carved a shared cultural identity. Visiting Greece today, it’s clear how deeply rooted the myths still are in modern culture. From the capital (named after wise Athena) and beyond, this is a country steeped in legends.

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

Brenda from Bristol entered the history books when she uttered the immortal words “You’re joking! Not another one” about the prospect of a general election. The Thursday quiz feels much the same when it looks at the calendar and notes that yet another week features a Thursday, and it needs to rouse itself to write something. Fifteen questions on topical news, general knowledge and popular culture await. There are no prizes, but let us know how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 255

This pretty little plant is carnivorous, so when placed next to plants affected by the insect pest it can be an effective living flypaper

The problem
The fungus gnat is the pest that just keeps coming. You dry out the soil, set up sticky traps, maybe even reach for the hydrogen peroxide, and just when you think you’ve have won, they’re back. The adults are harmless but maddening, drifting around your face and laying the next generation in any damp compost they can find. And most controls only deal with one stage of the cycle and leave the rest to carry on.

The hack
Butterworts are small carnivorous plants whose leaves are coated in a sticky mucilage that traps tiny flying insects, including fungus gnats. Keep one or two among your collection as living flypaper, catching adult gnats before they can breed.

Common misconceptions are that you don’t have the right skills, or you need to make a huge time commitment

Many people want to do good in the world. They want to connect and give back to their communities. But volunteering, much like Sunday meal prep or morning meditations, often ends up at the bottom of the to-do list – a nice idea we’ll get to when we have more time.

“For many people, volunteering is something they feel positively about, but don’t always prioritize or think they have time for,” says Matt Bertram, vice-president of volunteer services for the American Red Cross.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

The actor spent almost a decade fighting monsters – and making friends – on the hit Netflix show. Then, last year, it all came to an end. How’s he adjusting?

Finn Wolfhard is remembering his first experience of celebrity. It was 2016 and he was 13. The first season of Stranger Things had aired that summer, and he returned to his high school in Vancouver as if nothing had changed. But things had changed. “People didn’t know how to treat me, especially the teachers. Kids that didn’t even look at me before were paying attention to me or wanting to hang out.” He remembers a girl in the year above who really wanted a photo with him. “And I was like: ‘Oh, I can’t really take photos at school.’ And she wasn’t listening to me and pulled me into, like, a side hug. I remember thinking: ‘Shit, man. I have no control over this. This seems crazy.’ So, it was definitely weird at first, and something I still haven’t totally grasped.”

How strange it must be to have spent such a large part of your life playing a character that half the world knows, and has watched grow up on screen, turning from a wide-eyed, gawky, nerdy kid to a sharp-cheekboned (but still quite gawky) action hero. Nobody could have predicted how huge Stranger Things would become or how long it would last, fuelled by popular demand, then stalled by the pandemic. It concluded a decade later, at the end of last year, having reached the point where it was no longer sustainable for twentysomethings like Wolfhard to pass as high schoolers.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

‘Perhaps it’s all a fever dream,’ suggests parody candidate, expected to be Reform leader’s only challenger for seat

Count Binface had been looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX when Nigel Farage dropped a political bombshell on Tuesday.

Instead, Britain’s hottest new political property said he was left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn when news broke that Farage had resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering the possibility of a byelection in the English coastal constituency he has represented since 2024.

‘Sea cures’ are not new but the idea that exposure to oceans, rivers and lakes can be medicine for the brain is gaining traction

Watching the waves break across the vast, roaring ocean in front of him, Dave Phillips felt out of options standing on the cliff’s edge in Cornwall several years ago. The former British army corporal had lost a number of loved ones in quick succession, and the compounding effects of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his military tours had become all-consuming.

“I’m from a generation where we didn’t talk,” says Phillips, 67. “I tried dealing with it myself and ended up standing on a cliff edge thinking, ‘Yeah, this is the way.’”

Some of its amateur matches pull in bigger crowds than European leagues but are more of a spectacle than a pathway to the professional game, say experts

Michael Owen, a man who once quipped he had never drunk tea or coffee, isn’t known for his adventurous palate. Safe to assume, then, that the former England striker was out of his comfort zone sipping Roxburgh rose juice and eating chilli-wrapped rice noodle rolls during his recent visit to south-west China’s Guizhou province.

The 2001 Ballon d’Or winner dusted off his boots for a match in Rongjiang county, the birthplace of viral amateur football league Cun Chao, also known as the Village Super League. Scoring twice in a 4-3 loss for local side Rongjiang Niubi, Owen endeared himself to the thousands in attendance, even if some weren’t familiar with the former Liverpool and Real Madrid player.

We would like to hear from young people in the north of England about their experiences of looking for work

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in employment, education or training (Neet), according to a report published in May, which warned that the figure could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action.

We are particularly keen to hear from young people living in northern England who are not currently in work or education, or who have been struggling to find a job.

We would like to hear from people who have struggled to cancel their contracts or subscriptions with Virgin Media - or any other company

The UK telecoms watchdog has discovered that Virgin Media “likely mishandled” millions of phone calls between the start of 2022 and autumn 2024, which prevented broadband, landline and pay TV customers from cancelling their contracts.

The company has been fined £28m by Ofcom after it discovered evidence of call-dropping tactics, unnecessary call transfers and putting customers on hold for “no reason”.

We would like to hear from people who support national football teams outside of their own countries

In order to play for a country at the World Cup, a football player must have a “genuine link” to that nation, such as familial ties or citizenship. But the rule does not apply to supporting a country.

We would like to hear from fans who have supported national football teams outside of their own countries at the 2026 World Cup. Perhaps you follow a certain player, or the football clubs the team is associated with? Maybe you just like their style? Whatever the reason, we’d like to hear from you.

How long did you have to wait? Perhaps you are in a queue now. Tell us your experience

The EU has rejected calls to suspend its biometric border checks despite warnings from airports, airlines and ports that the system could lead to long queues and delays during the peak summer holiday season. MPs in the UK have also warned of potential disruption at the Port of Dover as holiday traffic builds.

We would like to speak to people who have been affected by the new system. Tell us about your experience – has the new system worked well or have you experienced delays? How long did you have to wait? What did you do to pass the time? Or maybe you are in a queue now? Tell us your experience.

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Typhoon Maysak caused severe flooding and killed six in Guangxi in the south, while tornadoes in Hubei Province in the centre killed at least 11

• Severe storms in China bring tornadoes and landslides that have killed 15 people

• Lethal tornado tears through Chinese province amid devastating storms – video