Sick of doomscrolling? From venues with smartphone swear jars to cabins with absolutely no signal, here are the fun and freeing ways to ditch your device

There’s a ritual at the start of every event hosted by the Offline Project. Run by Pelé Zachariah, the activities vary – it could be a group walk, a collage‑making class or a supper club – but each one begins in the same way, *with an invitation to hand over your phone. Devices go in a lockbox. Once they’re all in, Zachariah closes the door and turns the key. “I don’t place them in for people, because it’s nice for them to physically put it in the box themselves, walk away, and think: for the next two or three hours, I’m fully present.”

He has been running these screen-free events in London since August 2025. First-timers can be apprehensive about being separated from their phone. “You can sense the vibe when they’re putting it away,” says Zachariah. “People have said to me, ‘I felt really weird’ or ‘I felt super uncomfortable for the first few minutes not having my phone on me.’ Then they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed that.’”

Nigel Farage’s £5m gift, the Cottrell family’s links and donations, and Richard Tice’s business dealings form part of an increasingly clear nexus of relationships

It has been three months since the Guardian revealed that Nigel Farage had accepted a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne, a billionaire donor to Reform UK.

This was not the first story in our continuing investigation. But it has proved the most significant, and the consequences of the disclosure are still being played out.

Heat and drought have affected shipping, power plants and tourism across eastern Europe – as well as unearthing some surprises

Baking temperatures and drought across large swathes of central and eastern Europe have driven water levels on the Danube and Rhine rivers to record lows in some areas, hitting shipping, energy production and tourism hard.

Extreme conditions aggravated by the climate emergency left Europe’s waterways from the Netherlands to the Black Sea parched, triggering compounding crises.

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

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

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

Neil Hopper was celebrated for continuing to do his job despite the loss of his lower limbs. But what the people he was treating didn’t know was that his injuries were self-inflicted. Now they and their families are asking questions

• Warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of bodily mutilation that some readers may find upsetting

Of all the things that happened in the fraught days after 72-year-old Liz Spooner had her leg amputated at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro in 2022, one memory remains vivid in the mind of her daughter, Faye Harrison. Liz’s surgery had taken much longer than anticipated, Faye remembers, and, delirious after the anaesthetic and morphine, Liz had begun to refuse food and medication. That’s when Faye was ushered into a side room with a consultant surgeon.

“He was smiley. He came across as quite charming and caring,” Faye recalls. He ran through a long list of the medications Liz was taking, and began explaining why she needed them. “I remember looking down – you look down at the floor a lot when you have these kinds of conversations – and I noticed he’d got metal sticks coming out of his trouser legs.” Faye blinks in disbelief at the memory. “I thought, blimey, he’s operated on my mum, but he’s also an amputee.”

The double murder of two Scots in the Costa del Sol may have ended the war between the Lyons and the Daniels – but the crimes haven’t gone away

It was a warm evening in Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol last year when two Scottish men met a violent end.

The punters of Monaghans seafront bar had barely finished watching the Champions League final on 31 May when a car pulled up outside. A masked gunman emerged and headed to the table of 46-year-old Eddie Lyons Jr, shooting him at point-blank range. The assassin turned the gun on Lyons’ friend, the bar’s owner Ross Monaghan, 43, but it jammed.

• Infantino ditched proposals after widespread backlash

• Uefa adds: ‘We cannot keep going on with secret schemes’

Uefa has warned Gianni Infantino that his style of leadership cannot continue in demanding a thorough and fundamental review of Fifa’s governance.

In a strongly worded statement that referred to “secret schemes”, “shabby backroom deals” and “faceless individuals”, the Uefa leadership made clear it wants change at the top of Fifa, despite the world governing body’s overnight U-turn in abandoning Infantino’s plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup and other competitions.

Pedro Sánchez hits out at ‘polarising and unlawful reaction’ over mass crossing into Spanish enclave in north Africa

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called for an urgent meeting of EU interior ministers after what he called some member states’ “selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction” to this week’s mass border crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in north Africa.

More than 50,000 people crossed into the territory from Morocco on Thursday and Friday, with at least 67 people dying in the attempt. Some drowned, while others were crushed as they tried to cross a breakwater barrier.

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

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

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

Exclusive: As wildfires rage, Frank Elderson says more work needed to assess risk from collapse of ecosystem services

A senior policymaker at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy.

Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said the eurozone lender of last resort was stepping up its monitoring of the financial risks linked to the destruction of “ecosystem services”, which are nature-related processes or assets that support human activity.

Greek police throw entire homicide division at trying to explain fate of 38-year-old Elisabeth-Jane Ross

Two worlds separated by sheets of corrugated iron: one, a tree-lined road, bordered by a park and the home of Greece’s oldest sports club; the other a wasteland of derelict buildings and graffiti-covered walls in what was once a car park.

It is here, on the wrong side of the divide, in Kypseli, a neighbourhood in central Athens, that the body of Elisabeth-Jane Ross was found, inside a suitcase last month.

Exhausted firefighters, foresters and volunteers wage ‘war of attrition’ against blaze that forced 200,000 people from their homes

By noon it is time for a break. The temperature is about 35C, the smell of ash, cinders and burnt wood hang acrid in the air. At tables laid out in the shrinking shade on the desiccated grass and sand outside the sports centre in Le Porge, 200 men and a handful of women have gathered. Firefighters, soldiers, police, gendarmes, officials, first aid teams, foresters and volunteers sit elbow to elbow, plates of sausages, steak and potatoes in front of them.

The village was evacuated just over 14 hours after the “megafire” – as it has become known in France – broke out 6km away last week. The blaze has consumed 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of mainly forestland west of Bordeaux. Though finally contained, there are outbreaks every day, pushing to the limit emergency services and the hundreds of amateurs who have come to their aid.

Bev Craig succeeds Andy Burnham and wins back support in areas where Reform made gains in May

Labour has stormed to a decisive victory in the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection, seizing back areas that recently fell to Reform UK and the Greens.

Labour’s Bev Craig, the Manchester city council leader, will now succeed Andy Burnham and hold one of the most powerful political positions outside Westminster.

At least 21 injured and more than 250 evacuated in strongest quake to hit southern Italian region in 40 years

At least 21 people have been injured after a 4.7-magnitude earthquake rocked a region near Naples, in southern Italy.

The quake, which occurred at 7.46pm on Friday night, caused power outages, disrupted public transport and damaged buildings and a pier in Campi Flegrei, the site of Europe’s largest volcanic crater.

Alcohol is embedded in profession where long hours, loneliness and lobbying are the norm, report finds

Parliament is “Britain’s last alcohol-soaked workplace” where MPs are offered free drinks as early as midday despite alcohol-related scandals, a report has revealed.

Drinking is commonplace and some MPs have had their stomachs pumped after consuming so much alcohol that they ended up in hospital, one disclosed.

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

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

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

Some in Dover say their town is being exploited by content creators and politicians, but others claim there is a genuine problem

If you believe rightwing influencers and politicians, Dover and the wider Kent coast has been the site of an “invasion” for years now. And, for an online audience of millions, they and their camera crews have been the vanguard in the nation’s defence.

Indeed, if you believe all you see on the algorithms of amateur Channel watchers, the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, braved a hail of French gunfire as he took to the water in a fishing boat this week; an attempt by the French authorities, he suggested, to deter him in his mission of highlighting the small boats crisis.

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

• The best supermarket tinned sardines

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

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

Britons move away from trend of grey paving and pristine lawns in an embrace of colour, with lavender a top choice

If you manage to spot a garden in bloom this summer, beyond the strips of bleached and torched grass, there may be one colour you see more than any other: purple, the horticultural hue of the season.

Plants such as lavender, salvias and catmint are in vogue, according to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), which conducted extensive research into the colours Britons best love to see in their gardens.

Some have called it ‘S&M’, but partnership with Ann Summers is less a scandal than another step in a century of evolving underwear trends, experts say

The news that Marks & Spencer is selling Ann Summers crotchless knickers on their website has been greeted – as might be expected – with outrage online, being described as everything from “tawdry” to “S & M”.

But it could be this is just the latest evolution in what the UK’s biggest underwear retailer has available for the smalls drawer. In recent years, the store has sold vastly different options through its own products, ranging from full-brief knickers to thongs, period knickers and those that can be used by women who wear stomas. The introduction of other brands in clothing came five years ago, with underwear included. Ann Summers – which is selling bras and chemises as well as knickers on the M&S website – lines up alongside lingerie brands including Pour Moi and Calvin Klein.

Manhattan’s triangular building will open this fall to wealthy residents, with 36 apartments exposing Flatiron’s ‘steel skeleton’

New York City’s Flatiron building has had many lives: as a structure seen as a deathtrap; as a nuisance which created a deadly, petticoat-lifting, wind current and, mainly, as a commercial space.

Now, the triangular building, a favorite of tourists and locals alike, is entering a new era: as a residential building, where apartments cost up to $58.5m.

Supporters fear structure could be torn down as safety hazard and want it to become memorial to postwar foreign labourers in honour of its Turkish creator

Sometimes the currents of history converge in a single spot. In Berlin, one of the most intriguing of those places is a small traffic island with a lovingly tended garden and a ramshackle two-storey structure called the Treehouse at the Wall.

In 1983, Osman Kalin, a Turkish “guest worker”, was looking in his corner of the city cleaved by the Berlin Wall for a patch of earth in which to plant his onions, garlic and cucumbers. Virtually on his doorstep in the Kreuzberg district was a slice of no man’s land next to the concrete barrier and barbed wire. Although it sat in West Berlin, cold war logic meant the lot officially belonged to the communist East.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

Your friendly neighbourhood superhero spins a new web of adventures, and the singer returns from Oz with her hopeful eighth album

Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Out now
The – sequel to No Way Home maintains the focus on what’s now Spidey’s day job: protecting the city. New characters include crime boss Tombstone, played by Marvin Jones III who, like his character, is an African American with albinism.

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

A poetic coming-of-age tale haunted by racial profiling among the Asian community in Luton, while a BBC documentary unearths troubling allegations against the high-profile celeb. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

With a prime minister raised in a tradition that emphasises our mutual dependency, we may finally have a leader who can address the anomie gripping our country

Like Andy Burnham, I was once an enthusiastic altar boy, although I don’t recall competing to be at the front with the communion plate as the prime minister apparently did. Much of my motivation had little to do with piety. The tips received for serving at weddings were often very generous and I got on well with Father Jerome, an engagingly worldly monk from Ampleforth who shared my passion for Manchester United.

I’m five years older than Burnham, but the atmosphere of the small-town northern Catholicism we grew up with will have been much the same. The second Vatican council’s reforms, responding to the social changes under way since the 1960s, were “democratising” the tone and style of worship, and traditionalists were mourning the sidelining of the old Latin mass. The huge success of Pope John Paul II’s groundbreaking visit to Britain in 1982 – the first by a reigning pontiff – had made the faith seem more mainstream and less rarefied. Politically, most Catholics voted Labour, and the large number of Celtic surnames in parish registers testified to a demographic significantly different from Anglican congregations, which were both more English and more Tory.

Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor

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.

Voters on the left are more fragmented than ever – but they will pull together behind a convincing cross-party message

• The author is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

The results of the election for a new mayor to succeed Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester show progressives standing at the threshold of a new era. But only if they work together.

New mayor Bev Craig was elected using the supplementary vote which uses voters’ second preference if no one wins more than half the vote in the first round. Despite the Burnham bounce, Labour received only 47% of the vote in the first round, well down on Burnham who never achieved below 63% in his three campaigns. But when second preferences kicked in, it’s estimated that about seven in 10 progressives who had backed other parties piled in behind Craig.

Get your balls, pucks, Scrabble boards and packs of cards away from me – all I want is space to be together, ideally with a coffee or a glass of wine

The other day, I met a friend at the park for a catch-up. After 45 minutes of blissful note-swapping – my new tabi shoes, his new boyfriend – he pulled out a pair of ping-pong paddles and indicated a nearby table. “Fancy a quick game?” We are no longer speaking.

I’m joking, but only sort of. As far as I’m concerned, games of any sort ought to be illegal once everyone present is over the age of 12. I will make grudging exceptions for professional athletes, because apparently they’re earning a living, and realistically there is very little chance of me being asked to join in with, say, the Wimbledon final. But when it comes to anything less formal, the risk of being corralled is just too high: bat those balls, pucks, packs of cards, spinning bottles and Scrabble boards away from me, please.

Emily Watkins is a freelance writer based in London

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 longevity influencer and his girlfriend, Kate Tolo, say they’re studying women’s health – a worthy goal, but perhaps some skepticism is in order

The tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has devoted his life to dodging death. The 48-year-old is obsessed with becoming the healthiest person in the world and is on a quixotic quest to reverse his biological age and live forever. As such, Johnson is disciplined about what he eats, takes dozens of supplements a day, and measures every single biomarker possible, boasting that he is “certainly the most biologically measured person ever”.

In short: good luck finding any ice cream in his freezer. But you know what you will find? His girlfriend’s menstrual blood. On Thursday, Johnson, a chronic oversharer, posted a photo of his 30-year-old girlfriend, Kate Tolo, on X with the caption: “Kate’s period blood is in my -80 °C freezer. Around 10 mL.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The trillionaire Tesla owner has called the editor of the Economist a ‘traitor to the west’ after a clash-filled interview. How should the media respond?

Elon Musk’s long interview with the editor of the Economist is as good a representation as any of the current clash between two worlds. In one corner, the editor of an 182-year-old news organisation which promotes economic liberalism and freedom. In the other, the world’s first trillionaire, who spreads misinformation to his hundreds of millions of followers on his own social media platform. The bout is a masterclass in the challenges journalists face in a new world of AI, fact avoidance and online aggression.

The flash points in Zanny Minton Beddoes’ conversation with Musk start with definitions. Musk says that the people Minton Beddoes calls “far-right” and “fringe” (she mentions Germany’s AfD party) are in fact just “normal people”. They clash over whether the speed of his cuts to USAID led to unnecessary deaths in developing countries – she believes his claim that it didn’t defies not only statistics but the evidence from her reporters on the ground. Asked if he is racist, he cites the fact he has four children with a woman who is “half Indian”. In an awkward exchange, when asked by Minton Beddoes whether he is anti-Muslim, Musk says he is against “people coming to a country with antithetical views … I’m against rape and murder.”

Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. As the Marjorie Deane professor of financial journalism at City St George’s, University of London, she has a connection through a charitable foundation to Zanny Minton Beddoes, who is chair of trustees. She writes in a personal capacity

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

A New York school district has paused plans to bring an android into the classroom. Is this our educational future?

What’s more harrowing than sending your child to school? Maybe getting stuck on a city bus that can’t drop below 55 miles per hour or it will explode, but that’s about it. Once your kid hits school age, you have to decide (if you’re lucky) between public and private education, vet the teachers, and neurotically worry about whether they’re learning enough and are socializing effectively. For seven hours a day, someone who’s practically a stranger is responsible for the wellbeing of one of the most important people in your life.

It’s a stressful situation, but maybe it would be less so if your kid’s teacher was a humanoid robot.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Trump’s conflict keeps escalating, with Saudi Arabia joining airstrikes in Iraq and reportedly planning an attack on the Houthis. A recession could follow

The US war against Iran is spiraling out of control. Over the past week, the conflict has expanded across the Middle East, with attacks and counterattacks in at least five other countries. Instead of a quick war that sought to topple Iran’s regime, Donald Trump has started a regional conflict that risks severely disrupting energy supplies and prices – and triggering a global recession.

After a few days of relative calm, the conflict resumed with the Pentagon carrying out almost nightly strikes against Iran, and Tehran retaliating against US military bases in the region. The conflict also extended to attacks in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt. And there’s little sign that peace negotiations between the US and Iran, which are being brokered by Pakistan and Qatar, are making much progress.

American democrats need a Hungarian-style landslide to overwhelm Trump’s attempts to rig November’s midterm elections

In these days of extreme weather events, it seems odd to say that the US needs a big landslide. But a landslide defeat for President Donald Trump in November’s midterm elections is exactly what is required if the country is to start reversing his deliberate and rapid erosion of its democracy.

The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.

Devolution should finance transport, skills and industry, not become a rightwing contest to promise the largest tax giveaway

That England is among the rich world’s most centralised countries underpins Andy Burnham’s critique of the economic history of the past 40 years. Only post-communist Europe deindustrialised as rapidly as Yorkshire and the Midlands did in the 1980s. Centralisation did not close every factory or pit, but left regions without the powers, finance or institutions to cushion the shock or build a resilient, replacement economy. Hence Mr Burnham’s radical and welcome plan to unbundle English government.

There are three facets to his devolution programme. The first are the detailed and concrete proposals contained in a cabinet paper Mr Burnham released on Friday. This appears to be a blueprint to create a decentralised state organised around mayors as the key regional economic actors, while jointly governed pan-regional agencies could emerge, say for transport, energy, investment and industrial systems, that cross mayoral boundaries. Regions without mayors will get a chance to have one – or limit themselves to weaker powers.

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.

Funders have picked a damaging fight with scientists and the public. They should reconsider their plans

The iconic Lovell telescope, housed at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, has always expanded our view of the universe – from tracking the Sputnik launch in 1957 to its current contributions to the study of dark matter. It is now threatened with closure after it was announced that government funding will not continue past March 2028. The projected savings are just £2.8m a year.

This is just the latest in a rolling package of cuts from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – which disperses government funding to particle, astro and nuclear physics, among other disciplines – aimed at saving about £160m over the next four years. The STFC has insisted that the measures are a result of cost overruns. That may be true, but it is hard not to see this as part of a larger shift in what kind of science the government funds and prioritises, and what areas it allows to wither.

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 the prime minister’s pledge to spend his ‘political capital’ and find cross-party consensus on reforming social care

I write as someone whose disabilities mean that I will be in receipt of social care support my whole life (Andy Burnham seeks cross-party agreement on future of social care, 27 July). For too long, people like me have been cannon fodder for politicians who routinely forget that their highest duty in providing social care is to protect those less able, or unable, to care for themselves. Investing in the right support for us unlocks our often-forgotten abilities. When we are successful, it is often because we have had opportunity to be because of that support, and when we aren’t, as so often happens, it is because society writes us off.

Andy Burnham’s intervention is welcome news as it shows that he considers us a priority. Reform of the social care system has to be taken hand in hand with disability groups and people with lived experience of being disabled. Too often the system traps people into dependency on temporary accommodation rather than providing them with the means to receive support in their own home.

Former clients of Rajiv Menon KC, including Tariq Ali and Hillsborough family members Margaret Aspinall and Sue Roberts, say the charges against him must be dropped. Plus a letter from Andrew Smith

The fight for truth and justice can too often be a hard and long struggle. Navigating the law is complex, and justice depends on lawyers who we can trust – lawyers who listen to our voices, stand up for us, and pursue the truth on our behalf.

Rajiv Menon KC is an experienced and highly respected barrister who has spent his career representing people like us. At some of the most traumatic times in our lives he has represented us with professionalism, integrity and compassion, ensuring that our voices were heard in inquests, inquiries and criminal trials.

Reviving vocational education | Vanishing food | ‘Stingy git’ obituaries | Hydrangeas heading north

Michael Pyke of the Campaign for State Education refers to the Tomlinson report of 2004 (Letters, 30 July), commissioned but then sadly dropped by the Blair government. A year or so later, I, then a FE college principal, recognised Mike Tomlinson at Marylebone station. I told him how sorry I was that his report had not been implemented. He thanked me and said: “It will be, eventually.”
Colin Flint
Claverdon, Warwickshire

• Re vanished food (Letters, 28 July), we knew something was up when Alf, our ginger cat, was wailing outside. He struggled through the cat flap hauling a side of salmon. We never discovered who was missing a delicious supper that night.
Janet Mansfield
Aspatria, Cumbria

Readers respond to reports that the world-famous big dish is facing closure due to spending cuts by UK Research and Innovation

Throughout my long life, Jodrell Bank Observatory has been a source of wonder and pride (Jodrell Bank Observatory facing closure after major funder cuts support, 27 July). Sir Bernard Lovell’s inspirational creation never ceases to awe with its combination of cutting-edge space exploration and heroic engineering structure. A tour of its welcoming visitor centre with my grandchildren confirmed that this sense of awe is being passed on to future generations.

Yes, it would make another fine museum. But here in the north we have quite a few museums of our glorious industrial past. We have only one Jodrell Bank, probing the mysteries of the universe right now. So I’m afraid it is over to my fellow English graduate Andy Burnham to reverse the philistine decision of UK Research and Innovation, reminding him of his poetic hero Philip Larkin’s fear for the possible future of the UK: “Our children will not know it is a different country./ All we can hope to leave them now is money”.
Dr Ken Smith
Macclesfield, Cheshire

• Updates from Saturday’s live action around Glasgow

• Medal table | How ‘mop man’ Miller stole the show

Boxing The first hands will be thrown just after 11am in women’s 54kg final between Scarlett Savannah Delgado and Preeti Preeti. That’s the first of 14 finals day on the last day of boxing at this year’s Games.

Men’s 1500m T54 final Nathan Maguire powered to victory in the last lap, with Daniel Sidbury (England) taking silver and Sam Rizzo (Australia) the bronze.

I was so boxed. And then I felt like Moses – it just parted and I got through. I don’t know how it happened!

There was a little bit of panic. When I heard the bell (for the last lap) I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m so stuck.’ I dropped them a lot more than I expected!

• 2018 winners beaten by Silver Ferns 61-54 in semi-final

• Roses to face either Australia or Jamaica for bronze medal

England’s hopes of regaining their Commonwealth Games’ netball title are over after a 61-54 defeat to New Zealand that was far more comprehensive than the scoreline suggests.

The Roses, who famously won gold in the Gold Coast in 2018, at least have the consolation of the bronze medal match on Sunday morning, but they were second best throughout.

• Tarona Taafaki makes history in women’s 75kg category

• All boxers eliminated in semis receive bronze medals

A boxer has made history for ⁠Tuvalu by winning the tiny Pacific island nation’s first Commonwealth ⁠Games medal without winning a single fight.

Twenty-year-old Tarona Taafaki, ⁠one of five entrants in the women’s 75kg category, received a bye to the semi-finals where she lost on an unanimous points decision to India’s Lovlina Borgohain on Friday. At Commonwealth Games, all boxers eliminated in the semis receive bronze medals.

‍♀️ Updates from the 138km opening stage of this year’s race
‍♀️ Vollering gears up for latest Tour tilt | And email Luke

We’ve got 500m to the end of the neutralised sector. There will be a large amount of nervous energy in that peloton.

Lotte Kopecky, of SD Worx-ProTime, is asked on TNT Sports: What’s the vibe like in the team?

After a rollercoaster week at the Commonwealth Games, the double Olympic champion says he will never stop believing what he can achieve

“I couldn’t switch off because it’s been a real rollercoaster of a week,” Adam Ramsay-Peaty says with a weary smile on a quiet Thursday morning in Glasgow. He has just endured a rough night in which, after winning his third medal of the Commonwealth Games, he managed less than three hours of sleep. The medals consist of bronze in the 100m and 50m breaststroke and a silver in the men’s 4x100m medley. For most swimmers this would constitute success and satisfaction, but Ramsay-Peaty is different.

The fact that none of his three medals are gold, or attached to anything remotely like the kind of supreme performance that Ramsay-Peaty churned out with an aura of invincibility for eight years, has taken a chunk out of the double Olympic champion. There have been tears of frustration and an admission that “nothing makes sense this week”.

• Updates from the final day at Glorious Goodwood

• Asfoora retirement on hold. Plus Saturday’s tipping

Off and running in the 1.50 Goodwood …

Sing Us A Song works his way to the head of affairs, Small Fry close behind with Aeronautic fourth, Valedictory biding his time …

Managing director of men’s cricket wants a team that consistently win while preparing future captains and coaches

After a chaotic and miserable eight months, in which England’s Test team lost the Ashes in Australia, a home series against New Zealand, a captain, a coach, their once rampant self-confidence and a fair amount of respect, the appointment of Stephen Fleming gives them a chance to pivot towards a future that suddenly looks beguilingly bright, if mainly because for now it exists only in the imagination.

On Friday, Rob Key, the managing director of men’s cricket since April 2022, refused to admit to making any mistakes in that time. But as he explained the process behind Fleming’s recruitment, he occasionally and inadvertently damned himself. When he spoke about creating an environment designed to hone “all these players with so much potential who need refinement”, he said: “A lot of it’s about, can we bring someone in who can get this team to do the basics bloody well?” It probably didn’t need to take four years to realise such a person might be useful.

If professional athletes can represent more than one country, let alone multiple clubs, why shouldn’t fans change teams?

“I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that Americans are here to protect us against the Germans, I am fanatically pro-American … you and your country will have no more loyal partisan in Italy than me – but only as long as you remain in Italy.”

This passage from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – as an old Italian man explains the logic behind his fickle wartime expedience to a naive American soldier – plays with the question of what constitutes true strength. Universally perceived as weak, Italy are in fact the strongest nation in the second world war, according to the old man. And that, sort of, explains my feelings on football fandom.

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.

Donald Trump retreats further from commitment to let Ukraine manufacture its own Patriot missiles. What we know on day 1,620

Kyiv was once again under attack by ballistic missiles early on Saturday with at least 10 people killed, according to Reuters. “Fires and destruction occurred in five districts of the capital,” the state emergency service posted. Twenty-two people were reportedly also injured in the attack. It came as Donald Trump retreated further from a promise to let Ukraine manufacture its own Patriot air defence interceptors, which it desperately needs to shoot down Russian missiles. More than a ‌dozen explosions reverberated through Kyiv, and residents were warned to stay in shelters.

In Kyiv’s Darnytsky district, the attacks damaged multiple buildings and vehicles, with authorities reporting seven people killed and 14 wounded in the area. Two people were killed and eight others were wounded in Solomiansky district, where strikes damaged a five-storey residential building. “Everything was smashed, the windows, everything,” 75-year-old resident Kateryna Kravchenko told AFP of her apartment. “I can barely stand. I don’t know how I’m going to get through all this.” The emergency service said on Saturday morning that 105 people in Kyiv had been rescued from impacted areas.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday urged Trump and other US officials to help Ukraine gain permission from Elon Musk to use satellite internet service Starlink for guiding strikes inside Russia. Zelenskyy made the request directly to Trump during an Oval Office meeting this week, according to one person familiar with the matter. He also reportedly told lawmakers later on Capitol Hill that he wanted Starlink’s help. Trump did not commit to Zelenskyy’s request. Musk allows Starlink use within Ukraine, including Russian-occupied areas, but restricts it inside Russia.

During a cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump told reporters that handing over the underlying Patriot technology was “a hard thing” to do. Ukraine’s Zelensky had met Trump earlier this week and said Trump had agreed to license the production of Patriot missiles to Ukraine. Asked whether he was ready to grant Kyiv a licence to build Patriots domestically – something he had suggested at a Nato summit in Turkey just this month – Trump said: “We have not agreed to that. We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.” Giving away the weapons carried its own risks, he added: “People that you give that technology [to], they can some day turn on you. You know that is possible.”

Several thousand Ukrainians rallied in central Kyiv on Friday, angry about Zelenskyy’s decision to ⁠oust the defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. Fedorov is ​widely credited with driving military innovation during Ukraine’s war with Russia. But having taken charge of the wartime ministry in January, he was dismissed in a surprise government reshuffle ⁠in mid-July. Since then, Ukrainians have been gathering next to the presidential office, pushing for Fedorov to be reinstated as he refused to accept another government post.

Russia’s main grain lobby group warned on Friday that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian ships and ports could shut down grain exports via the Black Sea, pushing up ⁠prices and causing hunger in ⁠Africa and the Middle East. Russia, the ​world’s largest wheat exporter, and Ukraine, also a large agricultural exporter, have been attacking each other’s facilities and vessels in the Black Sea area in recent weeks, driving wheat prices higher. The disruption to shipping in the Black Sea ⁠caused by Ukrainian attacks “poses a direct threat to global food security”, Russia’s Union of Grain Exporters and Producers told Reuters.

Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian online retailer Wildberries amount to “acts ⁠of terrorism” against civilians, affecting millions of people in Russia and other countries, the company’s founder ⁠and CEO, Tatyana ⁠Kim, ​complained on Friday. Ukraine has attacked more than a dozen Wildberries sites since 18 July in ⁠a bid to disrupt the operations of the company, a vendor to the Russian war effort and linchpin of Russia’s consumer economy.

Shift from Westminster risks weakening scrutiny as regional titles battle hostility, big tech and ‘news deserts’

Greater support for local media is needed to hold mayors and councils to account under Andy Burnham’s plans for devolution, which would involve a massive transfer of power into local government, publishers have said.

A range of figures involved with local news broadly welcomed new plans unveiled by the prime minister, but said that monetising content, barriers erected by populist politicians and the roles of big tech and the BBC were among the challenges they faced.

Labour politicians say mutualised model puts public in control without adding debt to government’s balance sheet

MPs and mayors close to Andy Burnham have told the prime minister there is a “third way” to gain more control of failing companies, as the row over whether or not to nationalise Thames Water rumbles on.

Burnham is said to be concerned about the increase in government debt that Treasury projections show could be a result of nationalising water companies.

Prominent Fox News hosts have expressed concern, bewilderment and frustration over US objectives in Iran

Throughout his two presidencies, Donald Trump has leaned on reliable support from the conservative opinion wing of his favorite cable news channel, Fox News.

But, like a broad swathe of the American public, several traditionally supportive commentators on the channel have recently expressed concerns about whether the war on Iran is succeeding, suggesting that Trump is on increasingly dicey footing in the conservative media world he relies on for backing.

World-class venue puts renewed focus on staff wellbeing under new head chef after René Redzepi stepped down and apologised for his behaviour

The Copenhagen restaurant Noma – often ranked among the world’s best – is preparing to reopen next week under new leadership for the first time since its star chef and co-founder, René Redzepi, stepped down amid accusations of physical and psychological abuse.

The new executive head chef, Pablo Soto, who has worked at the restaurant for nearly a decade, said while it remained “the same Noma” there had been some significant changes. Along with a new, evolving monthly menu to replace its previous seasonal one, he said there was now a heightened focus on enabling employees to live full lives.

Lyme Regis, Dorset: Busy beaches can be bad news for shellfish. If curious children don’t know they are live creatures, then let’s educate them

My favourite beach at Lyme Regis is the capricious East Cliff, visible only at low tide. The best way to reach it is down a 114-step walkway.

The path drops through rough scrub, a feral mix of wild plants and garden escapes, sizzling with grasshoppers. Buddleia flourishes next to sallow bushes, hazel and gorse. Sour blackberries are already reddening among the brambles and somewhere in the tangle, a stonechat calls. The sound, like two dry pebbles clicked together, echoes the faint tap of fossil hammers audible from the beach below.

Drought and extreme heat are killing plants, driving up prices while also making some farms economically unviable

“It’s a constant battle,” says Tim Young. He and his family have been tracking the rainfall on their Norfolk farm since 1976, and the data shows the last six years have seen two-thirds the amount of rain compared with previous years. The lack of water has become the number one risk to Young’s business.

This summer has seen record-breaking climate induced heatwaves scorch much of Europe, which combined with droughts and “apocalyptic” wildfires has made farming virtually impossible. France has faced down fires that its president, Emmanuel Macron, called the worst since the second world war and on Wednesday half of England was declared officially in drought, with July expected to be the driest on record after winter floods, according to the Environment Agency. So how are farmers bearing up under the pressure?

Boom in solar farms and home installations in first half of 2026 began shortly after start of US-Israel war against Iran

Great Britain has recorded more new solar power installations in the first half of this year than in any six-month period since 2011, as households turn to rooftop panels to help cut their energy bills.

An analysis of the government’s official figures shows that Great Britain added 142,536 solar installations in the first six months of the year, putting it on track to top last year’s record solar additions.

As parks turn brown and paddling pools go unfilled, exemptions mean sports pitches can stay lush – even in school holidays

After multiple punishing heatwaves, and no rain in parts for over a month, it seems the whole of the south of England is golden brown.

But by Hammersmith Bridge in Barnes, south-west London, there is the unmistakable scent of damp soil. The playing fields of St Paul’s school, where fees are up to £57,000 a year, are a bright, lush green.

Sales soar as consumers seek maximum convenience, though experts say most products don’t need to be kept cool

When it comes to essential fixtures and fittings for bathrooms, the most common are tubs and taps. But now there is a new must-have emerging: a mini fridge.

Used to store everything from beauty products to GLP-1 medication, the growing demand reflects a wider trend in how the wellness industry and weight-loss drugs are reshaping homes.

Labour veteran is said to relish role that requires careful negotiation of Trump and impending G20 leadership

Extraordinarily, given the importance of geopolitics, the office of foreign secretary has sometimes appeared a consolation prize in British politics, perhaps reflecting the transfer of responsibility to Downing Street or the Cabinet Office.

That is not how Ed Miliband views the job. His allies say suggestions that he nurses resentment after he was deprived of the chance to be chancellor misunderstand his grasp of the policy challenges ahead. “Ed has an immense appetite to get things done and is relishing being in this job,” one says. “Ed will be a policy-driven foreign secretary.”

Legal challenge to King’s College London research study claimed it could harm participants but was rejected

A clinical trial of drugs that can delay puberty can go ahead after a high court judge threw out a legal challenge on Friday.

Campaigners had launched the attempt to halt the planned research into puberty blockers, to be run by researchers at King’s College London (KCL), on the grounds that they believed it could harm the children taking part.

Exclusive: Danielle Kirton calls on Ed Miliband to help her get answers about why evacuation order came too late

The bereaved daughter of a British couple who died in a Spanish wildfire is calling on the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, to get answers from Spain’s government about why her parents were not told to evacuate until it was too late.

Severe wildfires have burned across Spain and France since early July, killing people, destroying thousands of homes and forcing more than 300,000 people to flee.

Texts reveal that singer and Celeste Rivas Hernandez had been in touch stretching back to when she was 11 years old

The rising pop singer D4vd and 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez were in the throes of a clandestine relationship months before her mangled and decomposing body turned up last September stuffed in an impounded car registered to the musician.

D4vd, born David Anthony Burke, is set to stand trial for murder, child sexual abuse and mutilation of human remains in connection to the teenager’s death.

Accusations Indonesians were being excluded deepened a sense of frustration held by some residents on the island

When Annisa Rahmadani posted online about being rejected from a social running club in Bali, she expected a few sympathetic comments. Instead, her story went viral, prompted national politicians to weigh in, immigration authorities to intervene and ultimately, the club’s Dutch organisers barred from Indonesia.

“I had no idea it would get that big,” said the 34-year-old university lecturer from the Indonesian city of Bandung. “But it seems it was just the tip of the iceberg.”

At the Aids 2026 conference, Brazilian advocates said health systems need to be more independent from foreign funding

HIV advocates from Brazil, whose health system operates independently from foreign aid, say they predicted a dramatic reduction in donor funding for HIV and wish other countries had prioritized independence sooner.

While the dissolution of USAID might “feel like a rupture”, it’s something advocates at the Brazilian HIV NGO Gestos have seen coming for a long time, Juliana Cesar, Gestos’s political liaison coordinator, said during a session at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Troy Jackson gained the Democratic nomination, but now he needs to consolidate support to take on Susan Collins

Troy Jackson is ready to move on.

In fewer than 100 days, the new Democratic nominee has to convince Maine voters to send him to the US Senate – and he’s trying to do it without dwelling on Graham Platner, who dropped out of the race after accusations of rape, which he denies.

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

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

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

Whey protein, a key infant formula ingredient, is in growing demand, partly linked to rising use of weight-loss drugs

The rise of “proteinmaxxing” – a trend in which consumers try to eat as much protein as possible – could lead to higher prices for infant formula, experts warn.

Whey protein, a key ingredient in infant formula, has surged in popularity over the past year as health professionals emphasise the benefits of protein.

Adam O’Neal did not give reason for his departure at end of August in another major shakeup at US publication

The Washington Post had realized a state of relative calm in the five months since the paper was turned upside down in February, when nearly half the newsroom was laid off and its unpopular publisher, Will Lewis, abruptly resigned.

But on Friday, staffers were shocked to find out that Adam O’Neal, a millennial hired last year to lead its opinion section, was already leaving.

Multimillionaire Peter Waddell is also found to have been properly dismissed from Big Motoring World for gross misconduct

A multimillionaire used-car salesman was ousted from his £300m company after “a pre-conceived and orchestrated plan” devised by private equity investors that had backed his business, a high court judge has ruled.

Peter Waddell, 60, was forced out as the chief executive of the Kent-based dealership Big Motoring World in 2024 in a coup that resulted in “more-or-less open warfare” at the car seller and caused “unfair prejudice” to the investment company that held Waddell’s majority stake.

The stories in Mrs Leicester’s School, written by a woman who killed her own mother, were suffused with grief, and finally triggered mine as I was teaching a class of students

When my dad went into hospital for what would be the final time, shortly before Christmas last year, I had been finishing up a lecture series on early children’s literature for the university where I teach. My dad had had a drinking problem practically my whole life, but his alcoholism had worsened across decades. Then suddenly, after years of poor health, his liver just gave up on him. He was dead within days.

Shortly after his death I was due to lecture on a relatively forgotten book of stories for children called Mrs Leicester’s School, mostly written by the English writer Mary Lamb but with parts by her more famous brother, Charles. I was not prepared for how moved I would be by the simple message of one of the stories. That often bizarre and sometimes grim collection of tales for pre-Victorian boys and girls changed the way that I, an almost 40-year-old man, think about grief.

Christopher Nolan’s smash hit epic has continued to excite and enrage everyone from rightwingers to academics, an old-fashioned throwback to a uniting big-screen event

• Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey

• The Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers

• Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office

If a high-profile academic is reviewing a movie for the London Review of Books, that movie in question must be making some kind of mark on some kind of culture. And if people are actually reading a movie review in the London Review of Books, and writing thinkpieces in disagreement or favor of said movie or its review, that movie may actually be a cultural phenomenon.

Normally, volume of discourse about a movie should not be mistaken for a sign that people are actually seeing it. Sometimes online factions just have a bored fixation not shared by the rest of the world. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has some major receipts at the box office, too: the movie has already outgrossed Oppenheimer, Nolan’s last movie, itself a shockingly popular movie for adults. Though The Odyssey’s audience skewed male in its first weekend, by its second its gender split was closer to 50/50, suggesting reach beyond the stereotypically male-driven action-adventures. It’s also reaching out to older moviegoers, an endangered demographic in a summer where under-25s have driven the success of Obsession and Backrooms. Three-quarters of The Odyssey’s audience has been over 25, while memes inspired by the movie (most popular: Matt Damon’s anguished face portraying Odysseus listening to the sirens’ song and Robert Pattinson’s slimy suitor demanding that “someone get these BEGGARS out of here!”) have indicated that younger people are paying attention too.

Rebecca Lucy Taylor leads David Hare’s rock’n’roll drama, Michaela Coel tells us Chewing Gum Dreams and Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo stars in a murder mystery

Like a time capsule crowbarred open, its fug filling the auditorium, this year’s 50th anniversary production of David Hare’s drama about a 60s rock band’s unravelling made for a fascinating evening. The tunes by brothers Nick and Tony Bicât – plus Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem’s new number, Maggie’s Song, which expertly matches their milieu – have been collected on a cast recording best played on repeat. Altogether now: “Don’t let the bastards come near you. They just want to prove you’re sane.”

Animated cats banter tediously in a show that’s determined to shock, but which leaves you checking your watch to see how long is left. It’s lazy, dated and far too pleased with itself

According to multiverse theory, there are parallel realities in which news of a new Ricky Gervais project instils a feeling other than dread. But we don’t live in them. Having seen his new series, Alley Cats (Netflix, from Friday 7 August), a boorish banter-vehicle in which animated cats shoot the breeze like a bunch of pub bores, I’m not sure what there is to report – other than the fact that I didn’t laugh once. Considering what a fan I once was, I find this remarkable. What happened?

Woke happened, is what his diehard fans would say. Gervais has paid the price of a shifting Overton window on jokes about dwarves and disabled people and trans people. You can’t say anything any more, they lament, while defending a wealthy, highly platformed man who proves the opposite. They’re not wrong, though – politics plays a part. While writing this, I stepped outside to say hello to a queer friend who was, naturally, buying a bicycle in the street. I asked her what she made of Ricky Gervais.

The first world war drama has been a thrill throughout. Plus, the uneasy story of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Here’s everything to watch this evening

9.50pm, BBC Four

After coveting the role for years, Gosling has been announced as the new Ghost Rider – a superhero stunt rider with powers bestowed by Satan. Is this a smart move all round or has he sold his soul to the devil?

Steven Spielberg once said: “If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie.” And Marvel’s most popular big-screen superheroes can be described using less than half that number. Iron Man is a tech bro in a tin suit; Spider-Man has the powers of an arachnid; Thor is a Norse god. Go and watch a film featuring any of these characters and you know exactly what you’re going to get.

But then there is Ghost Rider, who, according to reports from San Diego Comic-Con last week, will be the subject of a new Marvel Cinematic Universe film directed by Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy, and starring Ryan Gosling. There is no quick way to explain what is going on with this guy. In the 1972 origin story, stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze sells his soul to Satan to save his adoptive father from cancer. The cure works but its beneficiary is killed almost immediately. The devil then tries to claim Johnny’s soul and, when that fails, binds him to the demon Zarathos. This, if Christopher Marlowe is to be believed, ought to result in corruption, despair and eternal, fiery damnation. Yet somehow our hero emerges from the arrangement with a cool flaming skull, vast supernatural powers and a motorbike capable of riding up buildings and across dimensions. Blaze regards the whole arrangement as a curse, but to the casual observer his principal penance is to roam the Earth passing judgment on people more wicked than he is, while looking good in a leather jacket.

(Republic)
Casting herself as a flower trampled underfoot, the superstar’s eighth album swaps the ​glitz of her Wicked years ​f​or dark blooms of haunted electronics

‘Tell me who’s to blame?” Ariana Grande asks, exasperated, on the title track of her eighth album, Petal. “Is it the people or myself?” As bleary, fuzzed-up drums threaten to drown her out, this shadowy carousel-ride of a song cycles through more questions than answers. Does her success only make her need more of it? Can her new record of No 1 singles stave off heartbreak? Does Grande’s life shape her music, or does her music shape her life?

Moody and muted, Petal is a riposte to the glitz and sparkle of the pop star’s Oscar-nominated turn in Wicked and the theatre kid energy of her last album, 2024’s Eternal Sunshine. She describes this record as one of “unfiltered rage”, and there’s plenty Grande could be angry about: just this week she filed a lawsuit against hackers who allegedly stole and sold numerous unreleased songs.

Combining grand melodrama with nuanced emotional character, Lucy Duncan and producer Niac’s collaboration sounds both timeless and true

From Hastings, UK
Recommended if you like Mary Margaret O’Hara, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple
Up next Old Feelings EP out now, album to follow later in 2026

The first time listening to Luki feels like a miraculous discovery of something timeless and true, as though they’ve been waiting patiently to be discovered in the noisy maelstrom of contemporary pop music. The collaborative alias of singer/composer Lucy Duncan and producer Niac, Luki write off-kilter showtunes performed as baroque art songs, embodying a seemingly contradictory combination of grand melodrama and nuanced emotional character.

(American Dogwood/Empire)
Beneath the Hollywood narrators, Pink Floyd-y interludes and accompanying comic books lies songwriting that proves the Tipsy singer’s breakout success was no fluke

It’s fair to say that if Shaboozey never released another note of music, his place in history would still be assured.

He wasn’t the only Black country-leaning artist brought to a wider audience by a guest appearance on Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter, but no one else capitalised on the exposure quite so remarkably. Released two weeks after his guest appearance on that album’s Spaghettii, his single A Bar Song (Tipsy) unexpectedly eclipsed Beyoncé’s success, becoming the biggest-selling country single of the year – more than 1.75bn streams and counting on Spotify – and for a time, the joint longest-running US No 1 of all time. He’s received three nominations at the Country Music awards, an event traditionally resistant to artists of colour. The accompanying album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, was by far the most successful sustained attempt to fuse hip-hop and country, two genres that have been warily circling each other for some time, spawning the occasional novelty hit such as Nelly and Tim McGraw’s Over and Over Again, the Ludacris-featuring 2010 remix of Jason Aldean’s Dirt Road, and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road; the baleful, rap-influenced spectre of bro country; and the deep underground sub-genre of hick-hop, a hidden world of Maga politics, confederate flags and festivals held at Georgia mud holes. The album is still on the US chart, 112 weeks after its release.

(XL)
In the follow-up to her Kick series, Arca jumbles the building blocks of electronic music to create a beautiful, disorienting sound world

XXXXX, the new album by Venezuelan producer-vocalist Arca, is reportedly laden with meaning: a press release claims that “suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, XXXXX exposes the mainframe”. But the reason Arca, real name Alejandra Ghersi, has become such a star of electronic music – and a mainstream-adjacent one at that – is not because she lets philosophy postgrads in Berlin write her marketing copy: it’s because, for well over a decade, she has been putting out records like XXXXX, which seem to tap into the body’s most primal, feral frequencies better than nearly anyone else. That ability has resulted in recent callups to collaborate on Madonna’s Confessions II and remix pop singer Addison Rae, and she has amassed a large, loyal fanbase – uncommon for someone making such outre music.

The follow-up to her phenomenal Kick series – five albums, each highlighting a different side of Arca’s work – XXXXX sometimes channels the frenetic feel of Aphex Twin (as on Everything) and zeroes in on the wild, footwork-y high-tempo club music she made her name with (like on Fxck, a breathless and grimy rebuke to patriarchy). But it also delves more deeply into worlds the musician has previously skirted around. The sound of a tolling bell on Willow rings into a song that’s harsh and uncompromising; Raver jumbles the building blocks of classic mainstream EDM into a piece of beautiful, disorienting sound design.

This bold family saga explores a search for healing and truth in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide

How to forgive the unforgivable? How to live in the aftermath of atrocity? Following 2016’s Small Country, French-Rwandan rapper and writer Gaël Faye takes on huge questions in his second novel, Jacaranda, which explores the seismic events of the Rwanda genocide and the aftershocks that continue to ripple through the generations.

Structurally bold, the story opens in summer 1994 with Milan, Faye’s then 12-year-old protagonist, enjoying an extended break from school. Milan’s father is white French and the family’s life in Versailles is the embodiment of first world ease – their holiday that year, as usual, spent sailing at the Île de Ré. Milan’s mother, though, is Rwandan. Venancia arrived in the 1970s, establishing a life for herself, a successful clothing boutique, a family. However, she cannot share the French ease, much less her thoughts on the disturbing reports from Rwanda now making the evening news.

The novelist on learning empathy from Charles Dickens, the playfulness of Irenosen Okojie and avoiding Jane Austen

My earliest reading memory
I was eight when I was given The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley, after being moved from my grand­mother’s care to live with my mother and her husband, who I barely knew. The story is about leaving one world, adapting to another. Surviving. It gave shape to unnamed feelings and developed my survival imagination: imagining beyond my circumstances.

My favourite book growing up
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I followed David’s journey from exclusion to belonging. Dickens vivifies his characters; you grow alongside them. The novel taught me empathy, and that some relationships sustain us while others must be left behind.

Max Porter, Daisy Johnson, Avni Doshi and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I recently read Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read about what it means to live with others, or decide not to; what we owe the people we love, the natural world, and ourselves. I also really enjoyed Robert Frost, by Robert Frost and Stacy Skolnik. It’s not that Robert Frost; it’s an itinerant young American Robert Frost who jots down his thoughts and observations on homelessness, food, value, music, drugs, the philosophical wastelands of contemporary life, and Stacy Skolnik has turned them into these delightful, oddly profound, poems. Also, coming soon, End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Everyone should read it. It tells us exactly what’s going on.

Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton; The Channel by Jana Prikryl; Stepmother by Helen Mort; Drunken Driving by Martina Evans

Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, £12.99)
Written in unrhymed couplets that shrink and grow across the page like a concertina going through its scales, Welton’s poems focus attention on the city through the seasons: weeds through concrete, wasps emerging from the gaps between bricks, frozen towels on a clothesline, the shadows of jackdaws on a lawn. His gaze is neutral, and it often falls on that which we’d normally turn away from, things slightly out of place, or that disturb our sense of propriety: “more cardboard in the recycling bin / than the recycling bin can contain”. This is a poetry of things, like the poetry of Francis Ponge, but as Welton says: “no thinginess without thought”. Welton’s thoughts – though whether they are his or whether they emerge from his surroundings or from the act of writing itself, it is impossible to say – are couched in deliciously riddling couplets: “it is not the habit of patterns / to emphasise the pattern of habits”. He reminds us forcefully that poetry is all around us and within us, that anything can go in a poem: a sandwich, a desiccated lump of duck shit, the pile of junk left outside a house during a refurbishment. Poems can mirror our world in all its messiness, and in doing so let us see it a little bit better.

The Channel by Jana Prikryl (Faber, £12.99
The casual violence of King Lear, the greed, the bureaucracy, and the indifference to human life, make the play particularly resonant to contemporary audiences. In her fourth collection, Prikryl channels the voice of Cordelia to think back through her own family story of displacement from the Czech Republic. Shakespeare’s Lear becomes “a document of fact / of things that happened and keep happening”, enabling Prikryl to explore her own separation from friends and family and her experiences of migration, where home is nowhere. In Dover Calais a ferry trip to France is meshed with the story of Cordelia’s exile, morphing into an account of a ferry disaster which in turn cuts to a scene where refugees make for shore in small boats: “Waves / unreal, and driving rain, the two-year-old / left face-down on a beach nine years ago / came up for me”. Like the scissored-off hospital undershirt in In the Mould, Prikryl’s language cuts off, ending abruptly: “or was the famous sweetness / of grandmother a bluff / which through and through was too”. This rewiring of the sentence creates dazzling leaps of thought, jumping from refugee camps to Shakespeare’s Fool battling with a tsunami of text messages to dissident window cleaners out of the novels of Milan Kundera to tender moments shared with her father. It’s a bold “stepping out of form” that turns its back on the neatness of the lyric, and by doing so creates a new poetic language which, like the language of Calvino in Invisible Cities, is able to connect everything to everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Halo Studios/Xbox Game Studios
Halo’s modernised introduction to all that was great about the 00s’ first-person shooter is also a welcome return trip for those of us who were there at the time

This 25th-anniversary remake of Xbox’s most iconic shooter comes loaded with symbolism. It arrives at a time when Xbox’s whole gaming division (and indeed the games business as a whole) is in turmoil. It’s been made by Halo Studios, an outfit that has arguably never quite recaptured the magic conjured by Halo: Combat Evolved’s original developer Bungie, a studio now owned by rival Sony. It has been polished and prettified using Unreal Engine 5, making it look and feel more modern at the expense of visual uniqueness: Halo now looks similar to hundreds of other games made with those same tools, where Bungie’s 2001 original, made with a bespoke engine, still looks austerely distinctive. I never wanted to become this person, but: perhaps things were better in the old days?

I had my misgivings after the opening level, in which freshly defrosted supersoldier Master Chief fends off an alien attack on a disintegrating spaceship. Originally this was a masterclass in explosive action: you wake up, you look around (once a clever way to determine whether you needed to invert the controls), and you get right into it, firing gaming’s best pistol at chittering alien grunts who scatter from your bullets. Now it’s wrapped in needlessly expanded cutscenes and explanations. Where Halo Studios has made changes to Combat Evolved’s pacing, it really feels noticeable.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is out now

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

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

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

Soho Place theatre, London
This multifaceted and personal homage to – and collaboration with – composer Philip Glass is a transcendent tapestry suffused with joy and wonder.

A show that doesn’t happen (and one that’s never seen); a shattered coffee table; the I Ching; Maurice Sendak; a flotation tank; Deep Democracy. Just some of the disparate fragments that are lovingly assembled by the Tao of Glass into what writer and co-director Phelim McDermott has called “a storytelling tapestry – part concert, part performance”. Premiered at 2019’s Manchester International festival, this beguiling meditation now makes its London debut – albeit without the figure who looms tousle-haired and scowling behind it: composer Philip Glass.

Glass’s music has been, McDermott explains, a “river” through his life. The award-winning director’s fascination started as a teenager, lying on his bedroom floor listening to Glassworks on repeat, later crystallised by a little light stalking (the young McDermott follows Glass through the streets of Covent Garden) and professional collaborations on the composer’s operas.

Gwen John’s singular poetic world, Enid Marx’s signature designs for the London Underground and the rural gothic of LR Vandy – all in your weekly dispatch

Gwen John: Strange Beauties
This excellent and moving encounter with the Welsh modern painter, touring from Wales’s National Museum, takes you deep into John’s silent, poetic world.
• Modern Two, Edinburgh, from 1 August until 4 January

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
Family show brings gleeful playfulness to the story of a 12-year-old whose escape into extravagant daydreams has begun to alarm him

The more children you bring along to this new family show – the latest co-production from the Globe theatre and Splendid Productions – the more fun you’ll have. It’s ostensibly about a 12-year-old school boy, Cass, who is struggling with his doubts and fears and considering reining in his imagination altogether. However, what makes this stubbornly ambitious production so special is the gleeful sense of playfulness it ignites in the young audience, as well as the parents watching alongside them.

The story unfolds in young Cass’s imagination; a place populated by a host of cracking make-believe characters. There’s classical Shakespearean actor Sarah, played with a twinkling sense of pomposity by Kerry Frampton (also a co-writer on the show). Then there’s Tanvi Virmani’s plucky Cobweb - a minor Shakespearean character who has stuck around in Cass’s mind thanks to a brilliant production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Finally we have Zachary Willis’s Big Guy, one of Cass’s favourite TV characters, who spends most of his time enacting very silly and very funny play-fights.

Two members given ‘stern warnings’ after concert and barred from returning, with band also excluded from performing in Singapore again, say authorities

British trip-hop band Massive Attack has been barred from performing in Singapore after an investigation found two members unfurled a Palestinian flag during a concert, police said.

Singapore, known for its tough laws on public speech and assembly, bans the open display of all foreign flags, national emblems or banners without a permit.

On his daily bike ride, the LA-based photographer stumbled upon the perfect subject for this black-and-white portrait

On New Year’s Day 2026, Alon Goldsmith began what he calls a “365-day project, which involves taking and posting a photo every day for a year. On some days, it’s a struggle to find something worthy of being included and on others it’s a challenge to make a choice,” he says.

This image was taken on day 111. Johannesburg-born, LA-based Goldsmith was on his daily bike ride, which usually takes him through Venice and around Santa Monica Pier, areas he describes as containing a “cornucopia of curiosities”.

As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever

Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.”

While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is set to reach the director’s biggest audience to date, opening to 700 US screens this week, a stunning figure for an independent film and a wider opening than recent films by indie veterans like Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch.

Prior to playing huge outdoor show in city’s Preston Park, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds set up on a record shop balcony – and play to fans visiting from across the world

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ only advertised UK live performance of 2026, a show in Brighton’s Preston Park, arrives with other events across the city attached. The Duke of York’s Picturehouse cinema is hosting a weekend-long Nick Cave takeover, featuring films curated and introduced by the singer-songwriter. There is a pop-up shop replete with exclusive merchandise, and a postbox where physical letters can be sent to The Red Hand Files, the website Cave started in 2018 where he answers fans’ questions on topics ranging from faith and grief to his favourite brand of hair dye (L’Oreal, apparently). Even the announcements at the train station have been changed: arrivals are temporarily greeted by the sound of Nick Cave welcoming them to Brighton.

All these have been well-publicised, but judging by the crowd gathering in Kensington Gardens, a narrow pedestrian road in North Laine – not far from Jubilee Street, the subject of a Cave song – word also seems to have leaked out about a theoretically secret event: a live performance on the roof of Resident Records, which is hosting the two-day Nick Cave pop-up shop.

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

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

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

Richard, 63, a communications consultant, meets Katrina, 60, a GP

What were you hoping for?
Easy conversation with someone interesting, smart and relaxed.

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

• Kitchen gadgets top chefs can’t live without

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

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

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

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop guessing and start probing with our writer’s pick of the top thermometers, including smart Bluetooth and leave-in models

• Readers’ favourite barbecue tips and tricks

While fewer of us are eating meat regularly – I refer you to the rise of “beef days” – if you’re going to cook it, it needs to be done properly. Overcooked beef with the texture of shoe leather, or undercooked poultry with a side of food poisoning, will put off even the most devoted carnivore.

A reliable meat thermometer solves both problems. It takes the guesswork out of cooking, helping you achieve melt-in-the-mouth steak and the best of any cut, with no special skills required.

Across Latin American households in the US, the steaming broth nourishes while keeping family traditions alive

When Patty Rodriguez hears the word caldo now, she thinks fondly of home. But as a child growing up in southern California, she despised eating the piping-hot soup-like meal during the summers. Rodriguez would swirl around the chunks of fish with her spoon and imagine that she was performing a magic trick where the dish disappeared. She would roll her eyes as she asked her family why they served the dish more often when it was hot outside. “This is not a hotel,” Rodriguez recalled her mother and aunts saying. “You don’t choose what you want to eat. You’re going to eat what we make.”

As an adult, Rodriguez realizes that caldo, which translates to broth in Spanish, was an inexpensive meal that could feed her Mexican American household for several days. It provided the nourishment and hydration needed during the hot summer months.

These roasted oyster mushrooms are meaty, savoury and chewy, made even more satisfying in a south-east Asian-style dressing

Not every plant makes a great burger filling. You might think pulses or potatoes for heft, but the lack of texture and propensity to mush can be unsatisfying. This is where mushrooms excel; they trade in satisfaction. Roasting them brings out their natural umami and removes water content, leaving them chewy, caramelised and occasionally crisp. They can also make friends with the most unlikely of ingredients, like they have here with peanut butter, soy, agave and sesame.

Cherry pops and citrus zings in this twist on a Hemingway special

A bright, citrus-forward riff on the classic Hemingway special, with cherry depth and a clean white rum base.

Daniel Emson, bar manager, The Culpeper, London E1

Think giant sweet yorkshire pud filled with a lake of summer berry compote … that’s some brunch!

This pancake/yorkshire pudding hybrid is nothing if not fun. The edges crisp and puff up in the most dramatic way, making for a very impressive brunch centrepiece that makes a change from regular pancakes. Although delicious just with some icing sugar, I’ve filled this one with a quick fruit compote to make the most of summer berries. The juices soak into the base, making way for my favourite part of a yorkshire: the slightly soggy bottom.

Daniella doesn’t want to go to bed early. Seamus says she shouldn’t offer the sofabed if she doesn’t want guests. Who has room for improvement?

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

It’s not that I don’t want him here, but he needs to understand that I am giving up my space to host him

It used be called playing the field, but now young people are claiming dating multiple people at once is intentional and growth-enhancing

Name: Roster dating.

Age: The term seems to be about a decade old; the practice is much older.

I was just 10 at the time but my siblings and I will never forget the sense of safety, comfort and warmth they offered

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We were doing the groceries when a blood vessel burst in my mother’s brain. I was 10 years old and on a family holiday to France that very suddenly changed its tenor. In the following weeks Mum went through brain surgery, suffered a stroke and was placed in intensive care.

We had been staying in a gîte but moved to a small hotel closer to the hospital. It was a terrifying and stressful time, even as a young kid who knew things were serious – but didn’t understand quite how serious.

Will’s lack of self-worth is creating a barrier between him and Fi, but talking more could help them adjust to their mismatched libidos

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

I worry that Will sees me more as a mother figure than a sexual being

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

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

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

We told it of our 11pm arrival time but when we got there our room was no longer available as it had ‘overbooked’

I booked and paid for a room in the Travelodge London King’s Cross Royal Scot hotel six weeks in advance. It was for myself and my husband, who has heart disease and dementia.

I had called the hotel on the day of arrival to advise that we would be checking in at 11pm and was told that was fine.

Criminals send victims to a cloned site that collects login, personal and payment details

You have had a Spotify account for years and your credit card is linked for the monthly payments. When an email arrives telling you that your payment couldn’t be processed you are not surprised as the expiry date on the card is soon.

“We encountered an issue while processing your recent payment,” it says. “To keep your access active and avoid interruption, please review and update your information.”

I’m a self-employed driving instructor and I’m running out of cash to hire a replacement dual-control vehicle

My livelihood as a self-employed driving instructor is under threat owing to Nissan’s failure to repair my leased dual-control car.

It has been off the road awaiting a spare part for three months, and I’ve now been told it will take at least a further month to arrive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The classic gym routine doesn’t isolate your stomach muscles as much as you might think, but here are five that will

If someone in a film or TV show wants a six-pack, chances are they’ll drop to the floor and start doing sit-ups. According to Dr Lee Brown, senior lecturer in strength and conditioning at the University of East London, that’s more Hollywood than science.

“It’s embedded in the archaic practices of boxing coaches and therefore everyone seems to follow it,” he says. “But they’re far from the best exercise for training your core.”

Stress, the cost of living, long working hours and even excessive exercise have all been touted as reasons the illness is rising among women in their 30s and 40s. What can be done to help them?

The “lightning strike” pain was like nothing Francine Jones had experienced before. “That is the only way I can describe it,” she says, of the stabbing in her torso that would occur every 10 minutes or so. “It was a really sharp, intense pain, as if someone was giving me an electric shock … it took my breath away.”

It had started in May with a strange pricking sensation under her bra. Then 10 large blisters, plus a host of smaller ones, formed in a band from her stomach to her back. They burned, “like someone was putting an iron on me. I don’t think I wore underwear for five or six weeks.” Showering, or even a cold flannel, would make her skin burn. Then came “the itch”, which lasted for five weeks and was so intense that she was lucky if she slept for four hours a night. “It was like something was crawling all over me all the time.” I can hear her wincing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired by Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart

Small boats and kayaks connect the sparse communities and flourishing wildlife living on the thousands of islets on the Baltic coast

At 5am on Arkösund bay, it is so light it could be midday. I slip out of the pretty clapboard Arkösunds hotell, opened in 1895, as a small boat putters into the Baltic Sea, the sun sparkling on its calm waters. A wooden boardwalk invites me on to a string of tiny islets as geese arrow overhead and a mother swan coaxes her fluffy cygnets into a nook under a bridge.

I’m on Sweden’s east coast to explore the Östergötland archipelago, a sprawl of about 9,000 islands scattered across the Baltic Sea a few hours south of Stockholm. Quieter and less crowded than the better-known isles off Stockholm or Gothenburg, it covers several pockets of coastline and smaller archipelagos: Arkösund, Sankt Anna, Gryt and Tjust. The larger islands are flecked with traditional red timber summer houses, and are home to seals, sea birds, and dense, verdant forests of alder, cedar, oak and pine.

Ebikes with child seats – plus idyllic campsites and pit stops en route – turn a five-day ride on the car-free Véloscénic into a wonderful family holiday

“Are you mad?” says a fellow guest over dinner at our campsite. “I heard you’re here on a long-distance cycle ride with your toddlers.”

I am in Orne, a region in Normandy, with my sister Issy and our three-year-old sons, Sid and Ralph. The landscape folds around us in green-over-green – hedgerow, oak, mossy manor wall – then opens into meadows where Percheron horses graze, knee-deep in wildflowers. Deer leap from the bocage. Cidre and poiré have been pressed here since the middle ages. The villages are sandy stone, blue- and green-shuttered; roses against the boulangerie.

The actor and comedian on her hatred of selfishness, her unhappy resting face, and why she dropped her agent

Born in Lancashire, Fiona Allen, 61, went to drama school in Salford. From 1999, she co-wrote and starred in the Emmy-winning and Bafta-nominated TV sketch show Smack the Pony. She had roles in Shameless, Skins, Waterloo Road and EastEnders, and her films include 24 Hour Party People, Fat Slags, Gladiatress and Finding Emily. In 2023, she took her show On the Run to the Edinburgh festival fringe and later toured the UK. This year, she performs White Lies at Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon Teviot from 5 to 29 August. She is married with three children and lives in Berkshire.

What is your greatest fear?
My kids navigating the world as it is today – and daddy longlegs.

She says I’m not allowed to select books as I’m the only man and not a full member. But how could they not love Death Comes for the Archbishop?

My wife would have everyone in our book club believe that the First Rule of Book Club is: Tim Is Never Allowed to Pick the Book. Having failed in her several attempts to have me removed from book club, she has settled for imposing restrictions on my participation to make my membership seem second tier.

“You’re not allowed to pick because you’re not really even in book club,” she says to me before every meeting. “You’re like a mascot.”

From a corned beef sandwich and a harmonica to Zener cards, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which mountain range is home to the world’s second-highest peak?
2 Which pioneer of conceptualism retired from art to play chess?
3 Who is the only Jesuit to become pope?
4 Which ancient shark grew to around 18 metres long?
5 Baseball is the national sport of which South American country?
6 Which global news organisation is based in Qatar?
7 In the aftermath of a scandal, who changed her family’s name to Holland?
8 Zener cards are used to test for what ability?
What links:
9 Banjul; Nassau; San Salvador?
10 Evert (5); Jaeger; Mandlíková; Graf; Garrison?
11 Corned beef sandwich; golf balls; harmonica; postal covers?
12 Altar Stone; Aubrey Holes; Heel Stone; Slaughter Stone; Station Stones?
13 Squiggly, Glasgow; Mathematical, Cambridge; Winking Eye, Newcastle?
14 Nimue and Viviane; Florence Nightingale; Elaine of Astolat for Tennyson; Bennett’s Mary Shepherd?
15 1; 4; 3; 11; 15; 13; 17; 43?

Oscar-winning singer, songwriter, actor and founder of the Dublin rock band the Frames

Glen Hansard, who has died aged 56 in a motorcycle accident, was one of Dublin’s musical heroes – a one-time busker who became an Oscar-winning international star, successful both as a singer-songwriter and as an actor.

He had already built up a local reputation busking regularly on Grafton Street, Dublin, when he decided to form a band, the Frames, along with other musicians he had befriended on the streets.

Ben Cohen says his ice-cream company has been silenced by corporate ownership – and a boycott of Magnum brands could force a sale

Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream in the tub is still great, but the brand’s newest chocolate-covered ice-cream bar on a stick?

“It ain’t the same,” Ben Cohen, the company co-founder, told the Guardian. Sure, the chocolate coating is still thick enough, but the ice cream itself is “kinda fluffy”, Cohen said – an insult in the ice-cream world that suggests extra air was added to cut costs.

The Hacks lead was cast in meta-slasher sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for her ‘deranged physicality’ – but it’s a fitting role for an actor who has made a point of confronting shame and speaking her mind

‘God is good all the time,” laughs Hannah Einbinder. She’s fresh off a plane from Los Angeles and curled up barefoot in an armchair. This, she says, is “a crazy time in life. Starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the midst of Hacks ending … it’s definitely an embarrassment of riches.”

Hacks is the HBO comedy that ended earlier this year; in May, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer meta-horror, became the breakout hit of this year’s Cannes film festival.

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

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

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

We want to hear from people who have recently completed an apprenticeship or planning to go on one

The government has announced plans to reshape education for young people in England from the age of 14, with a greater focus on technical and vocational learning, alongside an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

As part of plans to encourage more young people into apprenticeships, the work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, has announced a new bursary aimed at ensuring families are not financially worse off if their teenager starts an apprenticeship.

We want to hear how people are dealing with the very hot weather.

UK forecasters have predicted a fourth heatwave of the year, with temperatures forecast to reach as high as 35C by Wednesday, triggering heat health alerts.

Fire chiefs have also appealed to people to take care in parched parks and rural areas.

We would like to hear from people living near AI datacentres about their experiences and any concerns they might have

There are around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

There is much debate about how datacentres affect their local areas, with concerns raised by nearby residents about land use, pollution, noise, and the “heat island effect”.

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Wildfires in Europe, Russian missile strikes in Lviv, a tornado in Wisconsin and Spencer Tunick in Spain – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists