The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy

‘No one knows the real Rooneys,” says Coleen Rooney at the start of her family’s new reality-TV series, The Real Rooneys. “This is a side of us we’ve never shown before.” Coleen and her husband, ex-footballer Wayne, have had their personalities dissected in the tabloids every week for the past two decades; now we’re promised the truth. But how real can The Real Rooneys be?

There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

A conflict that began with tanks and then artillery is now pivoting around a new generation of drones focused on military, industrial, economic and civilian targets

Finally, in the dead of night, the threat above has passed. The rain has eased and the Ukrainian drones are ready, prepared by a ground crew shrouded in hard-to-detect green and red lights. A small succession of Ukrainian Fire Point FP-2 craft, miniature monoplanes with a 6-metre wingspan and more than 100kg of explosive, line up for an attack mission into occupied Luhansk, over 200 miles away.

The drone’s main piston engine is a familiar scooter’s buzz, but its launch booster is something else. The jet sound reverberates, almost painfully. A burst of fire lurches into the distance, the last of which signifies it is time for Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment to pack and go.

The launch of an FP-2 drone during the mission into occupied Luhansk

In the last 15 years, she has gone from respected actor to stratospheric, garlanded star. Now she is back on TV as a chic sleuth in a racy car – despite being terrible at guessing whodunnit

It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.

“You don’t go into a job thinking about awards,” she says, before grinning conspiratorially. “Listen, you don’t say to an Olympian, ‘Oh, is it OK that you didn’t win?’ Yes, you like to win!”

The earl on his globally lauded eulogy for Diana, King Charles’s sausage fingers and toxic Raine, topped off with a lavish sprinkling of adverbs

Cheers were heard up and down the land. Halley’s comet made an unscheduled appearance in the ethereal night sky. In very heaven, angelic choirs rang out. A saviour had been born. A light to lighten the world. But enough about me. For this paragraph at least.

In my universally acclaimed funeral address, I aimed to speak for my sister. The real Diana. For only I truly knew her. She had the heart of a lion. And I had a glut of cliches. Yet when Diana had swept so triumphantly into the arena of royal life, I was but a callow youth awash with hormones and gripped by the self-centredness of adolescence. Nothing much has changed. Yet I know, with all my heart, that Diana would have wanted me to tell our story.

Young men punched in the street, mosques attacked: Britain badly needs an anti-racist uprising. Let 70s Asian youth movements provide the inspiration

There it was: a pool of blood spreading across the pavement. A section of the high street had been cordoned off and a uniformed police officer gestured for bystanders to move along. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and a racist murder had stunned Southall in west London.

“What has happened here, officers?” asked Suresh Grover, then a curious 22-year-old, later to be widely known as a leading racial justice activist. “Go away, it’s just Indian blood,” was the response. Grover was soon to learn that 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an engineering student, had been stabbed to death by racist thugs the night before.

El Niño poses critical threat to nations’ defences, says Ed Miliband in presentation to global foreign ministers

The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of a report suppressed under Keir Starmer.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages.

US district judge orders temporary lifting of Trump’s ban on the three media outlets, saying it was likely unconstitutional

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore ⁠White House ⁠access ​to journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico, ⁠saying his ban on the three media outlets was ⁠likely unconstitutional.

US district judge Tim Kelly issued his order in a lawsuit that the news organizations filed ‌contesting the ban that the president announced ​on 18 September.

Approach to treating high blood pressure ‘not fit for purpose’, say researchers, with 59% of cases undiagnosed

Only half of people being treated by a GP for high blood pressure in England have it under control, and millions more are completely unaware they have the “silent killer” condition, research reveals.

Most people with hypertension (59%) are in the dark and undiagnosed, raising their risk of stroke, heart attack and early death, according to the largest ever study of its kind.

Prime minister says measure is discriminatory when fans of other sports are not similarly restricted

Andy Burnham has signalled he may lift the ban on drinking alcohol in the stands at football matches, suggesting it is “unfair” for fans to be singled out when it is permitted for other sports.

The prime minister, a committed Everton fan who still attends matches, said there was a case for trialling an end to the ban to bring football in line with rugby and cricket.

Courses such as finance and construction form part of PM’s push for education ‘that offers a path for everybody’

Teenagers are to be offered a range of new vocational GCSEs under a radical shake-up of the school system in England designed to tackle a crisis that has left nearly a million young people out of work or training.

From 2029, pupils will be able to supplement compulsory GCSE subjects such as English, maths and sciences with courses such as construction, creative media production and child development, marking the biggest changes to the qualification for more than a decade.

Andy Burnham under pressure to revisit Brexit as poll suggests pledge to rejoin could boost Labour’s electoral chances

Britain should work towards rejoining the EU in the next decade, Tony Blair has said, adding to growing pressure on Andy Burnham to abandon Labour’s reluctance to revisit the 2016 referendum.

The former prime minister has urged Burnham to use his 10-year plan in November to put the country’s membership of the union back on the table, a decade after it voted to leave.

Proposals aim to push people into work, but charities say families are still paying price of austerity cuts and rise in cost of living

People claiming universal credit (UC) would have their payments cut by a third if they have not paid enough national insurance, under a Conservative plan condemned by one charity as “a fast track to increased poverty”.

Under the proposals, those who receive this “subsistence allowance” would have it paid into a dedicated debit card that would prevent from them buying alcohol or tobacco, based on an Australian system that was scrapped after trials found limited evidence it changed behaviour.

Prime minister says he told Sam Altman he was disappointed it had taken OpenAI ‘way too long’ to disclose breach

Anthony Albanese says an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare in June and the tech giant notified the government earlier this month using an email sent to a “public mailbox”.

Australia’s prime minister made the comments at the UN summit in New York, saying it appeared no personal information had been accessed in the AI breach.

But Kyriakos Mitsotakis says he cannot accept any arrangement that recognises British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures

• Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Britain would not cut up the Bayeux tapestry. So seize this moment and reunite the Parthenon sculptures in Greece

The Greek prime minister has said a deal can still be reached to return the Parthenon marbles with “political will” but his country will not accept a loan in the style of the Bayeux tapestry’s visit from France.

Writing for the Guardian, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece “cannot accept any arrangement that would require it to recognise the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures, or a scheme that would mean we ‘borrow’ parts of our own monument”.

Five desalination plants shut down for days, while Gaza remains in grip of severe water and sanitation crisis

Israel is facing weeks of water shortages after an exceptional algae bloom crippled much of its desalination capacity, in a crisis scientists say was triggered when Israeli attacks destroyed much of Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure, causing a massive discharge of untreated sewage.

“Pollution does not recognise political borders,” said the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli NGO dedicated to protecting the country’s seas and shores. “The discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities. The wastewater contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae and cyanobacteria and may intensify their blooms.”

Die Linke candidate, a lawyer affected by her experiences as the child of political migrants from Turkey, poised to head Berlin coalition government

Elif Eralp launched her election bid last autumn with the blunt statement: “People like me are actually not supposed to become mayor in this country.” So the fact that the 45-year-old lawyer and daughter of political migrants from Turkey is on the verge of becoming Berlin’s next mayor and the capital’s first leader of Turkish origin is quite the moment in German politics.

After last weekend’s city state election, in which her far-left party, Die Linke, came first with more than a quarter of the votes, Eralp has become a household name.

Furnace Brook in East Sussex was home to carp, tench, bream, roach and trout – and 15 trailer-loads had to be buried. The mystery led to a neighbouring farm, and a story of waste, pollution and dirty rivers that reveals a lot about Britain today

When Alistair and Diane Gould bought Furnace Brook in 2013, they had big plans. It was an idyllic spot: a stream-fed fishing lake nestled in a secluded valley in the High Weald, East Sussex, surrounded by woodland and fields. “People loved to come fishing here because it’s so beautiful,” says Diane. “Some of them had been coming for so many years that they got to know the individual fish.”

Diane moved here from Kent in 2000, when Furnace Brook was owned by a distant relative. Her two younger sons, then 10 and 14, flourished. They would chat to the anglers about the fish they were catching and throwing back in, and sell them bacon sandwiches. Her elder son, Simon, moved from London to join them in 2006 and became a keen angler himself, and then the fishing manager, or bailiff, looking after the fish and the landscape around the lake.

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

Last weekend the quiz master was taking in the sights, sounds and overwhelming history of Istanbul. Did that deter the writing of 15 questions on the week’s headlines, random pop culture and general knowledge? Absolutely not. However, you may detect a certain “Cats of Istanbul” flavour to today’s effort, which is in no way a transparent attempt to show off the quiz master’s holiday photos. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 266 – Cats of Istanbul special

The new wearables come at a time of uncertainty for smart glasses, which are facing backlash over privacy concerns

Meta announced an advanced new set of virtual reality glasses and a collection of new smart glasses Wednesday, including an audio-only version without a camera.

At the firm’s Meta Connect conference in Menlo Park, California, executives said the new Ray-Ban Meta models set new standards for battery life and weight. They said the new glasses with screens in the lenses squeeze capabilities previously reserved for a full headset into a light set of spectacles that rest on a user’s ears.

The year’s most popular slang reveals what young people think about artificial intelligence – and it’s not positive

Name: “That’s AI!”

Age: Brand new.

Under the Finnish capital lies a world of swimming pools, go-karting tracks, playgrounds – and even an art gallery

The moon is an impostor. Swimming backstroke beneath its surface, I look up at craggy hollows in close relief. White rock undulates in all directions, a forest of peaks rising next to a desert of craters. Every time I trick myself into thinking I’m somewhere celestial, the sound of children splashing brings me back to earth.

This is no lunar landscape but Helsinki’s underground swimming hall, excavated from granite bedrock and officially opened in 1993. These days, Itäkeskus uimahalli is one of the Finnish capital’s most visited leisure facilities, welcoming 400,000 people a year. Local people mingle with tourists, I will discover, during a week exploring Helsinki’s subterranean metropolis.

It’s natural to want to soothe eye irritation, but mishandling could lead to more problems, experts warn. We asked them for advice on how to deal with it properly

It may feel like a gritty, annoying sensation, or a sharp pain. Either way, you may have the same problem: something is stuck in your eye and needs to come out.

Addressing the situation incorrectly can lead to bigger issues such as infection, scarring, an ulcer or corneal scratches, which are abrasions on the clear covering of your eye. Ignoring the dilemma can lead to similar consequences.

Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a shocking social crisis playing out behind closed doors

I’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely, causing an extreme loss of energy and a wide range of physical and cognitive symptoms that can prevent patients from working, socialising and, sometimes, even moving or eating. Yet these people have been more or less airbrushed from our minds.

To find out what this neglect looks like in practice, this week I put out a call on Bluesky asking people with ME/CFS about their recent experiences of treatment. I was immediately inundated with horrifying testimonies. “I’ve just been completely abandoned”; “a 10-year waiting list for treatment”; “we’ve given up seeking medical support”; “stuck in limbo”; “I just felt utterly unheard, invalidated”. I’ve been sent hundreds of shocking and heart-rending accounts.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Both Greek and British citizens think the sculptures should be returned. What’s needed now is political will and courage

• Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the prime minister of Greece

For the first time in nearly 1,000 years, the Bayeux tapestry is back in Britain. Its arrival is a significant cultural moment, and a reminder that, in an age of social media and ubiquitous screens, historic objects still capture the public imagination.

The British Museum describes the tapestry as one of the “wonders of the medieval world”. But the museum already houses many wonders, including one that is instantly recognisable: the Parthenon sculptures, chiselled away and illegally removed from Athens to be taken to Britain more than two centuries ago by Lord Elgin.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the prime minister of Greece

It is sad and dangerous that at such a perilous moment, the United States is saddled with a president like Trump

Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday to the United Nations general assembly was an object lesson in his lawless rule and remarkable capacity for self-delusion. Disregarding the UN charter’s emphasis on the peaceful resolution of disputes, he doubled down on his violent unilateralism while denigrating the global issues that the UN is designed to address.

For many, the headline remark was his musing about whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, a senior fellow at Yale University and a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments

Whether it’s an A-lister or an old schoolfriend emerging blearily from the spare room, those first moments of the day are tricky

First thing in the morning, that’s the hardest time. Eric Idle told me this. A wise man, is Eric. Actor, comedian, songwriter, musician, screenwriter and playwright and, when it comes to mornings, a man of wisdom.

I interviewed him about his new book, which is a love letter to his house in Provence. He bought it more than half a century ago, before he hit the big time. It didn’t cost him much, because it was tiny, tumbledown and without water or electricity. Slowly, as the money came in from this job or that, he made improvements. By hook or by crook, the water and electricity started to flow, and with them a steady stream of guests coming to stay. These weren’t just any old guests: they were superstars, among them David Bowie, Art Garfunkel, Penny Marshall, Lauren Hutton, Brian Cox (the professor and the actor too, I think, although possibly not at the same time), Paul Simon, Carrie Fisher, Robin Williams and George Harrison. Also Michael Palin and assorted Pythons; Ronnie Wood and assorted Stones. And so on. There are photos of Wood sitting on the floor strumming his guitar; Bowie mooning about clad only in short shorts. Quite something, but all I could think about was how tiring it must have been to have so many guests turning up all the time. Let’s be honest: guests are a bit of an effort. A-lister or Joe Bloggs, a guest’s a guest.

The PM’s shiny newness could explain the easy ride he got this time. But who would dare predict the ever-shifting weather in the president’s head?

Watching footage of Andy Burnham at the UN general assembly on Tuesday was like watching your child from behind a tree in the playground. Are they making friends? How normal do they seem relative to the average? How will they react when they come into contact with that hulking great child who seems to be running things? Burnham’s first face-to-face with Donald Trump was billed as a knife-edge encounter that, due to the latter’s capriciousness, could go either way. In the event, it was drama-free, leaving observers to ask: was it Burnham’s brilliance or simply the weather in Trump’s head?

To viewers at home, Burnham’s performance at the press conference looked like that of a man who had worked out his best approach was to go for the sheepish, slightly cheeky air of the junior partner. Burnham is 24 years younger than Trump, on top of everything else – which can afford a certain licence to the less powerful person in any exchange. At the last minute, the meeting had been moved behind closed doors and afterwards, in a windowless room at the UN, the two men appeared side by side, mirroring each other’s body language: just two guys, legs akimbo, shoulders hunched, hanging on a bench in the locker room.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

The biggest flotation in five years was a bit of a shoo-in. Let’s see what happens when overseas competition is tougher

• Indian billionaire’s payments firm plots biggest London flotation in years

A win is a win, but we should probably contain our excitement about the biggest flotation in London for five years. Airtel Money, a payments processor that operates in 13 African countries and should be worth between £6bn and £7bn, is a welcome addition to the stock market but it would be a stretch to say the event marks a definitive change in the weather to end the listings drought.

Why? Because, in a sense, Airtel Money is already here. It is a 78%-owned subsidiary of Airtel Africa, an established FTSE 100 firm with a market value of £11.3bn ultimately controlled by Bharti Enterprises under the Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, also known for his 25% stake in BT.

As the UN gathers, signatories from Bernie Sanders to Yeb Saño issue an open letter calling for clean power for all

• The climate fight has one great ally. You just can’t look at it directly


We the undersigned write this letter out of great fear and great hope.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen the world set ablaze by both war and warming. From the conflict in Iran, which has claimed thousands of lives and disrupted billions more, to the series of ever worsening climate disasters, from wildfires in Europe to collapsing glaciers in Nepal, the world seems to be falling apart exactly when it needs to be coming together.

As the secretary general, António Guterres, prepares to step down, the general assembly is highlighting the scale of the organisation’s challenges

The United Nations was created, its charter states, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Donald Trump used his address to the general assembly to threaten Iran, another member state, with annihilation again. The charter also speaks of the obligations of international law. On Venezuela, Mr Trump gloated that “to the victor belong the spoils”. His speech in New York on Tuesday might be regarded as an improvement on last year’s only in that it was not an explicit, full-scale attack on the UN itself, merely on its founding principles.

The absences this year are perhaps as telling as the US president’s hostile presence. Vladimir Putin has not attended for more than a decade. Nor has Xi Jinping – but the snub is more striking as he is in Washington to meet the US president. India’s Narendra Modi is not present; nor are Cyril Ramaphosa, Bola Tinubu or Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – the leaders of Africa’s three giants, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt. While their reasons are various, the gaps speak collectively to Mr Trump’s wrecking capability and the broader challenges faced by the UN.

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.

Andy Burnham’s accusation against the Kremlin tells half the story. Domestic extremists amplified by US big tech are part of the same problem

In November 2020, Barack Obama warned of an “epistemological crisis” facing western democracies. Polarisation and radicalisation were corroding trust in established information sources. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” the former US president said.

That vulnerability has grown since then. Democracy’s enemies have become more determined to exploit it. This is the threat that Andy Burnham highlighted in a speech at the United Nations this week. The prime minister accused Russia of waging an “industrial-scale assault” on the UK’s information environment using bot armies and fake websites to spread falsehoods, interfere in elections, foment discord and poison inter-community relations.

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 on the new grading regime that is causing more stress and health issues for school staff than ever before

Your report (New Ofsted inspection regime is damaging our health, headteachers say, 21 September) reflects what those of us supporting school leaders are hearing. As a volunteer with Headrest, a school leader wellbeing helpline, I cannot discuss individual cases. I can, however, describe the disturbing patterns we encounter.

We have spoken to headteachers whom mental health professionals considered suicide risks following their experience of the Ofsted process. We have spoken to leaders whose physical or mental health has been seriously damaged by inspections. We have heard from headteachers who successfully navigated inspections but then chose early retirement rather than face that level of stress again.

Celebrities like Ed Sheeran should not shy away from expressing political opinions, writes Dr Richard J Goy, while Anna Emms praises the singer’s commitment to his fans. Plus a letter from David Parry

Nadia Khomami provides an excellent analysis of current dilemmas regarding political songs and engagement (‘A maelstrom of his own making’: how Ed Sheeran’s tour turned into a full-blown culture war, 19 September).

However, I do feel that it lacks a longer timeframe. Outspoken, overtly political singers and songwriters have been active for decades. My own generation was brought up on Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. A bit  further back were Woody Guthrie and Billie Holiday. Who would dare to write Strange Fruit today? In all, far too many are being deterred by fears of censorship by media billionaires and their like. They need to get out there and shout and scream about the world’s appalling injustices. We need a hundred Billy Braggs, not just one.
Dr Richard J Goy
Cambridge

Readers have advice for a cross-party committee of MPs looking into the UK’s poor record at the song contest

I agree with Laura Snapes that the very last thing we need is MPs’ questionable tastes entering the murky waters of the UK’s Eurovision song choice (What do you think of the MPs’ inquiry into UK Eurovision song contest failure? I give it nul points, 21 September).

However, one thing I can’t believe hasn’t happened is for the UK to draw upon our ridiculously rich folk tradition. Loads of other countries do it – Ukraine won it a few years back with a song that infused Ukrainian folk with pop – so why can’t we?

Readers respond to the news that an Oxfordshire village has voted to leave the UK over plans to house asylum seekers nearby

So the people of Piddington have spoken – an overwhelming majority want to leave the UK (English village votes to leave UK in protest over migrant housing plan, 16 September). They didn’t really consider the consequences, did they? We can say goodbye, but to protect our borders we would need to erect a solid barrier around the village. Obviously anyone who works in the UK outside Piddington’s borders would need a work visa now, and travel visas will be needed by people wanting to visit supermarkets – or relatives. I note that there’s a small river running through Piddington. Any attempt to leave on small boats should be dealt with like any other attempted illegal entry.

I’m not sure they really thought through the reality of leaving, preferring instead a mix of populist soundbites and protest votes. It’s going to go badly. Where have I heard this before?
Neil Knowles
London

• Barcelona winger says England cannot play like Spain

• Gordon: players ‘could have done more’ in semi-final

Anthony Gordon has sided with Thomas Tuchel’s assertion that controlling games through possession is not part of English football’s DNA. Although Gordon revealed surprise at being substituted when England were 1-0 up in their World Cup semi-final against Argentina, the winger refused to blame the defeat on Tuchel’s decisions and argued that wider cultural issues influenced the side’s collapse.

England’s perennial struggle to keep the ball when under pressure flared when a place in the final was within touching distance in July, allowing Argentina to fight back and go through with two late goals. The pain has not gone away and there has been intense scrutiny of Tuchel’s role in Atlanta. The head coach’s tactical choices were criticised and he faced a backlash after saying “ball possession” was not in his team’s DNA.

Going into the last round 11 points clear, the bowler Olly Hannon-Dalby is confident the favourites can clinch the title

Olly Hannon‑Dalby, 6ft 7in of medium‑fast heritage craft, has just come out of training at Edgbaston. The last round of County Championship cricket is about to start and slow‑burn Warwickshire are nailed-on favourites. Hannon‑Dalby tries to pinpoint what has made the team tick this summer.

“Our bowling has massive depth,” he says. “Ethan Bamber has had an outstanding year with 60 wickets, and then Chris Woakes has been around the majority of the season. To be able to throw an English legend the ball every now and then is unbelievable – and his demeanour when he plays, how he carries himself is amazing. In fact our depth in general is great, everyone has played and contributed.”

Wieke Kaptein’s early goal gave Chelsea a winning start to their Champions League campaign proper against Austria Vienna, but it was a far from comfortable evening for them.

“Probably the performance is not the one we wanted to have,” Chelsea’s manager, Sonia Bompastor, said. “We could have controlled the game a little bit better in terms of scoring a second goal to kill the opposition’s hope, but sometimes you need to focus on what is most important and tonight that was to win and to take the three points from the game.”

• League agrees new interpretations to help Borthwick

• Scrum and breakdown targeted as areas of inconsistency

Steve Borthwick has secured a boost to his preparations for the World Cup next year, with an overhaul in the refereeing of Prem matches for the coming season designed to help England’s hopes in Australia.

The Guardian understands that in the formal absence of relegation from the Prem for the first time this season, agreement has been reached over a number of law interpretations that will better align officiating in club matches with the international game.

Jürgen Klopp and Xavi Hernández face each other in Nations League as they take the reins following disappointing World Cups

Before the latest instalment of a time-honoured international rivalry gearing up for two distinct new beginnings, Jürgen Klopp could not resist sprinkling a little of the old mischief. “The good thing is that we both have the exact same situation,” he said of Xavi Hernández, his counterpart when Germany visit the Netherlands on Thursday night. “We met on Monday and play on Thursday. And the coach knows the players from television. I actually know more of the Dutch players personally than Xavi does. Whether that’s an advantage, I don’t know, but it’s still a fact.”

In his public appearances Klopp has been on irrepressible form since taking the role in July. The task of whipping Germany back into shape has visibly and audibly topped up the energy levels that had drained by the time he departed Liverpool. Klopp, his wit sharp and appetite piqued, looks a far cry from the character who, to most trained eyes, was going through the motions upon his unveiling as Red Bull’s head of global soccer early last year.

• ‘I love going to the Middle East,’ says Ferrari driver

• Qatar and Abu Dhabi races could still be cancelled

Lewis Hamilton said he hopes the Formula One season can still end at the two scheduled rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, with the finale still in doubt because of the war in the Middle East.

Formula One is pressing ahead with its original plan, although a contingency is understood to be in place to host a final round in Imola if the volatile situation means both meetings have to be cancelled.

• ‘I didn’t celebrate. I went home to rest. It was a hard fight’

• Hrgovic stopped Briton to win the IBF heavyweight title

Filip Hrgovic, the new IBF world heavyweight champion, has offered a candid insight into the ordeal he endured before beating Moses Itauma in a shock stoppage victory last month, revealing he absorbed so many heavy punches in the first eight rounds that he felt headaches for a number of days afterwards.

“I felt fucked up,” said the 34-year-old Croat. “I received a lot of shots and I was bruised. I had a bit of a headache for a few days. On the Wednesday after the fight I was back in the gym, working out already, but for a few days I felt really tired and bruised, with some headaches.”

• 38-year-old had been facing attempted murder charge

• Former player will accept aggravated assault charge

Former NFL star Antonio Brown plans to accept a plea deal on an attempted murder charge in Miami, his lawyer said Wednesday. Doing so will mean the former wide receiver avoids prison.

Brown is scheduled to appear in court next Wednesday to make the deal final. He could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted of the current attempted murder charge.

The 23-year-old playmaker has been disappointing for Liverpool but has he really been that bad?

By Opta Analyst

When Florian Wirtz signed for Liverpool in the summer of 2025, there was only one logical assumption. The Premier League champions at the time had recruited one of the hottest young talents in world football – a key player in the Bayer Leverkusen team that had won the double in 2023-24 and a star in the Germany team. An exciting and productive young attacking midfielder being added to the best team in England? How could this not work?

Football has a habit of flipping the script, though. Last season was difficult for Liverpool for several reasons, and Wirtz, along with other new arrivals, struggled to make the impact expected of a player costing up to £116m. There were conversations among fans this summer about how long he and his fellow nine-figure signing Alexander Isak should be given before difficult questions needed be asked. The consensus was until Christmas.

Witness says T2 Hawk aircraft, which was being used for a training flight, ‘was basically on fire’ on takeoff

An RAF jet crashed and exploded moments after two pilots ejected during a training flight over Anglesey (Ynys Môn) in north Wales on Wednesday.

The aircraft, a Hawk T2, had just taken off from RAF Valley on the west of the island when the incident occurred, witnesses said.

Exclusive: Levy that allows almost 16,000 houses to be built on Norfolk Broads will not cover cost of mitigating environmental damage, critics say

A new levy on developers to allow almost 16,000 homes to be built in the environmentally protected Norfolk Broads has been cut by tens of thousands of pounds per house, the Guardian can reveal.

Ministers say the government’s environmental delivery plans (EDPs) were created to unblock housing growth across the country and are a “win-win” for development and nature.

Hung Cao, acting US navy secretary, answered questions from US senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a letter

Eight US navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, revealed in a letter to the US senator Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday.

“Since the beginning of Lincoln’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group,” Cao wrote, responding on behalf of US defense secretary Pete Hegseth to Gillibrand’s inquiry about the quality of life aboard the fleet. “This number includes the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons.”

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Japan’s government bond yields have climbed to multi-decade highs today, as the sell-off continues.

Bloomberg has the details:

The 10-year yield rose 10 basis points to 3.075% on Thursday, its highest since 1996, after the three-day break. The five-and 20-year rates also gained about 10 basis points each to 2.375% and 3.915%, respectively.

The main story is still the huge global bond selloff, with yesterday seeing the biggest jump in the 10yr Treasury yield (+15.2bps) since the market turmoil around Liberation Day in April 2025.

The main driver was a strong batch of PMIs, along with a rebound in oil prices, which both led to mounting speculation about faster rate hikes. Indeed, futures this morning are pricing a 71% chance of a Fed rate hike at the next meeting in October.

Kremlin yet to respond publicly to US invitation that is likely to raise concerns from Ukraine and EU countries

The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The invitation, which marks a significant reversal by the Trump administration of Russia’s international isolation, was announced by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations conference in New York.

Biggest study of its kind provides insights into bats’ evolution – a potential gamechanger for research into treating viruses and cancer in humans

In the northern forests of the Congo-Brazzaville, as the sun slips away, a distinctive honking fills the dusky sky. Every evening, thousands of hammer-headed fruit bats depart their daytime roosts in search of mates, calling out through large, box-shaped snouts that give the flying mammals the appearance of a winged moose. Here, along the Congo River, scientists have been collecting DNA swabs and tissue samples from the bats for years, working deep into the night in spacesuit-like protective gear.

Those hard-won samples are now among the thousands of specimens gathered from bats across the world that have helped to reshape what we know about the bat family tree.

What caused the turtles to begin nesting farther north than usual is the ‘million dollar question’

A sea turtle crawled out of the surf in southern California last weekend around sunset and started laying eggs in the sand.

People on Huntington Beach who saw the female olive ridley sea turtle were shocked and excited. And they weren’t the only ones freaking out, said Justin Viezbicke, the California stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa).

Cooperation on OceanEye, which aims to create ‘real-time’ model of world’s oceans, comes amid efforts to boost EU ties

Britain is to join a major new ocean science programme, led by the EU, to better forecast extreme weather and climate events, the environment secretary is to announce in New York.

The announcement on Wednesday will come as Andy Burnham’s government aims to rebuild the UK’s relationship with Europe, and follows warnings this year’s “supersized” El Niño, tracked in the Pacific Ocean, will fuel more extreme weather globally.

Six people have died as the typhoon hit the Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures with potentially record-breaking rainfall to come as the storm nears Tokyo

• Typhoon Dujuan and festival clear-up: photos of the day on 21 September

Hundreds gathered on Tuesday night in anticipation of a small boat arriving in Gosport

Three people have been charged in connection with anti-migrant protests that drew hundreds of demonstrators to a marina in Hampshire on Tuesday night.

Six people were arrested by police, as anti-migrant activists who mistakenly believed a small boat was due to arrive at Gosport gathered in an attempt to disrupt the arrival of any asylum seekers.

Warning from Charity Commission for England and Wales concludes two-year investigation after death of Hisham al-Hakimi in October 2023

The international aid charity Save the Children has been issued with an official regulatory warning over management failures and misconduct that put staff at its Yemen office at serious risk.

The warning concluded a two-year investigation by the Charity Commission for England and Wales into the running of the office after the death of its safety and security director, Hisham Al-Hakimi, in October 2023 after he was detained by the Yemeni authorities.

Torcal SUV can travel up to 375 miles on a single charge and is part of a £350m investment in the VW-owned carmaker’s UK business

Bentley is launching its first fully electric car – complete with a drum soundtrack to replace the growl of a combustion engine – as part of a £350m investment in its UK business.

The vehicle, an SUV called the Torcal, is Bentley’s cheapest, starting at £173,000, and will be built at its factory in Crewe, securing the jobs of the 4,000 workers there.

Cuts are part of plan to save £500m and lose as many as 2,000 staff by 2028

The BBC is to axe sports bulletins on its TV news channel and make more senior journalist roles redundant, as the corporation begins to unveil a series of painful cost-saving measures.

Lunchtime and overnight bulletins on the BBC News channel will no longer be shown, according to internal announcements made to staff.

Argentinian president accuses United Nations of being filled with ‘parasites’ in bellicose general assembly speech

Javier Milei has condemned the UN as he warned that Argentina would take “matters into our own hands” in its dispute with Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.

In a caustic speech at the general assembly in New York, the Argentinian president criticised the UN for being ineffective when it came to the long-running tensions over the British overseas territory in the south Atlantic known in Argentina as the Malvinas.

Agreement with Mauritius over Diego Garcia unlikely to be revived unless president changes his mind, insiders believe

The Chagos Islands deal is on hold for as long as Donald Trump objects to it, UK officials believe, with no immediate signs it can be adapted to suit the US president.

After Trump savaged the three-way plan as “a terrible deal” during a meeting with Andy Burnham at the UN general assembly, the prime minister said he was “confident” the UK would be able to find a solution to revive the idea.

Sentencing comes after years of appeals and retrials in case involving former TV production assistant Miriam Haley

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 15 years on Wednesday after being convicted of sexually assaulting former TV production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006 at his Manhattan apartment.

Haley appeared in court on Wednesday morning and delivered a victim impact statement.

Housing rights campaigners decry landlord’s ‘barbaric behaviour’ after apartment Maricarmen had lived in for 71 years was bought by a developer

There were violent scenes in Madrid on Wednesday as riot police fought with protesters trying to prevent the eviction of an 87-year-old disabled woman from her apartment in the Retiro district.

Hundreds of protesters had gathered, many of them overnight, in an effort to block the fourth attempt to carry out the eviction. Activists from the Madrid and Barcelona tenants’ union, and celebrities including the actor Carlos Bardem and the singer and actor Ana Belén, joined the protest.

IIF highlights challenges facing US, France, UK and Japan, while OECD and IMF also voice global concerns

Three heavyweight international bodies have issued stark warnings about the risks of rising debt levels and soaring borrowing costs across large economies.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Institute of Finance (IIF), the voice of global banking, on Wednesday highlighted the dangers of soaring interest rates on $365tn (£275tn) in global borrowing.

Wirral mother among renters turning to food banks as gap between a two-bed and housing benefit hits £158 a month – rising to as much as £324 in London

Do you prioritise paying the rent, putting food on the table or keeping the house warm in winter? In practice, says Laura Braddock, a single mum from Wirral, Merseyside, you always pay the rent first and improvise the rest. “If I’ve got a roof over our head, then everything else I can muddle through.”

The pressing problem for Braddock, 39, is that muddling through is getting harder. The monthly rent for her two-bedroom flat far outstrips the local housing allowance (LHA) she receives – and the gap may widen.

Programme will initially involve voluntary redundancies in the UK but the insurance and pensions firm will consider mandatory job cuts depending on the take-up

Legal & General plans to cut 1,000 jobs by the middle of next year, about a tenth of the British insurance and pensions firm’s workforce.

António Simões, the chief executive, is wielding the axe as part of his attempts to create a “leaner organisation” since taking over from longtime CEO Nigel Wilson in January 2024. L&G described the move as “the next stage of that transformation”.

Sunil Bharti Mittal’s Airtel Money targets $9bn IPO in boost for ailing UK stock market

Nils Pratley: Does this mark the end of London’s listing drought? Not yet

A payments business that operates across Africa and is ultimately controlled by an Indian billionaire has announced its intention to float on the struggling London Stock Exchange.

Airtel Money, the mobile money arm of Airtel Africa, is planning one of the biggest UK listings in years, in a boost for the shrinking London market that has faced a string of recent departures.

Mercury prize-winner reveals ‘quite severe’ bleed was why he’d missed support slots with Mumford & Sons this year

The British singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka has said he has suffered a stroke and faces a “long tough journey” on the road to recovery.

The 39-year-old singer from London, whose hits include Cold Little Heart and Home Again, said the “quite severe” bleed in his brain was the reason he had missed some tour dates this year when he was due to support Mumford & Sons, and that the stroke had been brought on by high blood pressure.

Making vast versions of sardine tins and fishing lures, the Dutch sculptor explains how she imbues disposable objects with autonomy and meaning

Midway through my conversation with Magali Reus, we are interrupted by a courier. They’ve arrived at the artist’s studio to deliver an important package – one of the final components of a sculpture being finalised for Reus’s show Swimming By Night at the Perimeter in London.

The studio is filled with such sculptures, all in various stages of completion. Reus likes to take everyday, often disposable, items – pizza boxes and sardine tins among them – and recreate them on a larger-than-life scale. One of them – vast looming fish hook lures made to look like uncanny cupcake cases or severed skeletal limbs – looms nearby, resting against a studio wall.

This over-controlled adventure never takes a breath or a moment to let its characters come to life

Frantically and even stroboscopically over-energised, this big new movie from DreamWorks about best friends for ever seems to me another example of exhausting AI-type content production in animation. You could make the same argument against plenty of live-action films of course, but it is in animation that this kind of soulless blitzkrieg tends to predominate. Forgotten Island is over-controlled and over-determined, a movie that never, or hardly ever, takes its pedal from the metal, never takes a breath or a moment to let its characters come to life. At times it seems to be aping the world of Japanese anime, but without its sense of character or capacity for calm.

The story, weirdly reminiscent of The Hangover of all things, is set in the Philippines in the pre-social media 90s. Jo, voiced by R&B star HER, is a lonely and super-imaginative teen always in trouble at school; like Moana she has a wise grandma who guides her to her ancestral destiny and has captivated Jo with stories of her culture and identity – stories of the forgotten island of Nakali. Jo makes friends with similarly lonely Raissa (Liza Soberano) who like Jo is smart but with a much more focused sense of academic discipline.

Dispatches gains access to unpublished Whitehall documents. Plus: hippos, googly eyes and yelling at art – it can only be Taskmaster. Here’s what to watch this evening

11.05pm, Channel 4
With Donald Trump cheerleading for a far-right Israeli government, the horror in Gaza has represented an extreme moral and political hazard for successive UK governments since the Hamas attacks of October 2023. However, they’ve played a difficult hand pretty badly. This film gains access to internal Whitehall documents to offer an insight into Britain’s compromised response to alleged Israeli war crimes. Phil Harrison

Netflix’s new series is the ruthless, hyper-capitalist competitive take on a kids’ book that no one needed. AI-generating Gene Wilder’s voice for it just feels wrong

As the sad-faced Oompa-Loompas who acted in Glasgow’s famously catastrophic Willy’s Chocolate Experience in 2024 will testify, if you come at Willy Wonka, you’d better not miss. There’s always a risk involved when trying to recreate fantastical, fictional worlds: if you fall short – or miss the point – the bathos is all the more devastating. Roll up, then, for Wonka’s Golden Ticket, Netflix’s twist on Roald Dahl’s confectionary phantasmagoria, which reimagines the story as Squid Game: The Sugar Headache. It gets messy.

As we join our contestants, they’ve assembled outside Wonka’s factory, having found Golden Tickets in apparently random bars of chocolate – although, as a group, they seem fortuitously demographically mixed and able to bring a range of disparate yet complementary backstories to the table. A lucky break. But wait! Is that the voice of beloved Wonka-proxy Gene Wilder?

Before Anthony Hopkins’ Dr Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Brian Cox played a cannibalistic killer in Mann’s pioneering Red Dragon adaptation

Five years before The Silence of the Lambs, there was writer-director Michael Mann’s pioneering Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter, now on re-release in a director’s “final cut” for its 40th anniversary. It was his version of Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon, a movie which features Dr Hannibal Lecter (here spelt Lecktor) in a relatively minor part, and played in a much more coolly matter-of-fact and downbeat way by Brian Cox, who is first discovered in his cell lying down with his back to the camera.

It has long been a haughty, hipster film-bro affectation to claim that Cox is better in the role than Anthony Hopkins. (Lecktor’s early acoustic stuff was great, you see, before he went electric as Lecter.) I think that’s a bit obtuse, for all that Cox is of course very good. Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs is the definitive version: face it. But I will concede that Cox is more interesting than Hopkins by the time the latter came to make the 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon, at which stage the franchise had become a bit tired. Manhunter itself is a very interesting and watchable movie, but feels a little unevolved compared to Jonathan Demme’s masterly guignol spectacle, although Demme clearly inhaled Mann’s excitement at jets, ’copters and military hardware deployed at speed to bring down just one man.

Like many south Asians in the UK, he kept creativity separate from a corporate career. But after co-signs from dance music’s A-list, he’s releasing a defiant – and daringly titled – debut album

When Ahad Elley was 12, his family moved from Karachi to the UK. Quickly, he discovered his Pakistani identity was the basis of a slur. “Growing up in Pakistan, I never knew that was a bad word, because why would it be? The word ‘pak’ means clean, it has no negative connotations.” Elley’s childhood response was to disconnect from his heritage, and what followed was “potentially shrinking or hiding parts of myself to fit into society”. It’s likely a familiar story for many diasporic south Asians who, at some point, have felt the call to assimilate.

Twenty years later, Elley is better known as Ahadadream, an integral architect of the current British south Asian music scene, as well as a DJ, producer, label head, A&R and promoter shining a light on dance music from around the world. His tracks are favourites in sets by A-list dance artists such as Fred Again, Caribou, Peggy Gou and Four Tet, and with the release of his debut album, P★KI (pronounced “pee-star-kay-eye”) Elley’s star is set to rise further.

LSO St Luke’s, London
Gabriel Kahane’s whimsical song cycle about grief, divorce and death brings irresistible melodies and moments of comic brilliance to the virtuoso US vocal ensemble

Between having a clarinet concerto at the Proms and a duo project with violinist Pekka Kuusisto this autumn, the singer, songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane is touring with Roomful of Teeth, the virtuoso US vocal ensemble whose founding members include Caroline Shaw.

Elevator Songs, which he wrote for them in 2023, is a darkly whimsical piece somewhere between a concept pop album and a song cycle. We are in a wormhole of a hotel, where the elevator – cue chimes – takes us to what seem like parallel worlds. Kahane’s songs deal deftly with grief, divorce and death, but within his style – tuneful, melancholic, full of twisty harmonies – it was the comedic ones that hit most immediately here.

The playwright’s daughter found Catch Me Who Can after her mother’s death. Now it has become a compelling audio drama with Toby Jones and Rita Tushingham

Was Shelagh Delaney a one-hit wonder? Absolutely not. Aside from A Taste of Honey which, in the words of Dominic Dromgoole, “has a rock-solid heart and the gleam of the natural”, she wrote the screenplays for the films Charlie Bubbles and Dance With a Stranger, TV series including The House That Jack Built and several radio plays. But now a 30-minute piece, Catch Me Who Can, has come to light, been released as an audio drama and turns out to be a little gem.

Its origins are fascinating. It deals with a teenage truant and was discovered by Delaney’s daughter, Charlotte, after her mother’s death in 2011. But why did it lay hidden for so long? According to Charlotte, who has adapted it for audio: “It imagines my last few hours on the lam having run away from home and school when I was 14 in 1978. I was gone for three days and two nights. I’d suggest it’s a racing certainty that the reason nothing has ever been heard of it is that it’s about me and my mum had rules about that kind of thing.”

Royal Festival Hall, London
Marin Alsop, the Philharmonia and three outstanding choirs gave the London premiere of Wolfe’s work about the deaths of 146 workers in a New York garment factory fire in 1911

On Saturday 25 March, 1911, Greenwich Village’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire. One hundred and forty-six garment workers – mostly recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women – died, many prevented from escaping the flames by stairwells and exits locked by the management.

The disaster is the catalyst for Pulitzer-winning composer Julia Wolfe’s 2019 multimedia oratorio Fire in My Mouth: the third in her series of large-scale works drawing on the history of the American worker, and a punchy opener to the Southbank Centre’s autumn season.

Is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? Two possible future worlds are linked in the new novel from the author of Station Eleven

In her second novel, 2009’s The Singer’s Gun, Emily St John Mandel tells the story of Anton Waker, a young man desperate to make a break from his criminal family. His plans are thwarted by his cousin Ari, whose hard-nosed talent for operating outside the law has become a way of life. A decade later in The Glass Hotel, a painting called Swan Dive that hangs in the lobby of the luxury retreat stands as a symbol of escape from a trap that is closing. You will not need to have read either of these earlier novels to enjoy Mandel’s seventh, Exit Party, though their loose intertwining of narrative threads will provide extra pleasure and a sense of homecoming for those who have. It is also interesting to observe Mandel’s evolution from a writer of quirky tales of offbeat protagonists to a novelist whose world-spanning, politically resonant narratives now attract a wide and devoted following.

Exit Party begins five years into our future, in 2031. Ari Waker has just come out of prison after serving an 18-year sentence for the attempted murder by contract killing of her cousin Anton. Much has changed while she has been inside: a second civil war has devastated lives and blighted the economy, and the United States as such has ceased to exist.

This year’s shortlist for the Booker prize was announced last night. Our books editors answered your questions about the contenders, the judges and literary fiction

Kohtao says: Can’t believe the two best books – Switzy and Shadow of the Object - were cut. Huge shame as they really added something different to the range.

Liese: I was sad not to see Switzy on the shortlist too. I am a big fan of Emma Cline’s writing and felt that it did something really interesting. I am sure that, as always, there were plenty of arguments and some horse-trading among the judges to arrive at this list – which does still include ambitious and experimental work such as The Disappearers (Marlon James) and one of my other faves, the brilliantly weird Black Bag.

Charlotte: It’s interesting that even Jarvis Cocker, one of this year’s judges, said that he found the male dominance of the list “quite surprising, because generally speaking the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”. And it’s also surprising in the light of the recent debate around the lack of contemporary novels written by men – there was even a small press, Conduit Books, established last year to focus on new male writers. So perhaps we could say that’s succeeded! But in fact, a lot of the men on the list are very long established, and there are two previous winners among them – Marlon James and Douglas Stuart.

I would say that although the perspectives are predominantly male, they’re not necessarily similar in other ways – they encompass different sexualities, and as you say, one isn’t gendered at all (funnily enough, I hadn’t read it that way, but others on the desk did and that’s obviously how it was intended). It’s interesting that we have a female author, Elizabeth Strout, writing from a male perspective, and a male author, M John Harrison, writing from a female perspective. Though Harrison’s novel isn’t entirely from Marnie’s perspective, and for me there are many other themes that jump out from these books, beyond masculinity – anxiety about the world and the future, sexuality, history, oppression. As a shortlist, it seems pretty varied to me, and I didn’t find that I missed a female perspective when I was reading these books.

Returning with his first-ever adult novel, the bestselling author reflects on fame, YouTube and his brother’s AI controversy

By his mid-30s, John Green had done pretty well for himself. His debut novel, Looking for Alaska, had won a prestigious award for young adult literature. He and his brother, Hank, had launched a popular YouTube channel, where they regularly posted videos about their lives. With their combined incomes, Green and his wife were able to cobble together a living, buying a house and starting a family in Indianapolis.

And then, in 2012, he published The Fault in Our Stars.

This revelatory history shows just how deeply embedded slavery is in the foundations of modern Britain

One tedious aspect of Britain’s post-imperial melancholia is the number of amateur historians who would rather we stopped going on about our role in the slave trade. Isn’t it all in the past? Weren’t we the first to abolish it anyway? In April, the Reform party announced a new policy of halting visas to people from countries seeking slavery reparations from Britain. “The United Kingdom is not an ATM for ethnic grievances from the past,” the party’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, said.

Unfortunately for those who would rather forget, the slave trade, as William Pettigrew argues in this grimly important book, can be found “in the depths of Britain’s grain”. Ninety per cent of the enslaved Africans transported to America went on British ships, and slave traders’ actions transformed Britain in ways that still resonate today.

From highlighted ledges to characters telling you what to do, blockbuster games are increasingly taking the challenge out of playing – and players are pushing back

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Marvel’s Wolverine, the latest action game from Sony’s stable of expensive blockbuster-factory studios, has had an unfortunate launch. Reviews were decent, if not stellar, but a series of viral video clips from reviewers and streamers have made it the scapegoat for a patronising flavour of game design that gamers have hated for decades. This clip, from Skill Up’s review, shows the player entering a beautiful wintry landscape before being overwhelmed by visual cues telling them what they’re supposed to be doing there. Sonar pulses point you in the direction of objectives. Targets – which, it bears emphasising, are shaped like targets – get an extra reflective visual effect so you know you’re supposed to pay attention to them. A trail shows you not just where to go, but where the level’s sole hidden collectible is.

It is hand-holding to the point of parody. Indeed, it reminded me of the sniggersome Mario in Unreal Engine satirical videos that makes the social media rounds every few months (“A mushroom? I should take a look at this”). Skill Up’s clip has been followed by hundreds of others, gleefully ripping into Wolverine with ironic savagery. In one much-copied clip, a streamer simply lays down his controller during a motorbike chase sequence and watches as Wolverine speeds on regardless, bouncing off the scenery as the game plays itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Cacophonous and comedic staging sees an experienced, older duo engage in an enthusiastic liaison rather than a rebellious first romance

As in any production of Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers, the nurse can tell Juliet’s age “unto an hour”. In this collaboration between the New Vic and Not Too Tame, however, that age is older than most. The Capulets’ upcoming party – a barrage of Balearic beats around a swimming pool with Tybalt (Patrick Knowles) on the decks – will mark her 40th birthday.

Played by Natalie Casey, Juliet gets ready to the sounds of a chamber orchestra playing Like a Virgin. If you believe the nurse (Louise Haggerty), she is anything but.

At New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 10 October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star’s estate granted restraining order against Bryan Seaver, who publicly announced Parton’s death, over alleged intimidation that he denies

The estate of the late Dolly Parton is involved in a dispute with the country music star’s nephew and former head of security, and was granted a restraining order against him and his private security company amid allegations of threats.

Bryan Seaver was responsible for Parton’s security, and was tasked with announcing her death on 25 August with a video, “something Dolly asked of me years ago”, he said.

Advances in digital technology mean that avatars are ever more realistic, and zombie concerts are coming our way. Exciting as it might be to witness the Fab Four, or Maria Calla on stage, I’d rather have flesh and blood live experiences any day.

It seems that AI’s powers – terrifyingly – know no bounds. But can it raise the dead? Here’s what Avatar concert producer Unit1 Studio’s CEO Barney Wragg said in a recent interview. “We [are] talk[ing] about using AI to simulate the way that tears evaporate in your eye between blinks, or subcutaneous blood flow, so that when one of our [digital] characters laughs or opens their mouth or smiles, areas of their flesh will change colour as it would do in a real human”. Digital avatars are already part of our entertainment landscape – from Tupac and Abba to Maria Callas – but now that an avatar’s cheeks can change colour mid-set, is it game over for humans?

Wragg last week reported a massive investment in his company to make hyper-realistic avatar-entertainment. Unit1 plans to roll out avatars of musicians living – and dead – so that the success of Abba Voyage is just the start of a slew of “hybrid” concerts. In other words, flesh-and-blood audiences paying massive amounts of human money to witness a very expensive LED screen showing phantom musicians in the 21st century’s equivalent of the magic lantern. (The tech is a 2D illusion: you think you’re seeing Abba’s Agnetha in 3D, but you’re not; it’s all just a new-fangled but fundamentally old-fashioned trick of the light.)

A new production of Clifford Odets’ agitprop work Till the Day I Die is being remounted on the back of a truck in a Melbourne car park – rekindling its activist intent

It might be difficult to imagine these days, but there was a time when theatre in Australia was so politically incendiary it could cause an international diplomatic scandal. A year after it premiered on Broadway in 1935, US playwright Clifford Odets’ Till the Day I Die found itself at the centre of controversy in Australia when it was banned by the federal government at the request of the Nazi party’s consul general, on the grounds it was offensive to a “friendly foreign nation”.

Odets’ play, about a communist Berliner arrested by the Nazis for producing leftwing political pamphlets, was a companion piece to his more famous Waiting for Lefty, which was staged the year before by Sydney’s New Theatre – one of a branch of theatre companies that sprang up around the globe in the 1930s that was heavily affiliated with communism. The ban was counterproductive, leading to a massive public outcry and a cobbled, surreptitious production performed on the back of a truck at Collingwood town hall in Melbourne.

That truck is a galvanising symbol of rebellion and resistance for theatre-makers Mark Wilson and Katie Sfetkidis, who have been inspired to revisit the play as an act of leftist solidarity with the past and a spur for future activism. They’re staging a new production of it for this year’s Melbourne fringe festival in the car park of the Trades Hall building on the back of their own truck. “We got excited by these artists refusing to be banned, about the idea of a necessary theatre,” Wilson says.

Each autumn the traditional alpabzug (descent of herds) sees farmers in Switzerland move their livestock from mountain pastures down to valley barns. In the Griesalp area above Kiental around 70 alpacas were herded down the valley, before being transported by truck to their winter farm at Aeschi, near Spiez, in the Bernese Oberland

Whether it’s streamlining shoes or being strict with toiletries, we asked the experts for the home organisation hacks they swear by

• How to get rid of household clutter – without sending it to landfill

Few things conjure a sense of achievement quite like a clearout or bringing order to that cupboard of doom you’ve been ignoring for months. But how best to tackle this beast of a job?

To help you make a start, we asked professional organisers and declutterers for their tips and tricks, as well as the products they recommend to help streamline the areas everyone struggles with. From never buying round storage containers to getting the kids to help tidy up, these are the solutions they swear by.

The push to buy lasting, sustainable clothes is a good thing, but every wardrobe need a bit of mischief

I do hope you are wearing your zebra stripe trousers today. Anyone who is anyone is wearing zebra stripes this month, you know. If you haven’t yet got with the programme, I suggest you nip to the shops and snap some up before they are all gone. It would be mortifying to be the last one without a pair. Hurry!

Only teasing. Fashion doesn’t work like that any more. The days when people like me bullied everyone else into wearing banana yellow one season and puffball sleeves the next are over. Looking trendy is over. Timeless chic is the only show in town. Peacocking has been phased out in favour of understatement and personal style.

A new smartphone needn’t cost a fortune. From Samsung, Google, Apple and more, these are the lower-cost models we rate most – and how to buy a refurbished handset

• How to make your smartphone last longer

Buying a flagship phone in 2026 makes little sense unless you’re really going to use all the features at hand. By comparison, the budget smartphone market has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years, and you can now get most of the features you’d want, including a high-quality OLED screen and a well-performing chipset, all for a reasonable price.

There’s more choice than ever for shoppers who don’t want to spend too much on their next upgrade, but many models simply aren’t worth your time. That’s where this guide comes into play. I’ve tested the latest models and pinpointed the nine best budget phones available right now – all you have to do is pick the one that best suits your needs.

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

• How I Shop with Laura Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

• The best supermarket runny honey

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

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

Move over ready salted, salt and vinegar and cheese and onion. Gourmet crisps are everywhere, but which are actually worth trying?

It seems the era of the “holy trinity of flavours” – ready salted, salt and vinegar, cheese and onion – is over. Gourmet crisps are everywhere. Caviar and truffle flavours are on corner-shop shelves, while supermarket brands now include everything from glazed meats to blue cheese. We tasted 100 of the strangest crisp options available to find out which are worth coming back to and which should have stayed in the test kitchen.

100. Grouse and whinberry, Taste of Game
For someone who has tasted neither grouse nor whinberry before, after eating these crisps I never want to. Smelling as meaty as a butcher’s but tasting sweet, this is truly the worst of all worlds.
Taste: 0/10, texture: 2/10, novelty: 10/10

Whip up a curry mayonnaise and turn your leftovers into a semi-instant classic

It was my gran’s funeral a few weeks ago, so today’s recipe seems rather fitting, because coronation chicken was one of the few savoury dishes she cooked, and also one I loved. This homage to her glorious personality and astonishingly sweet tooth (add extra mango chutney for sweetness) is a wonderful way to use up leftover chicken from a roast, barbecue or whatever. I make the mayo from scratch, because I don’t keep mayonnaise in my larder, but I do have eggs and extra-virgin olive oil.

Snacks never tasted so good: spicy corn fritters with a lime pickle-spiked yoghurt, and king oyster mushrooms laced with blackberries, pomegranate molasses and soy

King oyster mushrooms are quite the centrepiece: relatively meaty and receptive to big flavours. Paired with a vibrant glaze spiked with sweet blackberries, tart pomegranate molasses and savoury soy sauce, every bite balances the richness with sharp, fruity acidity. But first some tangy, fresh fritters, celebrating fresh corn with an earthy base of gochujang, which works brilliantly against the lime pickle yoghurt. Creamy, crisp and the perfect treat.

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

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

Financial pressures suspected to be behind figures showing failed marriages are lasting longer in England and Wales

Couples are putting off divorce because of the cost of living crisis, lawyers have said, after figures showed the average length of a marriage ending in divorce in England and Wales reached a record high last year.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) released figures on Wednesday showing that the average marriage ending in divorce in 2025 lasted for 13 years. This is the longest since records began in 1963 and up from a record low of 8.9 years in 1985.

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

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

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

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

Chris, 42, London

Occupation Electrical supervisor of the maintenance team at an NHS hospital

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

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

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

A First Saver account was set up by my mother when the children were born which we planned to use to fund them through university

My mother set up NatWest First Saver accounts for my children when they were born. The accounts are held in trust for when they turn 18 and my parents have paid into them monthly to help fund them through university.

My mother is now in the final stages of Alzheimer’s and I have registered financial power of attorney for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A growing number of men, including singers Shaggy and Harry Styles, are taking up pilates. When I realised I could no longer touch my toes, I decided to try it out

I realised something needed to change when I nearly toppled over trying to tie my shoelaces. I was on a busy high street, with people rushing past holding shopping bags, when I saw my open shoelace spooled on the ground. I bent down to deal with it and felt gravity move against me. Only a quick flail of my arms stopped me from faceplanting. When I raised myself back upright, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. This can’t be right, I thought.

Bracing my foot on a bin to finally fix my shoelace, it dawned on me. I’d become rusty. My core strength was nonexistent, as was my flexibility. Years behind a desk had taken a toll, not helped by an after-work routine of watching TV or playing video games on the sofa. But after getting home and doing some research (yes, from my sofa), I found a potential remedy: pilates.

Test using urine and vaginal fluid samples raises hopes thousands of lower-risk women could be spared internal ultrasounds and hysteroscopies

Doctors have developed a simple test that could help rule out womb cancer in women who experience bleeding after menopause.

The approach has the potential to transform care for thousands of women each year and spare them from invasive and uncomfortable tests that can also be costly for healthcare systems.

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

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

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

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

Milan show full of diaphanous dresses and visible bras celebrates ‘incredible feminist’ of the 1970s, Raffaella Carrà

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been having more fun with clothes since she decamped from Paris back to her native Rome to work at Fendi. “I have less of a uniform these days. I think it is because being back here makes me feel young again. I’m not sure my daughter appreciates [this attitude]! But I don’t care,” she said at a preview before her Milan fashion week show.

Not that Chiuri doesn’t approach her work as a designer seriously. She described her second ready-to-wear season at Fendi not as a show, or a collection, but as “the second part of the project I am working on for them”.

Stop ‘pushing through the pain’ or ceaselessly searching for the ‘right retinol’ – there are some great alternatives

Anyone with an internet connection will no doubt have heard that retinoids – a group of vitamin A-based compounds – are the most evidenced and effective ingredients in treating the visible signs of skin ageing. Message received loud and clear. But what often goes unheard are the voices of many beauty consumers who have found that they simply cannot use them. All too often, I see experts online telling those complaining of discomfort, unremitting dryness, persistent redness, stinging or angry reactions that they just need to “find the right retinol” or simply “push through” the pain barrier. But I will die on this hill: not everyone can use retinoids, and they can still achieve great results without them.

If I don’t convince you, believe my esteemed consultant, dermatologist Dr Justine Hextall (a woman I respect and trust so completely that I have entrusted her with my children’s skin health), because she agrees. While Hextall, as any good derm would, prescribes retinoids on a daily basis, she also sees patients for whom there is a more appropriate, kinder pathway. “While retinoids are effective, they can be difficult to tolerate and may not be used consistently in those with sensitive skin,” she says. “Consistency is the key in skincare.”

The star’s rise from Ramsay Street to global superstar is the subject of a new book. It’s a journey that has cleverly harnessed the power of fashion to transform, subvert – and shock

On 20 December 1989, Kylie Minogue first harnessed the power of fashion. Attending the Australian premiere of her film The Delinquents, she wore a custom sequined noughts-and-crosses minidress by Australian designers Morrissey Edmiston and a cropped blond wig. She also arrived with a new accessory: a rock star boyfriend in the shape of Michael Hutchence from INXS.

Before then, there’d been her Neighbours character Charlene’s peak-80s silk taffeta and lace wedding dress, and Kylie the pop star on the cover of her first album, in 1988, wearing a topless hat showing off cascading curls. But that had been fashion forced on her, at a time when she had no say in her image.

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

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

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

This once industrial area has been transformed into a vibrant artistic hub with a thriving food and drink scene

Located just north of the Centrale train station, Bolognina neighbourhood is more than just a Little Bologna. It is a completely different world from the medieval maze of palaces, churches and towers that define the city’s “Centro Storico”, which is increasingly filled with crowds of tourists as Bologna joins the big league of Italian getaway destinations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A feature called AI Overviews has been a profound change, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting

Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.

“AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever,” wrote Liz Reid, Google’s vice-president of search, last August. In May, the company said more AI is coming.

The water was my childhood playground but, as I grew up, my health left me landbound. Then my brother found a way to launch me back into the waves ...

My brother and I grew up surfing at Porthcawl in south Wales. My earliest memories are of playing in the waves and I learned to bodyboard not long after I learned to walk. When I lost the use of my legs, I felt as if I had lost the sea – and a part of who I was.

I was in my teens when I started to develop chronic illnesses, including endometriosis. At first, I was still able to surf – I just needed to rest afterwards. Then, in my early 20s, I developed further chronic conditions, including a connective tissue disorder that affected my joints and muscle strength. I could stand just for a few seconds and was able to walk only a few metres. At 23, an acute infection led to complications, including the loss of the use of my legs. Later, my stomach became paralysed; I’m now fed via a tube that runs down my oesophagus, through my stomach and into my intestines.

Cardigan: Taking a walk beside the River Teifi, I encounter trees beginning to fade into new season colour, and the low blur of a weasel

It is rare for me to visit the same place twice within a couple of weeks, but my walk in the Teifi Marshes recently was curtailed by heavy rain, and I feel that I have unfinished business. Last time I started from the Cilgerran end of the marsh, so today begin at the seaward side – crossing the bridge over the Teifi and heading upstream past the site of the old, sadly long-departed Cardigan railway station.

My route follows the former course of the railway line, but I briefly divert along a boardwalk into the broad reedbeds at the heart of the marsh. Here, I am surrounded by the ambient sound of the wind in the reeds, which ebbs and flows with an almost animate organic static – pushing back the distant sounds of traffic on the main road. Scrub and small trees interact with the reeds at the margins, their autumn bounty of fruits already well advanced. The blackberries are almost over, but the sloes are plump and mature with the promise of a warming winter spirit to come.

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

Name: Iced coffee.

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

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

As experts fear for future of UK capital’s bus network, some commuters are giving up entirely. London is not alone – with worrying implications for the poorest in society

Experts warn that slower buses risk driving passengers away: research cited by Transport for London (TfL) suggests a 10% fall in speed leads to a 6% drop in demand.

Passenger journeys in London have already fallen by more than 300m a year, or 16%, since 2013, despite the city’s population growing by almost a million people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’d like to hear from people who have stayed together or continued living together after separating because they can’t afford to live on their own

The average length of marriages ending in divorce in England and Wales has reached a record high, with lawyers suggesting that financial pressures may be causing some couples to delay separating.

Rising housing, childcare and other living costs can make the prospect of maintaining two households difficult or unaffordable. Meanwhile, some separated couples are continuing to live under the same roof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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