Daniel’s boyfriend thinks his youthful complexion is down to fancy skincare, and Jessica’s nearest and dearest still don’t know she’s had a breast enhancement …

Jessica was at a spa with her friends of more than 20 years when she noticed one stare at her bikini, lock eyes with her and laugh, before asking: “Wait, have you …?” The game was up – eight months after she’d had a secret breast enhancement, she’d been rumbled. Fearing judgment from even her closest circle, she had only spoken to two people who’d had the procedure, for advice, and told a neighbour in case she was unwell after the surgery. “My family still don’t know – most people don’t,” the 42-year-old from London says, including her two children who live between her and her ex-husband. “I’m not alone; I’ve since learned winter is the most popular time for people to get things done, then they can just hide under jumpers while everything settles in, so no one notices.”

For years, celebrities have endured public speculation about their tweakments and surgeries – but as procedures become more commonplace, “civilian” patients are facing the same questions from family and friends. And many of them are choosing to go incognito; some surgeons estimate up to 70% of their clients aren’t telling others about their aesthetic procedures. But what are the practicalities of disguising everything from breast augmentation to filler to hair transplants from your closest circle? And why are so many people spending thousands of pounds to alter their appearance – only to hope that no one notices?

They rule the roads and, in their wake, even old-style saloons have been supersized. It’s an illusion of consumer choice

Recently, while traipsing from showroom to showroom in search of a used car for my growing clan, the iconic line from Christopher Nolan’s seminal Batman movie The Dark Knight came to mind: “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” And by villain, of course, I mean an SUV driver.

Because, if you haven’t shopped for a secondhand family car recently, I’ll save you the shock: wherever you look, it’s SUVs.

More direct flights from North America and, say tourism chiefs, Highland warriors and Tartan Army have helped

For the tourist industry, 2026 has been a rocky year, with war, EU border delays, climate and economic woes gnawing away at holiday plans. But while much of Britain is feeling the loss of visitors from the Middle East and beyond, one part is thriving.

Scotland is reeling in ever more visitors, with strong annual growth and a 15% rise in flight bookings to Scottish airports in June and July, compared with a drop in bookings to London and the rest of England in recent months, according to VisitBritain figures.

Boats carrying hundreds of people are a clear and alarming trend. But where do such large vessels come from?

Providing a large dinghy for use in the choppy seas of western Europe was not a problem, as long as the order was for more than 20 vessels, they said. The sales manager at the Chinese company even had an online brochure for an undercover Guardian reporter, posing as a prospective client, to peruse.

They had a production capacity of 500 boats a month and, yes, it was possible to get even bigger ones for the right price. They could do a seven or even an eight-metre military-style dinghy for $1,678 (£1,238) a boat, without the engines, but that would be lacking CE certification, the mandatory mark that shows a product meets EU health and safety requirements.

Additional reporting by Lyndon Li

The New York congresswoman’s power is in the spotlight as people wonder if the stars are finally aligning for her to run for US president in 2028

“They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

The words were delivered slowly, deliberately and with some steeliness by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her audience, crammed into the pews of Rockefeller Memorial chapel at the University of Chicago, burst into spontaneous applause. That was in May. In the three months since, the speculation around Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions – for herself and for America – has only grown louder.

The British writer is known for his unique ability to get inside the heads of serial killers. But a Guardian investigation reveals multiple accusations of assault and child sexual abuse. What is the truth about the man described by his own daughter as ‘absolute evil’?

Warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual abuse and violence

From the outside, it looked like the sort of happy family home a child might draw. Red brick, surrounded by rolling countryside, in Curdridge, near Winchester. Here lived the true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee, with his second wife, Tracey Dee, and their two young daughters, Zoe and Sasha, in the early 1990s. Inside, it was a house of horrors, full of murder memorabilia. In a wardrobe were the clothes a nine-year-old girl had been murdered in. One afternoon, Zoe was playing when she found them. The now 38-year-old council worker from Romsey says she remembers “putting it all on … going downstairs and everyone being absolutely traumatised”. Later, another gruesome memento was added to the collection: the Austin Metro that convicted murderer Michael Sams had used to transport a body in 1991. Bloodied sections of the seatbelts had been cut out for forensic tests.

Berry-Dee was the serial killer man. He wrote to convicted murderers in jail and befriended them. They told him everything. Through them he saw the terror in their victims’ eyes, watched their anguished death throes, heard their final screams. He listened to tapes of their confessions in his study. Zoe grew used to hearing them echo through the house. “It would always be on,” she says. “At the time, it felt normal.”

Exclusive: More than 100 homes on King Charles and Prince William’s inherited estates have EPC ratings of F or G

• ‘It’s archaic’: the struggle to heat poorly insulated homes let by royal estates

More than 100 homes on the inherited royal estates of King Charles and Prince William fail to meet the legal minimum energy standards for landlords, the Guardian can reveal.

An analysis of a large sample of domestic lets on the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall and the Sandringham estate found that one in five have Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings of F or G.

Andy Burnham calls for reflection after ‘tragedy on so many levels’ in comments echoed by London mayor Sadiq Khan

Andy Burnham has called the death of Jason Arday, whose body was found at his home in south London on Friday, a “tragedy on so many levels”.

Arday resigned as a professor at the University of Cambridge last week after allegations of plagiarism, which he denied. He was pronounced dead just after 3pm on Friday.

Border security tightened after social media posts call for another mass crossing into Spain’s north African territory

Moroccan police have arrested 111 people as they tried to enter Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta, amid ⁠tightened security on both sides after social media posts ​called for another mass crossing.

The attempted crossing on Saturday came two weeks after more than 72,000 migrants surged into Ceuta, causing tensions within the EU and prompting anti-immigration rhetoric among far-right parties worldwide. At least 96 people died trying to ⁠reach European soil.

Fans line streets, singing Total Eclipse of the Heart ahead of Welsh singer’s Swansea funeral

Thousands of Bonnie Tyler fans lined the streets of her home town in south Wales to pay respects to the singer as her coffin was brought back to her former home.

The singer, whose real name was Gaynor Sullivan, died unexpectedly on 8 July in Portugal at the age of 75.

Many complained online that piercingly loud tone was ‘overreach’ while others lamented lack of action on decarbonisation

On Friday at 7pm, Thérèse Coffey was nine miles away from a nuclear power station when her phone made a loud, piercing and very worrying sound: it was a “severe” emergency alert. “Was expecting [a] much more specific alert, not a generic message on wildfires,” the former Conservative cabinet minister said on X.

She wasn’t alone in being alarmed by the alarm sent to phones in England and Wales. In the aftermath, thousands of social media users expressed their shock at alert. Some shared funny memes and others lamented what they viewed as lack of government action on decarbonisation. Academic John Ritzema called it a “massive overreach” and said the alert system should be “be for ‘drop everything and prepare for something terrible’ situations”, something Coffey echoed, saying alerts should not become commonplace to avoid “Peter cries wolf situations”.

Campaigners fear deeper diplomatic contacts are undermining demands for improvements in human rights

The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.

Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.

Family paid tribute to Bristol University geology student, 18, after being notified by Avon and Somerset police

A body has been found in the search for an 18-year-old British man who went missing last year while hiking in Romania, UK police said.

George Smyth, a geology student at the University of Bristol, went missing in November.

Alex McKee died when picking up showerhead in ‘outdoor and rudimentary’ bathroom on Kimolos

The death of an Irish teenager, electrocuted while taking a shower in a holiday home in Greece, has led to calls for tighter checks on appliances at tourist accommodation.

Alex McKee, 17, is said to have died instantly when picking up the showerhead in a bathroom described as “outdoor and rudimentary” on Kimolos.

British Museum’s £33 tickets sold out in a day but some slots have been reserved for guests at five-star One Aldwych

Those hoping to snare a glimpse of the Bayeux tapestry when it comes to the British Museum this September faced nine-hour online queues, with the £33 tickets sold out within a day.

But the monied guests of a five-star hotel in Covent Garden have not had to go to such arduous lengths to get a view of the nearly 1,000-year-old depiction of William the Conqueror’s victory over King Harold II of England at Hastings in 1066.

Peter Ruis appeared ‘to be doing a good job in difficult circumstances’ at department store chain, says analyst

“Going up?” After a tough week for department stores it feels as if that sales aspiration is as dated as the singsong phrase in the opening credits of Are You Being Served? Simpsons of Piccadilly, which inspired the fictional Grace Brothers department store in which the 1970s TV sitcom was set, is long gone, and several of its modern equivalents are now fighting oblivion.

The boss of John Lewis, Peter Ruis, clearly decided it was time to exit the elevator this week, announcing his abrupt departure from the UK’s biggest department store chain in a surprise statement. Days later, Harvey Nichols, the luxury Knightsbridge store that was once a byword for 1990s chic, was bought out of administration for a knock-down price by the owner of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group.

Brazil’s president was union chief who led metalworkers’ strikes of 1979-80 that paved the way for return of democracy

Day after day, tens of thousands of metalworkers would cram on to the football pitch in São Paulo’s industrial suburbs to demand higher wages and, perhaps unwittingly, transform the destiny of Brazil.

“You weren’t just documenting a fact – you were documenting history,” said photographer Jesus Carlos, who immortalised the now legendary strikes of 1979 and 1980 with his 24mm lens.

A number of idyllic-looking homes in estates owned by King Charles and Prince William do not meet energy standards for rentals

• Royal estates rent out homes that fail to meet legal energy efficiency standards

This summer, the duchy of Cornwall got a new-look website with a bold statement of intent at the top: “We’re on a mission to become a world-leading impact organisation.”

Updating the website will have been the easiest part of that mission. Upgrading hundreds of ageing, mostly rural, rented cottages, farmhouses and country houses will be one of the hardest.

Eddie Botha felt an easy connection with Jennifer. But when she went away for a trip, he thought that was the end of their growing romance

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I met Jennifer at a Guy Sebastian concert in Kuala Lumpur in 2005. It was strange I was there because I’m kind of anti-pop music, but we were introduced there by a mutual friend. We didn’t talk that much but I immediately liked Jen and invited her to dinner the following week.

That first date wasn’t in a fancy restaurant and we sat in the corner and talked for over an hour. I liked that she wasn’t at all bothered by the simplicity of the dining room. Being a foreigner in Malaysia, I immediately felt with Jen that there wasn’t as much of a culture gap as I’d felt with others. I could talk to her easily and was struck by her warmth and openness. And it was there that I first heard her laugh beaming out across the room, a pure, joyous sound.

This tense, powerful six-parter starkly captures the nation’s slide into oppressive terror. Its capturing of a shameful moment in history is hugely vivid

The final episode of Kabul pointedly soundtracks its opening scene with a speech given by George W Bush when America invaded Afghanistan in 2001. “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies,” Bush’s teleprompter tells him to say. “The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people.”

This taut six-part thriller, a pan-European co-production, is set in Afghanistan’s capital in August 2021, at the end of a 20-year western intervention that has, ultimately, not delivered the stated goal of freeing the country’s people from the fundamentalist authoritarianism of the Taliban regime. To the contrary, the Taliban are ready to install a more fearsome version of their old government as soon as the scheduled withdrawal of the Americans and their European allies takes place.

Kabul aired on BBC Four and is available on iPlayer in the UK and on SBS On Demand in Australia

Converts describe a demanding form of capturing nature very close up that has grown in popularity in last few years

• Vote here for your favourite invertebrate of the year

“I always just pray ‘please don’t fly away’,” says Dara Ojo. As a wildlife photographer, he can handle spending minutes, hours and sometimes days waiting for the shot, but insects are not always very cooperative.

Ojo is one of an increasing number of photographers turning their lenses towards something smaller: macro photography. This refers to photographing the natural world at an extremely close range, close enough to see the facets of a fly’s eye, or the geometry of a spider’s face.

The comedian and actor on her love for White Chicks, getting a bad Yelp review as a dog walker and doing stand-up during an earthquake

You went to film school; what movie do you rewatch or return to most?

This would not be an answer that my film school would respect, or expect: White Chicks by the Wayans brothers. It’s about two brothers who are pretending to be rich white girls from the Hamptons. I love when something’s super stupid and silly, and there’s a scene where this group of [white] girls is in the car singing, and the two brothers have to pretend to know Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve been there!”

Dominic Sessa plays Anthony Bourdain in a fun biopic, and the ever-danceable UK funksters are back with a sun-dappled new album

Tony
Out now
This comic biopic of Anthony Bourdain focuses on the celebrity chef and documentarian’s late adolescence, as he gets a summer job at a restaurant in Cape Cod at the age of 19. Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) plays Bourdain, with Matt Johnson directing. Rich Sommer, Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas also star.

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

A young woman battles social strictures in 1890s Australia in a charming period drama series, while the sonic experimentalist drops the drone metal for goth rock. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Guardian Australia’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Jacqueline Housden

• Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here

Welcome to the weekend. If you’ve woken up wondering why we haven’t yet met extraterrestrial beings, how to protect kids against the rise of brain-rotting AI slop, or how to break the ice with a true blue Australian, then you have come to the right place.

Five years since the Taliban returned to power, life – especially for women – is awful. We must keep the people’s stories alive and hope they will be free again

There are fewer and fewer stories coming out of the land of my birth. Before, I would open Instagram and see my cousins, lip-syncing to trending videos, posing with flowers at a rose garden or at a trendy cafe in their coolest outfits, keeping a record of their lives. I would hear British-Afghan friends talk about their recent trips to the provinces, towns and cities of their foremothers and the buzz of learning about their heritage. I would eagerly await the latest music video from Afghanistan’s many pop stars, all vying to become the hottest track played at weddings, not just in Afghanistan but all over the world. Afghanistan, its culture, and people felt closer back then.

Five years ago today, the brittle peace of the fragile new democracy was shattered by the withdrawal of western military, diplomatic and charitable groups that had intervened in the country’s fate since 2001. Overnight, on Sunday, 15 August 2021, Afghanistan was undone and abandoned.

Nelufar Hedayat is an Afghan-British journalist, and the presenter and co-director of the documentary In Real Life: the God Thieves

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

The pattern in the US and Britain is clear. They serve up stunt after stunt to mask incompetence and the betrayal of all those who trusted them

It’s a shame Nigel Farage ducked the announcement of his victory in the Clacton byelection, which confirmed his return as MP for the seat he had needlessly resigned from just a few weeks earlier. You’d have thought he would have loved it. It was the culmination of a stunt, an exercise in politics as performance. It was a display animated by – and seeking to inflame – grievance, a million miles away from the hard, grinding work of tackling the problems that underlie those grievances. It was an attempt to deflect scrutiny, distract attention and evade responsibility. It was, in other words, everything nationalist populists like him excel at. Indeed, the only thing.

Reform UK said Farage stayed away because Essex police had warned of a “credible threat” to his security, a claim swiftly denied by Essex police. (Add a flexible approach to the truth to that list of nationalist populists’ talents.) Still, it was a slightly odd claim to make. Recall Farage’s favoured explanation – there are others – for the undeclared £5m gift he received from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, which prompted the very parliamentary investigation that so riled the Reform leader he felt compelled to quit his seat and seek a preemptive not guilty verdict from the people of Clacton: namely, that he needed the money to pay for private, enhanced security. It seems £5m was not quite enough to ensure the lucky recipient would be safe standing next to a man dressed as a bin.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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

The Reform leader claims vindication from the people, and it’s too early to write him off. But the problems he now faces may be more than he can bear

Nigel Farage is a rattled, embattled politician. Perhaps he feels buoyed up by securing slightly more votes in a byelection boycotted by all the main parties than he did in the general election two years ago. That was despite 10,000 fewer people turning out to vote. But there was never any question that he was going to win a byelection he called purely to deflect scrutiny of his undeclared £5m personal gift from a Thai-based crypto-billionaire and donations from a convicted fraudster.

Farage chose Clacton as his parliamentary launchpad for a reason. It was here that his previous outfit, Ukip, secured its breakthrough in the byelection of 2014. It is one of the most pro-leave seats in Britain, while Electoral Calculus estimates that almost no other constituency is this rightwing.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

AOC’s remarks about past excesses have been ripped out of context. Progressives shouldn’t get roped into this sideshow

There is probably no word that has been more used and abused in the last decade than “woke”. It has been rendered completely meaningless, but it refuses to die. Indeed, it has now taken on new life: in the past week, there’s been a flurry of headlines about “Woke 1.0” or “Woke One”. If you haven’t seen the phrase pop up in your newsfeed yet, it will soon.

So what is this cursed phrase? There’s no official definition, but the term is largely being used to refer to the period between 2018 and 2021 when social justice language was at its peak in mainstream culture. Certain progressives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have started to use “Woke 1” disparagingly, as a way to distance themselves from that period and signal that they stand for a new form of left-leaning politics that is more palatable to centrist Democrats. “Woke 2”, I suppose.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

'I know my age group has called the young lazy, entitled snowflakes,' says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, who has been writing for the Guardian for nearly 50 years. 'But I know whose side I’m on and it’s not my own generation’s.'

Polly believes that the social contract between younger and older generations has been broken, with gen Z and millennials set to be worse off than their parents in the face of soaring unemployment, stagnating wages and ballooning house prices.

New research carried out for the BBC suggests that people in their 20s are facing a worse start to adulthood than any other generation in almost half a century, with more than 40% of 25-year-olds now living with their parents.

Watch to find out why Polly thinks her generation owes the younger ones an apology - and how they can right these wrongs

Weather forecasts once gave Britons something safe to chat about. Not any more, and that’s a problem for the experts – indeed, for all of us

In this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. Collectively, we have created and maintained a national climate narrative of small disappointments and pleasures. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that “tomorrow would be rather windy”, but “a good day to hang out the washing”. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.

Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. “Met Office considers issuing red ‘extreme heat warning’ across Britain while nation enjoys ‘incredible summer’,” said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website on Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have increasingly struggled to find the right language to describe this transformation’s daily consequences. Their struggle influences and exemplifies that of many Britons to understand, and work out what we think about, the apparent end of the weather patterns we expected to shape our whole lives.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Plus, heartbreakingly brilliant Cats: the Jellicle Ball, summer reads and Taylor Swift’s low-key wedding

I’ve been in New York for two weeks, where the unthinkable has happened. Even for a city accustomed to extremes, it is so hot, so humid, so reminiscent of Mobile in Alabama, or Mumbai that, all over New York, people have been forced to break persona to talk about the weather. “Was it always like this?” (No.) “Can you believe this?” (No.) “Are you having a stroke?” (Possibly.)

Reform won a contrived byelection, but scrutiny continues – while the party increasingly attacks the watchdogs and journalists asking awkward questions

Nigel Farage didn’t attend the count of the byelection he forced upon Clacton. Instead, Reform UK’s leader celebrated his win with supporters at a “Farage Fest”, filmed by a friendly TV channel. For a politician who claims to speak for the people, it was telling that at his triumph he preferred an audience of believers.

Mr Farage won because his toughest opponent on the campaign trail was a comedian in a jumpsuit with a bin on his head. That Count Binface nevertheless won 27% of the vote captured the absurdity of a contest the main parties had boycotted as a Faragist stunt. Reform UK’s leader wanted to turn scrutiny of his finances – notably an investigation into whether he failed to report a £5m gift from an overseas crypto billionaire – into a “fight” with the “establishment”. But the result determined who represents the Essex seat, not whether he broke parliamentary or electoral rules.

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.

In an unexpected twist, a Hollywood epic has contributed to Britain’s best-ever half-year in poetry sales

In a short story called Career Move, published in the New Yorker in 1992, Martin Amis imagined a world in which screenwriters wrote for little magazines and earned a pittance while poets were global superstars. Amis’s story, a wonderfully ironic inversion of the time-honoured norm, was surprisingly prescient: the film and TV industries have been struggling, with screenwriters facing contracting outlets for their creations, whereas poets are now big business.

The Bookseller reported recently that poetry sales were at a historic high. Part of the increase can be attributed to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, which has made Homer hot: editions of The Odyssey and its prequel, The Iliad, have garnered almost £1m in book sales in the UK this year. (As well as valiantly trying to keep the ailing film industry afloat, Nolan has also created a craze for epic poetry.) But Nolan’s film does not solely account for the boom in poetry sales. Even without the Homer run, sales of poetry texts and anthologies were still up by 7.2% from what was historically already a very high base.

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.

Kevin Lloyd is angered by the sheer impunity that radiates from users and calls for regulation

There may be something in the argument identified by Andy Beckett that increased use of ebikes reflects broader changes in urban areas, including the cost of housing (Lime bikes hurtling around the city: is this the revenge of a priced-out generation?, 8 August). Yet none of that excuses the sheer impunity that radiates from ebike users, worsened by the design of city bikes which encourage the rider to sit back as if on a magic steed from which to survey their kingdom.

Their irresponsibility imposes externalities on other road users and pedestrians: riding through red lights and across junctions with no heed to other traffic, wearing headphones (but seemingly never helmets), being on the phone or apparently scrolling while riding, carelessly weaving just to maintain a conversation, riding far too fast on paths shared with pedestrians, dropping bikes like litter. As for riding home after drinking in the pub – seriously?

Guardian readers reflect on the ableism rife in the debate about Ray-Ban Meta eyewear, despite the life-changing difference they can make

Your editorial on Meta’s smart glasses acknowledges their value to blind and visually impaired people, then asks that this “not be allowed to distract” from the harms (The Guardian view on Meta’s smart glasses: regulators must get on the front foot, 10 August). As an optometrist who owns a small independent practice, I’d suggest that it is visually impaired people who are being treated as the distraction.

I was reluctant to stock Ray‑Ban Meta, having no fondness for Meta or Luxottica, but colleagues persuaded me of the benefits for people with sight impairment. The reality has surpassed that. The majority of our buyers have a visual impairment or learning difficulty. One man, practically illiterate, now has the world read to him.

Cathy Scott-Willars responds to an article about the secret lives of theatre workers

I enjoyed your article (The secret lives of theatre workers: ‘People were having full sex in the stalls’, 9 August). I worked many roles front of house and later as operations manager at a busy regional theatre, and it has provided me with some of the most entertaining stories.

My favourite was working at a performance of The Rocky Horror Show in the large main theatre, while in the smaller studio was a play aimed at teenagers. The programming team had provided some post-show entertainment in the form of a DJ and breakdancer for the studio show, which happened to time with the interval of Rocky Horror. The scene I was met with was an usher crying, a furious college tutor shouting at her because her students had witnessed a man in a corset and thong attempt breakdancing, and his balls had fallen out, exposing himself.

Stephen Moss and Stephen Moss find the humour in having the same name and working for the same company

At least the Guardian’s Ewan Murray and Sky Sports’ Ewen Murray work for different outlets (A tale of two Murrays: when Ewan met Ewen to talk Tiger Woods, stiff gins and 15 years of mistaken identity, 8 August). Stephen Moss (former literary editor, and chess and classical music expert) and I (Birdwatch columnist) both write for the Guardian, causing endless confusion.

A member of Sedgemoor chess club once told me that “We would be very honoured if you could come and give us a game” (they wouldn’t), while a woman, after admitting that she “quite enjoyed” my birding articles, spoiled it by adding “but when you write about classical music, it’s absolutely wonderful!”

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Kate O’Connor (Ireland) 5,812pts
Emma Oosterwegel (Netherlands) 5,761pts
Sofie Dokter (Netherlands) 5,741pts
Annik Kälin (Switzerland) 5,707pts
Sophie Weißenberg (Germany) 5,689pts

Wembley curtain-raiser can offer clues but it is no reliable pointer to a season – its winners have not landed the title since 2018

The doubt for anyone when a long-strived-for goal has been achieved is hunger. Arsenal waited 22 years for their 14th league title and, compounding the yearning, finished second three times in a row before finally lifting the Premier League trophy in May. The physical exertions of last season were immense – as seen by Declan Rice’s clear exhaustion and Bukayo Saka’s intermittent contributions at the World Cup, where William Saliba picked up a back injury – but so too was the emotional strain.

The first weeks of a new season after a major tournament, especially the World Cup, are often a little erratic anyway, but this feels like a particularly unpredictable start to a campaign. Nine of the 20 Premier League clubs have changed manager this summer. For the first time in 40 years, none of the five big managerial beasts of the Premier League era – Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola – will be in charge of a club. There are unknowns and uncertainty everywhere, even at Arsenal. Mikel Arteta may be the longest-serving manager in the league but there are questions even there; it would be no great surprise if Arsenal were to start slowly.

• Lankshear ends Lincoln’s nine-month unbeaten run

• Millwall start with 2-0 win over 10-man Bristol City

Will Lankshear scored a second-half double on his debut as Middlesbrough fought back to kick off their Championship campaign with a hard-fought 2-1 victory, ending promoted Lincoln’s remarkable nine-month unbeaten run.

The Imps – playing their first second-tier match in 65 years – made a strong start and opened the scoring in the 12th minute through Adam Reach. But the former Tottenham forward Lankshear marked his first league appearance since his move to the Riverside by equalising just after the hour and then stabbing in a stoppage-time winner.

In spite of a 2-1 loss to Bayer Leverkusen, the new head coach at St James’ Park showed signs he is on the right path, and is closing in on Benfica’s Amar Dedic

Reasons to be fearful or cause to be cheerful? Newcastle fans among a crowd in excess of 39,000 at St James’ Park on Saturday had much to debate as they headed home from a slightly underwhelming 2-1 friendly defeat by Bayer Leverkusen.

The bad news is that a suddenly youthful team still coming to terms with life without this summer’s departed stars, Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimarães, look more than a little undercooked before Liverpool’s visit on Premier League duty next Sunday.

Women’s football has much to gain from the kind of reforms that threats to snub upcoming tournaments might prompt. Infantino should be taken on

“And I say to all the women … Pick the right battles. Pick the right fights. You have the power to change. You have the power to convince us men what we have to do and what we don’t have to do. You do it. Just do it. With men, with Fifa, you will find open doors. Just push the doors. They are open.”

Those were the condescending words of Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, three years ago during a tone-deaf speech in Sydney, which left his audience, including some of the most senior women in the game, exasperated. It is a damning indictment of Infantino’s tenure that his patronising monologue on the eve of the Women’s World Cup final now barely even creeps into the top 10 of the most controversial moments since his latest re-election, in March 2023.

• 19-year-old killed on Friday by collision with van

• ‘We will continue to hold Fin in our hearts’

Finlay Tarling’s NSN Development team withdrew from the Volta a Portugal on Saturday, the day after the death of the 19-year-old British rider in an accident during the race.

Tarling, the younger brother of the Ineos rider Josh, was reportedly involved in a head-on collision with a vehicle unconnected with the event that was travelling in the opposite direction.

• Belgian would be first non-Scot in role since Berti Vogts

• Scotland face Slovenia on 26 September in Nations League

The Scottish Football Association hopes to name the Belgian Sébastien Pocognoli as the successor to Steve Clarke as manager early next week. The 39-year-old, who was sacked by Monaco in June, will become the country’s first non-Scottish manager since Berti Vogts, who was in charge from 2002-04.

Clarke’s abrupt departure came as Scotland exited the World Cup at the group stage. He had signed a four-year contract extension immediately before the tournament. It quickly became clear the SFA would turn towards a foreign manager; Jon Dahl Tomasson and Kasper Hjulmand were linked with the position.

Quake struck Flores region early on Saturday, prompting thousands to seek higher ground for fear of a tsunami

A 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck eastern Indonesia has killed at least 47 people, causing widespread panic and collapsing buildings and homes in a region prone to deadly seismic events.

Rescuers have yet to reach Nagekeo, the area closest to the epicentre, because roads were blocked by landslides and communications disrupted.

In one court in Kent, most cases relate to term-time holidays, but non-attendance is a complex issue and post-pandemic rates remain high

As the long school summer break approached its mid-point recently, Margate beach was crowded with families enjoying the brief reprieve between the year’s fourth and fifth heatwaves. For most, thoughts of the classroom were probably not at the forefront of their minds.

But for the seven mothers and two fathers who were summoned at 10am to a stuffy room in the town’s magistrates court, set just behind the beachfront strip of arcades, the subject was unavoidable. They were among hundreds of parents due in courts across England this month for failing to ensure their children had regularly attended school over the course of the last academic year.

Paper mill activity has exploded in recent years, polluting the scientific ecosystem with falsified data and compromising medical research

Dr Reese Richardson’s phone constantly buzzes with notifications. The scientific research integrity specialist has been tracking shadowy organisations known as “paper mills”, which turn a profit by offering fraudulent academic authorship of scientific papers, IP registrations and other scholarly outputs.

For a fee, paper mills offer to list people as authors of scientific journal articles, often of falsified research that bypasses the peer review process.

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Death toll now stands at 68, with 18 children among the killed after ferry capsized on Lake Kariba

Twenty-two more bodies have been recovered after a boat accident in Zimbabwe, taking the death toll to 68, police said on Saturday.

The ferry capsized on Tuesday on Lake Kariba, on the border with Zambia. An investigation has suggested it was overloaded when it turned over during heavy winds.

School said shooting involved ‘multiple suspects’ as campus was locked down and police responded to scene

Multiple people were injured in a shooting at Virginia State University (VSU), police said on Saturday morning, with several suspects still at large.

The campus, about 20 miles (32km) south of Richmond, was temporarily put on lockdown as police released initial details about the shooting.

Thursday has been described by residents as ‘horrendous’, ‘distressing’ and ‘one of the scariest days of my life’

People in Stourbridge have described the fires that devastated more than a dozen homes as “horrendous” and “distressing”, with one describing blazes that surpassed the height of residential houses.

Multiple fires spread across the West Midlands on Thursday as temperatures reached record highs of 38.1C in the UK, during the country’s fifth consecutive heatwave.

Figures disclosed by 33 NHS trusts show temperatures on wards during July rose above 28C limit set by NHS England

Hospitals in England have recorded temperatures of almost 42C this summer, with surgeries being cancelled because operating theatres’ cooling units stopped working in the intense heat.

The Northern Care Alliance NHS foundation trust, which runs four hospitals in Greater Manchester, recorded a temperature of 41.8C during last month’s heatwave – 14C above the recommended safe maximum.

Some patients are also cancelling their own surgery because it is too hot for them to travel.

Hospitals and GP surgeries are offering frail elderly patients appointments at the start and end of the day, when it is less hot, to make it easier for them to attend.

Ambulance services are struggling to keep some medications at the right temperature because it gets so hot in the back of their vehicles.

NHS ambulance trusts have relaxed their usual dress code rules to help crews stay cooler, for example by wearing shorts rather than trousers

One person killed and hundreds evacuated in Croatia as blazes also hit Germany, Greece and Spain

Almost 500 people have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France since the start of the summer, authorities have said, as firefighters in half a dozen European countries tackle ferocious blazes amid a record-breaking heatwave.

A fire engulfed ⁠homes in a Croatian holiday resort on Friday, killing one person, injuring 40 and forcing 1,200 to evacuate, officials said, as the EU warned that pockets of “very extreme” wildfire conditions stretched across the continent.

Yorkshire common was thought to be the only known site of dark bordered beauty moths in England – until now

• Vote here for your favourite invertebrate of the year

Dave Wainwright first surveyed Wallington in Northumberland for a rare custard-and-chocolate coloured moth in 2004. He parked two miles from the site, hauled a moth trap across, and was bitten by a million flies.

He did not find a single dark bordered beauty that night. The ground was heavily grazed by sheep, and the creeping willow the caterpillars depend on was “quite well plucked”.

London police force tells Telegraph incident was result of ‘human error’ and it is conducting an investigation

The Metropolitan police have apologised for accidentally exposing the email addresses of more than 140 victims of Mohamed Al Fayed.

In a group update about its investigation into the former Harrods owner, the force copied the email addresses of 143 victims of Fayed in a message that included about 12 other recipients, the Telegraph reported.

Heathrow says airport operating as normal after passengers told not to travel by road and use rail and tube instead

Disruptions caused by flooding from a burst water main on a ring road at Heathrow airport restricted access to Terminals 2 and 3 on Saturday morning. The leak has been contained and the affected areas are operating as normal.

Water in the central terminal area prevented anyone trying to travel by road to or from Terminals 2 and 3. Passengers had to travel by rail and tube instead. Access to the carparks was also impeded, leaving people with parked cars unable to access them.

Students narrowly missing grades are being rejected, while some on oversubscribed courses are asked to defer

Students across the UK have found themselves unexpectedly squeezed out of their desired university courses as this year’s bumper crop of A-level grades ​h​as not always translated into ​​the places many were hoping for.

​With close to a third of the A-levels awarded in England, Wales and Northern Ireland achieving the top A and A* grades this year, universities are taking a tougher stance by rejecting students who narrowly missed their expected grades and who in previous years would still have gained a place.

Results from coastal town of Clacton have been interpreted positively by Nigel Farage and Count Binface, but one spoiled ballot tells its own story

• UK politics live – latest updates

It ended, perhaps fittingly, on a rather baffling note. After 34 days of campaigning to regain the parliamentary seat of Clacton on England’s east coast, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, declined to turn up to the town’s leisure centre to hear himself declared the winner and MP. It was quite the thing. The last high-profile winning candidate to fail to enjoy his moment of victory was Bobby Sands in 1981. The IRA man had his reasons: he was on hunger strike in a prison in Northern Ireland, and went on to die 26 days later.

Instead Farage attended a gathering of his supporters at an airfield on the outskirts of Clacton billed by his party as “Farage Fest”. He told fans he would be damned if he was going to stand on a stage “having won a resounding victory” and “be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

Rescue services search for survivors and bodies after airstrikes hit homes in Ansar and Deir al-Zahrani

Eleven people have been killed, including three children, and 19 injured in two Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon, the worst toll since deals in June brought a lull in hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israeli warplanes bombed a home on the outskirts of the village of Ansar, killing seven people and flattening the building early on Saturday morning. Rescue services were working at the site to try to find survivors and locate bodies.

Development comes after Anthropic was found to have spent millions on books to scan for ‘data acquisition’

Secondhand booksellers in the UK and Ireland are reporting a flurry of bulk orders from mystery buyers, amid speculation AI companies are acquiring the tomes for their data.

Bookshops contacted by the Guardian say they have been receiving orders from buyers in the US, Canada, continental Europe and the UK. The increase has been replicated around the world, with booksellers in the US, Australia and Europe also reporting unusual orders.

Apparent high level of removal orders suggests Sweden is rejecting ‘reasonable grounds’ for failing to apply to stay

Back in October 2020, the UK immigration minister stood up in parliament to reassure campaigners concerned about EU citizens who weren’t aware they had to ask the Home Office to stay in the country after Brexit.

Using an example of a child in foster care who might not know they were an EU citizen until they applied for their first job, the Conservative Kevin Foster said the UK would take “a generous approach as to what reasonable grounds [for failing to apply] were”.

Inside ‘mega master’ calendar hearings, the new tactic of scheduling hearings on short notice and deporting the people who don’t show up

A man in line for the elevator bank at the federal immigration court in San Antonio, Texas, on a morning in mid-July told the security guard that he had an attorney. “You’re special,” the guard replied, with genuine surprise.

Upstairs, inside Brittany A Rodriquez’s courtroom, the young judge with stark blond highlights gave an asylum seeker a month-and-a-half to turn around an application for protection or be ordered deported. Another person who told her “I don’t have a lawyer, I only have God” was given until September to find legal representation, or the judge indicated she would move forward with the case regardless.

Chinese-owned AESC has pushed back plans in sign of slowing transition from petrol and diesel to electric cars

• Andy Burnham moves to cut new EV sales targets

The UK’s biggest gigafactory has shelved plans to expand production in Sunderland because of stalled talks on a deal to supply electric car batteries to Jaguar Land Rover.

Chinese-owned AESC produces batteries for Nissan at its gigafactory next door to the Japanese carmaker’s Sunderland plant. However, AESC has had to push back its ramp-up plans because of lower-than-expected demand from Nissan and the lack of a deal with JLR, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Users need discretionary income of nearly £100,000 a year to make savings on their grocery spend after paying £1,200 for GLP-1s, analysis finds

The high cost of weight-loss medication is a “regressive tax on being thin” because the outlay outweighs any saving on food costs for all but the highest earners.

Someone needs to have discretionary income of nearly £100,000 a year to actually save money after covering the £1,200 annual cost of GLP-1 medication, according to an analysis by the consultancy Baringa.

Fan blade broke off shortly after takeoff on 10 July flight from Greece to Germany, preliminary findings show

• Business live – latest updates

Broken engine parts were responsible for shattering a window on a Ryanair plane, causing a passenger to be partly sucked out mid-flight in July, US investigators have said.

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found an engine fan blade broke off shortly after takeoff on the 10 July flight from Greece to Germany shattering the window and damaging the fuselage.

Frasers Group acquires majority of upmarket retailer’s sites from the administrators

• Business live – latest updates

The owner of Sports Direct has bought Harvey Nichols out of administration after the upmarket department store chain warned it could run out of money if it did not find new funding.

Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group said on Thursday it had bought the chain, which is headquartered at its store in Knightsbridge, for an undisclosed sum on the day it was put into administration. Sources said he had paid about £40m for Harvey Nichols, which has 1,200 employees and 13 stores.

Edinburgh film festival
Luis Gnecco brings warmth, wit and quiet melancholy to Jorge Luis Borges in this gently enchanting adaptation of Jay Parini’s semi-fictional memoir

There is great sweetness and high-minded, unworldly charm in this adaptation of American author Jay Parini’s embellished memoir, a romantic account of his road trip through the Scottish Highlands that, as a young doctoral student at St Andrews in 1971, he really did take with Jorge Luis Borges, the great writer whose blindness had become part of his mystique. Author of poetry, enigmatic short stories and metaphysical vignettes untranslatably known as the “ficciones”, Borges is described here as “the father of magical realism” – although he is surely more unique and interesting than that.

Parini drives Borges around, describes everything to the maestro (who is rapt and beaming), and shields him when he uninhibitedly urinates in public; all the while he is almost entirely unaware of Borges’ reputation and the enormous honour that this therefore was. Fionn Whitehead plays the callow young Parini, in specs and duffle coat resembling a young Tom Courtenay, wretched that he may have inadvertently persuaded his brother Billy back home to volunteer for military service in Vietnam. He is ungratefully grumpy that he has to spend time away from his PhD for this babysitting task, assigned to him by his supervisor, poet and Borges translator Alastair Reid, played by Alan Cumming.

Borges himself is entertainingly played by the Chilean actor Luis Gnecco; priestly, childlike, mischievous and sly, a performance executed with theatrical panache – I can imagine him doing it on stage – but without hammily overdoing the milky-eyed upward gaze. His Borges is a man who like all charming people has cultivated a dependency on others, and we can see how he has had a lifetime to deploy the combination of his huge reputation and the poignant helplessness of the blind. He has come to Scotland without a nurse or amanuensis and has to rely on the (cowed) kindness of strangers.

Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis faces trial on Monday over rap star’s death that marked notorious chapter in hip-hop’s history

In September 1996, rap star Tupac Shakur was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas strip, succumbing days later to his injuries. His killing, which remained unsolved for decades, gave rise to fervent conspiracy theories and conjecture.

Thirty years later, one man is facing trial for the ambush: Duane “Keffe D” Davis.

Edinburgh film festival
A women’s spiritualist investigation team go after the serial killer, braving evil forces conjured into being by fear, misogyny and political rage

Here is a cheerfully ingenious lo-fi movie experiment from first-time feature director Joseph Archer and writer-performer Cathy Wippel; it’s a found-footage horror with hints of Blair Witch and Peeping Tom, set in the Victorian London of Jack the Ripper. The footage that’s been found, incidentally, is composed of unearthed reels of monochrome film from the 1880s, which we see entirely in a kinetoscope-style circular screen, flickering and glitching and buzzing with eerie accidental jump cuts from one weird scene to the next.

It was supposedly shot by an enterprising pioneer called Tamworth (we hear his voice from behind the camera, but never see his face), who, it becomes clear, is a sensational and until now unacknowledged genius of early cinema – in that he manages to record lip-sync sound on to wax cylinders so we can actually hear what everyone is saying. With a cheeky touch of implied black comedy, the film is suggesting that Tamworth was somehow able to carry his camera and recording equipment to these places of Victorian horror and underclass shame as easily as an iPhone.

There is dignity and tenderness to this drama based on the real story of the Sixties Scoop – the scandal of First Nations children who were forcibly taken from their parents and adopted by white families

Here’s one you’ll like: a man comes home to find his wife handcuffed to the wall and his young children missing. They have been taken by child protection services due to the lack of a fridge in the house, which is treated as a sign of neglect. When he confronts law enforcement officials outside, they beat him to death. Decades later, one of the children, now adopted into a Jewish home in Montreal, goes looking for the family she lost, risking the collapse of her new life to do so. I never said it was a joke. Although it turns out there was a fridge, behind the house.

Watching Little Bird (18 August, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), I was reminded that TV is capable of more than mere entertainment, something we lose sight of when we think of it as a purely profit-or loss-making enterprise. I felt the visceral anger and sadness of this story of a First Nations woman caught between cultures, robbed by forces beyond her control and stonewalled by the authorities. Set in Canada, the attitude, if not the events, feel shamefully familiar.

How the US abandonment of the Afghan capital destroyed lives. Plus: celebrating Paul Simon’s legendary Graceland album at the Proms. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Four
When Joe Biden decided it was “time to end America’s longest war”, he set in motion a tragic and shameful train of events, dramatised in this gripping thriller. As Americans withdrew from Kabul the Taliban moved in, which meant hell for women, dissidents and anyone who had collaborated with the occupiers. Through the eyes of the Nazany family – trying to decide whether to stay or flee – Kabul illuminates the human dilemmas behind the geopolitics. Phil Harrison

Edinburgh film festival
A taut, dreamlike reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy strips away romance in favour of dread, creating an engrossing and fiercely physical dance film

Scottish Ballet, under the direction of Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom, gives us an engrossing dance riff on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The title alludes to Friar Lawrence saying, at the couple’s secret wedding ceremony, that “these violent delights have violent ends”, that their passion will consume itself in the act of marriage – which is true, but not in the way he thinks.

The ballet is fierce, athletic, knotty and sensual; it is not a filmed event beneath a proscenium arch but a film that inhabits its own theatrical space. The whole event is a radically impressionistic compression of the play’s action, bringing it down to just 70 minutes, an extended nightmarish dream sequence with a repeated and disturbing scene of Juliet being dragged across the grass by an unseen force. This version chucks out, among other things, the balcony scene, and it interestingly modifies the ending, suggesting that the double-suicide might not be a trick that goes wrong but an anguished mutual gesture of despair.

On their new album, Smith is subverting their singer-songwriter roots to tell a queer love story. They talk about their shifting fanbase, the nasty undercurrents of fame – and finding sanctuary in New York City

Sam Smith logs on to our video call with the username “Lily of the Valley”, the May-born singer’s birth flower. It sets a serene tone. They’re in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the latest stop of a residency tour, titled To Be Free, in support of their fifth studio album. Instead of Smith’s usual jet-lagged arena itinerary, this lower-key excursion stops at smaller venues in only six cities and sheds the ostentatious theatricality of their last outing.

On stage on their last tour, “I was flailing around on a massive gold bum and had, like, seven costume changes,” Smith says with a chuckle. It’s intimacy they’re after now, the ability to satisfy their “craving to look at people again”, which matches the romantic feeling of their fifth album, Hazel Eyes. But for Smith, whose genre-shifting stardom has been accompanied by harsh controversies, it’s also a chance to observe who’s still in their corner: “There’s some wonderful people that have stayed, but it’s a completely different room than it was with In the Lonely Hour,” their 2014 debut.

The South African singer has been a memorable guest artist, but the unhurried, emotional tracks on new album Some Strings Attached show she’s ready for the spotlight

From Cape Town, South Africa
Recommended if you like Summer Walker, SZA, Shekhinah
Up next Some Strings Attached out now

Rowlene Bosman learned to sing in a Cape Town school choir, and the discipline never left her: she is a precision vocalist in a scene that rewards volume. Most South Africans first heard her in 2018, delivering the hook on Nasty C’s SMA – she was the first signing to his Tall Racks label – and the featured artist circuit kept her busy for years. But while South African pop stampeded towards amapiano, Rowlene held her ground as a balladeer, writing slow, confessional R&B in which heartbreak is examined instead of danced away. Her 2020 debut album 11:11, a set of aching, close-quarters soul songs, brought a South African music award nomination for best pop album, and three of her originals – Cupid, Stay and the Nasty C collaboration I Need You – landed on the soundtrack of Netflix’s SA teen crime drama Blood & Water, carrying her voice far beyond home.

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Kuusisto/Lubman/Falk Winland
(Alpha)
Unconventional instrumentation adds to the filmic feeling of these three works by the Swedish composer, played on this recording by a powerhouse orchestra on top form

Anders Hillborg’s stylistically eclectic work resists easy categorisation as these three rewarding works, performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, demonstrate. Lost Landscapes opens with signature glissandi, features a filmic, jazz-inflected chase and ends in an orchestral death spiral. Pekka Kuusisto draws out its luminous colours and richly clustered harmonies.

The Strand Settings, a four-movement song cycle to texts by Canadian poet Mark Strand, was composed at the behest of Renée Fleming. Nature, the elements and a certain forlorn eroticism infuse poetry that Hillborg responds to with tonal and dynamic restraint. Gently pulsing strings with piquant woodwind and brass build atmospheric soundscapes over which Swedish soprano Ida Falk Winland spins haunting vocal lines in impeccable English.

(Nonesuch)
By turns gleeful, sensitive, urgent and ruminative, this is a brilliant set that plays to the trio’s formidable strengths

Though the century-old Pulitzer prize – launched as a celebration of the craft and social necessity of good news reportage – was eventually expanded to include fiction and music by 1943, the US-born art of jazz has only been represented by Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis in their lifetimes, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk posthumously – and most recently Henry Threadgill, for his four-part suite In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer once declared his dreams for his readership were “to arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy … stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience”. Contemporary-classical composer and flautist Threadgill has been doing all that with his music, his personal story, his internationalism and his charisma since the 1960s. Now 82, he releases Fifteen, joining him in a brilliant trio featuring pianist/composer Vijay Iyer and creative Cuban percussionist Dafnis Prieto.

Published for the first time this month, the Irish writer’s record of his months in pre-war Germany is a fascinating insight into his understanding of, and unease with, Nazism

War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler’s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. “They’ll need to fight soon (or burst),” he noted in his diary on 6 October.

The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics.

More than four decades after his Holocaust story Maus transformed the graphic novel genre, Art Spiegelman discusses Trump, the shadow of 9/11 and the rise of fascism in America

When the cartoonist Art Spiegelman began dating his future wife, Françoise Mouly, in the mid 70s, she would tell him not to worry about walking her home, because even the New York muggers didn’t bother venturing to where she lived in Soho. He moved in with her quite suddenly not long after, when his apartment in Greenwich Village burned down. His landlord, who lived on the ground floor, was a hoarder – once, when he came to collect Spiegelman’s rent, a cockroach crawled up from under his shirt collar – and eventually his accumulated junk caught alight.

This feels like a quintessential New York story, but then much of Spiegelman’s life does, or at least fits with the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves about the city. The Soho apartment Spiegelman and Mouly have lived in for five decades is worth millions now and is surrounded by high-end designers; his studio, down the road, is above a branch of Tiffany’s. “It’s just kind of an embarrassment, I mean Tiffany’s is not my class,” says Spiegelman, who refers to these flash new arrivals, dismissively, as “very fancy airport mall stores”.

The poet and novelist on the power of fairytales, being inspired by Frank O’Hara and the joys of Doris Lessing

My earliest reading memory
Reading On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan, aged five or so, sitting on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my brother – who, in my memory, was sitting on the carpet next to me.

My favourite book growing up
I had a collection of fairytales in a big yellow hardback, which I was totally entranced by from around the age of seven to 10. I’ll never forget the feeling of despair on turning the page and discovering that the Little Mermaid had become foam on the surface of the water; it was a very early lesson in the helplessness of the reader in the face of a story’s destiny. In particular, though, I loved a Scottish fairytale called The Black Bull of Norroway, which I think, in many ways, has been under the surface of everything I’ve ever written.

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian; Claws Out! by Bella Mackie; Plant Lady by Minyoung Kang; Children of Wolves by Lawrence Osborne; Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99)
American bestseller Bohjalian deserves to be far better known in the UK, although, as the first line of his 26th novel points out, “It is neither virtue nor might that rules the world; it’s luck”. Mira Winston’s luck began early, as she was born into a rich family, clever enough to secure a place at Yale, and a talented enough golfer to consider turning pro, but things change dramatically in 1978 when, at the age of 18, a ball she hits on a driving range smashes the temporal bone of a young caddy, killing him almost instantly. The freak accident turns out to be rather more complicated than first thought, not least because it becomes karmically conflated, in Mira’s mind, with her relationship with a married man twice her age. Told as a memoir, with Mira looking back on the derailment of her life and chronicling society’s changing perceptions of agency and privilege, this literary thriller is a masterfully executed ace.

Claws Out! by Bella Mackie (Borough, £20)
Mackie’s third novel centres on Diana, a manipulative grifter whose previous three husbands have died, apparently of natural causes. She’s in the process of getting her feet under the fourth mark’s prosperous Hampstead table when she encounters opposition. David Farrand’s “entitled but otherwise entirely average” daughter Catriona isn’t going to give up her father or her inheritance without a fight, and when she starts investigating Diana’s past, she discovers that her former stepchildren are convinced of foul play. Meanwhile, Diana’s own son, a feckless charmer, is also hoping to benefit from his mother’s matrimonial plans. Some readers may find the arch authorial tone grating, and the sharp-eyed will spot at least one major plot development before it occurs, but the incisive social satire, vinegary humour and expert pacing will keep you laughing as you turn the pages.

Creative Assembly could strike gold again with this follow-up to their fan-favourite, film-inspired game … if you’re brave enough to venture outdoors

Alien: Isolation redefined Alien games on its release in 2014, bringing the original taut, haunted house theme of the first movie to fans who had mostly been fed action-packed shooters. Cowering under desks and inside lockers wasn’t a new thing; being hunted by an intelligent and lethal xenomorph that could spring down from a duct at any moment was.

“I was thinking about what we could do for a sequel while we were still finishing the first game,” reveals Creative Assembly’s Alistair Hope, creative lead on Alien: Isolation and its sequel. “But we didn’t actually start the project until around the time of the 10th anniversary. We’ve seen the response grow over time, watching [Alien: Isolation] continue to find new players, even though it’s a relatively old game. And they’re surprised there isn’t a sequel.”

PC; Replicant D6
This GoldenEye 007-styled retro shooter is an agreeable set of straightahead shooting missions that hark back to a simpler time, with simpler controls

With 007 First Light, 2026 has already given us the best James Bond game in more than three decades, since the release of Rare’s N64 classic GoldenEye 007. But what about those players whose loyalties lie not with the super-spy himself but the particulars of that 90s interpretation of his adventures?

Enter Agent 64: Spies Never Die. Made almost entirely by a single developer (who goes by the very cloak-and-dagger alias Replicant D6), its production values couldn’t be much further from the blockbuster First Light. There’s no voice acting, with all dialogue instead delivered via subtitles, while each location on your globe-trotting adventure is depicted by a repeating texture wallpapered over scenery so blocky you can count the individual polygons.

As millennials return to the games of their youth, remakes of Star Fox and Halo suggest there is still plenty to learn from the past

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As much as some people more or less cease to listen to new music in their 30s, I have noticed a retreat to safe, familiar gaming territory among some of my fellow millennial gamers.

Retro collections are started, or resumed; jewel-cases of PS1 classics or cardboard boxes with SNES or Mega Drive games have started to colonise the living-room shelves. People are replaying things from their university days, or sticking to comfort games such as Stardew Valley. Many of the friends I used to game with never bothered to pick up a PlayStation 5 at its launch, and now that current-generation consoles are becoming prohibitively expensive, they see no need. With thousands of great older games, why bother playing something new?

After the success of space horror Mouthwashing, Swedish developer Wrong Organ has created a Battlefield-inspired co-op with a supernatural twist

‘Claustrophobic”, “oppressive”, “pretty depressing” – these are the words Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom volunteer when I ask them to reflect on their work as part of Swedish indie developer Wrong Organ. I’d add “nightmare-inducing”, too. Their last game, Mouthwashing, was an acclaimed work of horror storytelling set on a scuttled space freighter, in which players uncover the horrible things its desperate crew have done to each other.

When you’re planning a follow-up to something so pitilessly nasty, how do you raise the stakes? Well, you could set the entire game in the stifling crew compartment of a heavily armoured tank, a coffin-like interior you share with two other players as you co-operatively attempt to pilot your beleaguered war machine to safety through the crumbling remains of a city in enemy territory.

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
This is a fun and feverish journey, with well-crafted comedy and screaming guitar, through the star’s career so far

In an industry that claims to be inclusive, it’s so easy to feel tokenised. For musician and comedian Charlene Kaye, it has been an uphill battle feeling like the token queer Asian female guitar player, in demand to cater to people’s otherwise superficial concern around diversity, as well as their attempts at being perceived as politically conscious. But if you’re booked and busy, and genuinely skilled at what you do, does it matter if the requests come in through slightly nefarious means?

Diversity Shredder is a fun and feverish romp through Kaye’s journey of finding her artistic voice, and what it means to be an Asian American musician in the context of a very broken and unbalanced capitalist system. Using well-crafted, multi-genre musical comedy along with her masterful guitar skills, Kaye reflects on the mental gymnastics at play when you’re a person of colour trying to navigate a career in music, when all people really seem to want is Cassandra from Wayne’s World.

At Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, until 30 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh
Flabbergast Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s desolate play leans into slapstick – and loses some of the searing threat

This production by Flabbergast Theatre, which specialises in physical comedy, shows you what a good fit clowning is for Samuel Beckett’s work. The tragicomic characters in director Henry Maynard’s production are wretchedly grotesque. Hamm (Maynard), the master of this reduced and desolate world, or what remains of it, is recognisably bombastic, with flamboyant flourishes to his attire (an enormous hanky in his breast pocket, an ancient-looking rug on this knees). Clov (Simon Gleave) is his vaudevillian sidekick, with such exaggerated comic limps and gurns that you almost expect pratfalls. The tragic dustbin duo of Nagg (Derek Elwood) and Nell (Annabel Arden) are ash-faced yet upbeat.

The relationship between the sad clowns holed up in their grimy space, just about surviving the postapocalyptic threat outside, leans into slapstick. It is amusing but lightens the material, undercutting the tragedy, although you certainly feel the sense of loneliness. But their respective ends are not emotionally searing, and neither is the production quite as threatening in its master-slave games.

Disney production ran in Bristol earlier this year and its stars Oliver Tompsett and Samantha Barks will resume their roles at Theatre Royal Drury Lane

The Greatest Showman, the 2017 Hugh Jackman film with a chart-topping soundtrack, is to be staged in the West End next spring. After a sellout eight-week run at Bristol Hippodrome earlier this year, the Disney musical will arrive at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, currently home to Disney’s Hercules.

Its Bristol stars, Oliver Tompsett and Samantha Barks, will resume their respective roles as circus entrepreneur PT Barnum and his wife, Charity. Barks previously starred at Drury Lane as Elsa in Disney’s stage version of Frozen. Also returning from the Bristol production are Ben Joyce (as Barnum’s associate Phillip Carlyle), Vajèn van den Bosch (as opera singer Jenny Lind, known as the “Swedish nightingale”) and Malinda Parris (as the “bearded lady” Lettie Lutz).

Summerhall, Edinburgh
Every comment sparks suspicion in Oisín Kearney’s bold play about a meeting between a mother and a social worker

If you book a seat for Good With Faces you might only use the edge of it. This is a hugely assured psychological thriller, performed with just the right precision and edge. It is written and directed by Oisín Kearney, whose collaborations with Michael Patrick included the 2018 fringe hit My Left Nut, which transferred to TV – this could easily do the same.

I’d advise watching it without knowing anything else first. The two-hander opens with social worker Hegarty (Patrick McBrearty) training his video camera on newly single mother Garrick (Clodagh Mooney Duggan) in her hastily tidied living room, with children’s toys swept under the sofa. Garrick’s son has a bruise, which has led to this referral. It’s a matter of procedure, a discussion “for internal use”, Hegarty assures her, in an opening exchange where every comment sparks suspicion and even the correct pronunciation of bourbon biscuit is scrutinised.

At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

The British actor delivers his strongest performance to date in indie film Union County as a person struggling with substance abuse trying to turn his life around

Every week, Annette Deao, a drug dependency counselor, sits in the county jail and offers incarcerated people in rural Ohio a chance at recovery. One bright day she meets Cody, a young man who shuffles towards the lectern and quietly says that he’s ready to give it a shot. “His self-respect is in the basement,” said Will Poulter, the British actor who plays the character. “He doesn’t like or accept himself enough to embark on helping himself.”

Directed by Adam Meeks, an Ohio native, Union County is a bruising yet poetic depiction of a real life drug recovery court in Bellefontaine, Ohio, where individuals join long-term treatment programs with daily sobriety testing. Though the film is led by Poulter and Noah Centineo as foster brothers taking steps to get clean, much of the supporting cast is made up of first-time actors who share their real – and often painful and non-linear – stories of recovery. The hybrid of narrative feature and documentary-esque elements combine in a deeply affecting watch that is anchored by Poulter’s natural-feeling approach to the role.

I was struggling to make ends meet as an unpaid intern when a sarcastic song from the hit comedy gave me the clarity to walk out

It was 3am in the summer of 2017, and I was lying in a triple bunk bed in a hostel in London, listening to the sounds of the 14 other people in my dormitory snoring. I had been working unpaid internships in the fashion industry in London for the past 18 months and living in £12-a-night hostels. When I couldn’t sleep, I would watch TV on my beaten-up phone to drown out the snores. I was watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, an absurdist comedy about a woman who moves to New York after 15 years imprisoned in a doomsday cult’s underground bunker.

Her relentless positivity often inspired me to keep going, but on that particular night, the opposite happened: Kimmy gave me the courage to give up.

CabVol @ Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
A fringe fling is the backbone for a mischievous set with deft jokes and a fresh perspective but some of this material needs another draft

Ayo Adenekan’s ascent has been swift. Last year, the rookie comic cracked a joke on stage about Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa. This year, he scripted jokes for Gatwa, as a writer on Sky’s Saturday Night Live UK. In this second fringe set, the Edinburgh man shows why TV producers spirited him away after last year’s debut: his perspective is fresh, he writes a deft joke, and he has the warmth to win over a room. But he’s not the finished article. He could vary the pace, which tends to the sonorous. Several of his ideas go underdeveloped. And the story Homeland Insecurity tells is unremarkable.

It’s a love story, Adenekan tells us at the start, about a summer romance splashed across the canvas of the Edinburgh fringe. A meaningful but fly-by-night fling, it provides the backbone for an hour in which the 24-year-old ranges across his relationship with his dad, his “straight white man friends”, and his outrage when a namesake comedian comes up from London to steal his thunder at last year’s festival. “I’m not concerned about the boats, man. Stop the trains!” There’s a running visual gag too about product placement, which could be something, but Adenekan never really commits to the bit.

At CabVol @ Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 30 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Actor who played Shirley Johnson in the sitcom Citizen Smith, and whose dozens of other roles included EastEnders, Doctor Who and The Bill

Cheryl Hall, who has died aged 76, was an actor best known for her roles in 1970s sitcoms. As Shirley Johnson in Citizen Smith, she was the girlfriend of Wolfie, the would-be revolutionary leading the Tooting Popular Front with the battle cry “power to the people”.

Wolfie Smith, played by Hall’s then husband, the actor Robert Lindsay, and his small “army” of self-styled urban guerrillas, are simply inept, concocting plans such as stealing a Scorpion tank in order to mount an attack on the House of Commons, only to discover that parliament is in recess.

Brioche buns make an indulgent, rich home for a burger, but which have the perfect fluffy texture and which come with a chemical-like plastic aroma?

• The best supermarket veggie burgers

Brioche is a fabulously luxurious dough enriched with eggs and copious amounts of butter (often 25% or more of the total dough). Supermarket brioche buns, however, are a little different: the best products contain about 6-11% butter at most and some, surprisingly, contained none at all, using replacements such as palm fat and rapeseed oil instead.

But all is not lost: even the most processed products were passable, and the best were quite delicious. I tested these straight from the packet, analysing the egg wash, type of crumb and texture. I scored on flavour, value, processing, sustainability (though most products lack standards and certifications) and animal welfare.

The bar here is pretty low, though, with most buns sitting firmly in UPF territory. Squishy, carotene-coloured and stored in plastic, they’re fabricated from a cocktail of fats, emulsifiers and preservatives, creating remarkable shelf life but unremarkable buns with little authenticity.

You can save money at university, especially using schemes such as UNiDAYS, Student Beans or TOTUM

• ‘Watch your spending, use free perks’: an insider’s tips on student money

With rents on the up and food costing more, maintenance loans are stretched thinner than ever. Knowing how, and where, to get a discount can make a real difference.

A golden rule is to register with the big discount websites and apps – UNiDAYS, Student Beans and TOTUM – using your university email address as soon as you have one. Each has a slightly different roster of retailers, so it is worth signing up to all three.

We put 31 electric toothbrushes to the test, from oscillating Oral-B models to sustainable brands like Suri, to find the best for cleaning power and value for money

• How to make your toothbrush last longer

If you grew up using a conventional toothbrush – essentially a stick with bristles on the end – you may be surprised to learn just how long the electric toothbrush has been around. The first was designed in the late 1930s, but that model was a long way from the sleek, feature-packed and Bluetooth-enabled beasts you can buy today.

There are now dozens of ultra-advanced versions on the market, but which ones are worth your cash? To help answer that question, my teeth have become figurative guinea pigs. Over the past 20 months, I’ve put 31 electric toothbrushes from the likes of Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n and Foreo through their paces to separate the best from the rest. Here are my conclusions.

As hotter summers become the norm, home aircon can feel increasingly tempting. We put six units to the test for cooling power, noise and energy use – and explain what you need to know before buying

• How to sleep in a heatwave
• Can air conditioning be green?

Tell people you’re testing air conditioning, and the truth soon comes out: far more people have aircon than you’d ever imagine. It’s a guilty secret, the home improvement equivalent of Botox or weight loss jabs – everyone notices the results, but nobody admits to the method. Most portable aircons are in bedrooms, hidden away from visitors, so they’re easy to keep secret. And while friends with aircon don’t suddenly look younger or slimmer, they do look suspiciously well rested during a heatwave, while you’ve spent the night tossing and turning.

So if you’re using an aircon unit, why have it in the bedroom? Warm air rises, so upstairs bedrooms can be the hottest by the end of the day, making for restless nights. And if your bedroom is in a loft conversion, it’s even worse: the roof absorbs the sun’s heat all day before radiating it back into the room after dark.

Whether you want to improve your home’s security or simply know who’s at the door, the latest generation of smart doorbells will help put your mind at ease

• The best robot vacuums, tested

Doorbells have evolved. Today, they watch us as we approach, let the people inside the home know we’re coming sooner than our finger can hit the button, and give them a good look at our faces before they open the door. They’re essentially security cameras with a chime function.

If you haven’t already installed one of these handy tools, there’s a huge array available. Choosing the best video doorbell can be a bewildering task, with various factors to consider, including how much of your doorstep you want to see and whether you’re prepared to pay for a subscription. To help make the decision a little bit easier, I tested 11 popular video doorbells to find the best.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basics they scrimp on? The maître d’ and TV presenter talks secateurs, splurging on wine and terrible sofas with the Filter

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Fred Sirieix shot to fame as the smooth maître d’ on the Channel 4 reality show First Dates. He has presented shows including Million Pound Menu, Gordon, Gino and Fred’s Road Trip, Remarkable Places to Eat, and the travelogue series Tour de Fred, and authored the books Seriously British, Wine Uncorked and First Dates: The Art of Love.

Originally from Limoges, France, Sirieix cut his teeth in a number of top restaurants before becoming general manager of Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows. His charity, The Right Course, which teaches hospitality skills to prisoners, is opening restaurants in three prisons this year. He lives in London with his wife, affectionately nicknamed “Fruitcake”.

Change up your seasonal salads with an easy-to-prep dish that centres on slow-cooked rice and a lively Asian dressing

Here’s a recipe straight out of the low-effort, high-reward school of cooking, in which you chop the vegetables and nuts, boil the rice and beans, throw over a dressing … and it’s done! It was written in the middle of a heatwave, when cooking felt impossible, but I couldn’t look at another watermelon and feta salad. The trade-off is that this dish relies heavily on a couple of key ingredients: sambal oelek (which gives the salad its sparkle) and black rice, which, unlike other types of rice in a salad, never tastes worthy.

If you’re trying to meet your daily serving of 2.5 cups of vegetables, you might have some questions

If you want to eat lettuce, that no longer just means iceberg. In our bountiful age, there are many options: romaine, red-leaf lettuce, butter lettuce, beet greens, bok choy, bitter radicchio, every developmental stage of arugula.

Sometimes, it’s simply up to preference. But if you’re trying to meet your daily serving of 2.5 cups of vegetables – or you’re rethinking your salad choices amid the US cyclospora outbreak, you might have some questions about which greens to go with.

A vibrant and playful twist on the classic cocktail, with a bright, citrus kick and a subtle herbal note

Fresh, vibrant and full of summer character, this is a playful twist on the classic. It’s juicy and refreshing, with a bright, citrus kick and a subtle, herbal note that keeps things light and balanced. It also works very well with non-alcoholic tequila. If you like, double the syrup quantities, because it’s delicious drizzled over pancakes or diluted with sparkling water for a refreshing, summery drink.

Adrian Gonzalez Parrondo, director of bars, Six Senses, London W2

The classic British dessert, but with a frozen twist, captures all of the charm of the original with a welcome chill for summer

I love the glorious unruliness of Eton mess, all billowy cream, crushed meringue and tumbling fruit. This frozen version captures all of that charm but in a sliceable, make-ahead dessert that’s perfect for August entertaining. The fruit can even be cooked a day in advance, leaving little more to do than whip everything together before freezing. Thanks to the condensed milk, the cream freezes surprisingly softly, while the meringue keeps its gentle chew and the toasted coconut adds a welcome crunch and nuttiness. Late summer plums bring a lovely tartness that balances the sweetness beautifully, though apricots, peaches and nectarines would also work well.

Andrew, 75, a retired graphic designer, meets Gilli, 64, a counsellor

What were you hoping for?
An exciting evening in a great restaurant with a lovely lady I might be able to start a relationship with.

Julie makes notes in the margin as she’s reading, but Charlie says she’s ruining books he may want to read. Should they get on the same page? You decide
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

It breaks my immersion in the stories – like when someone says ‘This next bit is so good’

Call it a crisis, call it a decline, call it a recession: the long, lusty snog is in trouble, harder to experience in real life or even watch on screen. But why? And what’s it like to think you may never lock lips with another?

Spencer’s last kiss was two years ago, on a first date. It started off promisingly: after matching on Tinder, they met for a walk, then got drinks and ice-cream, before having dinner at her place. Finally, they kissed. “I didn’t like it,” says Spencer. He still struggles to identify why. “I found her attractive. There was chemistry, but something was lacking. There was nothing behind the kiss – it felt like a mechanical thing to do.”

That wasn’t just Spencer’s most recent kiss – it was his first ever, at the age of 29. Now 31, he says a second kiss in some ways feels less possible than having sex: “The jump feels way bigger.”

Public displays of affection are widely mocked online and off, but they have a positive side – and now science has proved it

Name: Kissing in public.

Age: Kissing is 17m-21m years old – probably older than the notion of privacy.

The Guardian’s deputy editor of social platforms on the demand from high-profile people and brands for help in harnessing the power of TikTok

I didn’t want to work in social media. If you’d asked 15-year-old me my dream job, I might have said foreign correspondent, or maybe travel writer. So you can imagine my surprise to now find myself giving these very colleagues advice on how to get the best selfie angle or write the sharpest TikTok ‘hook’.

But taking a job as the Guardian’s deputy editor of social platforms, may prove to be one of my smartest career moves if the current job market is to be believed.

Avoid getting into debt at university with tricks to save cash, earn extra funds and have a good time

• The best student deals and discounts

Over the past two years university student Erin has been giving Martin Lewis a run for his money when it comes to hunting down the best hacks, tips and tricks to save cash and earn money.

The 21-year-old has seen Oasis for free; earned tickets to race days; made money from selling secondhand clothes (£200 in one weekend alone); and enjoyed cut-price treats with friends.

With great software and battery for two days, the pricey svelte folder strikes best balance between phone and tablet

Samsung’s top folding phone for 2026 is its first to carry the “Ultra” moniker in its name, packing a much bigger battery and better cameras into the thin and light body of a book-style foldable.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra continues from where the exquisite Z Fold 7 left off last year. With its svelte chocolate bar dimensions opening into a square tablet, the Ultra sits above the new passport-shaped Z Fold 8 as Samsung’s top model. Costing £1,899 (€2,199/$2,099.99/A$2,999), it is a lot of money to pay for a phone, regardless of how many other devices it can theoretically replace in your pocket.

The new PM could bring in revenue for social care or defence with a land levy or by reforming council tax

Residential property is the largest store of wealth in the UK, and has long been a target for those who believe homes should be taxed more. Real estate remains a juicy plum for Andy Burnham to pick as he searches for ways to pay for an overhaul of the social care system and higher defence spending, to name just two fiscal priorities. Yet how to tax property, or possibly the land it sits on, has vexed economists and politicians for centuries. Here we discuss the background to the debate and some of the tax options.

• This article was amended on 11 August 2026. An earlier version said home occupiers in France must pay the taxe d’habitation; in fact, since 2023 this only applies to second homes.

Stressed out, endlessly scrolling and never satisfied? Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, the Buddhist monk with off-the-charts levels of contentment, may have the answers …

By some metrics, Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is the happiest man on Earth. In brain scans, researchers noted that Mingyur’s neural activity showed off-the-charts levels of activation in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm and joy. In other tests conducted when he was 41 years old, his brain reportedly “resembled that of a 33-year-old”. He also laughs a lot.

Can happiness be taught? I met Mingyur (Rinpoche is an honorary title meaning, roughly, “precious one”) to discover his strategies for a richer life.

Debilitating symptoms lead some to try over-the-counter medications Allegra and Pepcid due to a social media trend

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) and menopause can come with debilitating symptoms, like intense emotional changes and exhaustion.

All over social media, women are claiming that a simple hack has helped enormously: a combination of two over-the-counter medications, both antihistamines – typically, the name brands Pepcid AC and Allegra.

How can our understanding of mortality shape the way we live? Palliative care doctors and death doulas share the lessons they have learned

We will all face death one day, but our attitude towards this is individual. How can our understanding of mortality shape our approach to life? Here, palliative care doctors and death doulas share what they know about the end – and how it informs the way they live.

Darren Miles had skateboarded all his life. But in his 50s, he realised he was losing his skills and flexibility. So he took it in a new direction

Darren Miles never thought he would compete in any sport for Britain. But in October, he will represent Great Britain in slalom skateboarding – a form of downhill racing – at the World Skate Games in Paraguay. Last week, he completed his World Anti-Doping Agency awareness training. He had to tick a box confirming: “I’m an international athlete.”

“Justification” is the word that comes to mind, he says. “A feeling that I haven’t wasted my life skateboarding, that diverging into something new” – he took up slalom in his late 50s – “and working hard at it has yielded a result of which I am very proud.”

Vintage classics from WH Smith, M&S and Tesco are being bought online, perhaps as part of a nostalgic return to owning tangible items

When it comes to everyday objects, a supermarket carrier bag could be the ultimate one – a thing we’re more accustomed to squeezing into a drawer or using until it falls apart than giving any special treatment.

But these most mundane items are now enjoying something of a new life.

The latest craze on Instagram reveals how quickly personal expression can be absorbed into a homogenised feed and exploited by brands

For those looking for the defining social media trend of summer 2026, it’s time to call off the search party.

A new phrase is dominating algorithms and entering the English lexicon.

High summer nuptials call for a relaxed shape and shoes you can dance in

Alterations that don’t cost a fortune can transform old trousers, jackets or shirts into bespoke pieces

When I started shopping in vintage stores, I fell into the trap of thinking that if something wasn’t in my size there was nothing to be done. I’d still buy beautiful shirts that were huge, but never end up wearing them. I persevered with trousers that were three sizes too big and just scrunched in the waist with a belt, but it didn’t look good. Now I know that a belt is an accessory, not a necessity; it’s there to heighten the garment, not hold it up. And that’s because I have finally understood the power of tailoring.

Tailoring seems out of reach for most people, but more often than not a dry cleaner will be able to take in a waist or do the hem, which would set you back £30 max. And I mean, how much would you pay for a perfectly fitting pair of trousers?

From a 500-year-old inn in the Italian Dolomites to a log cabin in Finland’s lake district, these boltholes offer a tranquil and restorative getaway

Steam trains, horse-drawn trams and glorious coastal paths are all part of the adventure on a new self-guided walking tour of the island

On the shores of Douglas Bay, I could barely see the sand. Crammed on to the beach, on every available inch, were tourists bustling for the best spot. Luckily, I wasn’t there at the same time. I was looking at a black and white photograph taken some 135 years earlier, displayed in the Manx Museum in Douglas, the Isle of Man’s capital. When I’d stepped off the ferry earlier that day, the crescent-shaped beach was still there – but the crowds weren’t.

The self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea has always been a haven for outsiders. From the early hunter-gatherers who ventured here in 6500BC, to the Irish Celts (who brought over Christianity in the fifth century) and Vikings who established Tynwald (one of the oldest continuous parliaments in the world) to the Victorian tourists who transformed it into a popular holiday destination.

Söderåsen national park is one of Europe’s largest protected broadleaf woods, offering wild swimming, spectacular hiking trails and an inspiring story of regeneration

From the bus window, the ridge looks like a giant slumbering beast stretched deep green across the flat farmland. “It feels alive,” I say to the woman beside me. “Yes,” she answers. “It is where you would run for safety, don’t you think?”

I am in southern Sweden to explore Söderåsen national park, established in 2001 to protect more than 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of the larger Söderåsen ridgeline. Shaped over millennia by immense geological collisions, fractures, volcanic eruptions and ice ages, today it is one of northern Europe’s largest continuous protected broadleaf forests, and only 90 minutes by car from Copenhagen or, in my case, two hours by public transport.

The regeneration of historic warehouses has transformed this former red-light district into one of the port city’s most vibrant areas

A thin peninsula just south of Rotterdam’s centre, Katendrecht was once at the heart of the world’s busiest port, home to continental Europe’s first Chinatown and a lively sailors’ quarter. Its later reputation as a red light district has been shrugged off – part of the city’s wider reinvention in the aftermath of extensive second world war bombing.

Social media and Shazam-like birdsong apps drawing young people to hobby as they seek a gentler connection to the outside world

Sorry Elon, but they’re not your kind of tweets. Social media users are flocking to TikTok to join a burgeoning trend for birding videos as the hobby attracts a younger demographic.

With the internet ever more cluttered with polarising, shouty and AI content, evidence is emerging of Britons preferring a gentler, more melodic window on the world in the shape of footage of the nation’s feathered friends.

Soft toys and furry things keep appearing in the garden. I wouldn’t rule out the fox at this point

After weeks without rain, the garden has turned a uniform beige. Whole shrubs have perished in the unrelenting heat, their crisp brown leaves disintegrating in the breeze. In the middle of the scorched lawn lies the prone body of a large dead bird.

On closer inspection, it appears to be a stuffed toy fashioned into the form of a limp duck carcass. When I open the back door for a closer look, the dog steps out between my legs, picks up the bird and carries it inside. It was clearly made with dogs in mind.

From lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon and second childishness to George W Bush describing ‘some weird shit’, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which English cheese cannot be made in its namesake village?
2 What did George W Bush reportedly describe in January 2017 as “some weird shit”?
3 What is the UK’s only aquatic songbird?
4 In the church year, what is Ordinary Time?
5 Clara Rockmore was a virtuoso on what electronic instrument?
6 Which actor injured his achilles tendon while playing Achilles?
7 Carting Lane, off the Strand, has London’s last type of what lamp?
8 Which 1980 TV docudrama caused a crisis in Anglo-Saudi relations?
What links:
9 Chief mourner at Nelson’s funeral; chair of British Railways; Spider-Man?
10 Batgirl; Coyote v Acme; Nothing Lasts Forever; The Day the Clown Cried?
11 Barbary; Gold; Grain; Ivory; Pepper; Skeleton?
12 Infant; schoolboy; lover; soldier; justice; pantaloon; second childishness?
13 Wooderson; Bannister; Ibbotson; Coe; Ovett; Cram; Kerr?
14 Juliet; Reach Out I’ll Be There; December 1963?
15 Middlemarch; Das Kapital; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Watch Out!?

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

Ageing facilities offering daily refuge face funding threat as record temperatures parch the countryside

Suzy Bernard took a breath and jumped into the deep end of her village swimming pool with a splash.

“There’s a wonderful feeling of wellbeing in the water,” said the former hospital healthcare assistant, who recently learned to swim aged 75 and was now gliding along with her daughter and grandson.

With questions over Farage’s finances and a new face in No 10, could Barnsley council be a bellwether for changing Labour fortunes?

Labour marked its worst performance in more than 50 years when voters went to the polls in Barnsley in May, but 100 days on from those seismic local elections, the political landscape has shifted drastically.

Could the South Yorkshire town, where Reform UK reaped the benefits of dissatisfaction with Labour, prove to be a test case for whether the governing party has turned the tide?

Experts say putrid stench shows overhaul of sewers is needed – like the one prompted by the Great Stink of 1858

London was “reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors” after weeks of temperatures exceeding 30C and minimal rainfall. This was Disraeli’s description of the Great Stink of 1858, but something similarly disgusting has been happening this summer.

Once again, an exceptionally hot and dry spell has exposed the putrid stench of untreated human waste.

We’re interested in hearing from people who have found themselves unexpectedly out of work in midlife and have struggled to get another job despite years of professional experience

For many people in their 50s and 60s, losing a job can be the start of a long and unexpected struggle to get back into work. Despite years – or even decades – of professional experience, some say they are applying for hundreds of roles without success, while others have had to take lower-paid work or claim benefits to make ends meet.

The number of people aged 50 to 64 receiving out-of-work benefits has reached 2.15 million, according to recent analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. We’d like to hear from people across the UK who have found it difficult to find work later in their careers.

As gen Z are driving a boom in antiques and collectibles, we would like younger people to show us their most extraordinary thrifted pieces

Gen Z are driving a boom in antiques and collectibles with over 60% in a recent survey claiming they’re a fan of second-hand fashion, homeware and furniture.

Around a third of the 18- to 29-year-olds polled said they went thrift shopping every week as young people become more drawn to sustainable goods as they feel it adds more character to their wardrobes and homes.

We would like to hear from women who participate in the ‘looksmaxxing’ community

While “looksmaxxing” was once a predominantly male space, in recent years it has increasingly taken hold among women, with dedicated forums and apps where users have their individual features analysed and scored, with the aim of identifying areas for physical improvement.

If you’re a young woman who participates in the “looksmaxxing” community, and have been thinking about ways to optimise your appearance, we’d love to hear from you and learn more about your experience.

Have you - or a child in your care - been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent? We would like to hear from you

With more than 7m pairs reportedly sold in 2025, it’s clear that the popularity of Meta’s smartglasses is on the rise.

And while they can transform the lives of some people, for example those with visual impairments, others have raised concern about nonconsensual filming - including of children.

Have you - or a child in your care - been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent? We would like to hear from you if so.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

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Wildfires rage in Europe and the US, an earthquake rocks Colombia, Russian strikes in Ukraine and a solar eclipse – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists