Burnham has nothing to hide as he prepares to meet president he once called poisonous. It may actually win him more respect

It makes a pleasant change. Not so long ago, Keir Starmer was falling over himself in his efforts to keep things sweet with Donald Trump. Offering the US president a second state visit within minutes of meeting him. Everyone knows you should never put out on the first date: it only makes the other person think you’re a pushover. Sure enough, The Donald banked the marching bands and the Windsor silver service, made polite conversation for three days and then went back to trash-talking him.

Yet still, Starmer just sat there and took it. As if one word of criticism would be too much. Wittering on about the “special relationship” as if Trump gave a moment’s thought to the UK before he did anything. The rest of us wouldn’t have put money on the US president even being able to locate Britain on a map. It was only latterly, when The Donald chose to bomb Iran, that the penny finally dropped for Keir. And even then he looked pained by the apparent betrayal, as he resisted the calls of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to join in the war.

The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu

Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said, when asked about that recurring motif. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”

For Kusama, art making was a means of survival. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed and admired contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds. In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year (it ended up running until 2024).

The actor fully embraced his physical talents and outsized personality with a line in theatrical baddies teetering deliciously on the edge of serious and silly

• Tim Curry, star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Stephen King’s It, dies aged 80
• Tim Curry on sexuality, surviving a stroke – and 50 years of stardom
• Clowns, corsets and kings: Tim Curry – a life in pictures

As Dr Frank-N-Furter, the gender-nonconforming alien mad scientist who presides over Richard O’Brien’s glam rock musical, admits two innocents to his gothic castle and induces them into all sorts of delicious naughtiness, Curry is so thrillingly liberated as to seem a menace. An irresistibly appealing menace. Apparently able to arch both eyebrows and curl his lips in every direction all at once, Curry wraps his mouth around the double-entendres and belts out the lyrics with lip-smacking relish, and fully fleshes out this avatar of sexual confidence. The film earned one of the original cult fandoms, the stage musical endures and many other actors have pulled on Frank’s corset and high heels – but the role indelibly and for ever belongs to Curry.

People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us

The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.

However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded. Even decades later in the early 2000s, when Hare wanted to look into psychopaths in politics, he still needed to go to prison to find them (Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails). Research into the higher-functioning psychopath – who doesn’t get caught, or maybe doesn’t even resort to crime – has proved elusive, not least because self-reporting questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; arguably, that’s their main thing.

An anti-Farage army of voters is there to be galvanised, as exclusive data shows. But getting them out will be tricky

Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him?

Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen South, via countless flimsy leaflets claiming “Only X can win here”, parties have jostled for the part of his majesty’s opposition to Reform. Those battles have given us Hannah Spencer and Andy Burnham; they have bulldozed Labour in Wales and forced Keir Starmer out of No 10.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?

• Last chance to buy the summer issue of The Long Read magazine, now with 15% off. Click here to order

I travelled to Oslo in the early autumn. It felt like arriving into the future. Or, at least, a fragment of a possible future. I drove north in the quiet digital bubble of my electric rental car. In 2024, Norway became the first country in the world where electric cars outnumbered petrol cars.

A smooth, pristine motorway unfolded between farmlands and low hillsides of dense green forest. Long tunnels carried the route up above the banks of Lake Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. After a little more than an hour, the road curved downward to run parallel to the lakeshore.

Flash floods have killed at least 359 people while homes and infrastructure have been swept away

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• What caused the flash flood in Nepal and Tibet?

The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake ⁠formed at the ⁠site ⁠where the ​deadly torrents occurred ⁠was rising and ⁠at risk ​of ‌bursting.

The catastrophic flash floods, which hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and obliterating entire villages, killed at least 359 people and left more than 1,300 missing.

Moscow threatens retaliation after Andy Burnham says UK will help Ukraine start producing long-range missiles

Russia has said it could retaliate against the UK for its support of Kyiv by striking military targets inside and outside Ukraine, amid reports that the director of the CIA warned the Kremlin against attacking Nato during a secretive visit this week.

Andy Burnham, Britain’s prime minister, said on Monday the UK would allow Kyiv access to classified technology to start ⁠its own production of Storm Shadow ​long-range ​cruise missiles. France has also agreed to supply missile technology. Maria ⁠Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday Britain and France were “playing ⁠with ​fire”.

Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocide

From the archive:

• Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia

• Ratko Mladić will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you’ll see that he won

Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.

Mladić, 84, had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.

Coroner is told BBC veteran was dazzled by headlights before collision and her injuries led to bronchopneumonia

The broadcaster Jenni Murray died days after being involved in a car crash that happened when she was dazzled by headlights, a coroner has heard.

Murray, 75, was best known as the voice of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, hosting the programme for three decades and becoming the longest-serving presenter in its history.

• Uefa says claims will be made in Switzerland

• It says claims relate to alleged criminal mismanagement

Uefa is preparing to make a criminal complaint against Gianni Infantino for alleged “criminal mismanagement” in connection with his failed Fifa Forward Enterprise plan and has applied for the release of documents related to its conception.

In an explosive escalation of the war engulfing football’s governing bodies, Uefa has made separate applications in the United States for information, including from Fifa and the investment firm Thrive Capital.

Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’

Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.

Environment Agency issues 40 flood alerts across Midlands, Yorkshire and south-east of England

Dozens of homes have been damaged by flooding and the Met Office had issued warnings for thunderstorms and heavy rain at the end of a summer in which most of England and the whole of Wales was declared in drought.

The Met Office said thundery showers in England and Wales could cause 75mm of rain to fall in just 12 hours in some areas.

Experts say findings mean breast screenings for cancer could also flag cardiovascular problems in women

Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world’s leading – and frequently underdiagnosed – cause of death in women.

Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke.

Company that runs Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands hubs says passenger safety is unaffected

• Business live – latest updates

Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports have been hit by a cyber-attack in which hackers accessed the data of about 8.7 million customers.

The incident involved data related to “car park, lounge and fast-track bookings and in-airport wifi sign-ups”, and the hackers obtained email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registration numbers and postcodes, said Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates the three hubs.

A glacial collapse registering as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event occurred near the border on Wednesday morning

Hundreds of people have died in catastrophic flash floods in Nepal. Here’s what we know so far about what caused the disaster.

With Reuters and Associated Press

AI companies have promised us world-shifting technology. But there’s a cost: loud, unsightly datacentres that drain environmental resources. As the government pushes their rapid growth, can local communities do anything to push back? Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s global technology reporter Aisha Down about the backlash to datacentres across the UK and around the world

The once world-leading producer of crude oil has plunged into an energy crisis as Kyiv targets its refineries

A sanctioned shadow fleet tanker carries oil from Nato member Turkey to a Russian Baltic port. A deal is signed for Russian oil to be processed in Kazakhstan. Fuel cargoes arrive from India via Egypt. The Kremlin pressures allies to sell it badly needed fuel.

The data points may be diverse, but they point to a single inescapable conclusion.

First robot-assisted outlet opens in Liverpool to take on Shein and supermarkets in clothing, shoes and homewares

• Business live – latest updates

The owner of Zara is taking on Primark, Shein and the supermarkets with the launch of its cut-price chain Lefties in Britain, backed by an army of robots.

The Spanish fashion brand opened its first UK store in Liverpool on Thursday, a few weeks after quietly launching its UK website.

The actor on which star he’d devour first on a lifeboat, why he prefers pigeons to dogs and how Trainspotting put the Scottish accent on the map

You’re stranded on a lifeboat with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan, James Cosmo, Keith Allen and Irvine Welsh. Who do you eat first? DarkAnaemicI77
I suppose you have to think about who’s the healthiest and has looked after their body best. I reckon Ewan would be a wee bit too chewy, and Irvine a wee bit pickled. I’ll go for Kevin McKidd because he’s been out in LA for 20 years, eating good food.

Did you really not like Zippy the West Highland terrier who played Wee Jock in Hamish Macbeth? Campbell97

The finalists from the BBC young musician of 2016 have teamed up with a Mercury-nominated composer to craft a Proms premiere that’s uplifting, lyrical and goes out with an almighty bang

A cellist, a horn player and a soprano saxophonist walk into the Royal Albert Hall … it could be the setup for an exceptionally nerdy joke, but instead it’s a new triple concerto, with three soloists rather than the usual one, to be premiered on the final weekend of the Proms. The concerto – by Gwilym Simcock, the Mercury-shortlisted composer, jazz pianist and horn player who in 2006 was the BBC’s first New Generation jazz artist – reunites the three finalists from the 2016 BBC young musician of the year competition, hence the unusual lineup. “This is a unique combination of instruments,” says the saxophonist Jess Gillam. “I’m fascinated by the colours that we’re going to find. I hope we’ll be able to make a sound where people will think: what instrument is that?”

BBC young musician has launched many careers, but 2016 was exceptional: all three finalists have become major names. “It’s not like you win the competition and all these things fall from the sky, but it does give you a bit of public exposure,” says the horn player Ben Goldscheider, the 2016 brass section winner. “Then it’s up to you and the people around you what you make of that.”

In a disrupted job market people are turning to heritage crafts such as bookbinding, metalwork and boatbuilding

It’s a bleak moment for young people entering the workforce for the first time. For decades, a university degree seemed to promise a stable career – but entry-level white-collar jobs across almost all sectors are being disrupted by AI. Budding accountants, software engineers and junior lawyers increasingly find themselves displaced by cheap automation.

Even creative fields are struggling against AI tech that can produce artwork, lengthy prose or complex design briefs in seconds.

Ahead of the release of her 13th solo album, the fantastically titled Chakzilla, we rank the best of a sublime catalogue of funk, slow jams and tears-on-the-dancefloor disco

Chaka Khan had harsh words for the “assholes” at her then record company, Warner Bros, who she felt under-promoted 1992’s The Woman I Am, her first album in four years. Listening to Love You All My Lifetime’s cocktail of funk and contemporary R&B, you wonder if she didn’t have a point. There’s no obvious reason why it wasn’t huge hit.

Paul Greengrass drama The Uprising was supposed to be a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – but a strange new campaign has inserted a surprising figure

Nobody likes to have the full plot of a movie spoiled before they’ve even seen it. However, sometimes this can be taken to the extreme. Take the new Paul Greengrass movie, The Uprising, for example. It is two weeks away from its US release and, not only does nobody know the plot, but nobody seems to know what it is even about. Seriously, nobody at all. The film’s distributors just spent yesterday squabbling in public about whether Robin Hood was in it or not.

Here’s what we know so far. Initially, all the trailers and promotional materials made The Uprising look like a film about the Peasants’ Revolt that tore through England in 1381. And this was very exciting, since the revolt was a thrilling moment in history that has been bizarrely underserved by Hollywood over the years. Most excitingly of all, though, it sounded like it fit exactly into Greengrass’s wheelhouse; full of action and realism and political awareness.

Do you need a soft mattress if you sleep on your side, or are firm models better for your back? And what about pillows? Here’s what the experts say

• The best mattresses, tested
• The best mattresses for back pain

Most of us, me included, sleep on our sides. Drooling into your pillow and giving yourself a dead arm may not be as photogenic as Sleeping Beauty lying prettily on her back, but it’s probably better for you. Studies have found that sleeping on your left side can help reduce snoring, sleep apnoea and acid reflux, and the experts I spoke to for this article say side sleeping is good for your back and your sleep.

Side sleeping brings its challenges, though, and I don’t just mean the drool. The curves of your body need somewhere to go. If your mattress isn’t cushioning your hips and shoulders, or your knees are pressing against each other, you may struggle to sleep well and experience aches and pains. An overly soft surface can also cause problems, as you’ll know if you’ve ever spent the night on a friend’s concave sofa.

From quiet acts of generosity and life-changing gigs to singing for a professional puppeteer, Dolly Parton has had a profound impact on readers’ lives
• Photo gallery: fans pay tribute to Dolly Parton

I had the opportunity to meet her when I volunteered to work the Country Music Awards in the late 70s. Me and three other kids had Dolly all to ourselves for about 20 minutes. I remember with disbelief how she took several unhurried minutes with each of us and gave us her undivided attention for that time. She had no reason to do this. She was just as genuine as they come. Her philanthropy was exceptional. Her talent speaks for itself. I miss her already. Larry Lipman, Tennessee

People with allergies must be able to travel without fear, and a compassionate society should respect that

What are you most scared of? Perhaps snakes send a chill down your spine. Or heights leave your knees weak. Peanuts may sound like an odd source of phobia, but they have taken on an absurd bogeyman quality for me since my daughter was taken to hospital by ambulance after eating peanut butter when she was six months old. Just the sight of a bowl on a pub bar, or their shells discarded on the pavement, can raise my heart rate – even when I’m not with her.

Nowhere is the sight of peanuts more confronting than at 30,000ft, especially now when millions are jetting back from their holidays. Travelling with a severely allergic child can be a nightmare for all sorts of reasons, but the idea you could be sat next to a passenger consuming the very thing that has hospitalised them is its own kind of hell.

Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a Guardian assistant Opinion editor

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

Reform and the Conservatives are willing to mislead the public, but as environment secretary, I believe we must be honest – and act boldly

This long, hot summer has brought our third drought in five years and the driest July in almost two centuries. We’ve seen wildfires burn down homes and now face the risk of flash floods as we move into autumn. It should be a wake-up call for those saying that concerns about the climate crisis are overblown; that we should simply sit back and do nothing; or row back on attempts to restore our natural environment. As the new environment secretary, I won’t let that happen.

No one who has experienced this summer in the UK should be in any doubt that our climate is already changing. We know the future holds warmer, wetter winters, hotter, drier summers, and more extreme weather.

Angela Eagle is the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs

This week’s settlement without liability was pragmatic, but it doesn’t change the inevitability of further lawsuits around the world

Not many people would count paying $18bn they didn’t expect to when they woke up that morning as a victory. Yet for Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, the agreement with 52 US attorneys general to settle claims that it designed its products to be addictive to children, and misled people about their safety, could be described as a win of sorts.

Meta denies wrongdoing, and the amount it plans to pay will be spread over a decade. Some of it is contingent on other big tech firms not named in its case coughing up too. The cash is chump change for Meta, which made around $60bn in profit last year. More damaging to the tech giant in the long run could be the agreement to unwind some of the mechanics it has spent two decades perfecting to keep us on its platforms.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

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.

It’s hard to beat back charges that MPs are ‘all the same’ when they have accepted £400k in freebies this year – £100k up on last year

How has your summer been? Done anything nice? As MPs prepare to head back to parliament next week, you’ll be relieved to hear that some of the most prominent figures in British politics have been enjoying the season’s cultural highlights – and without paying a penny. MPs throughout the Commons have received £400,000 of “freebies” to concerts, sports matches and other events so far this year, according to the most recent disclosures.

Over the summer alone, Wes Streeting, now the defence secretary, enjoyed the Chelsea flower show thanks to Lloyds Banking Group covering the £1,839 cost, as did the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride. Lucy Powell, who has since become deputy leader of the Labour party and education secretary, accepted £858-worth of tickets to a Harry Styles concert at Wembley from the PRS for Music industry group. Meanwhile, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, nabbed seats at Wimbledon worth £1,360 from the All England Club.

We can no longer deny that many children get their sex education from online pornography. But the normalisation of violence can lead to tragedy

How can we possibly come to terms with reports a 16-year-old girl child may have died as a result of consensual sexual strangulation with her 16-year-old boyfriend? Police are still investigating this case. Meanwhile what do we do, as a society, to contend with children getting their sex education from pornography when this may be what they learn? When this is what they think sex is?

Often mistakenly referred to as choking, sexual strangulation in the mainstream is new. It has arrived into the bedrooms of young people via online porn which has become part of life, one of the many addictive services generously provided by tech companies making billions of dollars. Some companies do a good job of cleaning up the urgent issues of child sexual abuse material and trafficking, but still, violent porn proliferates.

The senator’s remarks reflect a turning point in Democrats’ attacks on the president. What should we make of them?

Apparently, he likes to say her name with a French accent. “Na-tah-lee!” the president cries out, in that affected tone of faux-formality that one might use with a person they love but do not quite respect, and she comes running, her thin legs teetering on her heels.

Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old “executive assistant”, was an odd recurring character in the latest blockbuster Trump administration book, Regime Change, by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Harp features like a silent sentinel, ever present but eerily quiet as Trump rants and raves. It’s not exactly clear what the scope of her responsibilities are; though, as Jamelle Bouie points out, the fact that she evidently helps run the president’s social media accounts, which can sway markets and influence his foreign counterparts, makes her one of the most powerful people in the federal government.

In an era of multiparty politics, first past the post risks generating perverse outcomes that delegitimise the democratic process

If the system that elects MPs to Westminster was obviously the most democratic one available, there would be no need to use alternative modes when electing the UK’s devolved assemblies or England’s regional mayors. The fact that first past the post (FPTP) was not preferred when establishing those institutions reflects an acceptance that there are better ways to turn popular opinion into fair political representation. So why should the Commons stick with an inferior system?

This question is raised by an amendment tabled to the representation of the people bill, which returns to parliament next week. The call to establish an independent national commission on electoral reform has been endorsed by 185 MPs.

There’s growing agreement that under-18s need to be protected – but international turmoil is pushing many towards wedlock

Every minute, 23 girls around the world wed, according to the Girls Not Brides campaign, a coalition of more than 1,000 organisations across 100 countries. No child should be married. But girls are far more likely to be affected than boys, accounting for nine in 10 of those wed before 18, and their spouses are often much older men. The consequences, beyond the immediate threat of sexual violence, include the shortening of their education, increased risks of poverty and domestic abuse, and poor health, including high rates of maternal mortality. In spring, the Center for Global Development thinktank estimated that child marriage costs $175bn annually in lost productivity and increased health risks.

The good news is that the last decade has seen a drop in rates; last year alone, Grenada, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Kuwait and Portugal introduced bans. But there are disturbing signs of regression elsewhere. In May, the Taliban issued a new judicial code enabling child marriage below the previous minimum age of 16, and preventing wives from ending marriages they entered as children if their husbands object. Previous protections were inadequate and often poorly enforced; now even those have been swept away. Activists say forced and early marriages have soared since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, thanks to the ban on secondary education and the state of the economy.

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

Readers respond to Gina Rippon’s criticism of a controversial TV documentary about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Three months ago, at 42, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Unlike many adults prior to receiving a diagnosis, I had not spent years wondering whether I had ADHD. In fact, I was oblivious until quite recently, when I strongly identified with several things a colleague said about their own experience of ADHD. The more I learned, the more I found myself thinking: “Wow, that’s me.”

My forgetfulness, distractibility, messiness, chronic need for organisation and memory strategies, constant lateness, tendency to lose things daily, persistent perfectionism and habit of going, tyres screeching, right up to the last minute of every deadline suddenly made sense. Things I had spent my life viewing as daily frustrations or personal failings had an explanation. I had ADHD, and had always had it. There was a reason for the constant chatter and noise in my brain, with any gaps filled with, or interrupted by, a song. Honestly, literally anything can trigger a song.

The UK’s response to flagrant breaches of international law is pathetic, writes Bernie Evans, and sanctions against a few individuals have no effect

How long does it take for the penny to drop in Downing Street and the Foreign Office (Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians, 20 August)? Israeli individuals have had sanctions imposed on them for over a year with absolutely no effect, and it is likely that people such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, see them as some sort of badge of honour.

Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband must realise by now that the only sanctions likely to have any effect are those imposed against the state of Israel, so denouncing the issue of tenders for the E1 settlement near Jerusalem as an “unacceptable and destructive act ” is just box-ticking.

Responding to an article in which birds comforted Helen Harris during bereavement, Angela Smith describes her own experience

Helen Harris’s experience (A moment that changed me: my husband died – and birds began behaving strangely towards me, 19 August) chimes with that of a friend of mine who had many close encounters with robins after the death of her father. She too had birds flying into her house as never before but, unlike Helen, she believed that this was the person’s spirit making contact.

My own association between birds and death is rather different. The day my mother-in-law died, a wren had flown into the window of the classroom where I taught, and I found it dead on the ground outside. When we took her ashes to be scattered in the sea, a pheasant hit the car windscreen and died.

Britain and other signatories to the UN convention on the law of the sea should protest against US proposal to lease seabed for mining, says Guy Standing

Your article on Donald Trump’s plan to lease millions of hectares of seabed in the Pacific for deep-sea mining correctly points to the ecological disaster that this could unleash (US territories hit out at Trump plan to explore deep sea mining in the Pacific, 24 August).

However, it does not mention that this plan contravenes international law in the form of Unclos, the UN convention on the law of the sea, which has been ratified by 171 countries and the European Union. The US has not ratified it, but since 1982 has agreed to abide by its rules and procedures.

Over-by-over updates from Lord’s (11am BST)
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The toss is now scheduled for 12pm BST, with play to begin at 12.20. We pray.

Yeah, we all saw it coming.

• Draw starts at 5pm BST (6pm CET)

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Takes us back to the Champions League final in 2011, David. “2011 was an amazing year for me and the club!” That’s more like it!

Ceferin awkwardly exits the stage after a slightly stilted chat with Henry. The former Arsenal man is sticking around to help with the draw and David Villa is joining him!

Too many players are off the pace and although Tottenham brushed aside Charlton, Newcastle will be a tougher challenge

Jan Paul van Hecke was among those given an unwanted name-check by Roberto De Zerbi after Tottenham’s 3-0 defeat at Brentford on Saturday. Not at the right level physically, was the gist of the manager’s comments. De Zerbi also mentioned Marcos Senesi and Sandro Tonali, two of the club’s other new signings. Their condition had to come as no surprise. It certainly did not to De Zerbi.

Take the case of Van Hecke, for whom the summer months have been a whirlwind. A few bullet-points from his timeline are worth noting. 18 June: joins Spurs from Brighton for £52m; 30 June: knocked out of World Cup with the Netherlands after last-32 penalty shootout defeat to Morocco; 23 July: boards team flight with Spurs for pre-season tour to New Zealand and Australia. “It was a really short break, to be honest,” Van Hecke says. “But I didn’t want to miss anything in the pre-season. My first days [as a Spurs player] were in New Zealand and Australia.”

American talks life on the professional circuit and those making sacrifices for a pay cheque, often compromising physical and mental welfare

For Mackenzie McDonald the players’ ongoing push for greater prize money and welfare contributions from the grand slam tournaments could result in the difference between simply putting food on the table and making a decent living.

After 10 years on the ATP Tour the 31-year-old American tennis veteran is not pleading poverty but knows from personal experience that life on the professional circuit can be a hand-to-mouth existence, with players’ physical and mental welfare often compromised due to their desperation to get back on court.

A welcome return to watch Cambridge brought back a whole lot of memories, nostalgia and contemplation

On 11 February 1989, Cambridge United beat Hartlepool 6-0. My memories of the game are faint. The internet can’t even tell me who scored – perhaps Laurie Ryan got a couple. I do recall walking past some Hartlepool fans on Coldham’s Common who were peering into a brook. “Looking for a new centre forward?”

Not a terrible joke from my dad. There was polite laughter at least.

• Liverpool would pay £100m plus £2om in add-ons

• Andoni Iraola hints at exit for Cody Gakpo in this window

Liverpool are closing in on a £120m deal for Bradley Barcola after a breakthrough in talks with Paris Saint-Germain and will attempt to “improve other areas” according to the head coach, Andoni Iraola.

Barcola has been Liverpool’s main transfer target all summer only for PSG’s £145m valuation to prove a significant hurdle. However, further negotiations on Wednesday night ended in an outline agreement being reached over a compromise fee. Liverpool have agreed to pay a guaranteed sum of just over £100m for the France international, with add-ons based on individual and team success, taking the overall package to about £120m.

• Councillors say plan does not tackle effect on residents

• RFU want to increase number of non-sporting events

The Rugby Football Union’s bid to stage more concerts at ­Twickenham has been delivered a blow after local councillors insisted planning ­permission should not be awarded until the proposal further commits to limiting the impact.

The RFU has ­submitted its ­planning application to Richmond council to use the ­stadium for non-sporting events for up to 15 days a year, with a decision due in October. Public consultation was due to end on Thursday with 240 ­submissions in favour and 456 against at the time of writing.

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The transfer window isn’t an actual window, of course. In reality, it’s a large collection of different windows, with each club having one of their own, through which they peer longingly, occasionally flinging large quantities of cash money out of them like half-cut sailors on a ship coming into dock, and they’re all in various states of disrepair. For example, Tottenham have only recently prised theirs open – the previous occupant, Mr Levy, had deliberately painted over the seals – and all summer it’s been flapping in the breeze like the screen door of a haunted house. Manchester City meanwhile have removed the glass from their frames altogether, allowing the free movement of large expensive items safely through it in both directions. There are some officious-looking gentlemen with clipboards currently double-checking the structural integrity of that one. They say they’ll get back to us.

I see that after disappointing at Man City, Savinho changed his name to Sávio, and then scored on his debut for Spurs. In the hope that the same trick works for me, in terms of improving my strike rate in getting letters to Football Daily published, I’m changing my name to Noble Francis” – Phil Taverner.

One of my very favourite things in modern football is to see players for billion-dollar teams in billion-dollar stadiums ‘giving it large’ after scoring against lower-league opposition, following a humiliating loss in a derby game (yes, I know it’s Brentford, but it still counts as a derby) – Noble Francis.

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Before the IBF world heavyweight title clash with Filip Hrgovic on Saturday, Barry Jones and Andy Lee analyse the unbeaten fighter

On Saturday night the 21-year-old Moses Itauma expects to become the second-youngest world heavyweight champion in history, after Mike Tyson, when he fights Croatia’s Filip Hrgovic for the IBF title at the O2 Arena in London. In an attempt to sift through the hype and to assess the potential Itauma has shown, the Guardian asked Barry Jones and Andy Lee for their expert views on the strengths and possible weaknesses of the young British fighter.

Itauma promises to become the dominant new force of the unpredictable heavyweight division but Hrgovic is his first real test as he strives to become a world champion in just his 15th fight.

Minister calls for Instagram owner to extend sweeping new safeguards for young users to Britain

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The UK government expects the Instagram owner Meta to roll out the same protections for children in Britain as those it agreed in the US on Wednesday, as part of a court settlement that could cost the company up to $18bn (£13bn).

Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said on Thursday he did not want young people in the US to have “a higher rate of protection” than those in Britain, after Meta settled a lawsuit brought by dozens of US states accusing the company of harming children with dangerous products.

Small boat crossings also down 23% year-on-year, with Home Office citing more trafficking arrests

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The number of asylum seekers living in hotels has halved within a year, including 13 closures over the past month alone, according to new migration statistics.

Sweeping changes to the asylum system have also seen a significant drop in legal arrivals and asylum claims. But the numbers of asylum seekers who are now being housed in private accommodation has increased, as the government shifts numbers being housed in hotels into privately rented houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).

Allegations Nathan Cofnas was unqualified for Ghent role and would cause ‘negative impact’ made to senior leaders months ago

Nathan Cofnas, the academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism, has been accused of having “very limited expertise” for his academic role by professors also working at Ghent University, who say he has a “far-right agenda”.

Cofnas secured a postdoctoral research role “on the future of liberalism” at Belgium’s Ghent University in March. Weeks later, Ghent’s department of philosophy and moral sciences handed a 19-page statement to university officials, setting out why it believed it was “improbable” that Cofnas was the best candidate.

Gold collection known as Treasure of Villena, worth at least €1.7m, is target of ‘very well planned’ raid

Thieves in Spain have raided the Treasure of Villena – a stunning collection of bronze age gold artefacts that has been described as the most important prehistoric trove in Europe – in the latest high-profile smash-and-grab heist on the continent.

The raid on Thursday morning of the 66 mostly gold objects in the Spanish town of Villena lasted just minutes, officials said.

Mosquito traps are set up at Germany’s biggest airport and doctors are asked to look out for symptoms of disease

German health officials are seeking to reassure the public after two workers at the country’s biggest airport died of malaria.

Mosquito traps have been set up at Frankfurt airport and a mosquito monitoring process is under way. A detailed investigation is being conducted to clarify how the workers contracted the disease.

Exclusive: utility company wants to draw off tens of millions of litres of water a day from Thames and replace it with treated effluent

Levels of a toxic “forever chemical” rose to 13 times the legal limit during Thames Water pilots for a controversial multimillion pound water recycling scheme that will pump millions of litres of treated sewage into the River Thames during drought.

The data from the pilots is in stark contrast to public comments from Thames Water that their water recycling project in south-west London will not harm the riverine environment.

From humpbacks learning the latest songs to sperm whales’ ‘clan codas’, drones and AI learning are helping reveal another dimension to the concept of culture

In 2015, the whale researcher Valeria Vergara pitched a small tent at the icy water’s edge on Somerset Island in the remote Canadian high Arctic, shrouded in a freezing fog so thick she struggled to see her own hands. She trailed a cord out to the coast and plopped a hydrophone into the water to record the calls of belugas.

As many as 1,000 of the whales, accompanied by their newborn calves, frequented the surrounding bay. Belugas’ ceaseless chatter, made up of dozens of unique sounds, is crucial to keeping these creatures connected in the dim, turbid waters of the Arctic.

Horticulturalists begin moving and propagating plants before the rusty and warped Palm House begins renovation – but some are too tall to save

It will be a gut-wrenching moment for the horticulturalists at Kew Gardens when some of the magnificent trees in the Palm House have to be felled.

“There are some sad moments ahead,” said Palm House manager, Will Spoelstra, who knows all the plants inside the cathedral-like greenhouse.

Bears killed 13 people in Japan last year, as a lack of forest foods increased conflicts. Yet some say the country’s controversial cull could threaten the endangered species

Every summer, millions of people escape the heat and humidity of Tokyo by heading to the tranquil resort town of Karuizawa in Japan’s Nagano prefecture – just an hour by bullet train from the capital. Here, at the foot of Mount Asama, visitors stroll bamboo-lined pathways, cycle in verdant highlands, and practise the wellness ritual of shinrin-yoku, bathing among the cool hinoki forests. It would be the ideal nature retreat – if it wasn’t for the bears.

From June to August, bears often move close to Karuizawa, feeding on the mulberries, ants, leaves and cherry blossoms that grow near the town. Unlike nuts, these foods are low in calories, spurring the bears to seek out further sustenance. “They’re more likely to get close to residential spaces to see what they can find,” says Amelia Hiorns, a British zoologist who previously worked with Picchio Wildlife Research Centre in the town. “This combines with the busiest season for tourists.”

Natalie McDonald, 34, and Valentina Foster, seven, died in fire less than mile from A66 crash, with police not ruling out links

A woman who died in a house fire along with her seven-year-old niece has been described as “a beautiful soul”.

Natalie McDonald, 34, died along with her niece Valentina Foster, seven, in the blaze in Grangetown, near Middlesbrough, in the early hours of Wednesday.

Elderly Aids Ltd, which sells call-blocking devices, made 758,053 cold calls between May 2024 and February 2025

A company that made its money promising to protect older people from nuisance calls has been fined £190,000 for “hounding” them with hundreds of thousands of nuisance calls of its own.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said Elderly Aids Ltd, a company selling call-blocking devices, made 758,053 cold calls between May 2024 and February 2025 to try to sell its products.

Figure is 30,000 higher than a year ago but latest data is a boost to efforts to reverse the rise in economic inactivity

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The number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK fell below 1 million in the latest three-month period.

In a boost to the government’s efforts to reverse years of rising economic inactivity among people aged 16 to 24, the Office for National Statistics said its surveys showed there were an estimated 981,000 Neets in April to June, compared with 1,012,000 in January to March.

Lawyers claim Eman el-Shazly, from Birmingham, was detained in effort to silence her sister, a critic of Sisi regime

The UK Foreign Office has been asked to intervene to secure the release of a British-Egyptian woman who it is claimed has been arrested in Cairo because of her sister’s political activism.

Eman el-Shazly, a 45-year-old based in Birmingham, was arrested on 16 August while visiting Egypt. Her lawyers say she has been detained in an attempt to silence her sister Mona, a relentless and harsh critic of the Egyptian government on her UK-based YouTube channel.

Andrew and Tristan Tate’s lawyer tells court that pair, who are wanted on rape charges, are not a flight risk

A lawyer for the social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate urged a US judge on Thursday to release the brothers on bail from a Miami jail ⁠as they contest extradition to Britain, ⁠where they are wanted ​on rape charges.

Howard Srebnick, a lawyer for the Tate brothers, told the Miami-based US magistrate judge Lauren Louis that they had regularly appeared in court in Romania, where they are on pre-trial release, which he said ⁠was evidence they were not a flight risk.

As the US president struggles to end his Iran war, and approval ratings hit new lows, he leans on a familiar gambit

Donald Trump knows the power of an image – of himself, with everyone from Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un to Kim Kardashian. How about George Washington?

As the US president struggles to end his war with Iran, and with his approval ratings hitting the lowest levels of his second term, he has in recent weeks posted a series of AI-generated images of himself alongside key historical American figures.

Bag, camera and pipe belonging to 86-year-old are latest relics uncovered as glaciers melt due to global heating

An 86-year-old mountaineer has been reunited with his backpack and climbing equipment after the kit emerged from a melting glacier in Austria – more than 60 years after he was forced to leave them there.

Items including an ice axe, camera and a pipe dating from the 1950s or 1960s were discovered on the Sulztalferner glacier in Austria’s Tyrol region, at an altitude of 2,955 metres (9,700ft) above sea level, by a hiker in July.

Georges Dib, who had 8.7m TikTok followers, was arrested on Sunday after being sentenced in absentia to life in prison

Known to his 8.7m TikTok followers as Dr Food, Georges Dib was a popular Lebanese food influencer who would hold giveaways, post behind-the-scenes tours of his food production facilities and wax philosophical about the ingredients of success.

But Lebanese authorities allege that when the camera was off, the chef was living a double life. For months they sought his arrest on charges of international drug trafficking and production, accusing him of hiding narcotics in his pastries.

Decision not to improve resilience sooner described as ‘unacceptable gamble with our national security’

Hundreds of Britain’s smallest power plants could remain at a higher risk to state-sponsored cyber-attacks until the 2030s despite a successful Iran-linked hack last month, it has emerged.

Officials this week briefed energy bosses on the breach, which is understood to have shut an unnamed small gas power plant for four days last month, and put the industry on alert over the growing cyber threat facing energy infrastructure.

Rules will require hedge funds, insurers and pension firms to report all non-financial wrongdoing

The City’s largest hedge funds, insurers and pension funds are racing to prepare for sweeping rules that will stop nearly 40,000 companies from hiding bullying and harassment cases from the financial watchdog.

From the start of next month, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will expand a crackdown on bad behaviour in the banking industry to a wider group of City investment firms and brokers.

The $5tn firm beat Wall Street expectations for yet another blockbuster quarter, though the stock made only modest gains

Nvidia announced on Wednesday that its quarterly revenue had doubled in a year to nearly $100bn. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO, jubilantly declared that demand is accelerating as the AI industry had reached a “golden age”.

The chipmaker, the most valuable company in the world with a $5tn market cap, brought in $96.2bn in revenue, beating Wall Street expectations of $92bn in the second quarter. That’s 106% more than the company saw in revenue this time last year. The company expects its revenue to continue to grow to $108bn by the end of the third quarter, higher than analysts predicted.

Jes Staley told US House committee he also was at one point named a trustee of convicted sex offender’s estate

Former JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley told US lawmakers he repeatedly shared confidential and market-sensitive bank ⁠information with Jeffrey Epstein and ⁠was at one ​point named as a trustee of his estate, according to a transcript released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday.

These admissions come as lawmakers investigate the late convicted ⁠sex offender’s ties with political and business elites. Staley appeared before the committee in July as part of its investigation into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate. Transcripts ⁠from the meeting were released on Wednesday.

(Reprise)
The crossover star’s introspective sixth album is full of memories of his mother, who died in 2025, bringing his dextrous guitar to songs rooted in tradition and yearning

On the face of it, 2025 was a landmark year for Billy Strings. His fifth album, Highway Prayers, won him his third Grammy. The first bluegrass album in more than 22 years to debut at the top of the US album sales chart, it confirmed him as the genre’s biggest crossover star in decades. He was feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”, a pretty impressive soubriquet in anyone’s book. As the New York Times noted, he was now capable of filling the arena-sized venues that his idols – Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck – could never have dreamed of performing in, packing them out with an audience that look less like traditional bluegrass aficionados than Deadheads: a vast, mobile, hippy-ish army that call themselves Goats. They’re presumably drawn by the ease with which Strings occupies the no man’s land between country and expansive, psychedelically informed improvisation, his willingness to put acoustic guitar through umpteen effects pedals and stretch out songs for 20 minutes on stage.

It’s a side of Strings’ music that’s only hinted at on Highway Prayers’ follow-up: as Burn the Other End and Lucid Daydream draw to an end, they briefly unravel into a kind of abstraction that you can imagine as a jumping-off point for heady, out-there exploration live. But So Much for Goodbyes is an album more concerned with introspection, and understandably so. In the midst of 2025’s successes, Strings’ mother died of an overdose. His chaotic upbringing is a matter of record. His father died of a heroin overdose when he was two, both his mother and his stepfather were addicted to meth and he left home at 14 on the grounds that “there was no food in the house and my parents were strung out”. But Strings said he had “no idea” she had relapsed, and her death seeps into every corner of the album: its title and cover art – based on a collage his mother was working on the night she died; the concluding instrumental that bears her name, Debra’s Waltz; the songs that, on the surface, appear to have nothing to do with her passing.

It has inspired violent protests from Norway to Rome – and now it’s hitting the UK. Playwright Tiago Rodrigues explains why the far-right speech at the drama’s climax has proved so incendiary

In February, turbulent scenes inside a German theatre made headlines around the globe. During the final act of a play at Schauspielhaus theatre in Bochum, the audience first jeered and whistled at a performer in the role of a far-right politician. An orange lobbed from the auditorium narrowly missed its target; eventually, two spectators climbed on to the stage and tried to wrestle the actor off. News of the incident travelled around the world: it seemed a bizarre throwback to a world in which people were not able to tell the difference between art and real life, like 19th-century Parisians stampeding out of a cinema after watching a train hurtle towards the camera.

For the man who wrote the play, however, it was nothing unusual. “I was not surprised by the reaction,” says Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues. “I was surprised by the fact that it was so surprising for so many people.” He describes the audience’s reaction to his play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists as “very intense”, but also “typical”.

Hugo Weaving stars in this wonderful Australian series about old friends in their 60s. It is a feast of hilarity and heartbreak – and there needs to be more TV like it

With Dalliance, television continues its brave expeditions into unknown narrative lands. It was first forced to venture into women’s stories (using female writers, directors, stars and, oh my goodness, sometimes it was just wall-to-wall womanity, you know?) in the post-Weinstein years. Previously unassailable figures were toppling like ninepins and investors needed to take refuge in those unlikely to have problematic pasts who were likely to tank projects the moment any reporter turned a beady eye upon them.

That turned out quite well. Women were not as boring as we had been led to believe, and were often capable of anchoring quite interesting, intelligent or funny shows. Sometimes they were all three at the same time, even if they weren’t called Fleabag.

Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr lead a goofy roadtrip comedy that is just sharp enough to keep you strapped in

Idiots is billed as a return to the raunchy bro comedies of the 2000s like Pineapple Express and The Hangover and about halfway through there is a visual gag involving bodily functions that is so revolting, so unexpected and so genius that it comes close to them. For a moment, I was transported back to the mix of delight and disgust I felt upon watching a ‘90s Farrelly Brothers movie when I was far too young: How is this allowed?

Described as an “earnest-dipshits-on-the-road screwball comedy” by director Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, The Toxic Avenger), this R-rated indie comedy can’t entirely deliver on that enticingly deranged promise, but it has enough testosterone-fueled transgression to make its runtime breeze by. Dave Franco plays Mark, a doofus with a neck tattoo who expresses affection for his fellow man by slapping them on the jowls. When he is invited to vacate his job at a call center – which he has been coasting through by playing gory video games and sneaking shots of whiskey at his desk – he teams up with with Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr) for a dodgy under-the-table job involving transporting wayward teens to rehab. Their first charge is Sheridan (Mason Thames), a moody influencer who has made a name for himself by playing cruel stunts on members of the public like an off-brand Jake Paul. Like Harold & Kumar before it, the road trip is an obvious but effective ruse for Idiots’s freeform, THC-addled approach to storytelling which finds the trio jumping from country diner to crummy motel to a Slavic granny’s living room as Sheridan attempts to derail his passage to rehab.

The bizarre story of French secret agents blowing up a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand is rivetingly retold by the eco-veterans – revealing an increasingly unhinged litany of lies, denials and James Bond-style antics

When DS Terry Batchelor received the call informing him of the whereabouts of the French couple suspected of bombing the Rainbow Warrior, he was eating a pie. The suspects were in Auckland, he learned, preparing to return their hired Toyota HiAce campervan to the rental depot. A scoop! Batchelor, who was based nearby, gathered his team and set off in hot – and ultimately successful – pursuit. And the pie? “Actually,” reflects the retiree, peering at us over his moustache, “I hadn’t started the pie yet.” A pause, heavy with the threat of italics. “But I was about to.”

There is a lot of this sort of thing in Sky Documentaries’ Rainbow Warrior, a feature-length retelling of the events surrounding the July 1985 sinking of the titular Greenpeace flagship. That is to say; granular recollections, delivered by elderly men with combative facial hair, seemingly irrelevant in isolation but riveting and oddly comforting when viewed as part of a startling and frequently unhinged whole.

This time the ranks of the undead have acquired a hive mind, making them even more formidable adversaries. Can a maverick academic save the day?

Here is another frenzied K-zombie action-horror from Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan and Peninsula. Colony is frontloaded with 10 minutes of sciencey exposition and setup during which a biotech CEO mentions maze-solving slime mould and the pioneering work of the entomologist William Wheeler on the hive minds of ant colonies. Then the CEO is injected with a disgruntled former employee’s bright green liquid tech – it always needs to be bright green in such circumstances – and becomes the first victim of a bio-terror attack that traps a small cross-section of South Korean society in a tower block with hordes of fast-moving rabid flesh-munchers. An hour and three quarters of goopy, bloody mayhem ensue.

An upscale shopping mall occupies the lower floors of the tower, and it takes some nerve to give your zombie film much the same setting as Dawn of the Dead, the masterwork of the godfather of the genre George A Romero. Thankfully Colony can boast an innovation: these zombies have a hive mind, an emergent collective intelligence that makes them more formidable adversaries than your average braindead stumbler. The moment that one of the infected notices you and screams, as in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, they all turn and attack.

A teacher’s private anxieties are subtly combined with political events in this Booker-listed tale set in coastal Massachusetts

Artie Dam is a much-loved history teacher from coastal Massachusetts famed for his white socks and old sneakers and who sees a growing hopelessness in his young students. Not only are they dispirited by the state of the world, but they also believe they won’t be able to achieve their professional dreams. Their feelings of dread and ennui are shared by Artie who is aghast at the imminent re-election of a cruel and divisive leader (who remains nameless).

Artie is also lonely in the company of his wife, Evie, a therapist who comes from a wealthy family and is dismissive of her “soft” spouse. Artie realises he doesn’t truly know Evie, and she doesn’t care to know him. He traces their loss of connection to their son Rob’s car accident a decade ago in which Rob survived but his girlfriend Heather was killed. Such is Artie’s desolation that he contemplates suicide, if only he can find a way of doing it discreetly. But something happens while he is sailing in his boat that changes his mind. Later, a revelation from his son further shifts his perspective on his relationships.

Jacques Forestier/Boris Kusnezow
(Warner Classics)
The Canadian violinist’s album definitely does what it says on the tin: from Bartók to Ernst, there is a quiet and beguiling eloquence to his playing

Perhaps the most promising thing about this impressive debut album from Jacques Forestier, the young Canadian violinist who tied in first place at the 2024 Joseph Joachim Competition, is the way it lives up to its title.

There’s a swing to the way he and the pianist Boris Kusnezow play Bartók’s six Romanian Folk Dances that extends even into the quiet movements, which sound distant and beguiling. Wieniawski’s Polonaise de Concert comes across as a dance rather than just a flashy showpiece. Bach’s D minor Sarabande is framed by movements from Ysaÿe’s solo Sonatas. All have persuasive rhythmic poise.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Yannick Nézet-Séguin polished up the Rosenkavalier suite then gave an exceptional reading of the composer’s self-congratulatory tone poem, while Elza van den Heever delivered a visceral account of Salome’s final scene

Artistically ambitious and with an ego the size of a small planet, Richard Strauss was rarely backwards in coming forwards. When quizzed about the wisdom of depicting his 34-year-old self in music he brushed the matter aside, declaring himself no less interesting than Napoleon. The work in question, the self-congratulatory yet brilliantly conceived tone poem Ein Heldenleben, formed the second half of this all-Strauss programme. Before that, the Met Orchestra, here making their Proms debut, stayed on home turf with music from the operas.

The Rosenkavalier suite, compiled by hand unknown, is frankly a mess, lurching from one bonbon to the next with never a thought for musical logic (the overblown ending is truly crass). Yannick Nézet-Séguin did a decent job of papering over the cracks, letting the music unfold naturally rather than forcing its ham-fisted transitions. The love scenes were the highlight here, the orchestra spacious and shapely. If the heart didn’t leap as it might, it was likely due to the absence of the human voice.

First-wave punks rejected religion – but come the 90s, bands embracing eastern thought found legions of devotees. Ahead of reformations and reissues, they discuss the Bhagavad Gita, brawls and tulasi beads in the pit

Whether wielded as shock tactic or part of a considered philosophical stance, mockery and distrust of religion have been baked into punk rock’s DNA from the get-go. The Damned, Crass, the Germs and the Dead Kennedys all proffered early potshots and takedowns, and if Bad Brains received a grudging pass for their Rastafari leanings, in general, songs kowtowing to gods or masters were about as likely to win you scene cred as praise for Reagan, cops or nuclear war.

As the 80s ticked into the 90s, however, something curious began to happen: a clutch of bands emerged who were wise to the hardcore classicism of Minor Threat and SSD but also looked east to Krishna consciousness. Leading the way was Ray “Raghunath” Cappo who, barely into his 20s, had already broken down walls as frontman for Youth of Today, a New York band who combined a straight-edge philosophy with animal-rights advocacy and a sense of full-throated positivity. He and guitarist John Porcelly had “witnessed enough young people screwing up their lives that we thought, as simple as it is, it’s a positive message. Let’s rally behind it,” he says. “And it became big, bigger than we expected.”

The author of The Adversary and Yoga unearths a history that includes the Nazis, Russia, and the Académie Française

When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. She had been “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, in effect its head, and 200 people gathered at Les Invalides in Paris to pay tribute. Emmanuel’s father, Louis, was there too, in a wheelchair, only half aware of what was going on. This 400-page memoir, translated into English by John Lambert, is a homage to both parents and the unlikely history that brought them together. It’s also an act of reparation towards Hélène, whom Emmanuel worshipped as a child but upset as an adult by publishing a book that she’d forbidden him to write.

Hélène grew up in stateless poverty in Paris, the daughter of Georges Zourabichvili, whose parents had fled Georgia in 1921, and Nathalie von Pelken, who as a child had six governesses, one for each day excluding Sunday. Though “the magical world of the fallen Russian aristocracy” was the backdrop, conditions were tough, not least after Georges disappeared in 1944, murdered by partisans for alleged Nazi collaboration. Hélène was 15 at the time and unsuccessfully tried to hide the truth about George’s death from her younger brother, Nicolas.

The much-discussed Life of M is the latest in a lineage of celebrity satire that spans from Virginia Woolf to The Devil Wears Prada

In Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, the famous actor protagonist participates in an event at a book store after hours. The actor, M, is joined by “a writer of some renown” and a fashion model who possesses “some vague self-absorption”. A brand sponsored the affair. I spent literal hours trying to find the real-world equivalent of the opaque fictional passage. I scrolled through the backlogs of influencers I know to appear bookish in their content, who might have fallen prey to Dior’s Ulysses tote bag drop or Miu Miu’s “literary club”. I even stooped so low as to DM a Natalie Portman fan account, asking for leads.

As has been widely reported, M’s character is based on Portman. One journalist was credited with the scoop, but she simply finished her advance copy sooner than the rest of us; it’s clear from page three, when Cusk describes M’s breakout film as having “immediately brought her childhood to an end” (obviously Léon: The Professional; Portman was 11 when she was cast) and a later film about obsessive, wild ballerinas (Black Swan). But the rumor that Portman is unhappy with her portrayal – an impression that cannot immediately be gleaned from the book itself, especially depending on interpretation of its final lines – has trickled down to the raggiest of tabloids.

A terminally ill woman makes a final trip to Egypt in an exquisitely wrought portrait of end-of-life reckoning

Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.

Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.

A brilliant new biography that does its subject the favour of taking her seriously – even if few else did

Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels. With a pekingese clamped to her hot pink bosom she would lie back on a library couch and exhale a story about virginal girls taming wayward dukes, damaged airmen or misunderstood surgeons. Meanwhile Miss Savory, Mrs Smith or Mrs Morgan, picked for being unfidgety and sneezeless, would take everything down in immaculate Pitman shorthand. Cartland reckoned on being able to polish off 8,000 words a day. “In this way,” she told one of the many reporters who quizzed her on her astonishing productivity, “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.” At her peak she was pushing out 23 books a year which added up to 723 in total. Only Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare topped her lifetime sales of 750m.

Cartland was a dictator in other ways, too. Husbands, dogs, houses and the local council were all expected to bend themselves to her indomitable will. Resistance, let alone opposition, was futile. The managing director of the company that printed her books suggested that she read Nietzsche on the perceptive grounds that they had a lot of ideas in common. Oddly, he also declared himself madly in love with her. Behind that marshmallowy exterior, all pink chiffon, candyfloss hair and soft, smudgy lines, there lurked sinews of high-tensile steel.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio
The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients

The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.

This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

An increasing tension between players and publishers about ownership of titles could lead to a divestment from the system the big companies are trying to enforce

At the time of press, there is a well-publicised protest taking place in the video games community. PlayStation 5 owners are being encouraged to log off from their consoles between 23 and 30 August – no playing games, no downloading new titles. The motivating factor is Sony’s decision to cease physical game disc production from January 2028. After that, games will only be released as digital products. In an act of poor timing or wilful defiance, Sony chose this week to send out a mass email reminding customers of their PS5 terms and conditions: “The software is licensed to you, not sold,” states the relevant clause. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play … ” It knows, of course, that most customers won’t open the email, let alone read it.

There has always been a tension between game players and game publishers – an underlying sense of mutual mistrust. Players are wary of their favourite franchises being canned, or games being delayed or released with bugs. Publishers and manufacturers are wary of piracy and the capricious tastes of consumers. But now the atmosphere among many game players feels more starkly political than ever. Microsoft has been targeted by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement for its ties to the Israeli military; the consumer advocacy group Stop Killing Games is gaining support; players have protested over the purchase of Electronic Arts by a Saudi-led consortium – boycotts have been proposed in part due to the possible ramifications regarding LGBTQ+ content in titles such as The Sims. As the games industry has grown and globalised, its impact on culture, society and politics has increased. Yet, on an individual level, gamers and consumers are feeling increasingly powerless.

PC; Nathan Grange, Léonard Lemaitre, Niels Tiercelin, IronEqual
Race across impossible dystopian cityscapes in this exhilarating game of wall-runs, death-chancing leaps and split-second improvisation

At first, Vholume seems like a quick rush through some smartly selected references. Has this breathless yet austere parkour game been designed or ingeniously curated? The urban gymnast moveset comes from Mirror’s Edge. Level names use terms like conapt, first coined by Philip K Dick. And the environments themselves are dystopian and surreal, Half-Life 2’s City 17 colliding with the blasted avenues and mute archways of de Chirico. Many games have influences. Vholume has actual taste.

All the surface stuff fades away when the game is in motion, however. Vholume’s an on-foot racing game in which you hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next. You’re clipping your wall-runs and power-slides together to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that gets you to the level’s exit and the worldwide leaderboards. And once that’s done, you have a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start of this one again to slice a few microseconds off your score? Or maybe you’d rather head over to multiplayer to race against the ghosts of others?

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
Songs, physical comedy and clever design come together in Theatr Iolo’s adaptation of Arnold Lobel’s offbeat story, aimed at over-fives

Arnold Lobel was a writer with a keen sense of the seasons. Frog and Toad Are Friends, one of my favourite books since childhood, has a wonderful story where the excitable Frog wakes up his grumpy friend Toad and tricks him into enjoying the dawn of spring with him. Those stories celebrate togetherness but Lobel’s collection Owl at Home is about aloneness and being at one with your surroundings – even when the arrival of winter brings a snowstorm blowing through your roost.

With his hair gelled into tufts, George Williams plays Owl in this adaptation by Rina Vergano and Theatr Iolo, directed by Lee Lyford. We find Williams dozing in an armchair on Anisha Fields’ accomplished set, which retains the cosy essence of Lobel’s illustrations but is less twee. The roost functions as an equally eccentric character in itself, filled with contraptions, dark wooden furniture and a periscope to nervously keep an eye on the world outside.

Underbelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh
Grace McLean brings vocal and emotional range in the central role of Alex Bechtel’s Homeric song cycle

She is the one played by Anne Hathaway in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the central figure in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and the inspiration behind a 2010 play by Enda Walsh. And here she is again, this time alone with her thoughts, a longsuffering woman in white, in a seductive song cycle by Alex Bechtel.

Penelope is played by Broadway actor Grace McLean who brings both vocal and emotional range to the part. Drily witty, defiant and elegant, she is the wife of Odysseus, doggedly hanging on for her husband’s return long after the end of the Trojan war. Much to her annoyance – and occasional temptation – a load of suitors are camping out in her house, ready to take his place.

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Two men shelter from catastrophe in this Beckettian tale of memory, companionship and survival, which is intelligently performed but light on tension

Jermyn Street’s basement theatre provides the perfect space for Simon Stephens’ postapocalyptic play about two men hiding in a bunker after an unnamed global catastrophe. Several of Beckett’s plays have been performed on this stage in recent years and these characters are distinctly Beckettian. Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) may be the last men on Earth; they spend their time rehearsing the same stories, sometimes singing and, ultimately, waiting. But for what?

The difference between Beckett’s men and Stephens’ is the emphasis of hope over despair, although the two converge at times. Ashton and Reece play memory games, it seems, enacting scenes from their former lives. These are filled with optimism and promise: a declaration of love, a moment between father and son, the announcement of a pregnancy. One man is a porter, the other a professor. In ordinary life, they might have little in common but here they become receptacles for each other’s most precious memories.

At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 26 September

The 80-seat venue at Edinburgh fringe combines sauna rituals with theatre, music, storytelling … and sweat

Tucked away behind the Summerhall arts centre is the hottest new venue at the Edinburgh fringe … quite literally. The Sauna theatre has proved popular among theatregoers at the world’s largest performing arts festival, with shows inside its purpose-built, 80-seat sauna drawing sweaty, swimwear-clad crowds.

Visitors may be forgiven for thinking the sauna is a gimmick, especially at the fringe where absurd, experimental and ludicrous performances are not uncommon. This year they include a man drinking his own urine, someone singing the same song over and over, physical feats of exertion and several fully naked shows.

Motoring series to return four years after Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff suffered serious injuries in crash during filming

Top Gear, the long-running motoring show that has been off air since its co-host Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff was seriously injured in a crash during filming almost four years ago, is to return to the BBC, the broadcaster has confirmed.

After Flintoff’s accident at Dunsfold aerodrome in Surrey, the BBC said the series would be “rested” for the foreseeable future.

Ahead of playing Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields, artists explain why female-first festivals are due for a resurgence

When I first saw the poster for Olivia Rodrigo’s inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival in June, I assumed it was AI. Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, the Breeders, Bikini Kill and Garbage, all arranged in a neat line – and this was before I got to the words “special guests”. Karen O, Sarah McLachlan. And, to top it all off, Stevie Nicks? No.

I saw the post confirmed on Rodrigo’s Instagram, and thought: how?

I was thrilled to finally experience the Nevada festival. But I underestimated how hardcore it was – and the life lessons it would bring

I was naked in our tent at Burning Man last year when all hell broke loose. The 100km/h (62mph) gust wrenched our tent stakes from the ground – and me from my nap.

I threw on a dress, fear coiling in my belly when I saw the midafternoon sky had turned dark.

Nestled in the heart of Dartmoor, Moretonhampstead carnival celebrates its 101st edition in 2026. The Scragg brothers got among the crowds with Robert Frank-like ambition to document the town’s favourite day, capturing rural creativity and chaos from one decade to the next. Here they distil some of their rare gems from 1978 to 1984. The collection fulfils a promise from one sibling, Adrian, to the other, David, who died in 2020: ‘People will see these, Dave’

There are two things to consider, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Are you hurt by the way she treats you or the way she sees you?

• Read more Leading questions

I’m struggling with a dynamic with my sister-in-law. We’re not a natural fit personality-wise, and I’ve tried to be mindful of that. At times I wonder whether she might be jealous of the life I have with her brother and our children. I often encourage my husband to spend time with her without me, because she doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy me being there. As a result, we now mostly see each other at family gatherings, which happen about once a month.

There’s a recurring pattern where she corrects me quite sharply, with an impatience that often feels disproportionate or plain mean. She might snap while I am talking to her parents (with whom I have a good relationship), laugh at how I pronounce a placename, or dismiss a question as though it’s too stupid to answer. These interactions are quick and barely noticeable to anyone else, although my daughter and husband have both observed and agreed it was pretty mean.

Suri’s eco-friendly brush fixes several flaws in the first-generation model – here’s what it does better (and what still needs work)

• The best electric toothbrushes, tested

When I wrote the Filter’s guide to the best electric toothbrushes, one brand I didn’t need a sample from was Suri. I already owned one of its brushes, drawn in by its impressive commitment to sustainability in a sector that seemed blissfully unbothered by the climate crisis unfolding around us.

Unfortunately, a few things held it back from taking the top spot, and I’m pleased to say that these have mostly been addressed with the Suri Pro 2.0. Is it the best you can buy? Still not quite, but the gap has significantly closed, and there are fewer caveats than ever when giving it a recommendation.

With a genuinely impressive lifetime guarantee, Nectar’s mattress outperforms pricier rivals for comfort and motion isolation

• The best mattresses, tested

Memory foam has been called the Marmite of the bed industry. Nice soundbite, but I think it’s more like butter – because many mattresses now include a “comfort layer” of this squishy material to make them more palatable. You wouldn’t eat a whole block of butter, though, and you probably wouldn’t want to sleep on a mattress made entirely from memory foam. Too much squish, too little support.

The Nectar Classic memory foam, like so many of the best foam and hybrid (foam and springs) mattresses, tempers the marshmallowy feel of true memory foam by sandwiching it between other types of foam, namely breathable polyfoam and dense support foam. As I discovered when testing it, this creates a lovely balance of comfort and firmness that feels more like a hybrid mattress, only without the bounce.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The former reality star and author talks family heirlooms, organic veg and splurge-worthy jeans with the Filter

• How I Shop with Fred Sirieix

Millie Mackintosh rose to fame as part of the original cast of the reality show Made in Chelsea, filming five series before leaving in 2013. She has since established herself as a fitness, health and beauty ambassador, releasing her own beauty collection with Boots in 2017, and publishing Made: A Book of Style, Food and Fitness.

After choosing to go alcohol-free, she shared her journey in the bestselling Bad Drunk, co-written with Dr Ellie Cannon. Mackintosh speaks candidly about the realities of motherhood, mental health and self-care on Instagram.

Our writer spent weeks putting capsules, sheets and liquid detergent through their paces to find the best for your clothes and the planet

• Sustainable cleaning subscriptions that make life easier

Nothing makes falling into bed more enjoyable than freshly laundered sheets, especially if they’ve just been dried in the sunshine. It’s a definite bonus, though, to know your clean bedding won’t bring you out in a rash or pollute your local river.

Laundry detergent can be a troublesome product. A few years ago, I suffered a full-body rash after using pound-shop detergent on my sheets. I switched to a big-brand product and never had a reaction again, but there’s still the question of whether its ingredients may be causing environmental harm after they’ve gone down the drain.

Sardines, mackerel, herring, pilchards, sprats and anchovies ... canning only makes the umami flavour better. They’re my top choice for pasta

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I can’t find it, despite having spent the past 35 minutes looking, but somewhere in the house is The Crisis Cook Book. It’s a standard paperback, postbox-red with white writing on the cover, and full of recipes from chefs including Rowley Leigh, Heston Blumenthal and Jeremy Lee. Not having found it, I needed Amazon to tell me it was published in 2007 and compiled by Nick Lander, at the time the Financial Times’ restaurant correspondent. He asked 28 chefs to donate three recipes – their favourite starter, main course and dessert – and proceeds from the book went to the national homelessness charity Crisis.

The reason I needed (and still need – it is now a mission) to find the book is because inside it is Rowley’s recipe for pasta with tinned sardines, fennel, chilli and lemon zest. It’s a recipe that I have made so many times, and for so many years, that I don’t need to look at the book; but, equally, because I’ve made it so many times and so much time has passed, I have no idea how far I have drifted from the original, and want to check. I’ve even written about this recipe in my weekly Guardian column, without referring to the book or even mentioning Rowley! Not that a store-cupboard version of the Sicilian pasta con le sarde (pasta with sardines and wild fennel) is owned by anyone, although Rowley did teach me.

Whether they’re consumed as a considered glass for one or something to sip on a short trip, miniature wine bottles are back with a bang

In the 1920s, the London wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd was asked to create a wine cellar for a doll’s house, commissioned by Queen Mary, to showcase the best of British craftsmanship. Designed by Edwin Lutyens, it had running water, electricity, a library of tiny books and, naturally, a wine cellar stocked with 1,200 miniature bottles, including vintage ports, an 1889 Montrachet and top-tier bordeaux. These days, the doll’s house resides in Windsor Castle, but Berry Bros has a replica of that cellar in its own Mayfair cellar, complete with 5ml bottles of those same wines.

It is fair to say that this is not representative of the calibre of wine one generally finds in miniature bottles, a format associated with air travel and what I once called “journey juice” – ie, a drop that would last me the six stops from home to London Victoria on a Friday night. Google “miniature bottles of wine” and you’ll overwhelmingly be served examples from the very biggest wine brands in the world. This is also true of canned wines, although I’d argue there’s more interesting wine going into cans than small bottles.

Including, to my surprise, a 100% cacao bar …

Although I’m un peu fatiguée of chocolates in bonbon shape with coloured cocoa-butter splashes atop, I appreciate this is the way many chocolates truffles are made. Overcoming that prejudice, I tucked into a box of Scoff chocolates. They were beautifully fresh tasting – they are made in batches throughout the year and the latest batch has just been let loose. I liked every one of the nine flavours I tested, from lemon to malted milk. But the ingredient list is long and a bit mainstream; a cleaner, more artisan approach and this would be a winning brand.

Marks & Spencer has brought out some 1980s classics in original packaging for those wanting to go full Rivals: look out for Now!, Jet, Sparks and Coconut Grove and see which chocolate classics they remind you of. My testers loved them.

Laborious to harvest and extortionately priced, the sunset-coloured stigmas of the saffron crocus have an extraordinarily warm, pungent taste. Fortunately, however, a little goes a very long way …

The saffron crocus has six lilac-purple flowers, three yellow stamens and three orange-red stigmas that extend beyond the petals like the wiry antennae of an insect. The thread-like stigmas have to be picked only by hand when the flowers are fully open, a laborious, finickety job that hasn’t changed much since ancient times. Then, to avoid the colour and flavour fading, the stigmas need to be dried very quickly, a process that reduces their weight by about 80%. Tens of thousands of fiery-looking filaments are required to produce half a kilogram of the dried threads, which make the “hay” or powder we know as saffron and explains the exorbitant cost. Fortunately, just a few threads of this precious spice go a long way.

Native to Crete, Iran and south-west Asia, the saffron crocus has been cultivated since the dawn of civilisation for its medicinal properties, as well as for use in cosmetics, perfume, food and as a dye. According to Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food, the Moguls brought the use of saffron from Persia to India, in particular Kashmir; meanwhile, in the westward direction, the Arabs were cultivating saffron in Spain by AD960, although it was not until the 13th century that cultivation spread to Italy, France, Germany and England, particularly Essex. In his book The Last Food of England, Marwood Yeatman describes the “orderly strips of purple flowers inches apart in beds of up to 10ft wide” growing in a field outside the prosperous, half-timbered Essex wool town of Chipping Walden. “The women (‘crokers’) stooped to lift the crop on damp and dewy September mornings.” By the early 1500s, Chipping Walden had been renamed Saffron Walden.

Helen says grabbing friends’ leftovers is a no-no. Bill thinks wasting food is wrong. You decide who should eat their words
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I know Bill hates waste, but pouncing on people’s leftovers is embarrassing, unhygienic and rude

With many adults admitting they feel lonely, meetup platforms offer the chance to make new connections

Would you pay £20 a month for the chance of making a friend, on the understanding that an algorithm – not you – gets to decide who you’ll meet?

Driven by the decline of “third spaces” such as youth centres and pubs, an increase in remote working and rising loneliness – 40% of adults aged 16 to 29 feel lonely “always, often or some of the time”, according to the Office for National Statistics – paid social events are now in vogue.

Research shows young adults often feel isolated. So alongside embracing ‘grandma hobbies’, they want to get involved with the places they live and be good neighbours

Name: Community-maxxing.

Age: The portmanteau is recent, but Homo sapiens have always been social creatures.

He has chased a deer across a dual carriageway, eaten an entire tray of chocolate brownies and jumped head first into a canal. But despite all the worry he brings us, he is extraordinarily lovable

Ernie found his way into our hearts and home about nine years ago, when he strategically crawled into my lap during a family visit to meet a litter of puppies. While all the other beagle puppies ran wild, Ernie sat comfortably on me with his long, soft ears dangling down. We chose him because of his placid nature and named him Ernie after my mum’s late dad, who coincidentally also had short legs and a bit of a round belly.

After a few weeks we realised that Ernie was anything but placid. His gentle temperament quickly morphed into an unruly and persistent need to find his way into danger.

We want our balance back, but we can’t access the money to pay for essential repairs and settle an electricity bill

Last November, Lloyds Bank informed me, in my role as treasurer of my parish church, that the church account was to be closed and that I should open a new business account instead. This can only be done online, but a fault with their system prevented me – and local branch staff – from doing so.

At the branch staff’s suggestion, I opened the new account with a different bank in early March. Since then, I’ve been trying in vain to get Lloyds to transfer the balance from the closed account.

Britons will be able to buy ‘balcony’ systems they can install themselves from 27 August thanks to rule change

Despite this summer bringing hours of sunshine, many Britons have been unable to cash in on free electricity generated by the sun. Rooftop solar panels are usually out of the question if you live in a flat or rent your home, and the cost has made them prohibitive to many more households.

However, this could be about to change because next week the first wave of low-cost “plug-in” solar panels will go on sale in Great Britain.

It has not paid me for months and I am in severe financial distress, and apart from my husband while I try to sort it out

I stopped receiving my NHS pension in May and, when I rang to ask why, I was informed that I was deceased.

I have repeatedly called to no avail and my emails have received auto-generated responses.

Sign-up perks may capture the attention but should the focus be on the interest-free overdraft?

• Students on their biggest financial shocks

• The best student deals and discounts

• An insider’s tips on student money

In the scramble to sort out university accommodation, join freshers group chats and work out how a student loan payment is meant to stretch across a whole term, there is one big decision that is easy to put off but worth getting right: which student bank account to open.

Student accounts work like any other current account but come with two extras that don’t apply to the general public: an interest-free overdraft, and a lot of perks designed to hook you in as a customer for life.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

Discussing people’s bodies can be fraught. We asked eating disorder experts how to do so – or not – responsibly

In the age of Ozempic and people being open about plastic surgery, discussion about people’s bodies is rife. At the same time, nobody seems quite sure how to talk about them, as shown by recent coverage of celebrities like Ariana Grande.

It is a fraught topic. We asked eating disorder experts for guidelines to follow when talking about other people’s bodies, and how to do so without doing harm.

Creatine has become the go-to supplement for anyone wanting to give their fitness a boost and build muscle. It’s even made it out of the gym, with influencers touting its cognitive benefits. But what’s the science behind creatine, and does the evidence stack up? Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample and Dr Justin Roberts, professor of nutritional physiology at Anglia Ruskin University

Is it true that … we should all be taking creatine?

Athletes and fitness influencers use creatine, but what is it? And does it work?

The 70s was a golden era for the jumpsuit, but I’m happy they’re back, thanks to Harry Styles, Benson Boone and – of course – me

Since appearing on The Traitors, I’ve become synonymous with jumpsuits. In fact, I’ve been required to wear one at every public appearance I have made since it aired, despite only wearing two on the show. That’s the power of the jumpsuit, I guess.

When I was packing for the show, I wasn’t even sure I would bring them – and not everyone watching liked them. Lots of people did, but I got messages saying: “What the hell is he wearing?”. The memes were also phenomenal. My favourite was my head on John Travolta’s body in a still from Saturday Night Fever.

The event feted its 25 year anniversary with labels like Zambesi, promising emerging designers and an explosion of Māori and Indigenous culture

New Zealand fashion week took place in Auckland this week at the heritage-listed Shed 10 on Waitemata harbour and other venues across the city. Founded by Dame Pieter Stewart in 2001, now run by entrepreneur Feroz Ali, the 25th anniversary featured a mix of established names, exciting newcomers and a dramatically enhanced Indigenous program. The event boasted three separate group showcases of creatives from not just the Pacific region, but India, Taiwan and the US, in addition to the inaugural New Zealand Indigenous fashion symposium.

If ‘lifespan’ is the time you’re alive and ‘healthspan’ the years you’re disease-free, then ‘hotspan’ is the period you’re attractive and vibrant. Want to increase yours? Experts share their tips

Forget 12-step skincare routines, red light therapy and injectables – the single most important thing you can do for your skin is wear UV protection. “Not just sun protection, but UV protection, every single day, regardless of weather or season,” says Dr Jennifer Owens, resident aesthetic expert at the Reborne Longevity clinic in London. “Up to 90% of visible skin ageing is caused by UV exposure – nothing else comes close in terms of impact.”

Cute, egoless canines offer a break from a world that feels dominated by ‘nepo babies’ and ‘Maga lady aesthetic’

What do Nicole Kidman, a pair of “nepo babies” and a beagle called Sansa Martínez Berlingeri have in common? They all appear on the covers of the all-important September issues of Vogue and Dogue. But the winner of the unofficial battle of the covers? The one with the keenest sense of smell and a penchant for playing with socks.

The September covers of British Vogue and Vogue US have come under intense scrutiny after their recent release, while their canine counterpoint, Dogue, has been almost unanimously celebrated.

Built in the 60s and 70s to curb a holiday exodus to Spain, with apartments inspired by Mayan pyramids and featuring ‘intergalactic curves’, La Grande-Motte is having another moment in the sun with fans of modern architecture

My dream holiday is a trip back in time. Not to see the results of seismic Pompeii or 15th-century Machu Picchu – although I love both – but somewhere created specifically between the mid 1950s and 1970s, when cities were getting weird. I love postwar architourism, exploring urban planning at its most frenzied and optimistic. I have relished trips to Niemeyer’s Brasília and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India, where the monumental and visionary modernist architecture and interiors are at odds with the minimal population. So La Grande-Motte, the retro futurist folly of a resort town on the southern coast of France, a 30-minute drive from Montpellier, had long been on my “must visit” list.

The tourist board of this Occitanie seaside town likes to flag up some superficial parallels between it and the aforementioned cities, but this isn’t a high-concept capital city or administrative hub. It was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s purely to persuade the French to stop going south to the Costa Brava in Spain. As part of an initiative by the French government, a stretch of windswept mosquito-infested coast between Montpellier and Perpignan, including Gruissan and Port Leucate, was reimagined as an alternative to the Côte d’Azur with several new-build beach towns. La Grande-Motte would be the weirdest project. It was made for fun. It’s also well positioned to visit the nearby salt marshes and 13th-century walled-in town of Aigues-Mortes, for when you want to feel as if you’ve ticked a few more holiday boxes.

The crowds at the top of Yr Wyddfa, the highest mountain in Wales, are now so huge that seasoned hikers and climbers are simply walking past them. Is everyone just making a mountain out of a molehill?

Name: The Snowdon queue.

Age: A decade and a half, give or take.

In the shadow of the crowded Lake District, this quiet coast path offers great views, breathtaking nature and a striking new hotel on the historic waterfront

What’s the edgiest region in the UK? I don’t mean in the sense of sketchy or fashionable, but where on the map of these four nations feels most at the margins of everywhere else? For my money, the north Cumbrian coast is a strong contender. Hemmed in by the Lake District fells on one side and the Solway Firth and Irish Sea on the other, this strip of towns and villages, farms and nature reserves, clinging to the low-lying littoral, has been battling nature, weather, geology and geography throughout its history.

Coastal erosion is part of the challenge. Like the railway navvies before them, the planners and builders of the England Coast Path (ECP) have done sterling work at plotting a viable footpath and shoring it up. But there are and always will be sections that are compromised and even impassable. I chose a section that would take three days, walking southwards, and my final destination, St Bees, was only reachable via a diversion. It’s all part of the adventure, and we’re lucky to have the ECP as a national trail, as it means issues and obstacles on the English coast will usually be promptly addressed.

From smoked kippers in Northumberland to dolphin spotting in Dorset and a palm-fringed village on a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands

The historic harbour is the hub of this working East Neuk fishing port, home to a fleet of about 30 small trawlers and creel boats. Their catches are sold at the covered market on the quay each weekday morning, and served at the harbourside Dory Bistro and Chip Ahoy at the Larachmhor pub. Pittenweem (which means “place of the cave”) also has a Victorian-era swimming pool next to the beach, which is filled by the tide twice a day. After falling into disrepair, it was saved by a local group called the West Braes Project and reopened in 2021, along with the crazy golf course. Early each August, there is an annual arts festival with exhibits by nearly 200 artists in harbourside spaces, heritage buildings, homes and studios. Pittenweem is flanked by two other pretty harbour villages, St Monans and Anstruther, while a third, Crail, is a little further north; the Fife Coastal Path links them all. The Bank in Anstruther has harbour-view rooms (doubles from £120 B&B).

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

Every now and then the Thursday quiz gets involved in a flap, as it did last week with “birb”-gate. After a sustained campaign lasting at least two weeks, subeditors finally relented and allowed the quiz to call our feathered friends “birbs” – only for half the comment section to revolt against the indignity of modern internet parlance. Still, that is nothing compared with the time a reader complained that the quiz using the phrase “baby cows” was unbecoming of a broadsheet newspaper. Anyway, 15 questions on news, general knowledge and obscure trivia await, and no “birbs” were harmed in the process. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 262

Dublin’s representative in the traditional festival defiantly reckons with xenophobia and balances Gaelic pride with her Somali heritage

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Last week marked the climax of Ireland’s Rose of Tralee festival, an annual celebration of Irish women, culture and the Irish diaspora. When Suad Mooge was chosen as Dublin’s participant in the festival earlier this year, she quickly became a symbol of Ireland’s fraught conversation around immigration and what constitutes Irish identity.

I caught up with Suad on a video call a week after the festival’s culmination, and found someone reflective and determined in the face of criticism.

Fiction sleuths are obsessed with the idea that the book, Life of M, is a flagrant riff on the actor’s life. And despite being a firm Cusk fan, Portman is reportedly not happy

Life of M, the latest book by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Cusk, is being billed by its publisher, Faber, as a “blazing interrogation of fame, power, beauty and truth” – and openly alleged as a thinly veiled portrait of Natalie Portman. For weeks before publication, speculation has swirled that its movie-star main character is based on Portman – to her reported displeasure.

With the book out this week, readers and critics alike are judging it as literature and gossip. Don’t want to read it yourself, but want to have an opinion? Here’s your crib sheet.

Service charges used to be a matter of choice, but now consumers feel obliged to pay them for even a cup of coffee. How do we navigate this minefield and who is really profiting?

In a London pub, Greg Double was brutally confronted with the reality of Britain’s evolving tipping culture. “I was annoyed about the pint being eight quid, but then when you put service on top, it’s absolutely criminal,” he says. In the past, you might have told the bar staff to keep the change or have a “drink” on you, but since when did we routinely tip in pubs? Or coffee shops? Or, worst of all, at self-service machines? Tip creep is happening.

Tipping was awkward enough in the UK when the general rule was 10% at a restaurant, plus anxiety about whether you should tip the hairdresser, babysitter or food-delivery driver. Now, with tipping suggested ever more frequently, US-style, it has become a minefield to Britons. The amounts edge higher – in fancier London restaurants, a 15% service charge is relatively commonplace. And it’s often asked for – in coffee shops for example, when you pay – before any service is delivered.

Poll to take place in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, where Bauhaus blossomed a century ago – and where AfD is promising ‘patriotic culture policy’ if it wins

The city of Dessau, where the Bauhaus design school flourished a century ago, catapulted Germany into the modern era and revolutionised global design.

It is also where the Nazis drove the avant garde movement out of town and attempted to crush its utopian principles. A hundred years later, another high-stakes culture war over its legacy is looming.

The standup has been the host of the panel show Mock the Week for more than two decades. As it returns to UK screens, he discusses its years as a macho bear pit, the dearth of jokes about Brexit – and why it’s important to punch up

Dara Ó Briain is still having photos taken when I arrive at the studio in west London. A comedian requires comedy pictures, so Pål, the photographer, has him sitting on the floor holding up a scroll of the rust-coloured paper that he’s using as a backdrop. It looks as if the roof is falling in on Ó Briain. He calls over to me. “We can tailor the interview to match the pictures,” he says. “Starting with: do you ever feel like you’re trapped in a box?”

Shoot over, he ditches his jacket and we walk up the road to find a quiet corner in a pub. There’s a new season of Mock the Week, the topical satirical panel show that ran for 17 years on BBC Two until 2022 and has now been reborn on the free-to-air channel TLC. A roster of comedians make up two teams and compete in a faux gameshow, ostensibly to answer questions about the previous week’s news, but really just to be funny.

Musicians and performers pay tribute to the country legend who managed to be a generational talent, a formidable entrepreneur, a dedicated philanthropist and a truly kind person

Shirley Collins, singer-songwriter

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

Hundreds are missing and at least 160 people have died after torrential floods ⁠hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of the performer - whether you met him or admired his work

Tim Curry, performer of screen and stage, who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, has died aged 80.

Curry got Tony nominations for his varied stage work on Broadway as Mozart in Amadeus, Alan Swann in My Favorite Year and as King Arthur in Monty Python’s Spamalot. He also made a supremely creepy Pennywise the Clown in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It. But above all he is most remembered for one role: Dr Frank-N-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the screen version of the 1973 stage show.

As people grow used to AI chatbots, we’d like to hear your views about Google’s search engine

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

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

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of artist Yayoi Kusama – whether you met her, or appreciated her work

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese outsider artist who became a global superstar, has died aged 97.

Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc announced in a statement on Thursday.

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