From an elevated heart rate to weakened immunity, experts explain the hidden physical costs of chronic stress – and why our bodies aren’t built to stay on high alert

You wake up later than planned, so it’s a rush to get everything sorted out ahead of the school run. While you’re waiting for the toaster, idiotically, you check your phone. Something has happened, and your timeline is a scalding-hot mess of the worst takes imaginable. One of your children has left their shoes somewhere unfathomable, and there’s an envelope on your doormat scolding you for driving in a bus lane.

You’re undeniably stressed, and your body’s likely to respond by ramping up the same biological systems that evolved to deal with inter-tribe disputes and mammoth attacks. But is there a downside to being stressed – and having these systems switched on – all the time? Take a calming breath, and let’s dig into the science.

Johan Cruijff Arena, the Netherlands
Styles’ first stop in his Together, Together tour, which will see him perform lengthy residencies around the world, is a reminder of how talented he is

Midway through the opening night of his world tour, Harry Styles asks where the audience in the Johan Cruijff Arena have come from. To judge by their response, residents of Amsterdam are vastly outnumbered by those who have travelled vast distances to be here: further investigation on the part of the singer reveals audience members from Switzerland and Ireland.

It’s evidence of what – to use a modern term – a huge flex the Together, Together tour is. There are doubtless sound reasons for performing lengthy residencies at single venues rather than dutifully dragging yourself around the globe – Styles’ 10 shows in Amsterdam are the only gigs he’s playing in mainland Europe, followed by similarly lengthy sojourns at venues in London, São Paulo, Mexico City, New York City, Melbourne and Sydney – but it also helps underline the scale of the former One Direction star’s solo success. Twelve consecutive nights at Wembley is a feat not even Taylor Swift’s Eras tour could match. Here, it suggests, is a man who’s not only pulled off one of the hardest tricks in pop – the journey from manufactured boyband member to respected solo artist is a notoriously thorny one – but done it with an almost unparalleled degree of aplomb. You’d have to look back to George Michael’s post-Wham! career to find even a vague equivalent.

Four months after Trump’s surprise raid, a political thaw has descended – but mingled with hope is trepidation for what comes next

When Ángel Linares heard a strange buzz followed by an explosion, his first thought was that neighbours were setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year.

Then his windows shattered, the building’s walls shook and its facade was ripped off, sending him flying on to the ground of an apartment suddenly reduced to rubble. His 85-year-old mother, Jesucita, feared Venezuela’s northern coast had been devastated by an earthquake, like the one she remembers from 1967.

Facts can be expensive in a dangerous world. I have covered some brutal wars during my three decades at the Guardian, but journalists are now actively targeted in a way I have never seen

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It has never been so dangerous to be a journalist than now, and the threat keeps growing. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded 129 deaths of reporters and other media workers in 2025, the most it has ever recorded, and five more than the previous record, which was last year.

I have worked for the Guardian for more than three decades and covered some brutal wars, but journalists are now in the crosshairs, actively targeted, in a way I have never seen before.

They were surprised to agree on some topics. But could the scientist and the lawyer see eye to eye on the future of the monarchy?

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Keith, 48, Leeds

Occupation University lecturer in medical microbiology

Your mother expects to be taken on holiday and your siblings aren’t pulling their weight, so you’re right to be angry as things clearly aren’t fair

For years, it has fallen to me and my sister to take my mother on holiday. Now, she has a big birthday coming up and wants me to arrange a trip abroad. I have three other siblings, who have never taken her on holiday, so to prod them into action I spoke with one of my brothers, who expressed disbelief at my mum’s request and told me I was a fool for going along with it.

I can’t decide if he’s being mean (our father died a few years ago and she doesn’t have friends to go with) or if I am the fool in the family. I have young kids and a tight budget, but our holiday has to be arranged to suit “Granny”, so it ends up being a less adventurous, more expensive trip than my siblings take with their kids.

Lisa Nandy told the BBC she did not understand ‘sudden focus on Europe’ from Labour leadership hopeful

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The UK culture secretary has dismissed calls for Britain to re-enter the European Union as “odd”, a day after her former cabinet colleague Wes Streeting said the country’s future lies back in the bloc.

Lisa Nandy criticised the former health secretary on Sunday, saying his comments over the weekend risked reopening a debate that was settled with the Brexit referendum 10 years ago.

Exclusive: Then-home secretary justified proscription of group in newspaper column despite advice it might unfairly impact trial of six activists

Yvette Cooper wrote a newspaper column about Palestine Action despite prosecutors warning it could prejudice criminal proceedings against six activists from the group, it can be revealed.

The then-home secretary wrote the column justifying Palestine Action’s proscription even though the Crown Prosecution Service advised it might unfairly impact a trial concerning a 2024 break-in at an Israeli arms manufacturer’s factory.

Wave of almost 600 drones launched across 14 regions, after Moscow’s deadly three-day attack on Ukraine last week

At least four people have been killed in a large-scale retaliatory strike by Ukraine on Russia’s regions, including Moscow, the Russian authorities have said.

The wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck overnight across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula and the Black and Azov seas, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.

The UK finished last as the contest, held in Vienna, saw five countries boycott it over the participation of Israel

Bulgaria has won the 2026 Eurovision song contest after singer Dara swept to victory with the song Bangaranga.

The 27-year-old singer’s triumph is a first victory in the 70-year history of the song contest for Bulgaria, which only joined Eurovision in 2005 and sat out the last three editions.

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Casemiro’s tifo is more of a large banner, really. The Brazilian’s face is pictured next to the slogan: ‘Até à Morte’ (Until death).

Here come the teams! The Manchester United players, the ones that are fathers anyway, are coming out with their children, which is a nice touch. Adam Diallo and Kobbie Mainoo appear to have borrowed some of their teammates’ offspring. Bruno Fernandes’ daughter is unmistakably a Fernandes.

At least 80 deaths and 246 suspected cases in DRC’s Ituri province, while Uganda reports spread from travellers

An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is a “public health emergency of international concern”, the World Health Organization has said.

The WHO made its declaration on Sunday after more than 80 deaths and 246 suspected cases linked to the outbreak of the Bundibugyo virus.

French police fire teargas and UK shops close for safety reasons as hundreds queue for Royal Pop timepieces that make up Audemars Piguet collaboration

The launch of limited-edition Swatch watches descended into chaos in several European cities and New York, with French police firing teargas to restore order at a store near Paris.

Hundreds of people waited through the night from Friday into Saturday – and in some cases for several days – hoping to buy the Royal Pop timepieces, made in collaboration with the luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet.

Actor says Ensemble 84 in Horden, employing local talent, is how a professional repertory company should be

It’s a chilly spring evening in what was once a Catholic church in a left-behind County Durham pit village, and Ian McKellen admits he is feeling emotional.

“This is the only company of actors in the United Kingdom and it’s in … Horden?” he says. “I’m feeling very emotional. This fulfils all my romantic dreams I’ve had ever since I discovered the joys of theatre-going and acting.”

Fan buys missing Chile sticker for £150 after finding almost completed album in his loft

This week, Stephen Butler completed a collection that he started almost 60 years ago. With the final piece in place, it’s now worth thousands of pounds, but he has no interest in selling it.

Butler was moving house five years ago when he stumbled across a box in the loft that he had not thought about in years. Inside was his old school cap, some exercise books, photos and, in the middle of it all, a 1970 Panini World Cup sticker book.

British photographer collaborates with Dignity in Dying in run-up to private member’s ballot, after stalling of England and Wales bill in Lords

Just before Christmas 2023, the renowned British photographer and director Rankin set up a small pop-up studio in London’s Carnaby Street for a RankinLIVE event.

People could turn up to sit for a cover-style Rankin portrait: an image to mark a special occasion, perhaps, such as a birthday, or wedding vows renewal, or beating cancer. “And this amazing woman walked in called Paola Marra,” he said. “I asked what the occasion was, and she said: ‘I’m going to Dignitas.’”

Despite the ban on disposables, waste professionals say the mountain of discarded devices is a £1bn-a-year issue

It is 2pm and Ana, 47, has just started the afternoon shift at the Suez recycling plant near Birmingham city centre, standing beneath a sign reading “Non-ferrous sorting station” with a bucket of vapes in front of her. Sorting and dismantling them is part of her job as a site operative.

Recycling them is not simple. Each bucket holds between 40 and 50 devices, and over the course of a shift, she gets through about half a bucket. Using a hammer, she has to smash each vape open, pry out the batteries and separate each component into a different container.

The 2022 World Cup failed to deliver on its environmental promises. From air travel emissions to heat-related dangers, the 2026 edition will be even worse

Soccer fans are increasingly watching preparations for the 2026 World Cup through their fingers. The most popular sporting event on the planet is awash in controversy, whether it’s the eye-watering ticket prices, the question of Iran’s participation while the president of one of the host countries threatens war crimes against it, or the role that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement may or may not play in policing the event. And yet, lost in the political pyrotechnics is a fiasco that carries as much long-term peril as any: the tournament’s staggering contribution to runaway climate change.

The 2026 World Cup is not only the most politically combustible tournament in modern history, but it is also on track to be the “most polluting” World Cup ever, with total greenhouse gas emissions hitting nearly two times the historical average. Scientists conservatively project that the tournament will generate around 9m tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Air travel comprises approximately 7.7m tons of this carbon budget, and more than four times that of the average for tournaments held between 2010 and 2022. The researchers note that the worst-case upper estimate for air transport is about 13.7m tons of CO2. That may sound bad, but that’s just because World Cup emissions have never been worse.

For years, I polished the brass plaques in front of my apartment dedicated to a Jewish mother and daughter who were murdered by the Nazis. Then a message out of the blue connected me to a surviving child …

At the grand, biblical age of 102, Sonja Ibermann Cowan has zero interest in wasting her time. There are delicious great-grandbabies to be serenaded, uproarious meals to share with her three beloved daughters, and meaningful celebrations of the high holidays to mark with her Melbourne rabbi, who makes house calls. Five years ago, she decided to invest some of that precious time in what became a friendship with me, across the world in Berlin, her birthplace.

The boredom of the pandemic certainly played a part. Cooped up at home under much stricter Covid-19 restrictions than we had in Germany – Sonja joked about being “eingesperrt” (locked up) – she and her extended close-knit family started turning their attention to the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss, a journalist at the Australian newspaper The Age, embarked on an  ambitious research project to uncover the mysteries of Sonja’s life and her mother’s and sister’s murders in the Holocaust.

The Paralympic swimmer on being a teenage champion, seeking her birth mother, and the joy of retirement

Born in Walsall in 1994, Ellie Simmonds is a retired Paralympic swimmer and TV presenter. She moved to Swansea when she was 11 to train with the GB squad and at 13 was the youngest member of the British team at the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, winning two gold medals. She won two further golds at London 2012, breaking two world records, and a fifth gold at Rio 2016. Since retiring in 2021, she has presented for BBC Sport, and her documentaries include A World Without Dwarfism? and Finding My Secret Family. Along with Stephen Fry and Mo Farah, she takes part in Celebration Day on 25 May, to honour those who are no longer with us.

This is me in my grandma’s garden in Walsall. I have happy memories of being there – we would bake cakes or play outside all day. It’s a typical image of me aged four – energetic, non-stop and vibrant. Mum says I was never one to sit inside and watch TV, despite her efforts to occasionally get me to chill out on the sofa. Screen time wasn’t for me.

He has made smash hit shows for Netflix and has adapted Harry Potter for the stage. Yet the in-demand writer’s latest show Falling is new territory for him – a love story

I hear Jack Thorne before I see him. We’re meeting in a quiet cafe in Hampstead, north London, to discuss his very first love story for TV, Falling. I catch snatches of him chatting with various waiters – “Thank you, good sir” and “Lovely, lovely” – before he appears in front of me, all smiles but a little nervous, too. Which is surprising given this is the writer who had a hand in hits such as Skins, Shameless and the This Is England trilogy, co-created a cluster of brilliant adaptations (His Dark Materials, Lord of the Flies, Enola Holmes) and is steadily building up a vast canon of work inspired by disturbing but fascinating real-life stories (National Treasure, Toxic Town, The Hack). Most notably, he also co-created the Netflix series Adolescence, winner of endless awards, including and viewed by 140 million people and counting.

The ridiculous thing is that Thorne’s theatre career is as illustrious as his TV work. There’s the small matter of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage (an experience that Thorne found rewarding but, with all eyes on him, “not always a lot of fun”); plus his takes on A Christmas Carol and the chilling Let the Right One In. He drew on his family’s own experiences with IVF for the screenplay to the movie Joy, and is currently co-writing Sam Mendes’s highly publicised but super-secret four-film series about the Beatles (“I’m not allowed to talk about that”).

A casual arrangement became something more substantial for Shani and Can, who are happy living in the moment
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I was used to telling people that I could only offer them adventure, but with Shani that wasn’t true

Daniel Sikkema is accused of hiring someone to kill his husband, Brent Sikkema, amid a divorce and alleged fights over money

In the early morning hours of 14 January 2024, a hitman slipped into the renowned New York City gallerist Brent Sikkema’s Rio de Janeiro townhouse.

The alleged assassin, Alejandro Triana Prevez, grabbed a kitchen knife and traveled to Sikkema’s upstairs bedroom. An altercation unfolded near the bedroom door. As Sikkema, 75, struggled for his life, Prevez stabbed him, a lawsuit filed in New York state civil court alleges.

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

Bob Odenkirk’s a put-upon lawman in Ben Wheatley’s latest, and the SNL UK star is back out on tour

Normal
Out now
Ben Wheatley (Sightseers) returns with an action crime thriller starring Bob Odenkirk as a man serving as interim sheriff in the fictional little town of Normal, Minnesota, a place that turns out to have some unexpectedly big secrets involving the yakuza. Also starring Henry Winkler and Lena Headey.

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

Jilly Cooper’s over-the-top TV industry romp returns, and Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel make a bracing artistic double act. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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• Alonso confirmed as Chelsea manager | Live scores

Bradley Lowery, the Sunderland mascot whose battle with neuroblastoma helped raise than more £1m before his death in 2017, would have been 15 today. There will be a minute’s applause at Hill Dickinson Stadium after 15 minutes of today’s game, and two fans – one of each club – have cycled to the ground from the Stadium of Light to raise funds for the Bradley Lowery Foundation. Hats off to them.

Two more goals have been scored in a thrilling end-of-a-season game at Old Trafford, and Bruno Fernandes has equalled a major Premier League record. Clickity click click click!

The former Real Madrid manager’s desire to sign and create mentality monsters breaks with previous club policy

The Chelsea end was mostly empty by the time the players went to collect their losers’ medals. There was no grand ovation for the beaten team. The disconnect was evident after defeat to Manchester City in the FA Cup final, underlining how one of Xabi Alonso’s first challenges as Chelsea’s new manager will be to lift the mood and get players, fans and owners pulling in the same direction after a hugely disappointing season.

Many people are wondering why Alonso has agreed to take over on a four-year deal. Why, after running into player power and reluctance to build a project at Real Madrid, would you choose Chelsea? Just how big is the payoff?

Forward doesn’t fit the mould of a classic Pep signing, but we have all come a long way in the past decade of Manchester City success

One way or another, this was always going to end up being a Pep day. At the final whistle Pep Guardiola didn’t punch the air or really celebrate at all. Instead he walked quite slowly over to the scorer of the only goal, Antoine Semenyo, and vigorously triple-patted his buttocks, then meandered around the edges of the bobbing huddles on the Wembley pitch.

There will be a temptation to look for clues here. Nobody really knows if Guardiola is leaving Manchester City at the end of the season. Contract extension brinkmanship is nothing new, although not with quite so much whispered chat about assistants on the move and leaked replacement plans.

Updates from around the grounds on day three
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OK, scratch Beau Webster from the below, he’s just been wiped out by Tom Norton, a full delivery, and an edge snaffled up by Colin Inrgam low at first slip. Warks 141-7

Not much to report yet here at Headingley. St Michael’s church looks lush and lovely with greenery and that many-capped slip cordon awaits.

• Home hope surges to six under thanks to round of 68

• Rahm among five on four under; McIlroy is three under

The leaderboard was spinning like a tombola at Aronimink on Saturday, where at one point or another just about every player in the field had a birdie putt to take a share of the lead and then a bogey putt to let go of it again. When the drum finally stopped turning, Alex Smalley, a 29-year-old from North Carolina who has never won a professional golf tournament, was top of the leaderboard on six under, two shots clear of a five-way tie for second. No disrespect to Smalley, the world No 78, but the field are queued up like bowling balls on the rack waiting to take a run at him on Sunday.

Philadelphia loves an underdog, but it’s probably best if the trumpeter waits another day before he strikes up the opening notes of the Rocky theme.

• F1 driver had reached first place during Saturday stint

• Race was on Dutchman’s ‘bucket list’ before F1 resumes

The four-time Formula One world champion Max Verstappen’s chances of victory in his 24-hour racing debut at the famed Nürburgring track have been ended by an apparent mechanical problem with his car.

Verstappen had been leading in Germany on Sunday morning by more than half a minute, sharing a Mercedes AMG GT3 car with the experienced sportscar racers Lucas Auer, Jules Gounon and Dani Juncadella. Juncadella had just taken over from Verstappen when he had to slow down with a problem affecting the rear-right of the car and lost the lead before pulling into the pit lane. The car had not returned from the garage after an hour.

• Club demand action over scenes at end of title-decider

• Hearts say authorities must protect ‘integrity of the game’

Hearts have issued a statement castigating the “shameful” and “disgraceful” scenes which marred the conclusion to the Scottish Premiership’s title race at Celtic Park. The Edinburgh club has emphasised “deeply disturbing” treatment of players and staff. Celtic’s last-day victory had secured their fifth title in succession.

Callum Osmand’s goal for Celtic, the third in a 3-1 win, fuelled a mass pitch invasion which saw Hearts players antagonised and confronted. Those who entered the pitch were audibly booed by those in the stands.

There needs to be a zero-tolerance approach to stealing other clubs’ secrets – Kim Hellberg’s emotional response shows just how deep this goes

Kim Hellberg was clearly upset and his press conference after Middlesbrough’s defeat at Southampton in the Championship semi‑final playoff second leg became unexpectedly moving as a result. In football, the Boro manager said, you accept that some teams have greater resources than others but where the coach of the less well-off team can gain an advantage is in the “tactical element”; it is in effect the only weapon he has. And if that weapon is made less effective by an opponent cheating, it is understandable that Hellberg should feel that his profession, the skillset he has developed to test himself against his peers, has been betrayed.

That disgust is, no doubt, genuine enough, and it is perhaps difficult for those of us who do not work in that world fully to grasp how frustrating it must be if strategies and ploys carefully conceived and practised are rendered ineffective, not by the in-game acuity of an opponent, but by espionage. But it is admittedly hard to square that righteous anger with the image published in the Mail this week of a sheepish young man lurking behind a tree with a phone.

• 39-year-old stops 44-year-old with signature armbar

• Rousey says fight will be the last of her career

Ronda Rousey stopped Gina Carano with her signature armbar just 17 seconds into the two fighters’ double comeback bout on Saturday night.

After finishing the 44-year-old Carano with a ferocity that evoked her famous heyday, the 39-year-old Rousey reaffirmed that this was the epilogue to her historic MMA career. She insists she is headed into retirement after ending on a dominant victory.

The challenge of how to look after an ageing population has been ducked by politicians for too long

If a new Labour leader wants to underline their determination to wrestle with Britain’s political challenges, it is hard to think of a better place to start than with the creaking social care settlement.

A new collection of essays, to be published by the Fabian Society this week, urges the government – whoever leads it – to crack on with creating a “national care service” more closely aligned to the NHS and ensure it is properly funded.

In an age in which the algorithm constantly guides us towards things we already like, I tried to stop being a control freak, imprisoned by my preferences. It wasn’t easy

How predictable is your life? I drink my coffee from the same Moomin mug every morning and run a tight roster of weekly meals. My Ocado order never varies. On weekends, we buy the same seeded sourdough loaf; do the same chores; see the same friends. That might sound stultifying, but it comforts me in a chaotic world.

Is it a coping mechanism, an expression of my control-freak tendencies? Probably, which is why I was gripped and horrified in equal measure by an extract from How Not to Know by Simone Stoltzoff in the Atlantic about Max Hawkins, a software engineer who, feeling “trapped by his optimised life”, decided to randomise radically. Hawkins built an algorithm for a “random ride generator” that took him to surprise locations: a hospital, a leather bar, a bowling alley. Then, enthused by those early experiences, he went further and let chance decide where he lived, what he wore and even his tattoos. “In choosing randomly,” he said, “I found freedom.”

Plummeting approval ratings for these three poisonous comrades-in-arms show voters are demoralised and tiring of forever wars – the west could soon breathe again

Feeling depressed about the state of the world? Worried about the future? You’re not alone. Pessimism about politics is the new normal among the peoples of the west. Major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and the harms caused by right-left extremism, stagnating economies, inequality, corruption, terrorism, racism, big tech, mass extinctions and the climate crisis make for shared nightmares.

Growing numbers of people simply refuse to personally engage with current events via the news media, finding them too anxiety-inducing (so they probably won’t be reading this). In a Reuters Institute survey last year, 40% of respondents in about 50 countries said they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether, a rise of 29% on 2017.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Growing up in Gwynedd, I was made to feel ‘not Welsh enough’. But things have changed – and the Senedd victory shows the politics of exclusion has no answer

Plaid Cymru and its leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, made political history this month: they won the Senedd. For the first time ever, Wales now has a progressive majority that is not dependent on Labour. Polls had put Plaid and Reform UK neck and neck. In the run-up to the election, some of my Welsh friends were panicking. They were relieved that Reform came second.

I was never convinced that Reform’s brand of essentially English ethno-nationalism was ever going to triumph in Wales. The party seemed to think it could transpose its tactics from next door and that they’d work in the same way. Yet unlike Plaid, Reform UK has no story to tell about what it means to be Welsh.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

He gets slammed as an entitled nepo baby, and just keeps doing what he enjoys, unruffled. Here are five things I’d do, if only I had his confidence

Nepo babies provoke a unique brand of ire. Fittingly, they seem to bring out the toddler in many of us; a foot-stamping tantrum sense of but that’s not fair. These privileged golden children are born into guaranteed luxury and opportunity they haven’t worked for, and – we are convinced, despite never having met them – do not deserve.

Some nepo babies attract fury by lazing around on constant holidays, or securing starring roles far beyond their skill set, others because they indulge in wild-eyed, consequence-free party lifestyles. Brooklyn Beckham does it by making sandwiches.

The centers are diverting much-needed resources from regular people. Local resistance has the industry playing defense

Back in 2016, Marco Gutiérrez, the Mexican-born founder of Latinos for Trump, issued an ominous warning to the US. “My culture is a very dominant culture,” he said on MSNBC. “It is imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

A decade later, I regret to inform you there is not a taco truck on every corner. But I am here to issue my own ominous warning about the takeover of America: not by immigrant culture but by AI culture. To echo Gutiérrez: it is imposing and it’s causing problems. And if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to have datacenters on every corner.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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

I cannot think of one thing that a cruise offers that isn’t available in the safe bosom of dry land

I don’t swim. This is a fairly crucial element of my backstory, something that defines me even if I don’t want it to and have begged people to stop asking me about it. Water and I simply have nothing in common. I’m a 41-year-old writer, and water is, well … wet. My son swims like a fish, and as soon as I dunk my head under the surface, I start wondering what it would be like to suffocate, how soon I can come back up, and what I’m even doing down there in the first place. As bad as a pool is, the ocean is even worse. It’s not just water. It’s water with living creatures in it. What’s down there? I don’t care to find out. Things are bad enough up here.

My general lack of interest in swimming, perhaps better described as a horrible fear, is one of the reasons I’ve never been on a cruise. God forbid I have to escape because of some kind of Steven Seagal/Under Siege situation. I’d jump on the edge of the boat, desperately attempt to doggy-paddle and end up at the bottom of the Mariana trench.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

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.

George Eliot’s masterpiece of provincial life still has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance

Virgina Woolf declared Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Henry James said that some of its scenes were the most intelligent in English fiction. Even Martin Amis, over 100 years later, called it “a novel without weaknesses”. Now this 900-page portrait of 19th-century provincial life has been voted the best novel of all time in a Guardian poll of writers, academics and critics.

George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) was already a highly successful novelist by the time Middlemarch was published in instalments in 1871 and 1872. Beginning with a marriage, and a deeply unhappy one, it upends “the marriage plot” established by Jane Austen. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke has “a passionate desire to know and to think”, and a longing “to lead a grand life here – now – in England”. Unfortunately, that England didn’t afford many opportunities for women, and she misguidedly hitches her idealism to the desiccated scholar Casaubon. This is not the novel’s only disastrous marriage. The ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate makes an ill-suited match to the vain and shallow Rosamond Vincy.

The president’s meeting with Xi Jinping was superficially cordial, extending a truce borne of necessity

“American strength back on the world stage,” crowed the White House social media post: a curious remark, when the attached video showed the stars and stripes fluttering beneath a long row of Chinese flags, and People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching in unison.

This week’s visit to Beijing offered the kind of style that Donald Trump enjoys – parading troops, a banquet and a polite if not markedly enthusiastic welcome from a strongman he called “really a friend” – but little apparent substance. The public account of the encounter will be partial: Mr Trump’s former adviser John Bolton has claimed that in previous conversations the US president begged Xi Jinping for help to win re-election and urged him to “go ahead” with internment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. But this meeting appears to have been about stabilising the relationship, not shifting it.

Readers respond to a long read article by editor-in-chief Katharine Viner on surviving the information crisis

Katharine Viner’s long read is excellent in its analysis of the challenges posed by unscrupulous leaders and rampant technology, and in its account of the good work being done by the Guardian (How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake’, 6 May). But I can’t help thinking that it is preaching to the converted: it is not Guardian readers, but those who might hold very different views, who need to be convinced of the arguments put forward.

Reading the article, I was hoping to hear more about efforts being made to reach out to those unlikely to share the values espoused by the Guardian. How can these values be communicated, for example, to Maga followers or, dare I say, readers of the Daily Mail? Here, a leaf can be taken out of the Guardian’s own “Dining across the divide” feature.

Salley Vickers and Carrie Eckersley respond to a letter on Richard Dawkins and his chats with AI bots

I was delighted to read Dr Simon Nieder’s cogent rebuttal of Richard Dawkins’s attribution of consciousness to the responses engendered by AI (Letters, 10 May). That human consciousness appears to have an innate tendency to project itself on to various othernesses has long been understood – John Ruskin termed it the pathetic fallacy – and that children animate their loved toys is readily observable.

But Wordsworth’s attribution of emotion to a mountain or my granddaughter’s lively conversations with Spice, her toy sloth, are, happily, unlikely to be dangerous. The conclusion that a widely harvested body of data on human response is equivalent to consciousness is naive and rather shocking in someone such as Prof Dawkins, who has founded his reputation and criticism of religious beliefs on a stringent rationalism.
Salley Vickers
London

Denis Hodžić was surprised to see a photograph of his favourite childhood hobby in his favourite paper

Your lovely article about Panini football stickers (Writers on their World Cup Panini collecting days: ‘We all remember the playground twerp’, 9 May) reminded me of my own sticker albums from the 70s and 80s. My favourite album and World Cup was Spain 1982.

I watched the games in Yugoslavia, where I grew up. We excitedly followed our own team, which in the end failed to live up to its reputation as the “European Brazilians”. The Brazilian Brazilians, meanwhile, had a fabulous team of their own, full of charismatic superstars who looked great on stickers and were the most valuable currency in the playground.

Maggie Rylance deployed a red spotted handkerchief in memory of her dad, while Terry O’Hara was tempted by the Parthenon

The letter (8 May) responding to Zoe Williams’ article about scattering her mum’s ashes brought back fond memories of Dad. He was a farmer and always carried a red spotted handkerchief in his pocket. When he was muck-spreading, he would get out of the tractor cab, hold the handkerchief up to check which way the wind was blowing, and make sure he drove in a direction that protected the cab from being covered in muck.

It was a family joke that we should use the same method when spreading his and Mum’s ashes. We saved a red spotted handkerchief and did exactly that. It worked well and no one got covered in ash.
Maggie Rylance
Winchester

Labour’s sometime safest seat in the UK, birthplace of Aneurin Bevan and Neil Kinnock, last week sent no Labour delegates to the new Senedd

Reminders of the Labour movement’s roots are inescapable in Tredegar, south Wales: murals pay tribute to party giants Aneurin Bevan and Neil Kinnock, both of whom were born here.

The Workmen’s Hall Library is long gone, replaced by a car park, but the Cambrian Inn, which hosted early trade unions and Chartist groups, survives. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society, which Bevan used as a model for the NHS, was across the road; today it is a heritage centre paying tribute to the public health pioneers and the area’s coal-mining and steel-making past.

James Clyburn could now find his district dismantled after supreme court effectively gutted Voting Rights Act

South Carolina has had exactly one Black representative in Congress since 1897: James Clyburn. A proposal to redraw the state’s political map would dismantle the district he represents.

The state’s sixth congressional district starts on its southern border with Georgia, in the suburbs of Savannah, moving a hundred miles north to wind around the heart of Charleston, before cutting through Black belt farmland to the state capital of Columbia, another 115 miles away.

Eden Project founder wants to inspire councils to build community gardens so young people can grow vegetables

Local councils should “rip up asphalt” to build community gardens so young people can grow vegetables, a co-founder of the Eden Project has said.

Tim Smit, who opened the giant biomes in Cornwall in 2000, has designed an “edimental” garden for the Chelsea flower show with the landscape designers Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis. The concept behind it is that plants such as cabbages and strawberries are beautiful but edible and should be placed alongside traditional bedding plants.

Union representative concerned about safety as workers rush to finish repainting DC pool before 250th celebrations

Workers renovating one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic sites in a project ordered by Donald Trump may be risking their safety as they race to finish on time for the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations, a union monitoring the site has warned.

Trade union scrutiny has focused on the reflecting pool on the US capital’s National Mall – scene of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream speech” – after it was drained of water and fenced off from the public to allow contractors the chance to upgrade it by 4 July.

Unlike its Nordic neighbours, finding a place in the Swedish capital to bada bastu is hard, with years-long waiting lists at member clubs

There is little doubt that Stockholm is a city of sauna-goers. All year round, from early morning to late into the night, the city’s residents can be seen emerging from wooden huts, a trail of woodsmoke coming from the chimney, and lowering themselves into the deep brackish waters of the Swedish capital’s shoreline.

But, for locals and visitors alike, getting access to one of these saunas can be a bit like getting into the world’s most exclusive private members’ clubs: the most popular waterside venues have years-long waiting lists of thousands and when new places open up they disappear in minutes. While a proportion of spots are sometimes bookable to non-members, they are difficult to come by.

China is dominating the energy transition with astonishing result, while fossil fuel fascists in the US try to turn back the clock

“Farewell,” the flag-waving Chinese children chanted to Donald Trump as he strolled along the red carpet back to Air Force One at the end of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

The US leader claimed he was leaving with a cluster of “fantastic” trade deals to sell US oil, jets and soya beans to China. That has not been confirmed by his smiling host, but one thing was crystal clear from the two days of meetings: the global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east.

After record losses last year, beekeepers report a warm winter has led to bees ‘waking up earlier’ this year

After a series of record-breaking US heatwaves, the 2026 bee swarm season in North America has started 17 days earlier than last year, pushing beekeepers to adapt to a rapidly shifting season while raising new questions about how honeybees are responding to the climate crisis.

According to a new report published by Swarmed, a tracking network of more than 10,000 beekeepers, focused on safe and ethical honeybee relocation, this year’s unusually early swarm season follows several years of record colony declines worldwide.

Exclusive: Commission says alert would trigger coordinated international response that could help avoid millions dying

The climate crisis should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization, or millions more people will die unnecessarily, leading international experts have said.

The independent pan-European commission on climate and health, which was convened by the WHO, concluded the climate crisis was such a worldwide threat to health that the WHO should declare it “a public health emergency of international concern” (Pheic).

Climate and transport organisations warn ministers not to ‘sleepwalk into crisis’ amid Iran war oil and gas shortages

Private jets should be banned and the speed limit on UK motorways reduced to 60mph as part of a pre-emptive effort to ease the looming fuel supply crisis, according to leading climate and transport organisations.

The group – including Greenpeace and Transport and Environment – are calling on ministers not to “sleepwalk into a crisis” that could lead to severe shortages of jet fuel and spiralling petrol prices at the pump in the coming months.

Turnout down at second ‘unite the kingdom’ march featuring Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers

The far-right activist Tommy Robinson told tens of thousands of supporters to prepare for the “battle of Britain” during a rally in London on Saturday.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, drew tens of thousands of supporters on to the streets of central London for the second year running in an event where Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers were distributed to the crowds.

May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now perhaps Starmer: each one was brought low for a reason. But what if the deeper problem is the office itself?

They were times in which prime ministers seemed to be on their way out as soon as they’d arrived. The big strategic decisions the country faced were ducked or postponed. The public finances repeatedly wobbled, yet efforts to rationalise the tax system faltered in the face of vested interests, including farmers. Reforms to social security were trumpeted before being diluted. The whole business of politics was animated by rancour and rivalry, rather than practical action. All the while, populists waited in the wings.

This is not a sneak peak into a future history book about today’s Britain, but a description of the French fourth republic, which staggered after a difficult birth in 1946 until 1958, when the exhausted regime ceded the authority to create a new order to Gen Charles de Gaulle, effectively putting itself out of its misery.

Comments come after Andy Burnham says he would renationalise water and other businesses as PM

Investors in Thames Water have told the Labour government that a temporary nationalisation of the embattled company would slow its turnaround, after calls from Andy Burnham to put key utilities under public control.

As Keir Starmer’s grip on power appeared to be fading, the Greater Manchester mayor suggested at the weekend that the renationalisation of water and energy would form part of his policy agenda should he become prime minister.

Met police say they pursued vehicle believed stolen before it collided with another vehicle in Ilford

Nine people have been injured after a car being pursued by police crashed in east London.

The Metropolitan police said officers had tried to stop a vehicle they believed had been stolen.

Campaigners say symbolism of Magyar inauguration must translate into real change for Roma rights after years of Orbán discrimination

The clutch of young Roma boys in black bow ties were lined up beneath the ornate arches and royal frescoes of Hungary’s dazzling parliament. Moments after Péter Magyar was sworn in, bringing an end to Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power, the young musicians launched into the unofficial anthem of Roma in Hungary, leaving many MPs wiping away tears.

It was an extraordinary moment – one that fused the nationwide hope for change with the longstanding aspirations of the country’s most marginalised community. Roma rights campaigners have seized the moment, calling on the new government to ensure that the symbolism of last weekendtranslates into real change.

Experts say the unseasonably hot weather across south Asia shows the impact of the climate crisis

An intense and prolonged heatwave has been causing misery for millions across Pakistan and India.

In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44C to 46C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers and farming communities.

Experts say slashed funding and growing misinformation are some of the greatest challenges facing public health

The hantavirus outbreak, while unlikely to spark the next big pandemic, is shining a spotlight on the ways public health has deteriorated in the US: its ability to test for rare diseases, its expertise on outbreak prevention and response, its ability to battle misinformation and restore trust.

“Assuming everything goes well in containing this outbreak, which I hope it does, the takeaway from that should not be ‘we’re fine,’” said Stephanie Psaki, former White House global health security coordinator. “We’re not ready for this type of threat.”

Flight from Melbourne to Dallas forced to land in Tahiti due to man’s alleged disruptive behaviour

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A passenger has been banned from future Qantas travel after a plane travelling on a long-haul flight from Australia to the US was diverted at the weekend after the man allegedly bit a flight attendant.

The QF21 flight left Melbourne at 2.30pm on Friday en route to Dallas and was diverted to Papeete in Tahiti seven hours later when the behaviour of the disruptive passenger forced it to land.

A decade after Theresa May spoke of radical reform, the mutual faces a bid that is testing the limits of democracy

In July 2016, in a canalside conference centre in central Birmingham, Theresa May took the stage for a speech that would formally launch her Tory leadership bid.

The home secretary of six years was seen as a safe pair of hands, including by the business community still reeling from the shock result of the Brexit referendum. What business had not banked on, though, was a social reform platform that would see May pledge to rein in corporate Britain and give workers and consumers seats on company boards.

Carmakers aim to expand into UK defence sector, exploiting spending boom by Nato countries

Jaguar Land Rover and General Motors are considering an expansion into UK defence via a £900m military contract, as carmakers seek to exploit a spending boom by Nato countries racing to rearm.

The manufacturers are among a group of automotive firms vying to make thousands of 4x4s for the armed forces to replace an ageing fleet of Land Rovers that have been out of production since 2016.

Businesses are advised against paying – but many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy

After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates and school login pages being defaced by hackers, the US tech firm Instructure – which operates the education platform Canvas, used by education providers worldwide – announced it had “reached an agreement with the unauthorised actor” behind the ransomware attack.

Experts read the careful language as a sign that a ransom has been paid. The company has not confirmed this.

With layoffs widely expected and editorial tensions deepening, correspondents await a post-season shakeup

At a time when viewers are fleeing traditional television shows, the CBS Sunday newsmagazine 60 Minutes remains in a class of its own. The 12 April episode, which featured Pope Leo and a story on great white sharks, drew an astounding 10.1 million total viewers. The show is trending as the most-watched news program for the current broadcast season. So, as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

That’s what some CBS News employees and veterans are wondering, amid persistent rumors that the show’s 59th season will look very different than the 58th, which ends on 17 May.

The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

Film-maker and longtime Corbyn ally says ‘poor behaviour’ squandered chance to unite the left in fight against far right

Ken Loach has accused Your Party of squandering an opportunity to unite the left in the fight against the far right after the upstart socialist movement founded by the former Labour figures Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana became mired in infighting.

“There was great hope when Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana joined forces; 800,000 people expressed interest – that’s three times the size of a political party,” he said. “But I’m afraid some of the behaviours were very poor and they lost a historic opportunity.”

Cannes film festival: The Marriage Story stars team up with Miles Teller for this sombre and impressive story of shady dealings in 80s New York

With this muscular, heartfelt and sombre new picture set in 1980s New York, James Gray again resurrects the spirit of Elia Kazan in a blue-collar tragedy of fraternal loyalty and betrayal; a movie about men and their horror of appearing weak and failing to protect their families. Paper Tiger has that distinctive Gray colour palette: a perpetual late-afternoon autumn of subdued ochres, reds and browns. And there are his keynote family supper scenes, the characteristic presence of the Russian community in New York, and the potent, tribal codes of the NYPD: part mob, part trade union, part masonic clan whose membership responsibilities and perks go on well after retirement.

Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller give weighted, intelligent performances at the film’s centre: all three characters, in their different ways, have Springsteenian hungry hearts. Teller is Irwin Pearl, a modest, working-class guy who is a qualified engineer in Queens, doing well at his trade but still concerned about paying for his teen sons’ – Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Benjamin (Roman Engel) – college education. He’s married to Hester, played with forthright authority by Johansson, sporting frizzy hair and glasses that make her look like one of the Golden Girls.

Cannes film festival: Succession of pointless AI-generated snippets does nothing for film about the artist’s final interview, which took place on the day of his murder

Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death.

The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of fate, although the film avoids emphasising the interview’s obviously macabre context, understandably preferring a positive emphasis. Inevitably, though, the unacknowledged irony flavours what we see and hear: a fundamentally happy, hopeful man looking forward to the future, behind whom a dark shadow is looming.

Cannes film festival: This tremendously alarming drama from Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a meditation on male auteurs entirely without sentimentality

Javier Bardem gives his scariest performance since No Country For Old Men in this disquieting new film about emotional abuse from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who made 2023 rural noir shocker The Beasts.

It’s a film about a film-shoot – often the occasion for whimsy or sentimentality or woozy rapture about the magic of cinema. Not here. And given this and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, this year could be the Cannes of father-daughter dysfunction.

Quirky crime series Death Valley is back with its unlikely detective duo. Plus: Australian thriller The Family Next Door. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.15pm, BBC One

Kings Place, London
This was a virtuosic, witty performance of a mixed programme of works mostly by Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copland, who spent the summer of 1939 together in Woodstock

An internationally acclaimed composer from “the land without music”, the reviver of British opera and co-founder of the Aldeburgh festival: Benjamin Britten is firmly ensconced in our national cultural pantheon. The time when he and his soon to be life-partner, the tenor Peter Pears, boarded an ocean liner and travelled to North America in spring 1939 as “a vacation from the general European atmosphere” – not returning until mid-1942 – has proved harder to celebrate. But in a season marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, the Britten Sinfonia have grasped the nettle.

The result is a programme split mainly between works by Britten and Aaron Copland, who spent the summer of 1939 together in Woodstock. Cue tennis, swimming and mutual admiration. But Britten was also hard at work – first on his Young Apollo, a fanfare commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then on his song cycle Les Illuminations. Directing from the violin, Zoë Beyers launched a taut, witty performance of the former. Amid so much energetically engaged string playing, pianist Huw Watkins’ mercurial scales and delicate sweeps of glissando provoked audible giggles of delight from audience members behind me.

(OVO/Republic)
It’s possible that the world’s biggest rapper is using this epic content drop to get out of his record deal, but aside from some bright spots on Iceman, should the public really be subjected to it?

It is easy to over-estimate Drake’s fall from grace. True, he was unanimously declared the loser in the most high-profile rap beef of recent times, and is currently engaged in a protracted legal battle with his own record company over said rap battle that everyone except Drake and his lawyers seems to think smacks of the worst kind of bad loserdom. He is also fighting lawsuits alleging that he illegally misled viewers during gambling livestreams – pretending to bet his own money while actually using funds from an online casino he promotes – and that he furthermore channelled funds from said online casino into artificially inflating streaming figures (Drake has not commented on the allegations; Stake, the casino, described one of the lawsuits as “nonsense”). Also in the lawsuits is Adin Ross, a denizen of the manosphere who Drake has been palling around with, unbothered that the other guests on Ross’s stream have included Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

Equally, Drake is still the most-streamed rapper in the world. Had all this really impacted on his mainstream popularity, his last album – Some Sexy Songs 4 U, 2025’s collaboration with PartyNextDoor – would have died at the box office, rather than entering the US charts at No 1 and going on to sell a million copies. If his public reputation is looking a little tarnished, well, we live in an era of short attention spans and shorter memories: it would probably only take one unequivocal banger – a One Dance or Hotline Bling 2.0 – for the slate to be wiped clean.

In this week’s newsletter: Sometimes they were enough to send our music critics and readers straight back out the door again – but mostly just noisy enough to make their clothes shake

Bowel-shuddering basslines. Drum fills that bounce off the walls like gunfire. Guitars resembling a pneumatic drill drilling into another pneumatic drill. A truly loud gig stays with you, figuratively and literally, as anyone who has spent the days after one accompanied by a troubling ringing in their ears can confirm.

Last week, prompted, strangely enough, by an old Alistair Cooke column suggesting that Janis Joplin’s group Big Brother and the Holding Company was noisy enough to cause permanent hearing damage in guinea pigs, we asked Guide readers to share their own loudest gig experiences. We had a huge response, with tons of you sharing memories of eardrum-piercing encounters with all manner of bands and artists, across genres and decades. So we thought we’d devote this week’s newsletter to your stories of extreme noise terror, along with a few from the Guardian’s music critics, who are often on the frontlines when it comes to aural assault.

Self-deprecating It Only Takes One Lion is partly inspired by team’s current song, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie

The lyrics came to Stuart Murdoch in the hazy aftermath of Scotland’s dramatic qualification for the World Cup.

The Belle and Sebastian frontman had watched his side’s playoff victory over Denmark through his fingers before deciding to write his own anthem to a team he has followed for more than 50 years. “Most people recognised instantly the next day that they’d witnessed the most important Scottish game ever,” says Murdoch. “That was our magic moment.”

The acclaimed author and poet talks about her new book, telling the true stories of patients at a derelict Victorian psychiatric hospital – a place in which she might have found herself at a different time

Doireann Ní Ghríofa wrote much of her first book of prose, A Ghost in the Throat, sitting in her car on the top floor of a multistorey car park, having dropped her children off at school in Cork city. Whatever works: her imaginative journey into the life and mind of 18th-century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was so convincing and original that it captivated readers and won the James Tait Black biography prize and, in Ireland, the An Post book of the year award. Having published several well-regarded collections of poetry, it seemed as if this blend of biography, memoir and meditation had enlarged the way in which she could write about her abiding preoccupation: the ever-present past.

She returned to her car to work on her new book, Said the Dead. But this time, it was parked in front of a vast building high on a hill overlooking the river Lee, one half of it derelict and the other half transformed into apartments. Its history was long: originally referred to simply as the district asylum at the end of the 18th century, a grand gothic-revival building had been constructed during the 1840s, and named, after Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, the Eglinton Lunatic Asylum; in the 20th century, it became the Cork District Mental Hospital and, in its last incarnation before closing in 1992, Our Lady’s Psychiatric Hospital. Many such institutions existed across Ireland, a patchwork of private and public mental health provision that operated against the backdrop of colonial rule, poverty and famine.

Innovative and award-winning science-fiction writer whose novels extended to horror, fantasy and the Warhammer franchise

The author Ian Watson, who has died aged 82 after suffering from oesophageal cancer, established his reputation as an exhilarating, intellectually adventurous writer of science fiction with his first novel, The Embedding (1973), winner of the Prix Apollo in France. It was followed by The Jonah Kit (1975), winner of the British Science Fiction Association award. Reviewing his third novel, The Martian Inca (1977), JG Ballard described the author as “the most interesting British SF writer of ideas – or, more accurately, the only British SF writer of ideas”.

Many of Ian’s novels dealt with dauntingly complex, even unanswerable, questions about communication, language, perception and consciousness (human, animal, even alien minds), but others were lighter. Though he was always identified with science fiction, his range as a writer expanded to include horror, fantasy and “the great, lurid, Gothic fun” of the Warhammer franchise books.

Honey by Imani Thompson; Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre; The Final Chapter by CB Everett; The Hollow Boys by Tariq Ashkanani; Shrink Solves Murder by Philippa Perry

Honey by Imani Thompson (Borough, £16.99)
Thompson’s smart and incisive debut centres on Yrsa, a young Black woman studying for a sociology PhD and teaching undergraduates at Cambridge. Irritated by her solipsistic, over-privileged students and tired of situationships, she’s fed up with life, and men in particular. Her first killing – that of a much older supervisor who reneges on his promise to leave his wife for a colleague, and steals her research in the process – is an accident, but Yrsa, who has catastrophically poor impulse control, enjoys the sensation and, more importantly, gets away with it. “It’s theory in action”: as victims pile up, her academic research provides a spurious rationale for justifiable anger, as with Hugh, who used her for bragging rights (“Black girl magic, 20 points”). But somebody is on to her, and things are starting to spin out of control … The best kind of campus novel, satirical and razor-sharp, crossed with a crime story: Thompson is an exciting new voice.

Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre (Abacus, £22)
Thirty years after Brookmyre’s debut, his latest novel to feature journalist Jack Parlabane makes a tonal return to his earlier, more irreverent style. Now 60, Jack feels increasingly like a “Boomer Ambassador” to the younger colleagues who are snapping at his heels. With his job on the line, he agrees to investigate a cold case: the death, 40 years earlier, of an MI5 operative. It’s thought to be connected to the Maskyn family, creators of much-loved but now contentious Thunderbirds-style TV series The Imaginators, and Parlabane finds himself on the transatlantic cruise liner hosting the 60th anniversary convention as “several hundred emotionally stunted fanboy incels alongside an over-remunerated family of nepo babies, trust fund pukes and outright fascists” duke it out over The Imaginators’ legacy. Masterfully plotted and scalpel-sharp, this is a riotously good read that uses a Golden Age set-up to take aim at the culture wars, while also providing a thoroughly satisfying mystery.

This fascinating novel about 18th-century privateer Alexander Selkirk, abandoned on a tiny island in the South Pacific, becomes a revelatory meditation on humanity

It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose marooning on a tiny island in the South Pacific would eventually inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet, curiously, it is a line from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky that Francesca de Tores refits for Selkirk’s mouth at the opening of her new novel, Cast Away.

Selkirk insists that he is cast upon the island “only by the catastrophe of my personality” – “which is a sobering thing, even for a man used to being sober”. And while the O’Hara of Mayakovsky is famously content to wait “for the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern”, Selkirk – newly and utterly alone on “a stony blemish in the ocean”, 400 miles off the coast of Chile – spends his first three days and nights on the island blind drunk on the cask of flip left behind with him as a courtesy from his erstwhile crewmates, raging at his fate. This act of unexpected transhistorical ventriloquism is a suitably strange beginning to a surprisingly uncanny novel.

The open world driving sim has roared through locations from Colorado to Australia, its authentic feel resting on exhaustive research. But, as the team explain, this was the toughest challenge yet

Since the arrival of the original Forza Horizon in 2012, a game that revolutionised open world driving sims by setting players loose in a virtual Colorado, British developer Playground Games has promised authenticity with its settings. For each instalment, design teams are sent out on location to take thousands of photos, hours of video, even detailed captures of the sky, before construction of a virtual copy begins. It’s a huge undertaking. But it seems that for much of the past decade, one country remained slightly out of reach – an intimidating prospect. “Japan has been on our shortlist for several games now,” says design director, Torben Ellert. “But we just didn’t feel like we were ready to take on the challenge of building it.”

It’s not just about the sheer variety of the country’s landscape. There’s something else going on. Most video game players hold an image of what it is like to explore Japan. It may be inspired by the fictitious rural town of Inaba in Persona 4, or the busy docks of Yokosuka in Shenmue, or perhaps the neon-drenched Kabukichō district of Tokyo, which forms a regular backdrop in the Yakuza series. For decades, gamers around the world have been bombarded with images of the country that are often highly stylised and fragmented, but nonetheless potent and persuasive. As art director Don Arceta puts it, “with Japan there’s such an expectation [of] what gamers want - it’s a certain version of Japan that they picture.”

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Forgoing Brecht’s usual distanciation, Anna Jordan’s new translation and Michelle Terry’s lovable performance bring out the humanity of a woman doing what’s necessary to keep herself and her family alive

This production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece seems to break the first rule of Brecht’s epic theatre, which requires emotional distance. It conjures Brecht’s upside down world, in which war denotes order and profit, while underlining all the losses that Mother Courage faces in spite of her relentless entrepreneurialism and attempts at profiteering – selling anything from burgers to ammunition and sex. But it is human, moving and funny. The distance closes and the production becomes devastating in its most savage moments, when Mother Courage loses her children, one by one.

Translator Anna Jordan justifies these moments by interpreting Brecht’s rule of verfremdungseffekt as making the drama “strange” rather than distanced. And in director Elle While’s powerful production, the emotional drama is tightly controlled, flaring up momentarily. In between flare ups, the narrator (Max Runham) pulls us away from the intimacies of this family to draw the bigger picture, summarising the gyrations of war and Courage’s travails over the years.

Hampstead theatre, London
A first love is rekindled on stage and off in Sarah Ruhl’s metatheatrical romance and farcical send-up of hammy old musicals

It doesn’t take long for the protagonists of Sarah Ruhl’s 2011-set romantic comedy – two actors who have been cast in a 1930s melodrama called The Last Kiss – to realise they’ve signed up for a theatrical flop in the making. The director is hopeless, all wafting hands and evasive “just trust your instincts”; the young supporting cast are as wooden as the boards they’re tentatively treading; and the bombastic script feels ludicrous to the pair’s naturalistically trained ears.

There is also a whopper of an art-imitating-life situation afoot: the pair, elusively named He and She, are portraying but also happen to be first loves, reuniting to crackling chemistry despite She and her character each being married with a grownup daughter.

Minerva theatre, Chichester
John Morton’s debut as a playwright is a finely crafted family drama with shades of Alan Ayckbourn

As a TV writer-director, John Morton specialises in the sort of English talk that either means nothing at all or something completely different from what was said. In the sitcoms Twenty Twelve, W1A and currently Twenty Twenty Six, the hesitations, repetitions and desperate metaphors – in conversations that sound improvised but are precisely written – reveal corporate conceit and deceit. But the stilted and stalled speech in Morton’s playwriting debut, Eclipse, represents unsaid and unsayable things among the gathered family of Edward, a late-stage cancer patient who has asked to die under “home hospice” care at an old rectory in Devon.

Edward, confined behind a door in the corner of the convincingly lived-in kitchen that dominates Simon Higlett’s set, is never seen or heard but feels completely real. That theatrical illusion recalls theatre’s genius of offstage characters, Alan Ayckbourn, as do many of those we see: bickering siblings Jonathan (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Sarah (Sarah Parish), diffident and assertive respectively, and the latter’s hapless, tactless husband, Graham (Paul Thornley). The pair of end-care nurses – gently attentive Karen (Selina Cadell) and self-consciously jolly Linda (Lizzie Hopley) – are also familiar English comedy types.

Britain seems to finally have an eye for art from the Asia-Pacific, with several big recent exhibitions, including the new Rising Voices show at the V&A. Why did it take so long?

An imposing new figure is greeting visitors inside the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington. Standing on one side of the domed hall, across from the galleries dedicated to medieval and Renaissance European art, is a lifesize, fibreglass sculpture of a burly bouncer. The Māori nametag hanging from his belt loop suggests he has travelled a long way from home.

This character, Kapa Haka (Whero) by Michael Parekōwhai from Aotearoa New Zealand, is a symbolic guardian for the exhibition Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific. Produced in partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, the show includes more than 70 works which have never before been exhibited in the UK, by artists from 25 countries who have featured through the decades in QAGOMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT).

It’s the latest in a recent wave of shows that have brought works from Australian galleries to international institutions. Last year, Tate Modern hosted Emily Kam Kngwarray in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art is now touring the US.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem, completed by relatives of William Greaves after his death, showcased at Cannes

In 1969, the pioneering documentarian William Greaves wrote of his fury over the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers threw up on American screens. “It became clear to me that unless we black people began to produce information for screen and television there would always be a distortion of the ‘black image,’” he said.

Three years later, Greaves began work on what he considered the most important footage he ever shot: a feature documentary gathering surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance to reflect on the movement they had built half a century earlier.

The Photo London 2026 Student Award has been given to Akanksya Dahal of Ravensbourne University London from a shortlist of four artists nominated by tutors at UK universities. The three other nominees were Anna Bradshaw of Birmingham City University, Bo Fan of London College of Communication, and Madison Hafner of Falmouth University. The judging panel was Fiona Shields, the head of photography at the Guardian; Lisa Springer, the curator of photography at the V&A; the photographer Mimi Mollica; and Kimberly Hoang, the picture editor at the British Red Cross

• Photo London takes place at Olympia until 17 May

The Turkish photographer was enchanted by this scene of a flower seller and monks on a lake in Myanmar

Alahattin Kanlioğlu had worked in the faculty of communications at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, for more than two decades before he took this image. A photography specialist, he first visited Myanmar in 2019, and was so captivated by the region that he returned in December 2025 to host a photography workshop. As part of the trip, the group of six visited Inle Lake, in the Shan Hills.

“The people of this region live in wooden houses built on tree stumps. Some surround the lake, but others are on the water, as if they’re floating,” Kanlioğlu says. “Agriculture and fishing are two of the main livelihoods here and, uniquely, the fishers use foot-controlled oars to steer the boat, keeping a hand free for their catch.”

The performance artist was a brilliantly subversive pioneer whose work exposed the predicament of women living in a world that was not made for us
• Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85

Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny, Valie Export was a hero to many women. Since the 1960s, she was driven by a fierce conviction that art and media would play an essential role in women’s liberation: that women must picture their own reality in the name of social progress. In Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972), she wrote that women must “use art as a means of expression, so as to influence the consciousness of all of us”. What she demanded was revolution.

I keep returning to her work. Can’t stay away. I have written about her in relation to violence in women’s art. Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain, and she made evident the violence of forcing women’s bodies to inhabit structures that were not designed for them. For the 1973 performance Hyperbuliashe crept naked through a corridor of electrified wires, exposing herself voluntarily to shocks.

For Evan Lewis and Dat Tien Lewis, a cycling odyssey was a test of their relationship. A quiet whisky session revealed how far they’d come

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I met Dat in San Francisco in 2015. I had left a tourism consulting role in China and moved to the US to start my own Mongolian vodka product. Dat was a specialised nurse. He loved being a nurse.

They say opposites attract and I think that rings true for us. He had this way of calming a room. Dat would arrive at a party and somehow the volume in the room would come down a little bit. He did the same with me. It was a very busy time trying to build my business but he was always there – very supportive and curious about what I was doing. We moved quite quickly into the relationship and spent a lot of time together.

A foreign face is often thought to add prestige to a product or business – what’s behind this unregulated economy?

Piers had been in China for all of two days in 2009 when he was used as a “white monkey” for the first time. He had travelled to a village in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, to attend a friend’s wedding and had stopped in the village to try a special crab dish at a small restaurant. Weeks later, a Chinese guest who had been at the wedding told him the restaurant had had an uptick in business because the locals had heard that a laowai, a foreigner, had been seen dining there, so people had assumed this restaurant must be good. Piers realised the boss had deliberately seated him in a way to attract attention: “I knew we were sitting outside in a premium spot, but I didn’t pick up on what was going on.”

When foreigners in China are used this way, they are called a baihouzi, a white monkey. They’re hired to help Chinese businesses appear more desirable, the foreigner association conveying prestige and a sense that your product is universally regarded. The industry is unregulated in China, operating in a legal grey area. White monkey positions are advertised on job boards and can fall into different categories, from acting and modelling for Chinese films and products to pretending to be the foreign CEO of a Chinese company to lend it credibility. They might be seat warmers or go-go dancers in Chinese nightclubs to draw in customers, or English teachers in language centres to make Chinese parents feel their children are being taught by legitimate native English speakers (even if a Chinese person is actually a better qualified teacher). These businesses believe that having the “foreign look” will give them an edge over other Chinese companies offering the same service. The phenomenon of recruiting foreigners for this performative purpose can be traced to the concept of mianzi, having “face” in Chinese society, which denotes bestowing and receiving respect for each other.

Fed up with frizzy and dehydrated locks? Dyson’s latest travel model allows effortless styling on the go – but at a cost

• The best hair dryers – tested

With the summer holidays fast approaching, the usual anxieties might be taking hold: pickpockets and touts, lost passport, severe sunburn, holiday tummy, and – perhaps most pressingly – the horrors of the hotel hair dryer. That last one is not to be underestimated: an outdated dryer with one scorching heat setting is a fast track to frizzy, dehydrated, unfabulous hair – not something you want immortalised in your holiday photos.

Worry not, though: Dyson promises to fix that particular woe. The British engineering brand has shrunk its Supersonic into a smaller, lighter, travel-friendly dryer offering the same powerful airflow and heat-control technology as its full-size sibling. So does this admittedly very stylish compact dryer really justify its premium price?

Dunk, nibble or wolf them down: this classic biscuit is at its best when it’s just sugar, butter and flour, so be wary of those that stray from the rules

• The best extra-chocolatey biscuits

At its best and simplest, shortbread is made using a classic 1:2:3 ratio – one part sugar, two parts butter and three parts flour, by weight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few supermarket shortbreads stick to that golden rule and include other ingredients such as cornflour and raising agents; they’re nothing to worry about – but some cut the butter (and costs) by using rapeseed oil, margarine or worse.

Unlike most manufactured products, however, the price of shortbread doesn’t always reflect the level of processing, and some of the cheapest are also the least processed. Look out for “all-butter” on the label, to make sure the shortbread doesn’t include oil and has that classic, buttery taste. And don’t be fooled by fancy packaging.

Whether it’s sandals comfy enough for walking, linen trousers or timeless sunnies, the secret to great summer style is all about keeping things simple

Don’t overthink it. That’s the key to summer style. The best looks are the ones you reach for when you aren’t thinking about clothes, but about the sunny weather, the long evenings, the good times.

You’ll already have your summer anchors, the pieces you come back to every year. The sundress that always works. Denim shorts that only get better with age. A breezy linen shirt you can wear open over swimwear or tucked into just about anything. These are your personal treasures, the pieces that never let you down. But it wouldn’t be summer without a bit of personality thrown in. Suddenly there’s room for pieces that might have felt a bit “extra” a few months ago. Stripes, florals, a pop of red – they all work when the sun’s out.

There’s a perfect perch for every camper. Here are our favourites, from ultralight models to inflatable pods

• The best tents for camping: 10 expert picks for every outdoor adventure

Ready to carry on camping this summer? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a good collapsible camping chair can change your life. If you’ve never used one before, you’ll be astonished at how comfy a folding chair is, letting you sit off the cold ground when you’re cooking, eating or just chilling out around the fire, and making every evening at camp a social occasion.

There’s a folding camping chair out there to suit everyone, including wild campers who only carry the essentials, glampers and campervan fans who like a bit of luxury. I’ve tested 15 of the best folding camping chairs, from tiny portable stools that collapse to the size of a baguette to cushioned monster chairs that wouldn’t look out of place in your sitting room, at prices to suit all budgets and starting from just £15.

Best camping chair overall:
Montbell Base Camp chair

Best budget camping chair:
Mountain Warehouse folding chair

Light enough for spring lunch, hearty enough to satisfy as dinner on a chilly night, and as good a starter as it is a main

I cannot preface this recipe better than Skye McAlpine, who writes that, “as the name suggests, this risotto is a celebration of spring and all the glorious, verdant produce the season brings with it”. Verdant, certainly, but also pleasingly dense – this is a dish that champions the abundance of this time of year, while also acknowledging that it can still be bloody chilly once the sun goes down, both here in the UK and in north-east Italy, where risotto originates. It’s also a dish that’s versatile enough to incorporate whatever looks good in your local area over the coming weeks, as well as one that can be served in smaller portions as a primi piatti, or in more generous ones as a main course.

As is the peril with most small plates restaurants, this meal is more a collection of loose ideas than a coherent dinner

Auguste, a brand spanking new Italian restaurant in Hackney, east London, is named, loosely, after a clown. The Edward Hopper painting Soir Bleu hangs on the wall, depicting a tragic sort in a whiteface mask sitting forlornly in a cafe surrounded by hipsters. The clown’s light veneer of calm, it seems, masks his bare tolerance of both his life and his fellow customers. Hopper painted it in 1914, and now, more than a century later, this same sad clown feels more than a little symbolic of all those who have chosen a life in hospitality at this time. Paint on a smile! Get out there! Make the crowds happy! If only business rates could be paid with a bucketload of glitter …

Auguste’s owners, chef Mike Bagnall and general manager Dylan Walters, have taken over the 32-seater premises formerly known as Papi, which recently upped sticks and moved on to a much larger site at The Golden Tooth in Newington Green. The space has been transformed from its Papi days as an extremely hip, European-influenced, irreverent, small plates, low-intervention wine and hyper-cool spot, to its new incarnation as, well, an extremely hip, Abruzzo-influenced, irreverent, small plates, low-intervention wine and hyper-cool spot. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, you might be thinking, but pas exactement! The room now has white tablecloths and the big draw on Auguste’s menu are its skewers or, to be precise, arrosticini. Think tiny mini kebabs with the meat cut into 1cm cubes, then grilled over something called a furnacella. The live-fire craze among London hospitality’s menfolk shows no signs of abating. Man make fire. Fire good.

A lighter risotto made with whizzed cauliflower as well as rice, but with a reassuringly rich cheese sauce

In series eight of Peep Show, Mark (David Mitchell) is working as a salesman in a bathroom shop when a customer asks him for a “modern but traditional” bathroom. Aghast, he tells the customer that these opposing styles can’t be married when his boss, Super Hans, swoops in to say they can: “Fancy taps but a rainforest shower head?” I was reminded of this silliness because here I’ve tried to create a risotto of opposing styles: lighter than a traditional one, because I’m using some blitzed cauliflower, while maintaining that richness you get from a cauliflower cheese. I think it works, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Viral recipes and fibre awareness boost demand for sweet fruit amid shift towards healthier alternatives

Instead of a customary biscuit or a chocolate bar to combat the 4pm slump, people are reaching for a more natural sweet alternative: dates.

The sweet fruit has been thrust into the snacking spotlight by a combination of viral recipes on social media, growing awareness about fibre intake and increasing demand for alternatives to ultra-processed foods.

Frances, 77, a retired marketing manager, meets Eddie, 86, an activist

What were you hoping for?
A lovely evening with pleasant company.

Can’t stand your friend’s other half? You could be walking into a minefield, warn experts. Here they share advice, from owning jealous feelings to blowing off steam (with the right person)

Years ago, my best friend fell in love with a man I disliked. He had a habit of looking over my shoulder when I tried to talk to him, and I thought he was too possessive. He spoke to her using a special high-pitched baby voice, and the worst thing was that my friend absolutely loved it, and would baby-talk right back. Thinking that our friendship was bound to outlive her infatuation, I made it obvious that I disliked him. I very pointedly made plans without him, and when I was forced to spend time in his presence I made so many private jokes I was essentially talking to my friend in a horrible baby language all of my own.

To no one’s surprise but mine, this behaviour didn’t have the desired effect. My friend started avoiding me. Her boyfriend won and eight years later he’s still winning. They are getting married next year, and I am not invited.

In antiquity, women were considered the more sexual sex – hornier, more libidinous and lust-fuelled than men. Why did that perception change?

All across the world, you will probably have read, people are having less sex. In Britain and the US, in France and Australia, frequency of sex has been on the decline (although Denmark appears to be bucking the trend). In 2018, the US magazine the Atlantic declared a “sex recession”, while last December the Telegraph ran a piece headlined “Sex is dying out. This is why it matters”.

As an ancient historian with a particular interest in the history of sex, this drought is fascinating to me – not least because some of the articles I have read seem keen to hark back to the historical period I spend most of my time researching. “Sex should be more wild and plentiful than it has been since ancient Greece,” reported the Telegraph. But antiquity was no bastion of sexual freedom – especially for women.

Some cheap fakes contain toxic chemicals that make pets seriously unwell – and leave you with a big bill

You want to save money whenever you can so when you see the usual brand of flea treatment for your cat listed at half the normal price, you click “buy”.

It arrives and you apply it to your pet, but they fall ill and you have to rush to the vet for treatment.

A student could lose hundreds after the UK changed travel advice – others face flight cancellations due to fuel shortages

In February, when Lottie Cornwall booked a summer trip to Lebanon, she was excited at the prospect of introducing her boyfriend to her Lebanese extended family.

“My mum’s whole side of the family live there,” she says. “I last saw my grandmother and cousins in 2022. My heritage means everything to me, and this was a chance for my boyfriend to meet my family, and to show him where I come from and why I’m so in love with it.”

We had booked a cruise for him and his carers, but we had a string of problems when we tried to change names

In November 2024, I booked a cruise for my wife, myself and our severely disabled son for this July. I’d booked well in advance to ensure an accessible cabin for my son. At home, he needs round-the-clock care from a rota of eight carers, so we made extra bookings for three to accompany him.

Because the care team has other commitments, I couldn’t confirm their names at the time of booking and was told to do so by this April, when the balance had to be paid.

If you are looking for a new account, there are some good rates around, but also pitfalls to watch out for

Earning as much as 7% on your savings sounds great – but what’s the catch? The top-paying accounts often come with strings attached, which could mean your money is not working as hard as you thought.

That’s important because there is a lot of cash sitting in fixed-rate savings accounts that are about to reach the end of their term. The total amount in accounts maturing between April and June is £90bn, according to the savings app Spring – and that money will need to find a new home.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: You’re supposed to be quiet in the cinema. So why are the snacks so loud?

I was recently beset by a plague of clothes moths. After hours of research, I discovered the miracle that is the parasitic wasp, or Trichogramma evanescens – near-microscopic beasts that you can order online (in sachets of 2,000 wasps!), the life’s calling of which is to destroy clothes moth eggs.

It made me wonder: is there anything else in our daily lives that is so beneficial to us, but which few of us have heard of – or realise is there? John Forward, Brixton

Researchers say risk comes from ‘other factors, including genetic predisposition to mental health conditions’

Taking antidepressants during pregnancy does not increase the risk of children going on to develop autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to an analysis of more than half a million pregnancies.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and published in the Lancet Psychiatry, analysed data from 37 existing studies that included 600,000 pregnant women who had taken antidepressants, and 25 million women who had no antidepressant use during their pregnancies.

Rather than bribery, or hiding carrots under ketchup, the key may be to expose foetuses to healthy flavours

It is an age-old battle with small children that most parents will recognise: please, please, eat your vegetables.

Some will read them books with titles such as The Boy Who Loved Broccoli. Others have been known to smother veg in tomato ketchup, or mix avocado and fruit with Greek yoghurt and call it icecream. Or resort to plain bribery.

The style on the Croisette is off to a strong start

Joan Collins, Catherine Deneuve, Isabella Rossellini and Jane Fonda among those representing wider age diversity on red carpet

The Cannes red carpet is, without question, a home of glamour. But in 2026 that glamour has a different spin. The women gaining the most headlines for style are, for once, over 70.

Joan Collins, 92, walked the red carpet this week in a white sculptural strapless gown by Stéphane Rolland. Jane Fonda, 88, wore a floor-length sequined Gucci dress. Isabella Rossellini, 73, has been seen wearing a striking patterned two-piece, while Catherine Deneuve, 82, was chic in forest-green satin and hoop earrings.

From Nike Mind, with its pre-game benefits, to recovery shoes from Hoka, bulbous sporty footwear is moving into fashionable circles. Will we see it beyond the jogging track this summer?

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When the much-hyped Nike Mind shoes were released in January, I bought a pair. I was grabbed by the idea that the orange nodules on the sole could, supposedly, focus the mind. The futuristic look of the shoe also appeals. If walking on knobbly things took a bit of getting used to, it was worth it – if only for that irresistible fashion smugness of having something rare. In the last week, I have been stopped in the street and asked where I got the shoes. It turns out they are now out of stock and have sold for over £300 on resale site Goat.

The Mind is part of a wider trend in “exercise slides”, a pre-game shoe designed to ground you ahead of your chosen activity. Nike claim that the 22 nodules on the sole stimulate the mechanoreceptors on your feet, engaging the sensory area of your brain, meaning focus is heightened. Meanwhile, recovery slides made by brands such as Hoka and Oofos use cushioned soles and a shape that cradles the foot to helpfight foot fatigue after a lot of exercise. The Mind are worn by footballers including Erling Haaland and Reece James, runner Keely Hodgkinson and basketball players Victor Wembanyama and A’ja Wilson, while ballerina Francesca Hayward namechecks Hoka’s slides as part of her daily routine.

Designer suggests decision to stage show in Los Angeles is part of strategy to deepen label’s cinema presence

Like Christian Dior, the founder of the house he now leads, fashion designer Jonathan Anderson’s ambition is to be not just a Parisian couturier but a Hollywood power player. “We think of Dior as this romantic character, but he was also a very savvy businessman,” said Anderson before a blockbuster catwalk show in Los Angeles. Stage Fright, the Hitchcock caper-noir for which Dior dressed Marlene Dietrich, was the show’s origin story. “There is all this amazing correspondence between Dior, Dietrich and Hitchcock, which shows how he navigated the money that it cost to make that film. I think we underestimate how much negotiation Dior did with studio executives. He was very smart in that way.”

Anderson, 41, who was born in Northern Ireland but since being appointed to Dior splits his time between London and Paris, has his own Hollywood side hustle as the costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s films, and is set on reinvigorating Dior’s relationship with the film industry.

From a stylish retreat in Norfolk to a remote hideaway on a Scottish island, these boltholes will make for a truly memorable stay

Tourism experts are predicting a bumper year for “staycations” with more of us choosing to holiday in the UK due to continuing uncertainty around jet fuel prices and possible flight cancellations. Holidaymakers are spoilt for choice with more than 350,000 UK self-catering listings on booking platforms, from rustic barn conversions to seaside villas with all mod cons for large family gatherings.

We’ve done some of the leg work and whittled down a selection of cottages which all offer something special, whether it’s a stunning location, a breathtaking view or a level of comfort and style that wouldn’t be out of place in a boutique hotel.

From Hadrian’s Wall to the locations of Happy Valley and Hot Fuzz, readers share their top discoveries

• Tell us about your favourite UK coast walk – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

“So this is where Officer Nick Angel [Simon Pegg] chased that swan.” As a fan of Hot Fuzz, I was excited to explore the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset, where much of the film was shot. This charming, compact and walkable city is awash with medieval architecture and magnificent buildings, such as the gothic cathedral, with one of the oldest working clocks in the UK (late 14th century) and the Bishop’s Palace and Gardens. Within easy reach of the Mendip Hills, Cheddar Gorge and the Wookey Hole Caves, Wells makes for a low-key alternative to tourist-soaked Bath.
Alison

There are few places where history can be felt more powerfully than these pathways, walked by explorer, author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane

How often do you look down and wonder who created the path your feet are following? Or ask the cause of its curves and dips? Formed over thousands of years, paths form an “internet of feet” – a web of bridleways and hollow ways, drove roads and ridgeways, coffin tracks, pilgrimage trails and city pavements. Whether you’re hiking a National Trail or pottering along a National Trust footpath, there’s a good chance you’re following ancestral steps.

It’s thoughts like these that led me on a journey to track the evolution of British paths for my book, The Path More Travelled. Eleven thousand years ago ice age hunter-gatherers arrived from Europe’s heartlands, moving through the wilderness along broad “routeways”, that later widened to tracks when horses and then wheels were adopted in the bronze age. For more than 2,000 years, traffic moved no faster than the speed of a horse, until the internal combustion engine drove pedestrians off the road just over a century ago.

Improve your mountain skills by day and party by night at the Arc’teryx Alpine Academy in Chamonix

After a day spent hiking across the Col d’Entrèves glacier, a sugar hit is required. I descend on the cable car and join the queue at the ice-cream counter. Above me, surrounded by jagged peaks, looms the huge white figure of Mont Blanc, serene and pure against a brilliant blue sky. Although it’s late afternoon, people are still heading up the mountain, and there are two clear groups. On one side are the tourists, who are about to be lifted into unfamiliar frozen realms at 3,375 metres (11,072ft), hoping to grab a picture and return. Mixed among them are the weathered faces of mountain experts: hikers confidently heading for a high-altitude hut, or climbers with coils of rope.

How many of those tourists, I wonder, are wishing they could be mountaineers, secretly regretting the twists of fate that kept them away from that path? But all is not lost. The aspiring adventurer, no matter what age or background, can begin the journey to competence in the mountains. The annual mountain festival I am attending aims to facilitate that by offering the chance to gain hands-on experience with experts.

While there are still days the Thames is so dirty even dogs avoid it, steps are being taken to restore public waterways

Some people think we are odd for swimming in the Thames. “Isn’t it cold?” they ask with a shiver, like they are the ones who just took the plunge. Er, yes, that’s the whole point. Cold water ignites the central nervous system and reboots the mind.

“Isn’t it dirty?” they ask. Yes, sometimes, particularly when it’s rained. Then we don’t get in the Thames, we get in a rage instead, taking contamination measurements and signing petitions challenging the behaviour of the water company that spews sewage into the river.

The Rivals actor on his very skinny ankles, swearing like a sailor, and his enduring love for Marlon Brando

Born in Essex, Alex Hassell, 45, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He co-founded an experimental theatre group and was noticed by the RSC where he went on to star in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V and Death of a Salesman. On TV, he appeared in His Dark Materials and Rivals. He reprises the role of Rupert Campbell-Black in season 2 on Disney+. He is married to actor Emma King and lives in London.

What is your greatest fear?
Loneliness.

We have to drag the bins through the house because the garden door is jammed. Until a scary encounter with my old enemy, that is …

It’s still light out when my wife comes to me with bad news.

“It’s bin day,” she says.

Firms do not offer cover for some models, or charge more than for equivalent petrol cars, research finds

• ‘Temu Range Rover’: what the Jaecoo 7 says about China’s electric car ascendancy

UK insurers are more hesitant to cover some hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs) from China than cars from other countries, research suggests.

While some drivers can save money by buying cars made in China, they may have more limited options to get insurance than those buying electric, hybrid and petrol cars from Europe, the US and South Korea.

What does defending press freedom mean in practice? We asked people across the Guardian to tell us something they have done to protect it this past year. The range of responses will likely surprise you

• Support independent journalism today

It sounds like a fundamental principle. A tenet. But, in reality, press freedom is more of a practical and relentless daily struggle.

I’ve been asking colleagues from across the Guardian to tell me about one of the things they have done to protect press freedom this past year – from our international correspondents and investigative reporters to our visual journalists and commercial and technology departments.

As continent faces tough headwinds, leaders are bearing brunt of delivering bad news to frustrated electorates

“People hate you,” the adviser informed his leader. A think-piece in a daily newspaper noted that “almost everyone agrees on one thing: they don’t like him”.

The recent disastrous set of local election results in the UK built on Keir Starmer’s longstanding reputational problem: only 11% of Britons believe he has been a good or great prime minister, and nearly 60% believe he has been poor or terrible, according to polling by YouGov.

Property portfolio in spotlight as Reform UK leader faces official inquiry over money accepted from billionaire

A week ago, Nigel Farage was toasting Reform UK’s successes in the May elections, and bragging about his prospects of becoming prime minister.

But there is a saying about a week in politics – and it has been a long seven days for the party leader, who is now facing questions over a £5m gift and his extensive property portfolio.

Find out how we compiled our list of the 100 best novels published in English – and nominate your favourites

• See the list here

This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference. We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.

What would be at the top of your list? Which authors do you think should be there? What are your favourite novels of all time?

Tim Allen, Joan Cusack and Greta Lee join Hanks to answer your enquiries about the forthcoming animation and its previous instalments

Is there a more eagerly anticipated movie this year than Toy Story 5? For many people (with and without children), you can keep your Odysseys and Minotaurs and Place in Hells, because the return of Woody, Buzz and friends is what cinema is really all about. The series so far has made $3.3bn, and last year’s teaser trailer had 142m views in 24 hours – of which only 140m were my son pressing refresh.

The new film, which is released worldwide on 19 June, sees Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack) leading the gang in eight-year-old Bonnie’s room, with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) her second-in-command, after the departure of Woody (Tom Hanks) at the end of Toy Story 4 to help abandoned toys find their owners.

As more childminders are quitting the profession amid concerns over costs, we’d like to hear why and from parents who’ve been affected

The number of childminders in England has roughly halved over the past decade, with many citing rising costs, low pay and increasing paperwork as reasons for leaving the profession. Childcare organisations have also warned that upcoming tax changes could push more childminders out of the sector.

Campaigners say the decline is making it harder for families to find flexible and affordable childcare, particularly in areas already struggling with shortages.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

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Russian drone attacks on Kyiv, Israeli strikes in Lebanon, Trump in Beijing and a mural of Lamine Yamal – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists