He has shot everyone from Madonna to Rihanna, Kate Moss and Frank Ocean. Now Walker has turned his lens on the activists, artists, writers, models and everyday heroes of gay life

Six years ago, Tim Walker was walking in the Highbury Fields area of London when he came across a plaque on the side of a building. In 1970, at these now-converted public toilets, Louis Eakes, chairman of the Young Liberals, was arrested for importuning following a “pretty police” entrapment in which male officers posed as would-be sex partners.

It was here, the plaque told the photographer, that the first ever gay rights demonstration in Britain had taken place, organised by the Gay Liberation Front, in protest at Eakes’s arrest. But Walker was jolted by the date: 27 November 1970. It was the day he was born. So he wondered: “Who were those people out marching that day? Where are they now?”

On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock started ticking

Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.

He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then,” he said, “all hell broke loose.”

Accusations of classism chime with my experience 20 years ago. So all hail the Bristol graduate awarding state schools red plaques

“So, where did you go to school?” On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a loaded question. I was mostly bemused when I first started university 20 years ago and found myself being asked it repeatedly by other students. Why were they so interested? Surely no one would have heard of the north Wales comprehensive I had attended? When they countered my baffled reaction with “Charterhouse” or “Marlborough”, how was I supposed to respond? When one student said, of another, “He went to Winchester, you know”, I stared blankly at him, not understanding why he was telling me about someone else’s day trip to a city in Hampshire (“Oh, did he have a nice time?”). It was strange, new territory.

Asking someone where they went to school is often not an innocent question. It is a way of “placing” you on a social scale. As thousands of freshers settle in to their first terms at university, a significant proportion will be battling with this dawning awareness that Britain runs on a network of private schools whose alumni often seem to know, or know of, one another. State-school students might have been dimly aware of it before, but nothing puts it into sharper focus than freshers’ week. It’s clear that little has changed since my own student days. I was saddened to read recent reports of classism at St Andrews, which led to a student’s announcement that she would not return this academic year: “Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” she said. The pervasiveness of private school culture, as I suppose you could call it, remains nationwide and deeply embedded.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

The actor and his sister were with the 10-year-old on the night he was murdered. For the first time, along with the caretaker who found him bleeding, they share their terror – and celebrate their friend

Next month marks 26 years since the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor prompted a wave of grief and incredulity across the UK. Damilola had arrived in London from Nigeria just a few months earlier, with his mother, Gloria, his brother, Tunde, and his sister, Gbemi. His father, Richard, remained in Lagos, intending – like the patriarchs of many diasporic families – to join his wife and children at a later date. But that reunion would never come.

On 27 November 2000, while en route from the local library to the family’s home on the North Peckham Estate in south London, Damilola was set upon by the brothers Ricky and Danny Preddie, 13 and 12 respectively. He was attacked with a glass bottle, severing the femoral artery in his left leg, and was found bleeding heavily in a stairwell. Shortly after, Damilola was pronounced dead at nearby King’s College hospital.

‘When I couldn’t do the spitting scene, Sean took me aside and said: “Ron, if you don’t actually spit in my face, we’ll be here all day.” So I let one fly – and kept having to redo it’

I read an article about a curious book that had great reviews in Italy, a murder mystery about monks in the middle ages fighting for the fictional missing part of Aristotle’s Poetics. I said: “This is for me.” Since childhood, I had been fascinated with medieval and religious architecture, and Aristotle’s Poetics is my favourite literary work.

Breathable bedding, slanted tweezers and an indispensable garlic press … here are the buys you wish you’d discovered sooner. Plus, the best walking poles, tested

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Sometimes a product changes your life – or, more likely, just makes your day 10% better.

Whether it’s something small-but-mighty (a gadget that helps you open a jar without swearing, tweezers that get every hair) or a more expensive item that has proved its worth over the years (a much-loved designer dress, a garden mulch-maker), we asked you to tell us about the buys that have made your life just a little bit better.

Researchers, who looked at UK, US and Dutch data, say lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives a year

Cases of seven types of cancer have risen sharply among younger people in England, major new research has found, prompting warnings that lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives each year.

The number of people under 50 diagnosed with prostate cancer in England has quadrupled since 2001, while early onset bowel, kidney and uterine cancer diagnoses more than doubled.

European Green party says motion goes against its policy, with German Green co-leader calling it ‘intolerable and unacceptable’

• Zack Polanski may rue lack of leadership when Greens needed him to act

The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.

The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.

Publisher says author died peacefully at home ‘between writing sessions’

Jeffrey Archer, the bestselling author and former MP whose political career ended in disgrace when he was imprisoned for perjury, has died at the age of 86.

Archer, who was a Conservative MP for five years before serving as the party’s deputy chair, died “suddenly and peacefully” at his home “between writing sessions” on Monday, his publisher HarperCollins said.

British banker Simon Andriesz helped to expose alleged ties between late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick

A top UK regulator has launched an investigation into how it handled a whistleblower – who highlighted alleged ties between the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick – after he took his own life.

The British banker Simon Andriesz died late last month aged 57, the campaign group Transparency Task Force, of which he was a member, confirmed over the weekend.

Inhabitants of the Hebrides and Shetland tell of how fuel costs are putting the squeeze on commuting, services, food and more

As fuel prices reach the highest level in the UK since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Scottish islanders are feeling the pain more than most. On the mainland, the price of diesel has soared to a record high of 200.01p a litre, bringing the cost of filling an average family car to more than £110, according to the RAC. Petrol has risen by a third since the start of the Iran war at the end of February, averaging 174.71p – increasing to 195.64p in motorway service areas.

In the Hebrides and Shetland, prices at the forecourt have jumped even higher, with some fuel stations selling diesel for more than 220p a litre during the initial rise.

Crimes involving US troops on Okinawa have been a constant source of tension between Tokyo and Washington

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has led public outcry over crimes committed by US servicemen after a marine suspected of killing a woman on Okinawa was arrested on Saturday.

In a speech in parliament, Takaichi described the alleged crime as “heinous” and urged US military authorities to enforce discipline among American servicemen stationed on Okinawa, an island 1,000 miles south of Tokyo.

President says ‘I’m doing great’ despite polls showing 32% approval rating and loss of support from 2024 voters

Donald Trump’s approval ratings reached a record low on Monday, according to new opinion polls.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Trump’s approval rating at a record-low 32%. That polling included the president losing support among independent voters and Latinos, who had backed him in 2024. The dip could prove dire for the Republican party a month ahead of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

Thousands expected to join marches of support on Tuesday across the country amid growing concerns over police response

France is bracing for a national day of protests and high-school blockades as a youth protest movement gathers pace amid a growing debate over the scale of the police response.

In one incident, a 15-year-old protesting against what demonstrators said were France’s dilapidated ⁠and understaffed ​schools ‌had his hand ‌blown off outside a high school in the northern town of Lens, said François-Xavier Lauch, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais.

British Airways Boeing abruptly lost altitude over Ireland due to ‘technical issue’ and returned to Heathrow

A flight from London to Chicago declared an emergency after a sudden and steep descent of 28,000 feet over Ireland and was forced to turn back to Britain.

British Airways flight BA295 was bound for Chicago’s O’Hare airport but after a “technical issue” during which oxygen masks were deployed from the ceiling, the plane landed safely back at London Heathrow.

The US withdrew its bombers from RAF Fairford after an investigation into an alleged planned terrorist attack on the base. At least 10 B-1 bombers used by the US military in the Iran conflict flew out of Fairford on Sunday, suggesting US officials were taking the threat seriously. Last week, five men in three vans near the military base were arrested, followed by a sixth British-Iranian national. All were released on bail, drawing criticism from the Pentagon. Lucy Hough speaks to Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor – watch on YouTube

Ukraine says its long-range strikes have hurt Russian economy while Vladimir Putin concedes they have cost Russia roughly 1% of GDP. What we know on day 1,686

Party has common enemy in defectors, while Nigel Farage’s woes have given some insiders reason to hope

During a quick-fire Q&A at the Conservative party conference this weekend, Kemi Badenoch was asked who she would pick between Robert Jenrick or Suella Braverman.

“Why do you keep offering me these? It’s like asking if I’d rather be shot or drowned,” the Tory leader responded with her trademark directness.

It’s being sculpted for fashion parties, collected by tourists and hoarded in freezers. There are even entire shops devoted to it. What’s behind the revival of the much-maligned foodstuff?

Temperatures in Paris were nudging 41C when Erwan Leo opened Le Butter this summer. Wildfires had already been tearing through France and the city was quiet, particularly in the less touristy 8th arrondissement, a flex-your-wealth area near the Eiffel Tower known as the “golden triangle”. The last thing it needed, you would think, was a shop that sold loads of butter. “We were just so worried about the fridges,” says Leo, the 34-year-old owner. “We didn’t think anyone would even turn up.”

I visit Le Butter, the first shop in Paris dedicated to selling the stuff, two months later in September. It’s a quaint, photogenic spot between a wine shop that was opened by Leo eight years ago and a cafe famous for being blown up in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Inside there are candy-striped walls, little shopping baskets, a shelf of Instagrammable buttery merch (knives, hats, totes) and two double fridges containing 50 different types of butter. It’s a lot cooler today; the fridges purr away at an exacting 3C. And the past few months have been busy – so much so that Leo has had to erect a bench for those waiting outside, and a retractable barrier to manage the queues.

Civilians try to flee as men and boys rounded up on streets by new alliance as Ethiopia conflict erupts again

As renewed fighting has threatened a fresh humanitarian crisis in the northern region of Ethiopia, reports are emerging that a new alliance of armed groups in Tigray has been forcibly recruiting men and boys to its ranks.

Renewed conflict erupted on 23 September between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which rules the region, shattering the fragile Pretoria peace agreement signed between the two sides in November 2022.

Ashmolean museum, Oxford

She’s the ultimate female nude, a Greek goddess who inspired centuries of artists. Yet despite some world-class loans, her story here is jumbled

Botticelli’s Venus has parked her shell outside your house and come to pay a night-time visit. The glowing strands of her hair glitter against blackness as she looks past you at a mystery only she can see, while your eyes follow those river-like locks down to a hand that gathers a looping cascade between her thighs. She is, unmistakably, the goddess from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, Florence. This very similar painting from about 1490, also by Botticelli and his workshop, suggests his Uffizi masterpiece was already such an icon that someone commissioned this version without the zephyrs and green sea, just that goddess body.

So it goes. Venus, in art, is just a word for “female nude”. Botticelli started a modern appetite that has never ended. From his hypnotic paintings a host of lush sex goddesses rose up, or reclined, to rule European art through to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ironic 1967 assemblage Venus of the Rags, also here, in which a heap of old clothes overflow from a corner around a marble nude seen from behind, the mix of beauty and chaos resembling a rubbish-strewn Naples piazza.

Since Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder in 1994, Denise Brown has devoted herself to ending domestic violence. She talks about her beloved sister, the trauma she witnessed in the couple’s marriage and how lives can be saved

The last night Denise Brown spent with her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was at a restaurant for a family celebration. Nicole looked out of the window. “All of a sudden she goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He was driving by.” Brown looked out, trying to get a glimpse of her sister’s ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson. “I saw these headlights. She said, ‘He’s constantly following me.’” They went back to talking about their plans for the summer.

The following morning, 13 June 1994, Brown was up early at her parents’ house in Orange County in southern California, when the phone rang shortly after 6am. “I heard my mom scream a scream that I had never heard from a human being,” says Brown. “It was so guttural. Just awful.”

Badenoch would never have reopened the door on Brexit, but now that the PM has, it suits the Conservatives to let him walk through it

There’s no way on earth it should have worked, but somehow he may have got away with it. Last week, the actor Richard E Grant became the first contestant on The Traitors – a show whose only unbreakable rule is never to let anyone know you’re the murderer – to gleefully announce within minutes of being selected that yes, haha, it’s him! Yet even then many of his fellow contestants seemed to like him too much to recoil.

And that, roughly speaking, is now Andy Burnham’s Brexit strategy. After years of Labour politicians – not least Burnham himself, in the Makerfield byelection, without which he would not now be prime minister – trying to hide their real feelings about Brexit, Burnham has decided just to tell the truth and hope people roll with it. Leaving hasn’t worked, he said bluntly last week in Liverpool, and Britain should consider the alternatives. If you’re a leaver who suspects him of being out to unwind Brexit – well, yes, he is. This bold strategy seemingly surprised much of his own cabinet, an early lesson in how he likes to work for those who hadn’t studied his Manchester operation closely enough. But the oddly muted initial response to what would once have been a seismic shock suggests it’s wrongfooting some opponents, too.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Birmingham event is like a safari park attraction where we get to see the remnants of a party in a protected habitat

At the Labour party conference in Liverpool last week, Andy Burnham floated the idea of electoral reform. This week in Birmingham, the Tories have come up with a plan of their own: voting with their feet.

How to put this nicely? Let’s just say that the Conservative party conference is extremely civilised. No queues for the food concessions. No queues to get into any of the halls. In fact, the organisers are delighted that anyone has turned up at all.

At conference here in Birmingham I found a small battalion of centrist remainers with a vision for the Conservative party to come

You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire.

Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her for ever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates. Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both Profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

For all the howls of a ‘stitch-up’, it’s hard to see what ministers were supposed to do, as the alternatives risked worse outcomes

• BT to buy broadband supplier TalkTalk in £400m rescue deal, saving 900 jobs

“All the characteristics of a stitch-up masked as a rescue deal in the public interest,” thundered Virgin Media O2. It’s not an unreasonable view of BT’s hurried weekend acquisition of TalkTalk. Once upon a time, TalkTalk was seen as a plucky upstart performing the useful role of irritant to BT’s giant Openreach broadband operation. Now the challenger is being consumed by the dominant player via a pre-pack administration that minimises short-term political headaches.

Here’s the problem, though, with the cosy stitch-up thesis. For all the howls of outrage, it’s hard to see what the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who gave her blessing by issuing a little-used public interest notice, was supposed to do differently. Alternative approaches, notably a chaotic collapse of TalkTalk without a rescue plan for the customers, risked worse outcomes.

The UK government urging households to prepare for unknown threats with a three-day supply of food and water doesn’t feel like an overreaction. But is there a bigger plan to go with it?

There is no national food stockpile and there hasn’t been since it was wound up in the 1990s. It feels like a metaphor for the delusions of that era: nothing bad can possibly happen again; no two countries with a McDonald’s have gone to war with each other (according to the journalist Thomas L Friedman, also in the 90s). Now, we all have a McDonald’s and wars regularly disrupt food supplies. The problem with metaphors is you can’t eat them – not even satisfying ones.

For people who remember the second world war, or feel as if they do, there is always enough muscle memory to do topical household stockpiling. My mum kept a trunk of food that was mainly filled with condensed milk in case of a nuclear war, all the way through the 80s. When the Berlin Wall came down, we should have had a ceremonial toffee-sauce-making event where we ate it all, but we didn’t; in 1990, she was stockpiling again, to mark the Gulf war.

Our relationships with pets matter to wellbeing. But concern for an animal’s welfare can also become a practical barrier to healthcare

“Doctor, do you know I have a little dog?”

My team exchanges a glance. It’s my turn today.

From microcheating to quiet quitting to weaponised incompetence, new terms to describe relationship failings are abundant. But that doesn’t mean there’s not space for some more ...

Are you committing “attention infidelity”? The New York Times alerted me to this expression, coined by the public opinion researcher Daniel Cox in a new book on the “crisis of human connection”. It’s exactly what you’d expect: failing to focus fully on your partner because you’re indulging in what the NYT calls, rather judgily, “the banal distraction of dead-eyed scrolling”. Who are you calling dead-eyed? This reel of an armadillo in a paddling pool has my animated attention!

Surely we’re all a bit attention-unfaithful – only saints don’t sometimes absent-mindedly thumb through medieval manuscript hedgehog memes while their partner relates a boring anecdote about how they thought they saw a strange bird that turned out to be a plastic bag. What I find more interesting is how we seem now to need a lexicon of relationship bad behaviour.

Politicians must redouble their efforts to tackle a disturbing pattern of pupils assaulting classmates

The Guardian’s findings about the extent of sexual abuse in schools require an urgent, calibrated response. Data revealing multiple rapes committed each year on school premises in England and Wales is hard to comprehend. Yet this is what freedom of information requests to police forces, covering the period from 2021 until last year, have revealed. As well as the severity of the offences, the youth of many of the victims is disturbing. More than 8,500 sexual offences at or near schools were committed against under-13s, most of them girls.

Data about perpetrators contains gaps, including their age and sex. While the overwhelming majority of such acts are carried out by boys, we don’t know the exact proportion, nor if there is an age gap between those carrying out abuse and those being targeted. Only 33 out of 43 police forces shared their data, meaning that large areas including Scotland are not represented. But whatever the exact details, and allowing for the fact that these are reports, not convictions, the findings are deeply dismaying.

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

The Conservatives blame their failures on abandoning their 1976 principles. But the country needs investment and resilience rather than another round of spending cuts

The Conservative party wants to go back to the future under Kemi Badenoch. In her foundational text, The Right Way, released at the weekend, the Tory party leader makes its intellectual lineage explicit, repeatedly invoking Margaret Thatcher’s 1976 policy statement The Right Approach. The 2026 economic framework is familiar: only private enterprise creates wealth; taxes, regulation and spending can obstruct growth and competition; markets make the country stronger. The speech by her shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, made it clear that Conservative failures over its 14-year spell in charge were the result of the party straying from Thatcherite principles.

One might argue that, on the contrary, errors were because the party slavishly followed such a creed. When Rough, a depleted North Sea gasfield that once provided around 70% of the UK’s gas-storage capacity, was judged uneconomic by its private owner, a Conservative government in 2017 accepted that international markets could provide the UK with adequate energy security. That proved to be a big mistake when Russia invaded Ukraine, sending fossil fuel prices upwards. Britain was particularly exposed as a net energy importer and highly dependent on gas. Tory ministers had to bring back Rough into operation in 2022. Mrs Badenoch puts its closure down to “false economies”. But what was wrong was putting private profitability ahead of the country’s needs.

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.

Amanda Cole says the government needs to weigh the cost of medicines against the damage that a shortage can cause to the NHS and patients

Without decisive government action, the reported medicine shortages in hospitals will only be the tip of the iceberg (Hospitals in England hit by shortages of common drugs such as paracetamol, 29 September). Medicine supply chains are complex and global, with multiple points of potential failure that are especially sensitive to geopolitical shocks. Brexit has made us even more vulnerable, as we no longer have access to EU medicine reserves, and cross-border logistics are further complicated.

Our research shows that these shortages tend to be concentrated in (off-patent) generic and biosimilar markets. It’s true that low prices for off-patent medicines are important in driving health system savings and promoting affordability. The problem is that when prices are driven an unsustainable low, manufacturers exit, leaving markets with too few suppliers and dangerously exposed to any supply disruption or demand spike. The NHS bears the cost when a shortage does occur, in the form of higher prices, expensive substitutes and a heavy staff burden in managing emergency procurement and, sometimes, rationing. Patients pay the highest price in delayed treatment and worse outcomes.

Bill Gabbett recalls teaching media, communications and cultural studies, while Michael Fuller studied under the influence

I enjoyed Emma Brockes’ piece (Would I want my child to study for a social media influencer degree? No, but it’s the way of the world, 1 October). It reminded me of the last 30 years of my working life spent teaching media, communications and cultural studies in two great university departments peopled with superb colleagues, and spending my time with bright and inquisitive students.

I got used to them being called Mickey Mouse degrees, mostly by people who seemed unaware that Mickey Mouse was one of the global top 10 recognised images, or even that the Walt Disney Corporation was valued at billions.

Jane Whitehead believes neighbours should be heard, not seen, while Paul Burton says the capacity of neighbours to take offence is limitless. Plus a letter from Joyce Corston

Thank you to Emily Retter for exposing the curse of the prefab garden shed (‘Just look at this monstrosity!’ Inside Britain’s bilious back yard shed wars, 29 September). Perhaps these luxury sheds should come with a health warning: “Do not assemble if you value good relations with your neighbours.”

In our street, shed wars have been fought with ghosting, poo emojis and sinister, overly loud laughter in back yards. In London, it seems that the more open-plan a house is inside, the more likely it is to have a sealed, square-eyed “room” outside in the garden. After all, we all need walls and doors sometimes.

Heathrow’s third runway and aircraft emissions | Taking the hint | Editorial mischief | Girls and ladies | The bleeding obvious

George Monbiot coins the word “perceptionware” for technology trailed but never trialled, and only intended to impress the credulous (The expansion of Heathrow would be an expensive disaster for Britain and the world. Burnham needs to block it, 3 October). But the IT industry has long had a word for this: “vapourware” – which seems apt when discussing aircraft emissions.
Robin Hughes
Worrall, South Yorkshire

• In the 1960s, my friend Linda shared a room in Paddington, London, with her friend Cynthia. Two beds in the living room, a kitchen and a shared bathroom. Normal in those days. If I went there for supper, Cynthia would get undressed and into bed at 9pm on the dot. It was difficult not to get the hint, with her head on the pillow and her eyes screwed shut. I went home (Letters, 4 October).
Mary Finch
Ditteridge, Wiltshire

Assistant coach Anthony Barry says new structure means their key attackers are not ‘caged in’ after 7-0 rout of Croatia

Anthony Barry knows the hunt is on. The England assistant coach has been through the debriefs. He has mulled over the minutiae with Thomas Tuchel to such an extent he is allowed to make a joke at the boss’s expense. “He’s doing my head in,” Barry says with a smile. What is the missing piece of the puzzle? After all the emotion of England’s semi-final finish at the World Cup, how can they take the decisive step to glory?

It is early days in the Nations League campaign, which everybody at the Football Association wants to use as a slingshot into Euro 2028 when England will co-host, but Barry can see the genesis of an answer. It comes down to liberation, enabling England’s top players to fully express themselves, and there is a reason why he finds himself talking about Jude Bellingham.

This game concluded with mutual irritation and a touch of chaos. It is an indicator of Northern Ireland’s progress that scoreless parity led to wincing from players, management and fans alike. Isaac Price’s 84th-minute missed opportunity from the penalty spot added to the sense of annoyance.

Michael O’Neill’s team are atop B2 after a window which, going by the players’s physical condition in the dying stages, has been exhausting. Northern Ireland and their youthful setup are a fascinating international story. They are a team on an upward curve, with standards elevated accordingly. O’Neill bemoaned “immaturity” in the second half, saying: “The disappointing thing is we have eight points instead of 10.”

• France score four goals in 14 minutes to triumph

• Italy see off Turkey, Hungary edge out Ukraine

Michael Olise came off the bench to inspire France to a 4-1 win over Belgium in the Nations League, handing Zinedine Zidane his first home victory since taking charge.

Dodi Lukébakio put Belgium on course for their first competitive win over Les Bleus in 45 years when he fired the visitors in front in the first half at the Stade de France. But the hosts turned the match on its head in a blistering finish, scoring four times in 14 minutes to preserve Zidane’s unbeaten start and move closer to the quarter-finals.

• Player struck rebounding ball into Beijing crowd

• Djokovic advances to final against De Minaur

Daniil Medvedev was disqualified from his China Open semi-final with Novak Djokovic on Monday after hitting a rebounding ball into the crowd that struck a ​spectator in the eye.

The Russian world ‌No 5 was ‌trailing 7-5, 5-3 and had lost a point ‌when, in frustration, he struck a ball that had come off the back wall. The spectator, sitting in the first row, clutched his left eye and appeared in pain as he left the gallery, assisted by the stadium’s ‌staff.

Review is under way, but there will be no quick fix for misconceived regulations that resulted in cars being unable to run in the rain

Formula One has gone to no little pains this season in insisting the new format is more popular than ever, despite overwhelming disapproval from the drivers regarding engine regulations. In short, there is nothing to see here.

But the farcical scenes that accompanied the opening to the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia on Sunday were all too visible and left some drivers expressing open mockery.

The star’s rift with Jorge Jesus is an unfortunate affair. But the forward has been holding his national team back for years

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If this is to be the end for Cristiano Ronaldo at international level, at least it can be said that he left the stage as he bestrode it: with monumental self-regard. Ronaldo has always been a preening, self-absorbed player, but for a time, when he was one of the best in the world, it could be tolerated. For the past four years, though, he has actively and obviously held Portugal back. There is a great generation of technical talent here weighed down by the monstrous albatross of his ego.

To recap the basic details of the past couple of weeks. Ronaldo played 67 minutes of Portugal’s scratchy 1-0 win over Wales. Portugal coach Jorge Jesus, who replaced Roberto Martínez after the World Cup, said he had a verbal agreement with Ronaldo that he would not start the following game against Norway but would perhaps come off the bench. Early in the second half, Ronaldo went to warm up – although whether that was on his own initiative or because Jesus had told him to is unclear. The game was tight, Portugal ultimately winning 2-1, and Jesus did not bring Ronaldo on.

• McDermott wants those who ‘can best stick to gameplan’

• Hull KR’s Lewis in but no Wakefield players included

Brian McDermott, the England head coach, has justified his surprise decision to omit Jake Connor from England’s Rugby League World Cup squad by insisting the players selected are better suited to his plans to defeat the world’s best.

For the second consecutive year, Leeds Rhinos half-back Connor is the major talking point in a squad that has no players from the new Super League champions, Wakefield. He was left out by Shaun Wane for last autumn’s Ashes despite winning Super League’s Man of Steel award. England lost that series 3-0 after a string of limited attacking displays.

• Group of clubs wants FA president Souleiman Waberi out

• Waberi has faced mounting opposition for weeks

Attempts to oust Souleiman Waberi as the president of the Djibouti football federation (FDF) reached a dramatic climax on Monday as police occupied the federation’s headquarters after a group of club presidents called an extraordinary general assembly aimed at removing the Fifa council member and his executive committee.

The FDF said police first occupied its national technical centre at about 5.30pm on Sunday, without presenting an administrative document or court order. According to the federation, on Monday a much larger police contingent ordered Waberi, members of the executive committee, staff and other federation members to leave the premises.

Back-to-back wins is a huge achievement, but owners have more to think about than unprecedented third title

It was, as the moderator of the post-Arc press conference put it, the “difficult question everyone wants to ask”, but Princess Zahra Aga Khan, the owner of the winner, Daryz, did not seem to find it difficult at all.

“Look, we’re breeders,” she said, “and you get to the point where you’re taking a risk every time you run the horse. Would we want him to train on for another year? I’m not sure. I think he has other things to do.”

Government offensive launched under air cover by Saudi military coalition aims to retake all Houthi-held territory

Forces of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen have recaptured several key areas around Bab al-Mandab strait from Iran-backed Houthi rebels, Yemeni officials said on Monday.

The officials said forces allied with the internationally recognized government have retaken the crucial town of Dhubab just north of the strait. They also captured the towns of Bab and Hadeid, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters. Witnesses said they saw government tanks and forces entering the towns.

Parti Québécois wins provincial election but will not be able to govern alone, as Mark Carney stresses unity in face of tariffs threat from Donald Trump

The separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) won Quebec’s provincial election on Monday but fell short of enough seats to govern alone, returning to power with a promise to hold another referendum on independence from Canada.

The result returns Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s party to power for the first time in more than a decade but denies it the majority it sought, forcing the separatists to rely on opposition parties even as they try to revive Quebec’s independence debate.

Progressive voters and supporters of incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left reeling after far-right surge

Flávio Bolsonaro is in pole position to win Brazil’s presidential election, after a far-right tsunami propelled him to a shock first-round victory over the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leaving progressive voters reeling.

The 45-year-old rightwing candidate received 56.1m votes to Lula’s 53.8m – 47.03% to 45.16% – meaning the 80-year-old leftwinger has a mountain to climb if he is to bounce back in the second round on 25 October. Never, since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985, has the first-round runner-up managed to turn the game around and win the second ballot.

Exclusive: Guardian analysis finds more than 150,000 tonnes of fuel was shipped to Russian ports in July and August, some using sanctioned tankers

Fuel is being shipped from South Korea to Russia via sanctioned tankers as Moscow scrambles for supplies amid the war in Ukraine, a move one expert said “undermines” Seoul’s public backing for Kyiv.

Guardian analysis of port records and ship-tracking data found that in July and August over 176,000 tonnes of fuel, mostly diesel, was loaded at several South Korean ports on to seven tankers that made 14 voyages to Russia’s far east.

Anthropic tells inquiry it ‘never tried to dictate’ Australian copyright rules as the ABC says copyright laws do not need changing

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Anthropic has told a parliamentary inquiry on AI that it is not seeking to dictate copyright law on model training, but the current rules make it “impossible” to train AI in Australia.

OpenAI has used an appearance before the parliamentary committee to apologise again to Australia about the hack on Medicare last month, on the same day media and entertainment organisations argued weakening Australian copyright law for AI model training would leave artists as “roadkill”.

Exclusive: Cop31 leader calling for global curbs on climate-heating gas has landfills producing some of world’s worst plumes

Two or three nights each week, the smell descends. Residents of villages on the rural outskirts of Istanbul don’t know what the smell is, but they have been plagued by it for years: a smell so bad they have to sleep with their windows closed even during hot summer nights. They know the source, too: the huge Silivri municipal waste dump a few miles away that is belching out stinking gases as food and other organic waste rots.

“The smell is not subtle. It suffocates you,” said Kemalettin Özenç, sitting outside a tea shop in the village of Yolçatı. “It’s worse when the air is still: sometimes families linger until midnight out here. Even when you go inside it’s inescapable.”

As trawlers compete with Greenland sharks for halibut and cod, conservationists and fishers clash over what to do about misunderstood species

‘When I accidentally catch a shark, I bring it to my dogs,” Henrik Jensen, a 27-year-old from Greenland’s west coast, says casually. “I don’t let it back down because [the sharks] bully me and cut my lines.”

Jensen has fished for halibut in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third largest town, for a decade. He works an hour north of the town’s main iceberg-laden fishery, which sustains the livelihood of nearly 400 fishers. There, the halibut are bigger and more plentiful, but so are the Greenland sharks.

How the court will lean is unclear amid Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil’s attempt to stop lawsuits at state level

The US supreme court began its new nine-month term hearing arguments on Monday in a major case in which big oil companies attempted to strike a fatal blow against lawsuits that seek to hold them accountable for the climate crisis.

After the almost two-hour hearing, while it was not yet clear which way the justices were leaning, experts said the court may find it challenging to write a majority decision siding with industry.

Temperatures in US state forecast to hit high 30s celsius this week, while regions in Indonesia grapple with wildfires

The National Weather Service in the US has issued extreme heat warnings for parts of southern California, including Los Angeles, until Thursday, as temperatures are expected to hit the high 30s celsius. Burbank, a suburb north of Los Angeles, recorded 39C on Saturday, a few degrees shy of the October record for the region set in 1987. A persistent area of high pressure will remain in place this week, leading to further hazardous hot weather and increased fire risk.

Parts of Indonesia are in the midst of an extreme wildfire season, which has peaked over the past month. Western Kalimantan (Borneo) and southern Sumatra have been particularly badly affected. The lack of rainfall has dried the usually water-logged tropical soils, meaning that fires have been able to spread quickly, above and below the surface. Indonesia’s soils are also extremely rich in peat, meaning that the smoke produced from the fires contain higher levels of toxic gases such as sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide. Cities in surrounding areas and as far as Malaysia and Singapore have experienced reduced air quality in recent weeks as a result. Drought and wildfires are more common in this part of the world during El Niño events owing to suppressed thunderstorm activity.

Blake Stephenson tells fringe meeting at Tory conference that the town is ‘a very dangerous place’ with ‘ghettoes’

A shadow Conservative Home Office minister has claimed there are “no-go zones” in Luton where “white people won’t go”.

Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire who was appointed to the Tory frontbench role two weeks ago, claimed the town was “a very dangerous place” where some communities “live in ghettoes”.

English Heritage acquires film of first re-enactment, ‘a lot of pushing and shoving’ between Kent and Sussex students

At the top of a hill in a field near Hastings, a group of defiant English combatants awaited the invading army of William the Conqueror, brandishing their spears and shouting “Harold! Harold!”.

Unfortunately, the Norman army had been held up in traffic on the A27 from Brighton, meaning the most significant battle in English history had to be delayed by 20 minutes while the French got into their costumes.

Nearly 90 organisations write to PM urging him to take decisive action to end violence against women and girls

• From unwanted touching to rape: the scale of child-on-child abuse

A coalition of nearly 90 organisations has written to the prime minister calling for “decisive action” on violence against women and girls after a Guardian investigation revealed the scale of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools in England and Wales.

The groups urged Labour to redouble efforts to deliver on its manifesto promise to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) and “end this cycle of harm once and for all”.

Party’s pledge to reduce aid budget from £9bn a year to £1bn to fund new prison places branded as ‘posturing’

Conservative plans to slash the aid budget by 90% would leave the UK unable to cover existing contributions to the UN and World Bank and “irreparably damage” Britain’s global credibility, several organisations and charities have told the Guardian.

In a series of announcements at the Tory party conference in Birmingham, Kemi Badenoch said that as prime minister she would reduce the aid budget from £9bn a year to £1bn, to part-fund 50,000 new prison places in England and Wales. The culture budget would also be slashed by £1bn a year to fund the plans.

Former president to visit 10 days before election day as victory for progressive challenger could tip Senate balance

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Barack Obama will head to Detroit this month to rally with Abdul El-Sayed, a show of establishment support for a progressive insurgent in Michigan, one of the most consequential Senate races in the country.

The former US president will appear with El-Sayed and the gubernatorial nominee, Jocelyn Benson, on 24 October, the state’s Democratic party announced on Monday. The rally falls on the first day of the state’s in-person early voting period and 10 days before election day.

Exclusive: Guardian Australia investigation reveals state governments use shared graves to bury those deemed too poor to pay for funerals. ‘It’s unspeakable,’ one relative says

• Find more from the Unmarked graves investigation here

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Vietnam veterans, rough sleepers and other impoverished Australians are being buried in unmarked communal graves often holding four or more people, a practice relatives have described as “unspeakable” and “a disgrace”.

A Guardian Australia investigation has identified more than 100 unmarked graves across New South Wales, and some in Queensland, that are being used by state governments to bury those deemed too poor to afford their own funerals.

Neighboring states are also reporting hundreds of cases, with over 3,800 recorded across the country

Pennsylvania has surpassed 1,000 measles cases this year, state health officials calculate, making it the largest state outbreak in more than three decades. The benchmark comes as neighboring New York declared a state of emergency about measles rates there.

Pennsylvania’s health department said Monday 1,004 cases of measles had been confirmed. Five Pennsylvania residents ⁠have died ⁠after ​contracting the disease, with 198 hospitalizations.

Hall housing Michael Kotlikoff’s office spray painted as demonstrators demand resignation of college president

• Cornell University to take ‘serious look’ at fraternities after rape allegations

Mass protests erupted at Cornell University on Monday, with students criticizing officials’ handling of gang-rape allegations, demanding the president’s resignation and painting “SMASH THE PATRIARCHY” on an administration building.

Thousands of students and faculty gathered for a demonstration, sparked by the high-profile case of a former student known as Jane Doe, who said in a recent lawsuit that she was plied with drugs and raped at a fraternity house in 2024. The case has prompted international outrage and intense scrutiny of college fraternities and sexual violence on US campuses.

Boss of OpenAI calls for a regulatory light touch because of the ‘good stuff’ the technology can deliver

Sam Altman says he believes the world should accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology.

The chief executive of OpenAI cited hacks, scams and “other bad things that will happen” in an interview that sparked an instant backlash from critics of the big AI companies. His comments came after one of his company’s safety experts resigned, saying at the weekend that its “culture is broken”.

Camera-enabled Meta spectacles are already restricted in UK and US because of fears about covert recording

Norway is planning a temporary ban on smart glasses in some public places, amid rising global concern at the spread of the AI-enabled recording devices.

The Oslo government is planning a bill to prevent the use of the camera-enabled spectacles in parks, beaches, museums, shopping centres, schools, daycare centres, healthcare facilities, gyms and public events, although private use would still be allowed.

Deal would have created a supermarket with a market share of 23.6%, still well behind Tesco’s 27.8%

Sainsbury’s held merger talks with rival Morrisons this year to discuss a multibillion-pound deal that would have been the biggest shake-up for UK supermarkets in decades, according to reports.

The two companies held exploratory negotiations, according to the Financial Times and Sky. It is believed they are no longer in live discussions.

Banks and building societies raise prices as turmoil in bond markets increases expectations of base rate rise

The average cost of a five-year fixed-rate mortgage has hit the 6% barrier for the first time in three years, as jitters in the money markets make the loans more expensive for lenders to offer.

Figures from financial information provider Moneyfacts show the average is now 6.00%, its highest point since September 2023, while the average two-year fixed rate is not far behind at 5.98%, its highest since December of the same year.

Her half-sister pieces together her demos for an album in this moving documentary. Plus: Bake Off lets the fans set the tasks in the tent. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
In October 2021, a triumphant performance at Usher Hall in Edinburgh set the singer‑songwriter Beldina Odenyo on the path to great success. By November, she had taken her own life. She was 31. In this documentary, her half-sister Leah attempts to gather Odenyo’s demos into an album. It also considers the trauma she lived with, as well as the force of her music. Hollie Richardson

A story of storico ribelle, produced by a small group of mountain herders according to a traditional farming system based on seasonal and rotational grazing

My journey into the world of storico ribelle began with a shared passion for photography and the mountains. A close friend of mine lives in the Orobie Alps. He loves the mountains and the natural environment that surrounds him, and we share the same passion for photography. When I finally went to visit him, I discovered a way of experiencing the mountains that was very different from the one I knew growing up in the Apennines, where I come from.

What struck me was not only the landscape, but the relationship people still have with it. Here, I discovered a world where the mountain is not simply a place to visit or explore, but a place to live and work. A world where cheese is still a tradition rather than an industrial product, and where the rhythms of the seasons, the animals and the daily work of the alpeggiatori – the mountain herders – are still deeply connected.

Harewood has always had star power to burn – and he well and truly ignites this bold, sharp show about working in the police as a person of colour. What a brilliant milestone for Black British cop drama

Some of us are too young to have seen David Harewood play Othello at the National Theatre in London back in ’97. It was the first time, on that stage, that Shakespeare’s Black lead was played by a Black actor – as opposed to a white one in blackface makeup. Even if you missed that groundbreaking performance, on the basis of Harewood’s star power in the London-set crime drama Pierre, you can be assured he blew the roof off.

Pierre’s co-writer Roy Williams may not be the Bard, but he is another highly acclaimed playwright with an interest in how Black men fare in this country. Pierre on Channel 4 isn’t exactly Othello at the National, either, but it is another cultural milestone in the story of Black British crime drama.

New York film festival: the actor impresses with a directorial debut about a club rat who discovers he is father to a 10-year-old boy

In a grungy backroom of a Brooklyn warehouse, a group of glamorously dishevelled clubbers raise their voices in a secular chat. “What do we want? Drugs! When do we want them? Now!” So begins Club Kid, an irresistible helter-skelter ride through the New York club scene from the comedian, actor and first-time director Jordan Firstman. A portrait of the importance of blood family and chosen family, it’s also one of the most bewitching debuts in recent years.

Peter (Firstman) is the life of the party and has been running his raucous Club Labor for over a decade. He always gets the drugs in, rolls up with the best-dressed crew and knows everyone. But the comedowns – bed-rot days of anime porn, takeout and self-loathing – aren’t getting any easier, and he is screwing up opportunities for the party to get to the next level. “You’re a fucking child,” spits his business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne in her best performance yet) after he shows up to a lunch meeting with potential investors straight from the rave.

This biopic of Sergiu Celibidache, the renowned Romanian conductor who refused all recordings, is a sturdy labour of love directed by his son

Here is an old-fashioned biopic from central Europe that is also a labour of love on the part of its director: a little stolid and stately, yes, but robustly made, heartfelt and high-minded, with workmanlike performances and decent visual effects work. It is the story of the Romanian conductor and composer Sergiu Celibidache, a brilliant musician who became renowned among musical connoisseurs in the years following the second world war for his unique and uncompromisingly purist belief – derived from his Zen Buddhist studies – that music should never be recorded. He believed that LPs and CDs were inert and dead, and that music had to be experienced live, in the passionately authentic present.

The director is the musician’s son, Serge Ioan Celebidachi, and as an older man in his rural French retirement, he is played with unsubtly querulous hauteur by John Malkovich, especially in the misjudged opening scene where he yells at Japanese executives for presuming to offer him a recording deal. Ben Schnetzer is the younger Celibidache, a prodigy whose musical ambition infuriates his old-fashioned father (Sean Bean), a well-regarded functionary who assumed that his son would follow him into public office. Celebidache Sr therefore demands the return of his birthday gift, a certain type of yellow tie that had been favoured by generations of the family’s menfolk, and which here becomes a fetish of the heartbroken young Sergiu’s need to please his father but also break away from him.

French farce set in the tumultuous three hours prior to the opening night performance of Macbeth features comic-timing perfection from cast

One of Matt Groening’s Life In Hell comic strips from the 1980s, entitled How to Be a Clever Film Critic, sets out cinema’s greatest paradox: “The French are funny. Sex is funny. And comedies are funny. Yet no French sex comedies are funny.” Well, this film from Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau proves that all commonly held certitudes must be disproved at some point, because here’s a French comedy, albeit one that’s not all that preoccupied with sex, that is a hoot.

Set entirely in the Parisian institution of the title, this frothy farce unfolds over the three hours before the opening night curtain goes up on a production of Macbeth, which is being directed by actor turned metteur en scène Nina (Pauline Clément). A series of catastrophes make it an open question as to whether the show will actually go on, starting from the moment Nina arrives at the entrance without her staff pass and has to try to get past the officious security team. Naturally, that’s just the beginning, and Nina must contend with superstitious actors, adulterous actors shagging while they rehearse (saying their lines between thrusts), a stoned grande dame (Danièle Lebrun), missing actors (Lady Macbeth is stranded in Brest while shooting a TV show on the side) and actors who understand their roles less than the usher (Sefa Yeboah), who is watching from the sidelines. Meanwhile, if there’s a technical problem, the stage manager (Christian Hecq) will tell you in tedious detail why it can’t be fixed, the wardrobe mistress (Florence Viala) discusses her colleagues’ bodily imperfections and the minister of culture is coming that evening to see the show.

The Guardian columnist and former Greek finance minister tackle big political questions in a hugely entertaining chat. Plus, why was actor Nkechi Simms placed in foster care?

This new series from the Guardian columnist and senior economics commentator is a lively interview show that tackles politics’ big questions. First up, it’s former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis for a hugely entertaining tour of his career, dissection of democracy and attempt to apply some long-term thinking to the UK. Or in his words: “How long do you think it’ll be before Andy Burnham is pushed out for someone else?” Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

Milton Court, London
A contemporary piece by David Fennessy is framed by JS Bach and Arvo Pärt in a show characterised by uncanny sounds and ghostly chorales

It’s not every day a concert promises “Bach & Blood”, nor delivers it so thoroughly. There were no massacres from the Scottish Ensemble, mercifully, just a characteristically singular bit of programming from this ever-adventurous string orchestra that framed Irish composer David Fennessy’s 2024 Blood with music by Bach and Arvo Pärt.

On 7 July 1720, while JS Bach was away in Carlsbad, his wife Maria Barbara died suddenly, buried before he could return. She was just 35. “Sei solo” – you are alone – the composer wrote at the top of his collection of Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin completed soon after. A slip of pen, misspelling “Sei Soli” (six solos), or a deliberate play on words? The intensity of the works – particularly the monumental 15-minute D minor Chaconne, with its weeping chromatic theme – suggest the latter.

The singer-songwriter owes a lot to Georgie Fame and likes the romantic side of Jimi Hendrix – but which ringtone song can put him in a bad mood?

The first song I fell in love with
The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix, which came out in 1967 when I was 12. Hendrix was known for outgoing music, but I was a romantic soul, so the emotional side of his music led to that strain in my own writing.

The song I do at karaoke
Karaoke? Certainly not. I do this for a living. Would you have made my great-grandfather dig ditches for fun? I prefer to live vicariously through Bill Murray singing (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding in Lost in Translation.

Corn Exchange, Edinburgh
Derry’s answer to the Ramones play 30 songs in a breakneck and breathless ride through the punk humour and new-wave surrealism of their repertoire

“This is the first record we ever made. Still sounds good to me,” smiles bassist Mickey Bradley, deliberately downplaying the song released in 1978 that secured the Undertones’ legacy for almost 50 years and counting. Played hard and unceremoniously tonight, Teenage Kicks still sounds lonely, horny, thrilling: it’s the stuff of raw teen spirit, but has also aged poignantly with the Derry band and their now silver-haired audience, with something moving to say about the weight of nostalgia.

When brothers John and Damian O’Neill’s guitars crash to a halt, many in the crowd are hugging – but the Undertones are already on to the next. This anniversary tour is far from sentimental: ripping through 30 songs in 90 minutes, it’s a breakneck ride through the punk humour, new-wave surrealism and open vulnerability of their first two albums.

The Undertones are touring the UK and Ireland

The Talking Heads frontman considers dormant ideas that made a comeback – from Indian irrigation to Kafka

There’s barely been a moment in  the last half-century when David Byrne hasn’t been zinging about, dancing forward, opting odd. The art-school dropout frontman of Talking Heads, he moved sideways into ballet, dance and experimental theatre, collaborated on the proto-ambient LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with his fellow polymath Brian Eno, directed films, wrote musicals (on – of course – Imelda Marcos), co-founded a label (Luaka Bop) that introduced the likes of Os Mutantes and William Onyeabor to a new generation, brought out books of tree drawings, and designed bicycle racks.

Byrne’s career – by most measures a remarkably successful one – has been built from code-switching, fidgety intelligence, stylistic infidelity. At first glance then, it’s surprising that Sleeping Beauties is devoted to failure – to artists who were ignored, laughed at, forgotten; to ideas deemed batty or heretical; to ways of thinking about the world – sustaining it, replenishing it – that, often for political reasons, were found wanting, and wiped from our collective memory banks. Sleeping beauties is (of course) a term he first encountered in an academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan. That was in 2004: this book, like a lot of the ideas and energies it animates, needed time to ferment.

The novelist has expanded her devastating 2014 short story about an imagined affair between Daphne du Maurier and a fictional Polish-Jewish housekeeper

The rollcall of notable novels that began life as short stories is surprisingly long and various. Two years before Clarissa Dalloway famously shopped for flowers in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway she was shopping for gloves in Woolf’s short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street; Evan S Connell’s Mrs Bridge and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides began life as stories published in the Paris Review. Rachel Cusk’s story Project, which ran in the New Yorker in September 2025, serves almost word for word as the opening for her new novel, Life of M.

The newest addition to that list is Rose Tremain’s 17th novel, The Housekeeper, which pays homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca by imagining the events that might have inspired it. Tremain first explored the idea in a 2014 story, also called The Housekeeper and included in her acclaimed collection The American Lover. Her protagonist, then and now, is Lilianne Danowski, a Polish Jew who fled the pogroms with her father as a child and who presides with reserved efficiency over a large staff at Manderville Hall near Fowey in Cornwall. When Du Maurier comes to lunch, it is Danowski, known to her employers as Danni (Danowski was “a mouthful of fishbones”), who is deputised to show her around the house, who proudly encourages Du Maurier to look through the clothes in her dead mistress’s fastidiously maintained bedroom and takes her down to the boat house. It is Danowski who, after a passionate year-long affair with Du Maurier, will be twisted into the malevolent Mrs Danvers.

The co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign and author of The Book of Trespass discusses the Oxfordshire riverside community he calls home and how Hardwick Hall has been taken back by the people

On the banks of the Thames in South Oxfordshire, the Hardwick estate has been owned by the Rose family for generations. When Sir Charles Rose, a banker, sportsman, yachtsman and aviator, sped through the lanes in his Rolls-Royce in the early days of motoring, he inspired Kenneth Grahame to create Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s character became a symbol of decadent aristocracy whose foolishness leads to the temporary loss of a fine house to weasel-socialists.

Now Toad Hall has been taken over for good and Nick Hayes, artist, writer and co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign, has had a riverside view of this striking turn of events. When Hayes, who lives on a beautiful wide-beamed barge on the Thames, became the Hardwick estate’s artist-in-residence, he discovered that Rose’s heirs are, in effect, disinheriting themselves. The estate is gradually being turned into a charity which will be run by the tenants and the alternative community that has grown up in its shelter.

Her last novel sold 5m copies and was adapted into a hit series. Nearly 10 years on, the Korean-American author has written another epic. She discusses ambition and the diagnosis that inspired her to leave work and write

Back in 1995, when she was in her mid-20s, Min Jin Lee quit her job as a corporate lawyer. As a teenager she had been diagnosed as a hepatitis B carrier and doctors told her she was highly likely to develop liver cancer in her 20s or 30s. “I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first,” the now 57-year-old Korean-American author says of her decision to turn her back on a regular pay cheque and healthcare. “I was told so many times that I was going to get sicker and sicker, that I’ve always felt that if I can get a really good book out then I’m done.”

Lee, looking very much alive and well, is on a video call from her home in Harlem, New York, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind her. We are meeting to discuss the publication of her third novel, American Hagwon, the final part in what she calls her “Korean trilogy”, following Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and her 2017 international bestseller, Pachinko, stylishly adapted for Apple TV in 2022. “Korean quartet!” she corrects me now. Thanks to experimental drugs, she is now so healthy she can commit to another book. “Before I turn 70, I should turn in my manuscript,” she jokes. “I’m writing the four books that I wanted to write and after that I’m going to take a long nap.”

Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios
E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing

Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.

Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!

PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC (version played); Bandai Namco
The game generates blood-pumping moments as you twist, turn and weave through the skies, while your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane

The core appeal of any Ace Combat game lies in the moment when the beautiful clouds part, the sunlight glints off your perfectly rendered state-of-the-art fighter jet, and guitar-shredding music kicks into overdrive as your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane. All of that is 100% present in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. What’s new is the way it delivers its unexpectedly compelling story.

Set in the Earth-like alternative world of Strangereal, where every country is absolutely obsessed with fighter planes and giant superweapons, Ace Combat drafts you into the role of a fake ace pilot called the Wings of Theve – a propaganda invention to raise the morale of a besieged nation, similar to real-life rumours about Ukraine’s Ghosts of Kyiv. You rapidly find yourself becoming an actual legendary pilot, soaring through the skies with your buddies and raining hell upon your oppressors as everybody cheers on the radio. Speaking of ghosts, you have one in your ear – your predecessor, whom nobody else can hear, a gravelly voice waxing lyrical about flying, war and whatever else is on his mind as you flit about.

I’ve been holed up in an flat, affectionately dubbed the ‘brotel’, with my son for weeks – and we’ve revisited the first game we ever played together

I have spent the last three weeks living with my 22-year-old son in a two-bedroom flat he has dubbed the ”brotel”. We cook curries and watch Lanterns. We barbecue meat and analyse Tarantino movies. We get pizza and we play video games. Boy, do we play video games!

The first game I ever played in co-op with him was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, when he was five. He wasn’t the most accomplished sidekick, not so great at placing a mobile gun turret while under fire from what seems like a bazillion enemy soldiers, but we had a laugh. It started the video game bond between us before his sister introduced him to Banjo-Kazooie and Rayman, and he stopped being a preschool warmonger. Probably for the best. So how would it be tackling the same game nearly two decades later?

Curve theatre, Leicester
Director Cara Nolan keeps the play’s original 1980s setting but its message about how expectations are dictated by class and gender is anything but dated

So much of the success of Willy Russell’s ivory-spired two-hander rests on the chemistry between its actors. The play traces a woman’s self-empowerment through education via her relationship with a world-weary Open University academic, but there is stiffness here between Rita (Alexandra Mardell) and Frank (Dominic Mafham) as they get acquainted.

Frank learns of Rita’s desperate ambition for life beyond her job as a hairdresser and role as wife. Rita hears about his history as a published poet – and picks up on his inveterate drinking. In director Cara Nolan’s production, the dynamic between the pair does not pop in the early scenes, not through any lack of trying, especially on the part of Mardell. She makes a broad, vivacious scouser who has enrolled on to an English literature Open University course in hope to expand her intellectual horizons.

At Curve theatre, Leicester, until 17 October

From underwater explosions to PlayStation joysticks, the Lebanese artist makes art inspired by sound. Can this work in a space known for its chattering day-trippers, overstimulated schoolkids and echoing acoustics?

Tarek Atoui is drumming the fingers of his right hand against the table. Listen! His left hand waves a cigarette at the surrounding world. So I listen. I can hear a busker on the riverside in front of Tate Modern and the hum of people walking the promenade. The low rumble of a plane flying over London and the wash of a boat under the bridge. You can identify a city by how it sounds, the artist is telling me, as much as by how it looks. And not only that! You can play a city, just like he is playing the table, so that it sings.

This is what Atoui, a musician and an impresario as much as an artist, does. He listens to the world around him, then he coaxes a tune out of it. Previous exhibitions have resembled recording studios in the midst of an especially far-out improvisation session, littered with instruments seeming to have been built out of scavenged materials on the instructions of a dream: someone might be playing a tentacular wind organ; wires might snake across the floor from a bleeping synthesiser; a glass booth may function like a walk-in flute, whistling around your body; marble boulders could emit woozy pulses, while drums beat to shifting patterns and your footsteps are picked up by microphones and fed back into the music. A world in miniature, made of sound.

Coronet theatre, London
Anguished monologue based on letter to jailed playwright’s ex-lover is gripping in its illumination of a tortured artist

Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis really does belong to the depths. Written as a letter to his ex-lover after being jailed for homosexuality, it reflects soul-crushing torments.

Its adaptation into a monologue rarely gets an outing, perhaps because it is so bleak, but is staged by the Berliner Ensemble with heaps of extra angst for good measure.

At the Coronet theatre, London, until 7 October

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Opera Rara revive the 1860 work in which a dog is appointed Sultan. A fine cast, the Hallé and ENO chorus, and impeccable rhyming narration from Alistair McGowan, ensure things fizz

An operetta in which a dog is appointed Sultan of Lahore and, thanks to a resourceful market trader, ushers in a more enlightened despotism – what’s not to like? Plenty, to judge by the critical mauling doled out in 1860 to Offenbach’s Barkouf. Even Berlioz – a fine one to talk – accused the composer of crimes against harmonic convention. It duly sank without trace until unpublished bits and pieces resurfaced in recent decades. It’s fallen to Opera Rara to splice it back together again, fill in the odd blank and give us a chance to judge for ourselves.

Barkouf followed hot on the heels of Orpheus in the Underworld, against which it must inevitably be considered a failure. Eugène Scribe’s workaday lyrics lack the divine silliness of the composer’s finest collaborators while blunting the story’s satirical potential. Offenbach, on the other hand, was never short of an idea and his energetic score has sufficient tics and quirks to suggest he was on the trail of something a little bit different. The orchestrations are original (there’s four horns) and a string of witty ditties go off like uncorked bottles of pop. Unfortunately, at other times it runs on a lower level of inspiration.

As Andrew Lloyd Webber’s enduring gothic melodrama celebrates its 40th birthday, producer Cameron Mackintosh and cast members from down the years recall what makes it so special

There is something about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s masterly musical The Phantom of the Opera – celebrating 40 years on the West End this month – which seems to take hold of its fans in a special way. For me, it was the show that first sparked my love of theatre and inspired me to work in the industry. Even today, Phantom is still the memory that gets my heart racing as I sit in the stalls, waiting impatiently for the curtain to come up, hoping for an experience just as intoxicating and all-consuming as that very first experience all those years ago.

It’s not just the fans, either. When I talk to a cluster of key creatives, all of whom have a special working relationship with the show, each of them seems a little spellbound by Phantom. Sierra Boggess, who plays Carlotta in the 40th-anniversary production, talks tearfully about the lingering spirits of original director Hal Prince and choreographer Gillian Lynne. Jordan Donica, now starring as the Phantom in the West End, speaks passionately about the power of Lloyd Webber’s music (“It feels like heaven to me”), and John Owen-Jones, who has played the Phantom more than anyone else in the West End, talks tenderly about his long-term history with the show: “I’ve got a picture of me in full Phantom get-up holding my baby daughter. It’s an incredible thing to be part of.”

Classicist and museum trustee visited the line after people complained of waiting for hours, with some turned away

Mary Beard has intervened in the row about excessively long queues for the Bayeux tapestry by visiting the line and submitting a list of improvements to the British Museum.

Beard, 71, is a trustee of the museum and inspected the queue herself after visitors to the tapestry complained that they had to wait for hours for their turn to view it, and some were turned away with no guarantee they would get another time slot.

It is one of the world’s finest collections, full of Monets, Miros and Picassos. But is the great Swiss architect’s extension for the Beyeler Foundation a worthy addition? Or is it a bit luxury boutique?

In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father’s cabinet-making workshop, he designed his first cupboard. He later recalled the satisfaction of fitting the door so perfectly that it closed “with a special sucking sound”, saying his father instilled in him “the Basel pride in the well-built object”.

Six decades on, with a fleet of globally celebrated projects to his name, the 83-year-old Swiss architect is back in Basel, beaming with the same local pride. He is gazing out at his latest well-built object, which is also his first project here: a monolithic new gallery that looks chiselled from the earth, its layers of pale crumbly concrete hammered into shape, its big oak and bronze doors – their handles wrapped with leather cord – closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh.

A new documentary by Eleanor Coppola goes behind the scenes on her daughter’s 2006 punk classic, Marie Antoinette. To mark its release, Sofia Coppola will be taking your questions

To say that Sofia Coppola grew up on screen would be an understatement. The youngest child and only daughter of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and documentary-maker Eleanor Coppola, she appeared in all three Godfather films: as the baby being christened in 1972’s The Godfather, as a child on the steamboat in 1974’s The Godfather Part II, and, aged 19, as Mary Corleone in 1990’s The Godfather Part III.

In between came small roles in several of her dad’s films, including 1983’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, 1984’s The Cotton Club and 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married, in which she played Kathleen Turner’s younger sister Nancy. She also popped up all over 1990s music videos, playing a wild-eyed Joan Crawford in Sonic Youth’s 1990 Mildred Pierce, a troubled drifter in the Black Crowes’ 1992 Sometimes Salvation, one of Madonna’s clubbing friends in 1992’s Deeper and Deeper, and an injured gymnast in the Chemical Brothers’ 1997 Elektrobank, directed by her then-boyfriend Spike Jonze.

Italian designer plays with ‘idea of glamour in the wrong way’ in collection of see-through gauzy fabrics and mis-buttoned blazers

Alessandro Michele is the Italian designer who, during his seven year tenure as creative director at Gucci, made maximalism a meal ticket for the brand.

His challenge now is to bring the same hot sauce to Valentino. He’s been in the top creative job for just 30 months but time moves fast in fashion and he’s already rolled out 10 collections and four catwalk shows. At Paris fashion week on Sunday afternoon, he ticked off show number five.

A beloved family pet, she is also the best employee ever, brilliant at her rescue work. If everyone could be more like Poppy, the world would be a better place

When we picked up a nine-week-old black labrador from a couple just outside Callander, Scotland, I had no idea that she would soon be an employee of mine. Poppy became the family fur baby and we realised early on how clever and empathic she is. I work as a Special Operations Response Team paramedic and we decided to involve her in my search work in 2021 when she was only a year old because we knew it would play to her strengths. She took to it immediately.

Poppy and our team of dogs look for missing people. My colleagues and I then provide any medical assistance needed. She is trained to search without needing to smell someone’s scent from an item such as clothing. During training, we hide our volunteers along the riverbank, in the woods, beside lochs and canals, and set the dogs off. They have to find the people and come back. Poppy’s curious nature has served her well. She loves the undergrowth, sniffing about and finding things.

Which salty condiment nails that deep flavour profile, and which is saltier than the sea? Our resident taster tries 10 soy sauces straight from the bottle

• The best supermarket kimchi

Soy sauce was created in China about 2,200 years ago, as a means to preserve food and to zhoosh up the humble vegetarian Buddhist diet. It’s a demonstration in kokumi – literally “rich taste” – a flavour sensation that’s often called the sixth taste.

I tested all of today’s soy sauces straight from the bottle, in all their intensity. I first identified distinctive aromas such as cooked potato, sulphur and broth (all typical in soy sauce and not as off-putting as they sound), alongside caramel and malty notes. The best ones are more nuanced, with fruity high notes and vinous tones.

Steam through the laundry pile with our expert’s top picks for smoothing creases on cotton, linen, silk and more

• How to look after your knitwear

I grew up in a household where everything was ironed. And I mean everything: tea towels, pyjamas, bath mats. Perhaps as a result of watching my mother (and yes, it was always my mother) spend hours every week standing at an ironing board, I revolted. My heart sinks every time I have to go into battle with an iron. But how do we banish irons while still getting linen trousers to look crisp? I present the clothes steamer.

Clothes steamers use heat and moisture rather than pressure to smooth fabric. A small onboard tank heats water into a steady flow of steam, which you run over garments while they hang. Instead of pressing fibres flat like an iron, the steam causes them to swell and relax, releasing creases without the need for an ironing board.

From bullets to rabbits to wand vibrators, our sexual wellbeing expert demystifies what’s available and rates her top 17 models (she tested 67)

• 26 easy ways to spice up your sex life

I could write here about how almost a fifth of women surveyed by Durex said using a sex toy was the most dependable way for them to climax. Or I could point out how Kinsey Institute research suggests regular masturbation can help relieve and prevent symptoms of menopause, such as vaginal atrophy. I could even tell you that studies demonstrate a significant correlation between intimate toy ownership and greater satisfaction – not only with sex but also with life itself.

But the potted version is that orgasms and erotic pleasure are glorious, and top-class toys can help you savour more of both. So here are the best vibrators available. Scroll to the bottom to find out how I selected these vibrators from the 67 I tested for this piece.

Trekking poles can improve balance on uneven terrain and reduce stress on joints. Our seasoned adventurer put 10 to the test to find the best

• ‘I’d never head out without one’: 10 hiking essentials

Oh, I would walk 500 miles – with the help of a trusty pole. A walking pole – or two – makes a surprisingly handy addition to your hiking kit, helping with balance on uneven terrain, taking strain away from your legs and knees, and making going up and down hills much easier. I first tried walking poles when I went trekking in the Himalayas – now, I wouldn’t be without one on rugged terrain, but they can be just as helpful on a casual stroll.

Hiking poles are typically used as a pair, and the idea is to swing each pole in time with the opposite foot as you move forwards: right foot and left pole, then left foot and right pole, in a rhythm. You can also use poles singly to keep a hand free or to take the weight off one side of your body.

This tart uses the richness of red vermut to bring together the sweet and the nutty for a flavour explosion

In Spain, vermut is traditionally enjoyed as an aperitif, while pedro ximénez is often poured at the end of a meal, alongside dessert or a piece of cheese, say. In this tart, however, they come together to tell the story of the Spanish table in the form of pudding. We have a wonderful tradition of fortified wines, and while lighter sherries often hog the limelight, vermut and pedro ximénez deserve just as much attention. They’re both made from wine, but each brings something completely different to a dish. Here, vermut, which is infused with herbs and spices, gently perfumes the pears, while PX, with its rich raisin, fig and caramel notes, introduces a flavour that’s impossible to resist.

A great way to pack in your vegetables, while adding pops of colour to your rotation of meals

I am still making large, nourishing and vibrant salads, with gado gado being one of my favourites. It is a well-loved Indonesian salad, and something I devoured almost daily when we travelled around the islands many moons ago. It is also an excellent way of eating an abundance of veg, and can be made to suit your taste. If I was going all out, I’d add tofu or tempeh, some prawn crackers and beansprouts, but feel free to make the bowl as you wish, with whatever you have to hand – have a play.

A spice-rich twist on a classic soup, and poached eggs with garlic yoghurt and green chutney

While purists might scoff and find the combination of spices in my French onion soup a little blasphemous, do give it a shot. Nigella seeds are the best flavour-enhancer for onions, while using ghee instead of butter adds a warm, nutty, caramel flavour. Then, my Indian-inspired twist on çılbır, the classic Turkish breakfast of poached eggs with yoghurt. It features my go-to poached egg method, which I learned from Nigella Lawson.

A tomatoey, southern Italian alternative to moules marinière – but who makes the definitive version?

Abundant, good value and ready in minutes, mussels are one of my favourite seafoods, but when it comes to preparing them, I rarely look farther than northern France. Italians, of course, also eat mussels, and this tomato-rich recipe is a particular favourite in the south – Neapolitans traditionally tuck into zuppa di cozze on Maundy Thursday but it’s found on menus all year round. With its bold flavours and oily, garlicky sauce, it’s a great alternative to creamy moules marinières, and similarly needs no accompaniment but a hunk of bread to make a meal, though chips, of course, are rarely unwelcome.

LD is the submissive to Lady Alice’s dominatrix – and it has been a revelation for them both

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

I have cerebral palsy and live with my parents. Lady Alice is a delicious secret

You can be curious about others’ beliefs without compromising your own

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who explained that her ill health was down to reasons I would describe as dubious. Taking certain supplements and changing her diet have significantly improved her health. Good for her. However, she was disappointed and a little annoyed that I didn’t share her outrage and wasn’t going to follow her views.

I’ve got another friend who thinks cholesterol is a lie and that we should live largely on meat (and supplements). Another went through a sugar causes cancer phase. And another is sceptical of vaccines. Each of them may be right. They might not. We are learning more about the human body every day. But I was raised by scientists and I want to see a large-scale trial before I get outraged and change the way I live. Equally, I’m not convinced that a lightly regulated for-profit industry (supplements) is automatically more trustworthy than a highly regulated for-profit one (pharma).

Conor Curran’s first date with Chris lasted nine hours but their relationship remained casual. Then, when Conor was at his most vulnerable, Chris was there for him

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

At 29 I had lost my career in hospitality because of Covid and decided to throw my hat in the ring as a contestant on MasterChef Australia. By the time I was eliminated in 2021, restaurants still weren’t open and I didn’t know what to do with my life. My lease was coming to an end in Melbourne and I wasn’t doing well with the lockdowns and people recognising me from TV. So I decided to retreat to my father’s place in Adelaide for a while.

By early 2022 I was dating a guy but, after a few months, he ghosted me suddenly.

Instead of asking her to step away from her distress, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, could you suggest she channel it into action?

• Read more Leading questions

My wife is obsessed with everything that’s happening in the US. She literally spends all day sitting on the couch, watching videos and reading opinion pieces. She’s originally from America and has been living abroad for 25 years and she has family in the US, so I get that she needs to feel connected to what’s happening. But it’s constant. Whether we’re eating, watching a TV show or movie, when we’re talking about something completely unrelated – everything, every topic, either starts or ends with outrage.

I’ve told her she needs to take at least one day off all social media, but she won’t do that even for an hour. It stresses her out more and more every day, but she just keeps going back to it – and it has been really affecting me, more lately than ever. On weekends I stay up late playing games (my way of winding down after a week of work) and she’ll go to bed early. And during those times sometimes I just sit and cry. Everything that’s happening is so stressful, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I just wish I could rip away her phone and let her breathe! I don’t know what to say or do. Is there anything that could help?

Sykes Holiday Cottages showed no empathy and insisted on paperwork we didn’t have so soon after my husband’s death

We booked a break with Sykes Holiday Cottages for 11 of us to celebrate my mum’s 80th birthday last February. The cost was £2,400, paid for by my 87-year-old dad, but it was my husband who made the booking.

In January, my husband was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma, and he died 10 days before the trip. My parents and some other members of the party still planned to take the holiday, and my dad informed Sykes of the death, since my husband was their point of contact.

Scammers reuse personal details harvested from fake Esta websites – and texts and calls can keep arriving for months

When the British actor Lisa Riley was preparing to travel to the US last year, she applied online for an Esta so she would not need a visa. After finding the site through a Google search she filled in her passport, bank and personal details and waited for the confirmation, which normally takes just under an hour.

When it failed to arrive, she emailed an address from the site where she had paid and got back a message unlike any she had seen before, with a link to a website that displayed a jumble of words and letters.

The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump

Clare Naylor paid close attention to how much energy she and her family were using last winter, filling hot-water bottles and bringing out extra blankets to ensure they didn’t go over budget. This year, she won’t have to worry as she is guaranteed not to receive a bill.

While millions of British households face the highest energy charges in three years from this week after a 4% rise in the price cap, and predictions of a 16% increase in January, upgrades to Naylor’s home mean she will not have to pay a thing.

From a neo-baronial country house with turrets in acres of grounds in Scotland to a modernist tower block in a bustling part of London

For years, eating was something to control, fear or regret. After I hunted my first deer, I started to see fat, hunger and my own body in a different light

I muffled my sobs with a pillow so my family couldn’t hear me from the adjacent room. I was 19 years old and we were in Paris, staying on the top floor of an old six-story walkup where every step echoed through the thin walls. I was trying, and failing, to hide the emotional war I had decided to wage on my body. Who does that on a family vacation? In Europe, no less?

Pulling tear-soaked strands of hair off my cheeks, I stood in front of a full-length mirror and grabbed the fat of my thighs. If only I could just – I pictured ripping off fistfuls of my body and flinging them out the windows, where they would land on some unknowing French person six stories below. I had this vision often: pulling bits of myself off and casting them somewhere far away from me.

Formerly a favourite of the A-list, the chain has abruptly ceased trading, leaving teachers and customers blindsided

Kate Comer is a single mother with two children, so she is used to living on a financial knife-edge. But when the yoga studio at which she taught closed without warning in September, leaving her with two months’ worth of unpaid wages, it sent her anxiety skyrocketing.

“I’m just reeling right now,” she said, estimating her loss at about £1,500. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

Experts say that if you’re eating any berry – strawberries, blackberries, currants, raspberries, blueberries – you are benefiting

Sprinkled on top of yoghurt, blended into smoothies or baked into crumbles, berries are among Americans’ favorite fruits.

Luckily, berries are as healthy as they are delicious and versatile: low in calories, full of vitamins and antioxidants, and a good source of fiber. Research shows that, depending on the type, berries support cardiovascular health, may boost gut health and fight inflammation and show promise as part of a “healthy dietary strategy for diabetes prevention and management”, to quote researchers. Meta-analyses also link compounds in berries with improved cognitive health.

The internet is full of warnings about our ‘dysregulated’ nervous systems. But, experts say, you don’t need to reset yours – you might just need to make it more flexible. Here’s how (and no, you don’t need an acupressure mat)

Whether it’s tapping the side of your hand or standing on a vibrating plate, suggestions on how to “reset” your nervous system are saturating the internet. Cold water plunges, humming, gargling, yawning and spiky acupressure mats are all being touted as ways to help us “regulate” and return to calm. If you’re still talking about feeling “stressed”, you’re behind the times; now, says the internet, you are “dysregulated”.

The nervous system is an integral part of being human. “It’s essentially the body’s communication and control network,” says Dr Serena Lai, consultant psychiatrist and associate medical director at London Psychiatry Clinic. “Made up of the brain and spinal cord, it communicates with the entire body through nerves, helping us to sense what is happening around and inside us. When we have that information, we can process it and coordinate a response.”

Brand’s signature desire to subvert the ordinary brings blazers with track pants and crop tops under blazers to Paris fashion week

Speaking backstage at Miu Miu’s show on Sunday at Paris fashion week, Miuccia Prada said she had been thinking about “real clothes”. The clothes people wear on the street for running errands rather than posing on social media. Her findings? Succinct. “The reality of clothing today is this mix – sportswear, casual, normal,” she said. Her challenge? To make them “more interesting, more rich”. To achieve this, she outlined how she had decided to focus on mixing “elements of sports with sophistication”.

The collection opened with a series of five neatly pleated checked skirts. The first was worn with an equally neat checked blazer but rather than a smart shoe, such as a pump or loafers, there were brightly coloured trainers. The second featured a crop top under the blazer, the trainers swapped for spiky high heels. The other looks ditched the blazer and clipped the tops so they sat just under the bust line.

From pillboxes and boaters to bicornes and buckets, characterful hats are making their way from the catwalk to the high street

“Here goes – an order for a million hats,” wrote Jackie Kennedy to Bergdorf Goodman before moving into the White House in the early 1960s. It’s a line that could have been uttered by any number of people working in fashion today, because the hat – and not just the ubiquitous baseball cap – has been enjoying a very characterful resurgence.

This season at the turbo-high-end brand Loro Piana, whose clothes are beloved by tech bros and Kendall Roy, almost every model was wearing a hat. At Thom Browne, straw boaters came shrouded in colourful mesh. At Chloé there were see-through hats to match see-through trenchcoats and white sailor hats atop all-white outfits. Courrège’s hats were space-age, Burberry had big buckets, Bottega Veneta had hats brimming with charisma.

American in Paris showcases new simplicity with stretch cocktail frocks, but there’s still plenty of gold-foiled nipples and peekaboo fabrics to wow the frow

In a world of mega brands, the house of Schiaparelli is small but perfectly formed. There are only 10 points of sale worldwide where Schiaparelli clothes can be bought. The size of the business has risen from $6m in 2020 to around $100m today, but Schiaparelli is still small fry compared with other names on the Paris catwalks.

However, the Schiaparelli name punches above its weight. An exhibition at London’s V&A museum this year made a strong case for its founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, as a creative force in the surrealism movement of the 1930s.

The animal welfare group has revived their runway-storming tactics from the naughts, now targeting the use of wool

Her walk was poised, her outfit – crop top, tailored trousers, high heels – so on point that when Josie Knowles strutted down a London Fashion Week catwalk last month she could have passed for a model. That is, had it not been for the sign the Peta protester held saying “H&M: Wool is Bloody Cruel.”

Still, as one social media commentator put it when praising her strut: “you cant tell me Peta didn’t know what they were doing when they hired this diva”.

The classic pre-dinner drink and snack combo varies depending where you are in Italy. In this fair city, it’s an institution that can even be enjoyed first thing

I arrived in Verona, I admit, without a particularly clear idea of what aperitivo meant. In Italy, the ritual – broadly, a drink and something small to eat before a meal – speaks a different dialect in every city.

Milan has turned it into a polished after-work institution. In Venice, it is more itinerant: an ombra (a small glass of wine) along with a cicchetto (a bite-size snack) and then on to the next bacaro (one of the city’s traditional wine bars). Verona follows another logic.

Tell us about a European ski resort that has retained its relaxed, uncrowded feel – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

This winter thousands of holidaymakers will be packing their thermals and heading for the ski slopes. We’d love to hear about your favourite smaller ski resort, one which has managed to hang on to its local character and charm, whether it’s in the Alps, the Pyrenees, Scandinavia or eastern Europe.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

A world away from the tourist hotspots of the coast, Extremadura and Castile and León offer unpolluted skies, lower prices – and hope for the future of vulnerable wildlife

As photographed at night from a satellite, or the International Space Station (ISS), the Iberian peninsula looks encrusted with lights along its coastal edges. Madrid forms a big pulsing cluster near the centre, while surrounding hinterlands appear as something of a void. Ever fewer people live out in Castile and León and Extremadura, adjoining regions that cover much of what is known as La España Vacía, or “Empty Spain”.

Not many visit either, or at least not compared with Barcelona and other glowing nodes of the tourist circuit. So, while the big ports and resorts struggle to manage surplus holidaymakers, there is room for plenty more out west, toward the Portuguese border. Some have been following the stars that way lately, under the auspices of an astrotourism initiative called Extremadura Buenas Noches.

As Michael Sheen prepares to bring Owain Glyndŵr to life on stage, our writer walks the peaceful national trail named after the last Welsh Prince of Wales

Between the treetops, I can see the towers of a distant mist-shrouded castle. Is it possible I could make contact with the spirit of the great Welsh hero Owain Glyndŵr so soon, at the very start of our hike? We are not even on the actual trail of Glyndŵr’s Way. I’ve had to make a detour to find accommodation that takes dogs, as Stevie the terrier is with me. The Castle Inn at Knucklas is a mile off the route, and two miles or so from the pretty border town of Knighton – where the 135-mile (217km) Glyndŵr’s Way officially begins.

The towers slide away behind trees and a railway viaduct emerges. The medieval castle ruins, it turns out, are believed to have been plundered to build the viaduct in the 1860s, and the builders dropped in a couple of crenelated towers to honour the origins of the stone. I fear this may be an early omen: the spirit of Glyndŵr will be as elusive as the man himself was in his lifetime.

When Barbara Scully tried to get a job after years as a stay-at-home mum, no one would hire her. So she made her own work as a writer and broadcaster – and soon found herself on TV and stage

If anyone had told Barbara Scully five years ago that she would soon be enjoying her “sixth career” – this time as a standup comedian, or comic storyteller – she would have laughed in their face. “But once you get to 60, you realise that failure isn’t a big deal,” she says. “As long as nobody’s going to die, that’s grand.”

Scully, who lives in Dublin, is now performing her one-woman show Because I’m Worth It around Ireland to capacity audiences of up to 200 people. “I’m on a mission to try to tell women in particular not to fear getting older, to embrace it, to push back against all the bullshit about how you should be fighting ageing,” she says. “The more women like me who are willing to stand up and say: ‘This is me and I am 64 and I’m not really bothered about spending my time and money and energy on trying to look younger …’” She trails off. “I’m actually spending my time and money and energy doing stuff that makes me happy.”

Did a Tory voter who opposes all censorship offend a leftwinger concerned about how people treat one another?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Ted, 24, London

Occupation Works for a thinktank

Longer battery life, better screen, upgraded Siri and new variable aperture camera in refreshed design from last year’s model

Apple’s smaller Pro iPhone gets the best kind of spec bump for 2026: longer battery life, faster chips and a fancy new variable aperture for the main camera.

The iPhone 18 Pro is one of a pair of slab phones launched alongside Apple’s first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, and is the cheapest of the new phones, with a regular iPhone 18 yet to be announced.

Screen: 6.3in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi)

Processor: Apple A20 Pro

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 256GB, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: iOS 27

Camera: 48MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 4x, 18MP front-facing

Connectivity: 5G, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)

Dimensions: 150 x 71.9 x 8.75mm

Weight: 211g

If you want to seriously oxygenate your rooms with greenery, you’re going to need a lot of space

‘Plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen when they photosynthesise,” says John Tregoning, a professor at Imperial College London and author of Live Forever? A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death. “If you’ve got enough of them, they should produce more oxygen than there was initially.”

It’s tempting to think of plants as a kind of natural air filter, cleaning the air in stuffy, poorly ventilated spaces. But the reality is different.

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

After Turkish police found drugs on board the Phoenician M, the ship’s chief mate, Ali Albokhari, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. His wife is still fighting to free him

In the early hours of 6 October 2023, Elena Albokhari was woken by a text message from her husband. Ali Albokhari, 42, a Finnish-Syrian with dark hair and cherubic features, was chief mate on a cargo ship named the Phoenician M and had been at sea since June. The 180-metre bulk carrier had docked at Ereğli in the Turkish Black Sea a few days earlier and Ali was due to return home to Helsinki soon, but instead of feeling excitement, Elena was growing increasingly worried about his welfare.

She’d had a similar feeling of unease a month earlier, when the ship had arrived at Barranquilla, Colombia. Ali had called in a panic to report that drugs had been found; Armada Nacional officers had marched onboard and uncovered holdalls stuffed with 137kg cocaine. Labels on the packages – the crest of Turkish football club Kayserispor – hinted at their destination: Turkey was the next port of call. “I never want to work as a seaman again,” Ali told Elena. “We are having big problems.”

A Ukrainian publishing boom sparked by the 2022 invasion is now under threat from the force and frequency of Russian attacks

On a Saturday morning in August, Viktor Kruglov, the co-founder and chief executive of the publisher Ranok, was at his headquarters in Kharkiv – the eastern Ukrainian city that, along with Kyiv, is the centre of the country’s publishing and printing industry. Built 15 years ago on the site of a former bread factory, the footprint of the premises is about 10,000 sq metres (107,640ft). Books were stacked 12 metres high on rank after rank of shelves.

Kruglov, along with five senior colleagues, were on the warehouse floor to discuss the approaching school year. The warehouse was holding 628,000 new schoolbooks. “It was the high season of distribution,” he said, “so we were checking all our processes: how to do it more successfully, how to do it in time.”

Those who have stepped in to keep young family members from going into care in England and Wales say the decision has brought them joy and hardship

Clive vividly remembers the day when, without warning or time to work out what he was really letting himself in for, he became a kinship carer.

“The social worker left, the door closed and Savannah was lying there in a carry cot, wrapped up in a pink blanket. She looked so calm and so comfy, absolutely oblivious about what’s just happened.

The war with Iran is reshaping America ahead of the midterms – how will it affect US voters at the polls? Join us for a live conversation on 6 October at 12pm ET with political and global correspondents

• Sign in or sign up to join the conversation

Welcome to our latest US midterms live Q&A – just over a month away from election day on 3 November.

The war with Iran has had major implications for Americans’ wallets, government spending and US foreign policy. It’s has also been an important factor in reshaping the political landscape as the war enters its eighth month, with the 2026 US midterms quickly approaching.

The makeup of the Democratic party, plus key races to watch

Who are the groups financially backing the candidates in the midterms?

If your local fox population has caused differences of opinion among neighbours, please get in touch

Have foxes in your area caused friction between you and your neighbours? If so, we want to hear from you.

Some people like to leave food out for foxes, while others take measures to try and deter them from coming near their homes – and this can be a point of tension between those living nearby one another.

Are you making cutbacks in light of the price increases?

The average price of diesel in the UK climbed to a record £2 a litre on 2 October.

The price of a litre at UK forecourts has risen 40.5% since late February, when the US-Israel war on Iran began disrupting supplies of crude and refined oil products from the Gulf, leading to cost increases across the economy.

Much is made of the decision to try to preserve fertility but less explored are the choices that come afterwards. We want to hear from people about what happened next

Oocyte cryopreservation, more commonly known as egg freezing, has been around for decades but the procedure stopped being considered experimental in 2012. Since then, elective egg freezing has boomed. Often represented as an insurance policy against age- or illness-related fertility decline, the process can be costly and complex.

While figures vary, research suggests most people who undergo egg freezing never access their eggs and results are mixed for those who do. Long-term storage poses its own costs and questions.

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