Labour can proudly say this was a budget for working people – that is, if your job happens to be prime minister

Thanks to Labour’s incredible Black Friday deal, breaking manifesto policies is buy-one-get-one-free. As part of its all-promises-must-go drive, it’s ditching its flagship policy giving the right to claim unfair dismissal from day one of employment. Employers will now have up to six months to summarily sack workers who don’t pan out – unless they’re the government, in which case people have to wait till 2029.

The employment rights bill was drawn up and championed by Angela Rayner, who resigned in September following a series of discoveries about her tax affairs. Weird to think that Rayner could easily have been in the I’m a Celebrity camp right now. The former deputy PM reportedly got pretty far along in her discussions with ITV in terms of booking a spot on the current series of the fauna-testicle-based format, and could at this very moment have been giving us her Queen Over the Water/Queen in the Jungle Shower for 80 minutes of primetime a night. But in the end, Rayner seems to have concluded – or had it concluded for her – that there wouldn’t be a way back to frontline politics if she took that particular leave of absence.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
On Tuesday 2 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at another extraordinary year, with special guests, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

From Michelangelo and Leonardo to Picasso and Matisse, bitter feuds have defined art. But are contemporary artists more collaborative than their renaissance predecessors?

“He has been here and fired a gun,” John Constable said of JMW Turner. A shootout between these two titans would make a good scene for in a film of their lives, but in reality all Turner did at the 1832 Royal Academy exhibition was add a splash of red to a seascape, to distract from the Constable canvas beside it.

That was by far the most heated moment in what seems to us a struggle on land and sea for supremacy in British art. It’s impossible not to see Tate Britain’s new double header of their work this way. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time, they must be bitter and remorseless rivals. But is that really so, and does it help or hinder creativity?

If ‘naked dressing’ is a stretch too far, sheer fabrics can provide a real-life friendly compromise

Fashion loves nothing more than an extreme trend, one difficult to imagine transferring to most people’s everyday lives. See naked dressing, where stars on the red carpet wear transparent and sometimes barely there gowns.

This party season, however, there appears to be a real-life friendly compromise. Enter the sheer skirt.

Exclusive: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund, including unseen letters by Doris Lessing and a note from James Joyce saying that he ‘gets nothing in the way of royalties’, show authors at their most vulnerable

Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

From ICU meet-cutes to holiday sparks, readers share the unexpected moments that brought them lasting love this year

Ask someone who is single about their dating life, and the answer might sound like Oliver singing “Where is love?”

According to the headlines, nobody knows how to flirt, dating is dead, sex is over, and so is love.

The skin-lightening industry is booming, while at the same time there has been a surge in cancers and irreversible skin damage among women of colour using unregulated products. But this is not a new story. The dangers of skin-lightening products have been well documented for years, so how is this still happening? Josh Toussaint-Strauss digs into the long history behind the practice of skin lightening, and how the beauty industry has used messaging rooted in classism and colonialism to sell its products, as well as investigating what unregulated products are doing to the skin

• How the colonial legacy has created a toxic beauty industry

• How skin-lightening products are linked to cancer in black African women

Exclusive: Chancellor says she made ‘fair and necessary choices’ in budget, and was unwilling to make cuts

Britain’s wealthy must shoulder the burden of paying to rebuild the UK’s “creaky” public services, Rachel Reeves has said, as she warned Labour MPs that leadership speculation was bad for the country.

The chancellor said she had opted to increase taxes by £26bn in this week’s budget to improve schools, hospitals and infrastructure, rejecting calls to “cut our cloth accordingly” after a downgrade in productivity forecasts.

Leftwing party asks members to pick between Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many

The leftwing party formed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana has revealed a shortlist of names for its members to pick from: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance and For The Many.

Ahead of its first conference in Liverpool this weekend, the party is asking its 50,000 members to choose what it should be called, with the result to be announced by Corbyn on Sunday.

Immediate software change on ‘significant number’ of jets to result in disruption to half the global fleet

Airbus said on Friday it had ordered immediate repairs to 6,000 of its A320 family of jets in a recall affecting more than half of the global fleet – a move that was expected to bring major disruption during a busy weekend of travel.

The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters.

Trump baselessly claims his predecessor didn’t sign off on directives himself due to use of autopen machine

Donald Trump has declared he intends to cancel most of the executive orders signed by Joe Biden, his predecessor as president of the United States.

In a post on social media, Trump claimed baselessly that Biden had not signed off on the orders himself, saying that “the radical left lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him” by signing his name using an autopen – a signature machine that has commonly been used by US presidents since the device’s invention.

Tracey Smith sent the government minister and MP Ellie Reeves 22 emails and 10 voicemails

A woman who tried to summon her MP, the solicitor general Ellie Reeves, to court has been jailed for harassment in London.

Tracey Smith sent Reeves 22 emails and 10 voicemails calling her “transphobic” and accusing her older sister – the chancellor, Rachel Reeves – of physically assaulting her at a buffet bar.

• He scored twice in 1988 final against West Germany

• Olympic star was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019

Imran Sherwani, who starred in the Great Britain hockey team that won Olympic gold in 1988, has died at the age of 63, his family have announced.

Sherwani revealed in 2021 that had he been diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s in 2019, and his family continue to raise awareness of the condition. He represented Great Britain and England 94 times, culminating in scoring two goals in his team’s 3-1 final victory over West Germany in Seoul.

Ukrainian president announces departure of Andriy Yermak, who was leading peace talks with US

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff and closest ally, Andriy Yermak, has resigned after Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies conducted searches at his apartment earlier today.

The abrupt departure of the aide, who had been leading the latest round of the delicate peace negotiations with the US, was announced by the Ukrainian president in a late-afternoon social media video on Friday.

Video of an Israeli military raid in the West Bank shows soldiers summarily executing two Palestinians they had detained seconds earlier.

The shooting on Thursday evening, which was also witnessed by journalists close to the scene, is under review by the justice ministry, but has already been defended by Israel’s far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said 'terrorists must die'. Julian Borger, the Guardian's senior international correspondent based in Jerusalem, analyses footage of the event

Exclusive: London mayor says allegations of teenage racism against Reform leader remind him of being called P-word

• Opinion: Antisemitism allegations against the teenage Farage matter – look at what he went on to do

Sadiq Khan has spoken of his dismay at Nigel Farage’s “desperate” denials of allegations of teenage racism as he described how his experience as a child shaped his life.

The mayor of London said testimony from more than 20 individuals who made allegations about the Reform leader had summoned memories of his own past.

With the blaze extinguished but hundreds still unaccounted for, the city is grieving – with questions being raised of authorities

For almost 48 hours, Mr Lau had been calling his cousin. On Wednesday afternoon Lau was at his home nearby, when he saw smoke from Mei Lan’s building. Mei Lan, her husband, and their children live in the Wang Fuk Court high-rise apartment complex in northern Hong Kong. Shortly after lunchtime on Wednesday, a fire started in one of its eight high-rise towers, and quickly spread to six others. It burned for more than two days, killing at least 128 people – a number certain to rise.

The inferno has been compared to London’s Grenfell Tower disaster. Not just for the scale, but for the now rampant questions about negligent safety standards and corruption, amid revelations that the construction site had been inspected 16 times for safety concerns and allegedly had a history of violations.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to expand UK presence after sector was spared from higher taxes in budget

Over canapés of beef and stilton pie, bone marrow gravy and mushy peas, the financiers at JP Morgan’s New York headquarters held their champagne flutes aloft for a toast: “His majesty the king.”

Just days before Rachel Reeves’s budget – amid the chancellor’s efforts to soothe business fears and bond market jitters – Jamie Dimon, the Wall Street banking company’s boss, was hosting a birthday celebration for King Charles at its new $3bn (£2.3bn) Manhattan headquarters.

Up to 1,000 women globally await execution in prison, with mitigating factors such as child abuse and coercion ignored

• Read more in our Women in prison series

There are between 500 and 1,000 women on death row in at least 42 countries, according to a 2023 report by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The countries that execute the most women are also the countries that execute the most people, namely China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

According to Amnesty International, in 2024 an unknown number of women were executed in China, two were put to death in Egypt, 30 in Iran, one in Iraq, nine in Saudi Arabia and two in Yemen. Some countries, including China, North Korea and Vietnam, do not publish accurate data.

Hollywood megastars hit Leeds this year to make Tinsel Town, a feelgood festive comedy about panto. The 24 star, Rebel Wilson and more talk about their addiction to Greggs sausage rolls – and epic brawls with Danny Dyer

Twenty-odd years ago, I binged a TV series on DVD for the first time. At my mate’s house in a village outside Harrogate, I was glued to Jack Bauer shooting his way through 24. We probably only made it to episode six before surrendering to sleep for school the next day.

Fast forward to the start of this year, and photos are all over the local news of Kiefer Sutherland out and about in nearby market towns Knaresborough and Wetherby. The real Jack Bauer in Yorkshire! He and Rebel Wilson are in the area making Tinsel Town, a British Christmas film about pantomimes. By March, I am invited to a Leeds studio, where they are filming, and find Sutherland dressed as Buttons on a stage. His glittery eyeshadow shimmers as he smiles and dances to Katy Perry’s Roar with the Cinderella cast. He repeats this showstopper scene about 15 times. It’s a surreal full circle moment; I half expect him to pull a pistol out on the ugly stepsisters.

Paul Brown looks back at his career reporting on the climate crisis, failed summit and nuclear power – and how to do it well

Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005 and has written many columns since. He submitted his last column last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. From his hospital bed in Luton, Paul offers his reflections on 45 years writing for the Guardian.

We, in the climate business, all owe a great deal to Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Her politics were anathema to me and to many Guardian readers. But she prided herself on being a scientist before she was a politician.

We’ve tested them, we’ve recommended them — and now picked the offers worth knowing about on our favourite products across home, tech, beauty and toys

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• The best Black Friday beauty deals

Like Christmas Day, Black Friday has long since ceased to be a mere “day”. But, this morning, we finally reached the day that puts the “Friday” into Black Friday. That means products that have been discounted throughout November have been given even more tempting offers, and some fresh savings have hit the shelves.

So, if you’ve just clocked off from your nine-to-five, there’s no need to panic. There are still plenty of savings available to shop and, crucially, there’s lots of time left to mull over your decision. Remember, there are lots of dud deals flying around and it’s important to only buy the things that you really need. There’s a long weekend of savings ahead, and last-minute deals won’t drop until Cyber Monday.

Photographer Owen Harvey explores belonging and identity in his work, and as the pearlies reach a major milestone, he decided to capture their traditions and discuss their future

The first time I saw a pearly, I was sitting on a fairly empty midday Northern Line train. As it screeched to a standstill and the doors opened, an elderly gentleman appeared, head to toe in shimmering buttons that were sewn into his black suit. I was fascinated by this man and his bold clothing choice, and I was intrigued to find out more about what this outfit represented.

I later learned he was a member of the pearly kings and queens.

Shannon Crowe, the pearly queen of Haggerston

Not since 2014 have Liverpool struggled so much, with questions aimed at directors and players such as Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz

“Would you say this is Roy bad or Brendan bad?” was one of the more repeatable questions asked in the Anfield press box in between PSV Eindhoven’s third and fourth goals on Wednesday. The correct answer would have been “Don Welsh bad”, given he was the last Liverpool manager to preside over nine defeats in 12 games, back in 1953-54. But the on-the-spot consensus was “Brendan bad” for reasons that may increase anxiety at Fenway Sports Group as the club’s owners desperately await a recovery under Arne Slot.

The Roy Hodgson era, airbrushed from history by some at Liverpool, is too low a base for comparisons with a Premier League champion. There are, however, some parallels between the current Liverpool crisis and the final 16 months of Brendan Rodgers’ reign at Anfield. The 2014-15 season was the last time confidence in a Liverpool manager or head coach began to drain. It was also the last time the impressive development of a Liverpool team – one that went agonisingly close to an unexpected title triumph in Rodgers’ case – not only came to an abrupt halt but veered into a steep decline with several new signings on board. FSG must hope the comparisons go no further, because that decline was precipitated by self-sabotage in the summer transfer window of 2014 and there is no conclusive evidence so far that it has avoided an expensive repeat in 2025.

British driver with world championship within his grasp is showing no sign of nerves despite Verstappen mind games and pressure from Piastri

Standing outside the McLaren motorhome in the paddock for the Qatar Grand Prix as a warm desert breeze stirs the air, Lando Norris cuts a figure entirely at ease even in the maelstrom of an increasingly tense fight to claim his first Formula One world championship.

While dozens of photographers jostle for space, the mic boom of the Netflix Drive to Survive series swaying over them, Norris has an air of assuredness as he speaks to the clacking of shutters that have increasingly become the backing track to the 26-year-old’s march towards the title.

• Competition will not now begin until 2028

• ‘Decision to shift our launch is strategic’

R360 has delayed the launch of its global franchise league by two years until 2028 amid doubts over its ability to recruit players and the viability of its commercial model.

The rebel league, which was scheduled to run a truncated 12-week season starting next October featuring eight men’s franchises and four women’s teams, is understood to have advised players who have signed pre-contract agreements that they are now null and void, and therefore they are free to sign elsewhere. In an email to players on its books and others who have expressed interest, R360 board member Stuart Hooper said the delay would “strengthen its integrity”.

• Head coach backs midfielder to improve further

• Arsenal visit second-placed Chelsea on Sunday

Mikel Arteta is confident the best is to come from Declan Rice as Arsenal prepare for their top-of-the-table showdown at Chelsea on Sunday.

The England midfielder was outstanding in Arsenal’s victories against Tottenham and Bayern Munich over the past week and will face the club where he spent seven years before being released aged 14. Arsenal lead second-placed Chelsea by six points and Arteta has not lost at Stamford Bridge in six visits as a manager.

Ben Stokes’s batters must realise the aggressive option doesn’t always mean attacking Australia’s bowlers, and if they don’t, it could be all over in Brisbane

It’s not over yet. There is still hope. Before the Ashes started I had plenty of it, because of England’s fantastic array of fast bowlers and because I felt they had improved on their crash‑bang‑wallop, one-size‑fits‑all approach to batting. Then the series got under way, and while the bowlers did their bit, the batters failed badly. After the two-day humiliation in Perth they are inevitably under the microscope – but while everyone is questioning England’s approach, how much are they challenging themselves?

I based my optimism on some of what I had seen over the summer. In the first innings against India at Lord’s Joe Root and Ollie Pope put on 109 runs at almost exactly three an over, staying calm and building a foundation that eventually won their side the match. I watched that and admired the way they had refined their attitude, becoming more adaptable to the match situation, the surfaces they were playing on and the challenges presented by the opposition – in that case, in particular, the need to negate the brilliant Jasprit Bumrah.

• Iran among nations under restrictions issued by Trump

• Snub for Washington event deemed ‘unrelated to sport’

Iran are to boycott next week’s World Cup draw in Washington after the president of the country’s football federation was denied a visa to enter the United States.

A spokesperson for the Iranian football federation (FFIRI) described the decision to reject the visa application as “unrelated to sport” and the move raises the prospect of Iran withdrawing from the tournament altogether.

• Final, first leg: Germany 0-0 Spain

• Germany had 19 attempts on goal to Spain’s nine

Germany dominated the first leg of their Nations League final against Spain on Friday but could not find the back of the net as they were held to a scoreless draw before Tuesday’s second leg in Madrid.

The Germans racked up 19 attempts on goal, but Spanish goalkeeper Cata Coll was outstanding in the first half, much to the frustration of the home fans.

• Image rights payments to be taxed at 45% from April 2027

• Some players already have clauses making clubs liable

Premier League clubs are facing the prospect of higher wage bills after the government’s announcement in the budget that image rights ­payments will be treated as income from April 2027.

The change will leave many ­top-flight players with significantly larger tax bills and several agents have said that is likely to be passed on to clubs, particularly for players who sign new contracts before the measure takes effect.

Nicky Henderson’s star hurdler needs to bounce back on Saturday after another poor performance at Punchestown

The venerable Timeform organisation used a well-chosen four-letter word to describe Constitution Hill’s performance in the Boodles Champion Hurdle at Punchestown in early May, when the top-rated hurdler of recent decades started as the odds-on favourite but finished fifth of the six runners. It was, the firm’s post-race analysis said, a “disconcertingly tame display”.

Tame. Ouch. It is not a word that could ever have been applied to the first dozen races of Constitution Hill’s career, which ranged from the electrifying, effortless brilliance of his first two seasons to the high drama of falls at Cheltenham and Aintree this year.

Farage has cosied up to US figures who espoused conspiracy theories about Jews. That kind of talk is becoming alarmingly mainstream on the Maga right

Nigel Farage could have strangled this story at birth. Confronted with the testimony of more than 20 former schoolmates, who shared with the Guardian their memories of a young Farage taunting Jews and other minorities in the most appalling terms – telling a Jewish pupil that “Hitler was right”, singing “Gas ’em all” and making a hissing sound to simulate lethal gas – he could have said: “I have no memory of what’s been described, but such behaviour would of course have been atrocious and if I was involved in any way, I am genuinely sorry.”

Sure, it would have been more of an “ifpology” than an apology, its admission of guilt wholly conditional, but it would surely have closed the story down. Reassured that the Reform UK leader had declared racist and antisemitic abuse unacceptable, most observers would have allowed that these events took place half a century ago and moved on.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US?
On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path.
Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Jonathan Freedland will be the writer of this week’s Matters of Opinion newsletter. To find out his take on the budget, Donald Trump v the BBC and Paddington: the Musical – and to receive our free newsletter in your email every Saturday – sign up at theguardian.com/newsletters

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In the face of multiple crises, disruptive technology and populism, making Britain orderly again is an impossible goal

This Labour government loves rules. Fiscal rules, stability rules, investment rules, immigration rules and rules restricting protests: this government’s first impulse, when faced with the fluidity and chaos of the modern world, is to put in boundaries and try to police them. Keir Starmer, a methodical person as well as a former director of public prosecutions, is so keen on orderliness that in 2022 his close colleague Lisa Nandy called him “Mr Rules”.

There are things to be said for this approach. Many voters have been saying for at least a decade that they want politicians to exert more control over Britain’s erratic trajectory. Meanwhile the recent catastrophic administration of Boris Johnson, with its vast carelessness about Covid deaths, Brexit and immigration, still looms over our politics as a demonstration of what happens when governments have little interest in rules. As tech oligarchs, bond traders, international criminals, and digital and physical viruses increasingly prey on vulnerable people, it can be argued that a libertarian or fiscally loose government is a luxury most Britons can’t afford.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Barristers and criminals may not like the idea, but it’s key to reforming Britain’s antiquated and overloaded justice system

• Gaby Hinsliff: Jury trials are flawed and unwieldy – but vital for justice being seen to be done

Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence. They deserve dispatch to the world of ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering.

As it is, criminal courts have built up a hopeless backlog in England and Wales of almost 80,000 cases, with some hearings postponed to 2029. A surge in rape cases has led to a two-year delay, with twice the number of complainants withdrawing as five years ago. Britain’s prison population threatens to break the 100,000 barrier, or twice its size in the 1990s. These are not just convicts. A fifth of cells contain remand prisoners spending months awaiting trial. This is a parody of justice.

David Lammy’s plans for justice on the cheap risk cutting the public out of the legal system – which will only hit confidence even more

• Simon Jenkins: David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries – it’s an open-and-shut case

For the sake of British justice, something has to give. Everyone knows that the courts are in crisis, that we can’t go on like this. Traumatised victims can’t keep being told that the earliest available date for a trial is 2029, so they’re either going to have to live with it hanging over them for another four years or drop out. (And nor can defendants put their lives endlessly on hold, worrying that witnesses’ memories will only fade with time.) Something obviously needs to change. But the idea that the only solution is to scrap jury trials in all but the most serious cases of rape, murder and other offences with sentences longer than five years – as a leaked letter from the justice secretary, David Lammy, suggests – should ring alarm bells nonetheless.

Anyone who has sat in a courtroom for long enough, never mind on a jury, will know that it isn’t exactly 12 Angry Men out there. Members of the public obliged to dispense amateur justice have the same flaws, limitations and tendency to fall asleep in the boring bits – or, as on one memorable occasion at the Old Bailey, repeatedly ask if the hot witness is single – as the rest of us, and unlike judges they aren’t obliged to give their reasons for sometimes baffling decisions. Juries are notoriously resistant to convicting in all but the most straightforward rape trials, and expert doubts raised over Lucy Letby’s murder conviction make a strong case for removing them from cases with very complex medical evidence. All that said, however, they’re absolutely vital to justice being seen to be done.

Kyiv and the rest of Europe must stand together to prevent Russia from seizing more territory by force

• Dmytro Kuleba is a former foreign minister of Ukraine

Europe breathed a deep collective sigh of relief on Monday, as the crisis triggered by Washington’s presentation of a new 28-point plan for ending the war appeared – briefly – to have been stabilised. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, spoke of “substantial progress” after Ukraine-US talks in Geneva. On Monday night, Vladimir Putin made his countermove: another massive barrage of missile and drone strikes on Kyiv.

The sequence of contrasting events captured the grim essence of the outgoing year. By day, diplomatic battles are fought: hopeful statements are issued from Washington, London, Brussels and Kyiv. Immense energy is expended on containing Donald Trump’s initiatives. By night, Putin brutally reminds the world that, for him, war remains the primary tool for achieving “peace”.

Dmytro Kuleba was Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs from 2020 to 2024

A change of heart on the search for a GHS down by the Thames before discovering the growing trend for ‘posting zero’

The hunt is apparently on in London for the German hairy snail. OK. I have an idea. Why don’t we NOT search for anything called “the German hairy snail”? In fact, I have an even better idea – why don’t we not search for any kind of “hairy snail”. I would go even further and suggest not searching for anything “hairy” at all because that is second only to “mucus” in the list of world’s worst words. But I will settle for not searching for the thing that unassailably evokes the two in grotesque combination.

A new report suggests playwriting is in crisis after Covid, with producers retreating into safe old classics. Well, not from where I’m standing

Crisis? What crisis? British Theatre Before and After Covid, a report released this week, is like a comedy-tragedy mask rendered in academic form. If you look at it one way, you see smiles. Look at it another, you see only things to cry about. The media coverage of the report, by the British Theatre Consortium, focused on the latter, with industry bible the Stage reporting: “‘Sharp decline’ in new plays since Covid.” Between 2019 and 2023, the number of new plays produced dropped by almost 30%. If vindication was needed for much recent angsting about the condition of new writing in UK theatre, this report seems to provide it.

So is playwriting in crisis? I’m in a decent position to comment, at least insofar as that question applies in Scotland. I run A Play, a Pie and a Pint (PPP), the Glasgow theatre institution producing more new plays than any other theatre in … Europe? The world? The known universe? (We wait in vain for someone to tell us we’ve been trumped.) Based on our experience – fielding hundreds of scripts a year, producing and touring new plays every week, year-round – there is plenty to be concerned about. But there are also reasons for optimism, some evidenced by the report, which was written by director Dan Rebellato and playwright David Edgar.

Russia’s president is only interested in a deal on Moscow’s terms. Equipping Kyiv with the resources to fight on is the quickest route to a just settlement

As Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving Day deadline for a Ukraine peace agreement came and went this week, the Russia expert Mark Galeotti pointed to a telling indicator of how the Kremlin is treating the latest flurry of White House diplomacy. In the government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a foreign policy scholar close to Vladimir Putin’s regime bluntly observed: “As long as hostilities continue, leverage remains. As soon as they cease, Russia finds itself alone (we harbour no illusions) in the face of coordinated political and diplomatic pressure.”

Mr Putin has no interest in a ceasefire followed by talks where Ukraine’s rights as a sovereign nation would be defended and reasserted. He seeks the capitulation and reabsorption of Russia’s neighbour into Moscow’s orbit. Whether that is achieved through battlefield attrition, or through a Trump-backed deal imposed on Ukraine, is a matter of relative indifference. On Thursday, the Russian president reiterated his demand that Ukraine surrender further territory in its east, adding that the alternative would be to lose it through “force of arms”. Once again, he described Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government as “illegitimate”, and questioned the legally binding nature of any future agreement.

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Capturing the changing landscapes of the 18th century, the rivals transformed British art. The climate emergency gives new urgency to their work

JMW Turner appears on £20 notes and gives his name to Britain’s most avant garde contemporary art prize. John Constable’s work adorns countless mugs and jigsaws. Both are emblematic English artists, but in the popular imagination, Turner is perceived as daring and dazzling, Constable as nice but a little bit dull. In a Radio 4 poll to find the nation’s favourite painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which even features in the James Bond film Skyfall – won. Constable’s The Hay Wain came second. Born only a year later, Constable was always playing catch-up: Turner became a member of the Royal Academy at 27, while Constable had to wait until he was 52.

To mark the 250th anniversary of their births, Tate Britain is putting on the first major exhibition to display the two titans head to head. Shakespeare and Marlowe, Mozart and Salieri, Van Gogh and Gauguin – creative rivalries are the stuff of biopics. Mike Leigh’s 2014 film shows Turner (Timothy Spall) adding a touch of red to his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1832. Critics delighted in dubbing them “Fire and Water”. The enthralling new Tate show is billed as a battle of rivals, but it also tells another story. Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too.

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.

Prof David Feldman, Dr Ben Gidley and Dr Brendan McGeever from the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism say it is wrong to characterise Jewish support for the Greens as ‘paradoxical’

We were fascinated to read your article on the important report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) on Jewish voting patterns in the UK (British Jews turn to Greens and Reform UK as support for main parties drops, 20 November). This demonstrates that growing numbers of Jews are deserting the Labour and Conservative parties in favour of the Green party and Reform UK.

As JPR points out, there is no symmetry here. The turn to Reform among Jewish voters is half the size of the growth in support for the party within the population as a whole. On the other hand, support for Greens among Jews is 900% the size of the turn to the Green party overall.

Life’s five ‘eras’ | Levelling up Huddersfield | Favourite headlines | Posh breakfasts | Grieving nominative determinism letters

As one of your older readers, I was looking forward to reading the interesting article on the five epochs of brain development (Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s, 25 November). But why was I not surprised to find the final two epochs given just one sentence between them?
Dave Headey
Faringdon, Oxfordshire

• I was delighted to find out that the Royal Opera House is replacing its 26-year-old stage curtains. Perhaps the old ones could be reused to make new riser cushions for the stage of Huddersfield town hall. We’re still waiting to be levelled up. (See my Guardian letter, 14 February 2022.)
Lynn Brooks
Kirkburton, West Yorkshire

It seems likely the artist’s family wanted to get rid of a woman who was just difficult to get along with, writes Helen James

JMW Turner mother’s died when she was 29, when he was busy preparing for and opening his first public exhibition, and her “mental illness”, referred to in your review of the BBC Two documentary Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks (19 November), should be described as “purported”.

We only have the testimony provided by the actions of her husband and son, who sent her to a lunatic asylum designed for paupers, when they were in fact not poor and could have accommodated her in a better environment with better care, and thereby lengthened her life.

A concerned NHS midwife responds to an article about the Free Birth Society

I’m an NHS midwife, despairing over your article (Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world, 22 November). My key frustration, though, is how, as with any successful charlatanism, there is truth and real fear being exploited: medical overreach blights lives, women can and should trust their bodies, and a healthy body rarely grows a baby it can’t birth.

However, physiology is not a perfected endpoint. Evolution continues with genetic variation spreading through a population by “survival of the fittest”. In the brutal “wild”, the least “well-adapted” (whether by health or circumstance) do not survive. Human beings, however, don’t like those odds. Medical intervention, yes, but a body of life-saving social knowledge has been passed down since language began, towards facilitating successful birth.

Charities express ‘deep disappointment’ as government advisers find harms of screening all men would outweigh benefits

Prostate cancer screening should not be made available to the vast majority of men across the UK, a panel of expert government health advisers has said, to the “deep disappointment” of several charities and campaigners.

The UK National Screening Committee (UKNSC) has instead recommended that there should be a targeted screening programme for men with a confirmed BRCA1 or BRCA2 faulty gene variant, which means they are more at risk of faster growing and aggressive cancers at an earlier age. Men in that category could be screened every two years between the ages of 45 and 61, they said.

About 200 people still unaccounted for, say officials, as fire chief confirms no alarms went off in any of the eight towers

• Anger swells in Hong Kong over deadliest fire in more than 70 years

• How the Hong Kong fire unfolded – visual guide

The death toll from the Hong Kong apartment complex fire that began on Wednesday has risen to 128 with as many as 200 missing, officials have said, as rescue operations were declared over.

Firefighters had been combing through the high-rises on Friday, attempting to find anyone alive after the massive fire that spread to seven of eight towers in one of the city’s deadliest blazes.

UK had been pushing to join €150bn Safe fund, a loan scheme that is part of bloc’s drive to rearm Europe

Keir Starmer’s attempt to reset relations with the EU have suffered a major blow, after negotiations for the UK to join the EU’s flagship €150bn (£131bn) defence fund collapsed.

The UK had been pushing to join the EU’s Security Action for Europe (Safe) fund, a low-interest loan scheme that is part of the EU’s drive to boost defence spending by €800bn and rearm the continent, in response to the growing threat from Russia and cooling relations between Donald Trump’s US and the EU.

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea says it is checking whether data taken contained residents’ details

A London council has urged thousands of residents to be “extra vigilant” when receiving calls, emails or text messages after confirming that data had been taken in a cyber-attack.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), which has 147,500 residents, said some data had been copied from its systems in an attack this week.

Heavy rain from Cyclone Ditwah has left people stranded, with more than 18,000 evacuated to temporary shelters

Troops in Sri Lanka were racing to rescue hundreds of people marooned by rising flood waters on Friday as weather-related deaths rose to 69, with another 34 people declared missing.

Helicopters and navy boats carried out rescue operations, plucking people from treetops, roofs and villages cut off by flood waters.

The Canadian PM’s breakthrough oil deal with Alberta cost him a cabinet minister and will still face stiff opposition

When the people of the Haida nation won a decades-long battle for recognition that an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia in Canada was rightfully theirs, it was a long overdue victory.

The unprecedented deal with the provincial and the federal governments meant the Haida no longer had to prove that they had Aboriginal title to the land of Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai, “the islands at the boundary of the world.”

In this week’s newsletter: Ultimately, climate progress will come from real-world action, and this year’s summit made some promising strides on that front

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Some commentators have called Cop30 a failure. An attempt to insert plans for a route to the phaseout of fossil fuels into the legal text was stymied, consideration of how to improve countries’ emissions-cutting plans was put off till next year, and although developing countries got the tripling of finance for adaptation that they were seeking, it will not be delivered in full until 2035 – and will come out of already promised funds.

Look beyond the headlines, however, and the Cop achieved a great deal more. Take the outcome on fossil fuels – it seems absurd, but until 2023 three decades of annual climate summits had failed to address fossil fuels directly.

UK can create 5,400 jobs if it stops plastic waste exports, report finds

Zombie fires: how Arctic wildfires that come back to life are ravaging forests

There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data – and it’s a gift to deniers | George Monbiot

US, Russia and Saudi Arabia create axis of obstruction as Cop30 sputters out

We delivered a clear message at Cop30: the delayers and defeatists are losing the climate fight | Ed Miliband

Another Cop wrecked by fossil fuel interests and our leaders’ cowardice – but there is another way | Genevieve Guenther

Alarming shift since 2010 means planet’s three main rainforest regions now contribute to climate breakdown

Africa’s forests have turned from a carbon sink into a carbon source, according to research that underscores the need for urgent action to save the world’s great natural climate stabilisers.

The alarming shift, which has happened since 2010, means all of the planet’s three main rainforest regions – the South American Amazon, south-east Asia and Africa – have gone from being allies in the fight against climate breakdown to being part of the problem.

Researchers using aircraft to sample exhaust plumes say infringements persist – even in stricter zones

A new study has found that a significant proportion of ships are breaching air pollution limits.

Although the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has set regulations for shipping pollution since 2005, it is hard to know what happens once ships are at sea.

David Coburn, who was leader of Ukip in Scotland, denies involvement after Nathan Gill jailed for taking bribes

A former leading member of the group of MEPs headed by Nigel Farage has denied taking money as part of a campaign to promote Russian interests.

David Coburn, who was leader of Ukip in Scotland for four years, was responding after the jailing of his former colleague, Nathan Gill, on charges of being bribed by an alleged pro-Russian asset.

Prosecutors cite ‘significant evidential developments’ in decision to end criminal case against Romanian boys

Prosecutors have dropped charges against two Romanian teenagers who were accused of raping a schoolgirl in Ballymena, an allegation that triggered race riots in Northern Ireland.

The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) on Friday cited “significant evidential developments” in its decision to end criminal proceedings against the boys, aged 14 and 15.

Exclusive: Matthew Gould, close friend of George Osborne and former envoy, resigns before investigation concludes

A former high-flying diplomat who is a close friend of George Osborne has quit as the head of London zoo after the launch of an investigation into his “unacceptable workplace behaviour”.

Matthew Gould, who previously worked in Downing Street and as ambassador to Israel, resigned as chief executive of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) last week.

Some say Jeremy Corbyn is too non-committal for project to work, while others blame Zarah Sultana’s combative nature

At an early meeting to set the path for what would become Your Party, participants quickly agreed on one thing: given the cliches about leftwingers forever falling out, at all costs they must avoid a descent into factionalism.

Six months on and the Liverpool venue hosting this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference has been warned to expect potential disruption, including stage invasions by disgruntled members representing particular wings. Extra security guards have been hired.

Internationally renowned cinema temporarily closes after audience members complained about being bitten

The prestigious Cinémathèque Française in Paris has announced a temporary closure due to a bedbug infestation after sightings of the blood-sucking creatures, including during a masterclass with Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver.

The Cinémathèque, an internationally renowned film archive and cinema, said in a statement it would close its four screening halls for a month from Friday.

Trio given leave to stay in their abandoned convent near Salzburg until further notice, church officials say

Three octogenarian nuns who gained a global following after breaking out of their care home and moving back to their abandoned convent near Salzburg have been given leave to stay in the nunnery “until further notice” – on condition they stay off social media, church officials have said.

The rebel sisters – Bernadette, 88, Regina, 86, and Rita, 82, all former teachers at the school adjacent to their convent – broke back into their old home of Goldenstein Castle in Elsbethen in September in defiance of their spiritual superiors.

Exclusive: It follows calls from US senator Elizabeth Warren to investigate bank executives including ex-Barclays boss Jes Staley

US regulators say they are taking allegations that top banks may have facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activity “very seriously”, as they faced calls to investigate executives including the former Barclays boss Jes Staley.

In correspondence seen by the Guardian, bosses from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said they had reviewed a letter from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, which raised concerns over bankers’ alleged support for the convicted child sex offender Epstein.

Bill 9 would outlaw prayer and face coverings in public institutions, sparking fears it targets Muslims in Canada

Quebec says it will intensify its crackdown on public displays of religion in a sweeping new law that critics say pushes Canadian provinces into private spaces and disproportionately affects Muslims.

Bill 9, introduced by the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on Thursday, bans prayer in public institutions, including in colleges and universities. It also bans communal prayer on public roads and in parks, with the threat of fines of C$1,125 for groups in contravention of the prohibition. Short public events with prior approval are exempt.

Airline says 55,000 people signed up to Prime, making €4.4m, but passengers benefited by more than €6m

• Business live – latest updates

Ryanair is shutting its frequent flyers members’ club after only eight months because customers exploited its benefits too much.

The budget airline said on Friday it was closing the scheme, which offered benefits including flight discounts, free reserved seating on up to 12 flights a year and travel insurance.

Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation

As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.

The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

But supermarket blames ‘self-inflicted’ IT problems that left gaps on shelves for 3.7% drop in sales

Asda has criticised the government for “killing confidence” among consumers but blamed “self-inflicted” problems that left gaps on shelves for a big reverse in sales.

Total sales at the UK’s third-largest supermarket fell 3.8% to £5.1bn in the three months to the end of September compared with the same period a year before – diving back from 0.2% growth in the previous quarter. Comparable store sales fell 2.8%.

Friedrich Merz to ask for series of exemptions in attempt to protect crisis-hit automotive industry

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is to urge the EU to soften the 2035 cutoff date for the sale of combustion-engine cars.

Merz said he would send a letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday urging Brussels to keep technological options open for carmakers. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the EU is scheduled to be banned in a decade’s time.

François Ozon’s handling of classic novel draws both praise and criticism, including from the author’s daughter

More than 80 years after it was published, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger remains one of the most widely read and fiercely contested French books in the world.

Until now, few attempts have been made to adapt the novel, published in English as The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive for its portrayal of France’s colonisation of Algeria.

The one-act play Oh, Mary! – ‘the stupidest, funniest thing possible’ – to open after blockbuster run in New York

What if, in the final weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the first lady could not care less about the American civil war and was instead hell-bent on becoming a cabaret star?

That is the question posed by Oh, Mary!, the smash-hit show that reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a gloriously unhinged alcoholic who despises her closeted husband.

A controversial Netflix documentary follows an investigation into the truth behind one of the most important wartime photos ever taken

It is one of the most recognizable photographs of the 20th century: a naked girl – arms wide, face contorted, skin scorched and peeling – running toward the camera as she flees a napalm attack in South Vietnam. To her right, a boy’s face is frozen in a Greek tragedy mask of pain. To her left, two other Vietnamese children run away from the bombed village of Trảng Bàng. Behind them, an indistinguishable group of soldiers and, behind them, a wall of black smoke.

Within hours of publication in June 1972, the photo, officially titled The Terror of War but colloquially known as Napalm Girl, went the analog version of viral; seen and discussed by millions of people around the world, it’s widely credited with galvanizing public opinion against the US war in Vietnam. Susan Sontag later wrote that the horrifically indelible image of nine-year-old Kim Phúc in distress “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. Sir Don McCullin, the legendary British photojournalist who covered the conflict, deemed it the single best photograph of what would later be called “The Television War”. Napalm Girl is, “simply put, one of the most important photographs of anything ever made, and certainly of the Vietnam war”, said Gary Knight, a British photojournalist with decades of combat photography experience.

Noah Baumbach’s meditation on celebrity sees George Clooney deliver easy charm alongside Adam Sandler, while Michelle Pfeiffer stars in what will certainly be 2025’s best festive movie

Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach’s meditation on the meaning of true celebrity, and he benefits greatly from casting George Clooney – perhaps the last classic movie star – in the lead. Co-written with Emily Mortimer, it explores the personas A-listers tend to trade in, and what happens when that starts to fall away. It’s a role right in the centre of Clooney’s comfort zone, and he inhabits it perfectly; imagine the heightened knowingness of Hail, Caesar! twinned with the easy charm of his Nespresso adverts. Plus it helps that he’s backed by a couple of Baumbach all-timers in Adam Sandler and Laura Dern. Catch it now, before all the Oscar buzz kicks in.
Friday 5 December, Netflix

Luna the labradoodle and Chico the bulldog need new owners for life, not just for Christmas. Plus: trippy tea sparks upset in Return to Paradise. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Teenager Kyra has spent eight years trying to convince her dad to get a dog – surely he’ll cave in to lovely Luna the labradoodle? Chico the American bulldog is looking for love – but is he too much for Queen? And after an accident left Rick paralysed, his mood is a little Scroogey – will Jenny the terrier melt his heart? It’s a festive special of the wonderful dog matchmaking show. Hollie Richardson

Gillian Anderson’s wealthy landowner threatens rural smallholders in a zippily entertaining period drama set in 1850s Oregon, while the Sussexes’ rental mansion is awash with enough festive kitsch to bother even Santa

As his biker epic Sons of Anarchy proved, Kurt Sutter is helpless to resist the iconography of the American outlaw. This western is set in the 1850s, a gritty era of cattle rustlers, blood vendettas and murders with pitchforks. In rural Oregon, the brutal Van Ness family are threatening smallholders as they expand their territory. Will the locals join forces to protect their homesteads? Lena Headey stars as sad-eyed Irish emigre Fiona Nolan, a woman who cannot bear children but has gathered a band of orphans around her. Looming menacingly over her is Constance Van Ness (Gillian Anderson), an amusingly one-note villain. Pure hokum but it rattles along entertainingly.
Netflix, from Thursday 4 December

Despite being exiled from pop’s mainstream, he’s outlasted his contemporaries and is still selling out big rooms – what’s the secret to the national institution’s success?

At 85, Sir Cliff Richard is out on the road again. Last week, he wrapped up a run of shows in Australia and New Zealand. Tomorrow, the UK leg of his Can’t Stop Me Now tour opens in Cardiff, finishing at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 December. He was the artist who opened the British rock’n’roll era, with Move It in 1958, and after 67 years he is still selling out big rooms.

To the uninitiated, Sir Cliff’s continued presence is at best a mystery, and at worst an affront to taste. That is to misunderstand him: Sir Cliff doesn’t operate in the music business – despite his gripes with it – so much as in the Cliff Richard business. When he disappeared from national radio, to his great distress, it was because he had long since ceased to operate in a world recognisable to the rest of pop.

Even though he’s partial to hideous noise, free jazz is mostly unknown to the Guardian’s pop critic. A new guidebook from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore may change his mind

In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more.

The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”

Californian singer-songwriter Lukas Frank is picking up rave reviews for his second album’s epic choruses and lush orchestrations

From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like John Grant, Scott Walker, Father John Misty
Up next A cover of Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur is out now, with another single due in February

After several years of perseverance, things are happening for Storefront Church. The audience at this month’s sellout gig at St Pancras Old Church in London included Perfume Genius and members of the Last Dinner Party and the Horrors and their self-released second album, Ink & Oil, is picking up rave reviews. One used the term “emotional flood” to describe the album’s epic, baroque pop, big pianos and drums, sweeping choruses and Travis Warner’s lush, cinematic orchestrations.

(Ghostly International)
Sharon Van Etten, Stephen O’Malley, Perila and more transform the duo’s gloomy, sensual songs on an album of covers and remixes

HTRK have been making their gloomy, sensual brand of music, at the intersection of electronic pop and noise rock, for 22 years. To mark the milestone comes String of Hearts, a collection of covers and remixes featuring an all-star cast of friends and collaborators, from next-gen underground favourites like Coby Sey to fellow old-school experimentalists Liars. This brilliant, genre-agnostic record allows you to trace the breadth of the Melbourne band’s shapeshifting sound, echoes of which can now be found all over underground and commercial music, without leaning too hard on nostalgia.

The record spans HTRK’s early hits right up to their most recent album Rhinestones, a period in which they’ve shifted from a darker, industrial palette to warmer territory. Not that you’d be able to tell here: instrumentals are reshaped by Loraine James’s IDM-style glitches and Zebrablood’s atmospheric breaks, while Jonnine Standish’s disaffected vocals are transformed into desperate alien wails by Liars.

This collection of macabre stories set across England explores class, hierarchy and the enduring nature of inequality

Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre.

In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin.

The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them…

First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot.

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

Andy Serkis revels in his narration of the first murder mystery from the author of This Is Going to Hurt, which showcases Kay’s signature pitch-black humour

Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

This nebulous study of Luigi Mangione veers close to romanticising him as a latter-day Robin Hood

On 5 December 2024, the New York Times ran the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The newspaper then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcase costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

It’s always crushing when a wildly anticipated game turns out to be a dud, but this RPG’s awful story and clunky dialogue gave my son and I something to talk about

It was an exciting November for the Diamond household: one of those rare games that we all loved had a sequel coming out! The original Outer Worlds dazzled our eyeballs with its art nouveau palette and charmed our ears with witty dialogue, sucking us into a classic mystery-unravelling story in one of my favourite “little man versus evil corporate overlords” worlds since Deus Ex. It didn’t have the most original combat, but that didn’t matter: it was obviously a labour of love from a team totally invested in the telling of this tale, and we all fell under its spell.

Well, when I say all of us, I mean myself and the three kids. My wife did not play The Outer Worlds, because none of those worlds featured Crash Bandicoot. But the rest of us dug it, and the kids particularly enjoyed that I flounced away from the final boss battle after half a day of trying, declaring that I had pretty much completed the game and that was good enough for a dad with other things to do.

Two decades on, its influence still lingers, marking a moment when gaming felt thrillingly new again

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Almost 20 years ago (on 1 December 2005, to be precise), I was at my very first video game console launch party somewhere around London’s Leicester Square. The Xbox 360 arrived on 22 November 2005 in the US and 2 December in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a junior staff writer on GamesTM magazine. My memories of the night are hazy because a) it was a worryingly long time ago and b) there was a free bar, but I do remember that DJ Yoda played to a tragically deserted dancefloor, and everything was very green. My memories of the console itself, however, and the games I played on it, are still as clear as an Xbox Crystal. It is up there with the greatest consoles ever.

In 2001, the first Xbox had muscled in on a scene dominated by Japanese consoles, upsetting the established order (it outsold Nintendo’s GameCube by a couple of million) and dragging console gaming into the online era with Xbox Live, an online multiplayer service that was leagues ahead of what the PlayStation 2 was doing. Nonetheless, the PS2 ended up selling over 150m to the original Xbox’s 25m. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, would sell over 80m, neck and neck with the PlayStation 3 for most of its eight-year life cycle (and well ahead in the US). It turned Xbox from an upstart into a market leader.

Nintendo Switch 2; Bandai Namco/Sora/HAL Laboratory/Nintendo
It takes some getting used to, but this Mario Kart challenger soon reveals a satisfyingly zen, minimalist approach to competitive racing

In the world of cartoonish racing games, it’s clear who is top dog. As Nintendo’s moustachioed plumber lords it up from his gilded go-kart, everyone from Crash Bandicoot to Sonic and Garfield has tried – and failed – to skid their way on to the podium. Now with no one left to challenge its karting dominance, Nintendo is attempting to beat itself at its own game.

The unexpected sequel to a critically panned 2003 GameCube game, Kirby Air Riders has the pink squishball and friends hanging on for dear life to floating race machines. With no Grand Prix to compete in, in the game’s titular mode you choose a track and compete to be the first of six players to cross the finish line, spin-attacking each other and unleashing weapons and special abilities to create cutesy, colourful chaos.

From Minecraft chess and coding for kids to retro consoles and Doom on vinyl for grown-ups – hit select and start with these original non-digital presents

Gamers can be a difficult bunch to buy for. Most of them will get their new games digitally from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation’s online shops, so you can’t just wrap up the latest version of Call of Duty and be done with it. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful accessories and fun lifestyle gifts to look out for, and gamers tend to have a lot of other interests that intersect with games in different ways.

So if you have a player in your life, whether they’re young or old(er), here are some ideas chosen by the Guardian’s games writers. And naturally, we’re starting with Lego …

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
Director Holly Race Roughan transposes the summer tale into the darkest of winters as the fairies’ feud over the stolen child leaves the snow smeared with blood

Puck snatches the lovers’ breath from their bodies. They stop mid-sentence, floating under his spell, lanterns shining in the frozen night. Sergo Vares’ malevolent clown, dressed in half tux, half tutu, has chaos in his veins. In this wintery co-production between Headlong and the Globe, comedy and horror sit cheek by jowl, as director Holly Race Roughan conjures a nightmarish take on Shakespeare’s classic dream.

Vares’ crow-like Puck, a nimble shapeshifter, may be the face of the dark deeds in this frosty landscape, but Michael Marcus’s Oberon is the vengeful controller, his every action designed to get his hands on the young girl (Pria Kalsi) in Titania’s care. By shifting the show’s centre of gravity to revolve around this changeling, Roughan brings the play’s brutal undercurrents roaring to the surface.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The violinist was joined by an unconventional ensemble of cello, guitar and accordion for a relaxed evening that felt like a super-polished jam session

Not for nothing was Nicola Benedetti proclaimed “the country’s favourite violinist” in the publicity for this concert. Six weeks in to her first major concert tour in a decade, she arrived at the Royal Albert Hall to lead what in some ways felt like a celebration – a sort of super-polished jam session, punctuated by friendly, unpolished chat from the stage. Musically, though, if this were a party she was serving canapes – lots of small, delicious things, but not quite a proper meal.

And yet those bite-size pieces offered a lot of enjoy. Benedetti’s supporting ensemble is an unconventional but inspired combo of cello, guitar and accordion: Maxim Calver, Plínio Fernandes and Samuele Telari were tight, flexible and responsive partners, and together the quartet created some intriguing sonorities, which came across in this hall better than some of the finer details.

The Lucky Chance, Frome
Joy radiates from the stage as an ensemble cast from the Emma Rice Company bring Thomas’s twinkling poem to life

Dylan Thomas’s beautiful Christmas poem has that amazing ability to slow life down. It’s a poem to rest inside, with its gently tumbling sentences and twinkling memories of Christmases past. Emma Rice’s exquisite adaptation shares these qualities. There are just five performers – one pianist and four actors – but they bring a flurry of characters to life. There is a little bit of magic in every scene, all of which glow with a very Thomas-esque combination of hope and melancholy.

The ensemble performs in the Emma Rice Company’s new home, a converted church in Frome. It’s tiny. The audience sits on plastic chairs and – perhaps this is just Thomas’s poem casting its spell on me – but it feels like the memory of past communal gatherings lingers here. When encouraged to join in with the carols, the audience responds quickly and with relish. We throw snowballs and socks at the actors and pass around family photos of the characters in the play, handling them as fondly as if they’re our own.

Curve theatre, Leicester
A full-throttle Maria, a memorably forlorn Captain von Trapp and the carousel of classic hits make Nikolai Foster’s production something to savour

You know what to expect from The Sound of Music (nuns, Nazis, Do-Re-Mi) – but Nikolai Foster’s richly entertaining revival honours its serious intent. The real-life story of the Von Trapp family’s flight from occupied Austria may contain lashings of melody and a prickle-eyed love story – but it also becomes a tale of personal loss, political integrity and the healing power of music.

This was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final musical together – Hammerstein, the lyricist, died just months after the opening in 1959 – and the tunes don’t hang about. The title song launches a first half driven by Maria’s dreams and desires, especially her love for the widowed Captain von Trapp. Molly Lynch’s tremendous Maria, scrambling through pools and over rocks on Michael Taylor’s mountain set, has rambunctious vim – more pagan than pious. Endearingly full-throttle, she launches into her numbers with a guitar hero flourish.

Ticketmaster said they would ‘lead by example’ after Dean called out companies when tickets for her North American tour appeared on resale sites at prices in excess of $1,000

Ticketmaster has given fans of Olivia Dean partial refunds after the British singer condemned ticketing companies for allowing touts to relist tickets for her North American tour at more than 14 times their face value.

After the tour sold out in minutes on 21 November and tickets appeared on resale sites at prices in excess of $1,000, Dean addressed the major ticketing companies on Instagram: “@Ticketmaster @Livenation @AEGPresents you are providing a disgusting service,” she wrote. “The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be re-sold is vile and completely against our wishes. Live music should be affordable and accessible and we need to find a new way of making that possible. BE BETTER.”

Beauty and the Beast or Wolf Alice? Queen Marie Antoinette or Count Arthur Strong? Come and behold: the holiday season offers stage, film, music and art that’s worth singing about

The 12 Beans of Christmas
Touring to 19 December
Last year, character comedians Adam Riches and John Kearns joined forces for an archly silly tribute to crooners Michael Ball and Alfie Boe. Now Riches is back with another leftfield celebrity riff as he gives his Game of Thrones-era Sean Bean impression (as seen on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and his Edinburgh show Dungeons’n’Bastards) a yuletide twist. Rachel Aroesti

Ex-member of the hip-hop group was convicted of money laundering and campaign finance violations after funneling money from a rich Malaysian

From the moment the Fugees shot to fame in the mid-90s, Prakazrel “Pras” Michél was discounted as an incidental member of the hip-hop superstars. He was the unremarkable New Jersey rhyme spitter by way of Brooklyn who was lucky enough to be a high school classmate of the mesmerizing Lauryn Hill and a cousin to mercurial Wyclef Jean. On the group’s breakout album The Score, Michel’s eight-bar features were minor contributions, relative to Hill’s adroitness as an emcee and balladeer and Jean’s compositional polymathy.

“From Hawaii to Hawthorne, I run marathons, like / Buju Banton, I’m a true champion, like / Farrakhan reads his daily Qur’an / It’s a phenomenon, lyrics fast like Ramadan,” Michél raps on the band’s breakout single Fu-Gee-La, in one of his more pedestrian efforts.

Lullaby, a reimagining of a traditional Palestinian song, will be released on December 12 to raise money for Choose Love’s Together for Palestine Fund

Musicians including Neneh Cherry, Nadine Shah, Celeste, Mabel, Leigh-Anne and Brian Eno have joined the bid for the Christmas No 1 spot with a single to raise funds for Palestinian-led organisations.

Lullaby, a reimagining of the traditional Palestinian lullaby Yamma Mwel El Hawa (Mama, Sing to the Wind), was put together by the team behind September’s Together for Palestine charity show. The new English-language lyrics were written by Peter Gabriel.

Black Friday isn’t all about pricey electronics. Here are all our favourite 2025 deals under £50

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• The best Black Friday deals on the products we love

Garmin watches and iPhones whose prices fall from insanely unaffordable to merely very expensive may be the headline-grabbers of Black Friday, but they’re not exactly cheap. In a cost-of-living crisis, the true bargains of the sales season are those useful and joy-giving items discounted to genuinely affordable prices.

Here we’ve assembled the best sub-£50 bargains we’ve found so far, with prices falling even further as you scroll down the page. These deals span the Christmas gifting gamut from premium vodka to Sealskinz socks, plus the Filter’s top-rated household items and tech – all now for less than the price of a takeaway.

Quirky and characterful, our gift ideas run from socks and chocs to sleep aids and lovely homeware – and all of them with affordability in mind

• The best Christmas gifts, handpicked by the Filter

We’ve all had it, that sinking feeling after drawing the name of a colleague you barely know from the Secret Santa hat. You’ve shared little more than pleasantries with them, know nothing of their life outside work and don’t even know how they take their coffee.

Then there’s the price cap, which dramatically limits the gift options, and the worry of misjudging who you’re giving the gift to, or even buying something so irrelevant to them that it will end up in the bin.

Never mind the food, what about the vibe? Restaurateurs share tips and tricks that will bring a touch of restaurant magic to your table

Restaurants are temples of aspiration. From sound, scent and ceramics to hand soap and elegant wine glasses, I’ve often wanted to recreate elements of my favourite restaurants at home. I’m unlikely to sous-vide celeriac or triple cook my chips, but I can elevate my plate of pasta with a drizzle of amazing olive oil, or invest in a cutlery set that gives even a midweek dinner a sense of occasion. As much as the cooking, it’s the little details that are, as celebrated chef Skye Gyngell puts it, “what you take away and what make you feel wonderful”.

I spoke to restaurateurs across the UK about the little touches that make their restaurants distinctive – and easy ways to bring their magic into our homes.

Where to find premium versions of this beloved kitchen staple to bring to your next dinner party or Christmas do

This festive season, olive oil is the new bottle of wine. If booze or a scented candle used to be a fail-safe gift option for a party, retailers and food experts are reporting a surge of interest in the kitchen cupboard staple.

The trend is being driven by several factors including a decline in drinking and a shift from dining out to dinners at home. It is premium extra virgin olive oil – or evoo to the experts – that is dominating.

We’ve tasted, sniffed and inspected more than 300 presents to bring you our ultimate Christmas gift guide – from must-have Lego and smoky mezcal to Meera Sodha’s favourite knife

Don’t you just love Christmas shopping? There’s a massive thrill in finding a present you know they’ll love and won’t have thought to ask for, but the pressure is enough to drive any sane person to hibernation.

We’ve gone the extra (2,000) miles to help you find the perfect gifts: we’ve tested out the latest products to see which ones are worth the hype (and which aren’t); trawled shops in person; enlisted babies (OK, their parents), tweens and teens to test out toys and give us their must-haves; tasted the good, bad and the did-I-really-put-this-in-my-mouth; and rounded up some of the products that were tried and tested by us this year.

Shaped by lockdown and two Trump presidencies, gen Z are grappling with a lot in love, dating and the bedroom

The sex lives of gen Z are of great interest – to politicians, to parents, to influencers and dating app executives and to you, apparently. Are gen Z so lonely they are falling in love with AI robots? Are they forming polycules across the US? Are they having enough sex? Are they having sex at all?

Gen Z is defined roughly as young Americans aged 13 to 28. This generation came of age with information about sex readily available to them, for better (the internet provides both sex education and community) and arguably for worse, too (in 2022, 54% of US teens reported first seeing online pornography at age 13 or younger). They are more likely to embrace non-traditional identities and are progressive on issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage – especially gen Z women.

Influential Michelin-starred chef who championed using local ingredients and developed a simple, elegant style of cooking

The pioneering chef Skye Gyngell, who has died of Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare skin cancer, aged 62, was the first Australian woman to win a Michelin star, an early supporter of the slow food movement, and a champion of charities such as StreetSmart and the Felix Project.

Gyngell was a quiet radical. She came to public attention when she opened the Petersham Nurseries Café in south-west London in 2004. Until that point, she had been honing her own distinctive cooking personality that emphasised the quality of ingredients and the simplicity of their treatment and presentation. Her dishes were light, graceful and deceptively simple, but were founded on a serious understanding of how flavours and textures worked together, sometimes in surprising ways.

A festively fizzy, rosy-red aperitif based on a rustic Italian strawberry liqueur

Earlier this year, we launched a range of tiny cocktails in collaboration with drinks writer Tyler Zielinski to reimagine Italian classics in miniature form, all designed to serve as light, pre-dinner tipples. This one’s suitably red, to go with the festive season.

Matteo Pesce, head of beverage, with Tyler Zielinski for Bar Lina, London and Manchester

Make all the individual elements ahead of time, then, on the day, as if by magic, you can conjure up this amazing tower of choux buns and smother it in boozy chocolate sauce

Christmas is the perfect time for something a bit more extravagant and theatrical. And a very good way to achieve this is to bring a tower of puffy choux buns to the table and pour over a jugful of boozy chocolate sauce and coffee caramel while everyone looks on in awe. To help avoid any stress on the day, most of the elements can be made ahead: the chocolate sauce and caramel can be gently reheated before pouring, while the choux shells can be baked the day before and crisped up in the oven for 10 minutes before filling.

Don’t panic if you’ve left it late to plan your gathering – follow these tips for whipping up an instant party atmosphere

At this time of year, when there’s enough going on to make the most vivacious person occasionally look forward to the financial and social drought of January, it’s all too easy to forget things. I cannot be the only person who’s ever been shocked back into consciousness at my desk by a message from a friend asking, “What time do you want us later?” Fear not; whether you’re absent minded, or just prone to last-minute invitations, I have your back.

Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, whether you’ve been planning for a year or 15 minutes, the best parties are the simplest. All anyone is hoping for is a good chat, something to drink, and enough to eat that they don’t feel like gnawing an arm off on the bus home. Unless you’re Jay Gatsby, no one expects a full bar, Michelin-starred catering or a live band.

That said, a theme is helpful for disguising the fact you’ve just thrown this thing together on the way home from work … And by theme, I mean something like, for instance, Christmas. Getting slightly more specific (Scandinavian Christmas, say, with glögg, spiced punch, smoked fish and rye crackers, Nordic beats playlist; or Mexican Christmas, with ponche navideño, cold beers or margaritas, and heaps of tortilla chips, salsa and guacamole, and Luis Miguel on the stereo) will focus your options on the inevitable supermarket sweep.

Beyond Black Friday, there’s much to enjoy about the American holiday – think succulent smoked birds, sumptuous stuffings and perfect pumpkin pies

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

It’s easy to be cynical about Thanksgiving. The origin story that we’re all told – of a friendly exchange of food between the pilgrims and the Native Americans – is, at best, a whitewashed oversimplification. And then there’s Black Friday, an event that has hijacked one of our few non-commercialised holidays and used it as the impetus for a stressful, shameless, consumerist frenzy.

Besides that, Thanksgiving is meant to be a celebration of American abundance and, boy, does that feel inappropriate at the moment. It sucks to be an American right now. It’s hard to feel gratitude for a country that’s an out-of-control dumpster fire stoked by an ogre of a man who treats the global economy like a game of Monopoly and orders his steaks well done (and with ketchup).

It’s important to express your disagreement: for their sake as much as yours, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But first decide on what you aim to accomplish

• Read more Leading questions

How do I respond to someone who contributes to a conversation with “I’m not racist, but … ” and then inevitably proceeds to say something racist, such as talking about immigrants on benefits or getting priority for housing?

I’m referring to social occasions with people that I am not necessarily close to but rather acquaintances I may bump into semi-regularly. I feel myself getting simultaneously angry and tongue-tied and I mostly sit with my frustration to maintain some sense of harmony in the group.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

From picking your guests (always add a random) and your outfit, to coping with drunks and nudity, this is what you need to know

When I was young, I thought the worst thing you could do, as a host, was to run out of booze. Then, when I was less young, I thought it was to not have enough food, and now I am perfectly wise, I know that those things don’t matter at all, because you can always go to the shop. The important thing is not to look harried, and to not look that way, you need to not be that way.

As I watched the news about Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2020 I felt compelled to help. It was the start of a new relationship with nature, and a reminder of my childhood joie de vivre

As hookup sites go, it was in another league. I was looking for a different kind of soulmate and I was spoilt for choice. Would it be Floyd, “a stylish poser and a winner of hearts”? Or Bobby, “who loves cuddling and is a bit of a showoff”? Or could it be the “beautiful and incredibly sweet Morris with a gentle nature”? One stood out. Not only was he “very affectionate” but he was also “a bit of a troublemaker – always exploring and often found sitting on the rocks”. Just what I was looking for; I swiped right. That’s how I met Jarrah. My koala.

A month before, in 2020, I’d seen a newsflash about the bushfires in Australia. The effect on the continent’s wildlife was devastating. An estimated 61,000 koalas had been killed or injured among 143 million other native mammals. There were two things I felt I could do from the UK: one was to make koala mittens to protect their burnt paws (following a pattern I found online); and two, I could adopt a koala and send monthly donations to protect them in the wild. So I joined the Australian Koala Foundation, which is dedicated to the marsupials’ survival.

It is said to be harder to make friends as you age. But I found that a mix of apps and other tools, as well as a happy attitude, led to a world of potential new pals

Tonight, Rachel, Elvira and I will meet for dinner. A year ago, none of us knew the others existed. Six months ago Rachel and Elvira were strangers until I introduced them. But now, here we are, something as close to firm friends as is possible after such a short time.

If you’ve ever consumed any media, you would be forgiven for thinking that life after 35 is a burning wasteland of unimaginable horrors: the beginnings of incessant back pain, an interest in dishwasher loading, the discovery that you’re ineligible for entire industries billed as “a young person’s game”, and, apparently, an inability to make friends.

How Rachel Reeves’s measures on tax, NI and benefits affect single people, couples, families and those receiving pensions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland

Luke can’t get a graduate role and works 35 hours a week in a cafe. He is paid the national living wage (NLW) of £12.21 for workers aged 21 and over. He pays £1,930 in income tax and £772 in national insurance (NI) contributions. This results in a monthly take-home pay of £1,627 after tax, or £19,520 a year. On 1 April 2026 the NLW rate will increase 50p – 4.1% – to £12.71 an hour. His annual income tax bill will rise to £2,112 and NI to £845, leaving him with £1,681 a month, an increase of £54.

Use our interactive tool to see how you have been affected by Rachel Reeves’s tax and spending announcements. Use the arrow keys to scroll sideways and enter your details

• How does freezing tax thresholds affect your tax bill?

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

Rachel Reeves is freezing tax thresholds in an attempt to plug the hole in the public accounts. Find out how it affects your tax bill

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced that income tax thresholds will be frozen until the 2030-31 tax year.

Freezing tax thresholds results in “fiscal drag” – a phenomenon where people are dragged into higher tax bands when they get pay rises.

From joint bank accounts and pooled savings to mortgages and tax allowances, talk about money for a happy financial future together

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for whether you should manage your finances jointly, separately or somewhere in the middle.

If you aren’t getting the quality time or intimacy you need, try these connection experiments to shake up interactions

Lately, life has felt like Groundhog Day: work, gym, sleep, repeat. Between a punishing work schedule, the grim weather and my desire to hibernate, my social life has suffered. I feel dissatisfied, restless and isolated. But I have plenty of friends and active group chats – I can’t be lonely, surely?

Wrong!

It used to be all boozy lunches and late-night carousing. Now it’s hyperbaric chambers and longevity chat. Andrew Carnie, CEO of the private club, explains how life and trends have changed since the Covid era

Friday night in the north of England. On the ninth floor of the old Granada Studios, a very chi-chi crowd is drinking tequila and eating crisps. Not Walkers out of the bag, mind, but canapes of individual crisps with creme fraiche and generous dollops of caviar. A young woman – leather shorts, chunky boots, neon lime nails, artfully messy bob – winks at me from the other side of the silver tray. “Ooh, caviar. Very posh for Manchester.”

Soho House’s 48th members’ club has caused quite the stir. Thirty years after Nick Jones opened the first club in Soho, London, the first north of England outpost of the empire is raising eyebrows. An exclusive club, in the city that AJP Taylor described as “the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery”. (The home, after all, of the Guardian.) An open-air rooftop pool, in the climate that fostered the textile industry because the rain created the perfect cool, damp conditions for spinning cotton. Will it work?

Here’s what you should know before getting an epidural – and why it might not provide full pain relief as expected

The first time I got an epidural, it was too late.

I’d heard it was best to wait, for fear the medication would run out mid-labor (I later found out this is a myth). So I gritted my teeth through hours of contractions, and when I finally told the nurses I was ready, the anesthesiologist was with another patient.

Our muscles, bones and organs are held together by a network of tissue that influences our every move. Is there a way we can use it to our advantage?

Fascia, the connective tissue that holds together the body’s internal structure, really hasn’t spent all that long in the limelight. Anatomists have known about its existence since before the Hippocratic oath was a thing, but until the 1980s it was routinely tossed in the bin during human dissections, regarded as little more than the wrapping that gets in the way of studying everything else. Over the past few decades, though, our understanding of it has evolved and (arguably) overshot – now, there are plenty of personal trainers who will insist that you should be loosening it up with a foam roller, or even harnessing its magical elastic powers to jump higher and do more press-ups. But what’s it really doing – and is there a way you can actually take advantage of it?

“The easiest way to describe fascia is to think about the structure of a tangerine,” says Natasha Kilian, a specialist in musculoskeletal physiotherapy at Pure Sports Medicine. “You’ve got the outer skin, and beneath that, the white pith that separates the segments and holds them together. Fascia works in a similar way: it’s a continuous, all-encompassing network that wraps around and connects everything in the body, from muscles and nerves to blood vessels and organs. It’s essentially the body’s internal wetsuit, keeping everything supported and integrated.” If you’ve ever carved a joint of meat, it’s the thin, silvery layer wrapped around the muscle, like clingfilm.

Now a hugely popular photographic genre, many women pay thousands to have intimate portraits taken of themselves by a professional. What do they get out of it?

A few hours into Brittany Witt’s boudoir shoot, with the mimosas kicking in and the music going strong, the photographer asked: “How do we feel about some completely nude photos?” Witt was lying on the bed in lingerie, in a studio in Texas, and hadn’t considered nudity an option. “I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this trust path.’” She undressed. The photographer, JoAnna Moore, covered Witt with body oil and squirted her with water, then asked her “to crawl across the floor with my full trust,” Witt says. “I did so. The pose was nude, and it was completely open. I wasn’t covered with a sheet. It was all out, it was all open, and it brought that worst level of self-doubt. I was terrified.”

Witt, 33, has come to see that terror as an important part of her experience. She used to be a competitive weightlifter. “I had a very masculine aura. I showed up in strength,” she says. At school and work – in the construction side of the oil and gas industry – she was “type A – scheduler, planner, had everything together, kind of led the group”. A turbulent home life when she was growing up led her to develop robust protection mechanisms which, in adulthood, acted as a block to relationships – issues she had been addressing with a life coach. But in that moment, on all-fours in Moore’s studio: “I felt those protections stripped away. There was nothing to hide behind, literally, figuratively.”

What begins as a harmless scroll through the secondhand app quickly turns into a window on our anxieties, ambitions and alter egos

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This week’s newsletter idea stemmed from where all good ideas stem from – procrastinating while on a deadline. All it took was for one person to reveal what was on their Vinted Favourites list and suddenly everyone was whipping out phones to compare.

The Lithuanian resale platform launched in the UK just over 10 years ago, but really revved up during 2021 when many of us ran out of excuses to avoid clearing out our wardrobes. Today, “it’s from Vinted” has become a humblebrag indicating you are the type of person who can track down a great deal and don’t buy new from mass retailers.

Its popularity is as enduring as its fabrics – and it allows men to age stylishly without worrying about their waistlines. One collector delves into the reasons the ordinary clothes of workers past live on in men’s wardrobes today

We’ll never know who designed much of the workwear worn by the labouring classes of yesteryear. But they might well be bemused that the ordinary garments they cut generously, to allow movement while operating a machine or driving a train, are now highly collectible and sought after – worn by men who do little more than swivel on an office chair.

If you’ve not noticed the prevalence of the dull tan of the Carhartt barn jacket or the triple-patch pocket of the chore coat, then perhaps you’ve been living in a cave with no signal to receive Instagram ads. Marks & Spencer is abundant with chore jackets and, in this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, the dad has his suitably saccharine emotional moment wearing one, too.

Shades of green, pink and glitter accompany sold out screenings as Wicked: For Good’s release prompts wave of themed dressing

Outside one of Leicester Square’s main cinemas, small crowds gathered in shades of green, pink and glitter, a loose palette of fairies and witches.

As Wicked: For Good lands in UK cinemas on Friday and this weekend, some fans have decided that simply watching the film isn’t enough. They want to wear it.

From an ancient castle in Easter Ross to a cosy cabin on Lough Erne, our tipsters share their favourite country boltholes for an active winter escape
• Tell us about a UK winter walk – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

After a beautiful wintry walk along the Roaches in Staffordshire (having been fuelled with Staffordshire oatcakes), we stayed at the historic YHA Hartington Hall youth hostel, a period drama setting for a cosy bunk. We woke up to find the Peak District under a blanket of snow, calm and with that magical silence that makes the world feel at peace.
Ruth Campbell

A series of walking festivals and cultural programmes aim to lure visitors to the Algarve’s woodland interiors and pretty villages to help boost tourism year round

‘I never mind doing the same walk over and over again,” said our guide, Joana Almeida, crouching beside a cluster of flowers. “Each time, there are new things – these weren’t here yesterday.” Standing on stems at least two centimetres tall and starring the dirt with white petals, the fact these star of Bethlehem flowers sprung up overnight was a beautiful testament to how quickly things can grow and regenerate in this hilly, inland section of the Algarve, the national forest of Barão de São João. It was also reassuring to learn that in an area swept by forest fires in September, species such as strawberry trees (which are fire-resistant thanks to their low resin content) were beginning to bounce back – alongside highly flammable eucalyptus, which hinders other fire-retardant trees such as oak. Volunteers were being recruited to help with rewilding.

Visitor numbers to the Algarve are growing, with 2024 showing an increase of 2.6% on the previous year – but most arrivals head straight for the beach, despite there being so much more to explore. The shoreline is certainly wild and dramatic but the region is also keen to highlight the appeal of its inland areas. With the development of year-round hiking and cycling trails, plus the introduction of nature festivals, attention is being drawn to these equally compelling landscapes, featuring mountains and dense woodlands. The Algarve Walking Season (AWS) runs a series of five walking festivals with loose themes such as “water” and “archaeology” between November and April. It’s hoped they will inspire visitors year round, boosting the local economy and helping stem the tide of younger generations leaving in search of work.

With stunning beaches, cosy cafes and a lot fewer people, the unspoilt surfing village of Croyde has just as much to offer out of season

It’s been a while since I’ve struggled into damp neoprene of a morning. It’s the second day of a wintry weekend in Croyde, north-west Devon; I’m stiff from an hour in the sea the previous afternoon, and the upper part of the super-thick wetsuit won’t budge past my elbows. Together, my husband, Mark, and I jiggle and pull and yank it over my limbs. Finally, five minutes later, I am in a silver-blue sea, entirely empty, save for us. White-crested waves roll in, broiling and foaming, rocketing us forward towards the empty swathe of sand. For once there are no other boarders to dodge, no surfers whisking past: it’s exhilarating, extraordinary and … really rather cold.

Croyde has long been a family favourite, but visiting in November does feel a bit of a gamble. It has a reputation as something of a ghost town in the off-season, with a large number of second homes and rentals that stay dark from October to April. But when an unexpected email landed from Endless Summer Beach House offering a 20% discount on winter stays, it seemed the ideal 30th birthday treat for my nephew, Ben. So, together with his girlfriend, Tasha, best mate, Rob, and my sister Caroline, we decided to take the plunge and find out what off-season Croyde is actually like.

The Alicante region is renowned for its rice and seafood dishes. Less well known is that its restaurant scene has a wealth of talented female chefs, a rarity in Spain

I’m on a quest in buzzy, beachy Alicante on the Costa Blanca to investigate the rice dishes the Valencian province is famed for, as well as explore the vast palm grove of nearby Elche. I start with a pilgrimage to a restaurant featured in my book on tapas, New Tapas, a mere 25 years ago. Mesón de Labradores in the pedestrianised old town is now engulfed by Italian eateries (so more pizza and pasta than paella) but it remains a comforting outpost of tradition and honest food.

Here I catch up with Timothy Denny, a British chef who relocated to Spain, gained an alicantina girlfriend and became a master of dishes from the region. Over a fideuá de mariscos (seafood noodles, €20), we chew over local gastronomy. “For me, Alicante epitomises the Mediterranean – for rice, seafood and artichokes,” he says. “But there are curiosities, too, like pavo borracho.” Tim explains that so-called “drunken turkeys” are cooked in vast amounts of cognac plus a shot of red wine and eventually emerge as a hefty stew, perfect in winter.

Dread the thought of party chat? This selection of cultural keypoints will put some fizz in your conversation

It seemed Trump had finally dealt with domestic terrorist Jimmy Kimmel after his chat show was briefly cancelled, but now it’s back on air. So should we expect more censorship? Surely South Park is skating on thin ice by mocking the president and his allegedly inadequate penis? Maybe the president will throw a curveball and declare a nature show about squirrels to be a secret antifa recruitment operation? Or perhaps he will simply cut the niceties and just put Oprah Winfrey up on Showtrial (“Ratings like you’ve never seen before!”)?

Our student theatre group had the bright idea of using actual knives on stage for authenticity. The blade missed my aorta by about a centimetre

As someone committed to my craft, I’ve always believed that the show must go on. An accident in my second year of university took it to new extremes. It was the Exeter University theatre society’s annual play at the Edinburgh fringe and I’d landed the part of Cassius in Julius Caesar. The director decided that instead of killing himself, Cassius would die during a choreographed fight with his rival, Mark Antony. We also chose to use real knives, which sounds absurd, but we wanted to be authentic. The plan was for the actor playing Antony to grab my arm as I held the knife, and pretend to push it behind my back. We must have rehearsed the sequence 50 times.

We were about halfway through our month-long run, performing to a decently sized audience. Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong.

Whether it’s a tipple with the neighbours or your office party, dress to impress in tactile fabrics and jewel tones

Rachel Reeves’s ‘mansion tax’ may encourage people who were considering downsizing to do so. Here are some options

Alan, 87, has devoted his life to trying to defy death, and has promised his wife, Sylvia, that they will be cryogenically preserved upon death to be reunited in the future. However, when Sylvia dies all too soon, Alan unexpectedly falls in love with another woman and is forced to reconsider his future plans. An extraordinary love story, told with humour and tenderness about how we deal with loss, our own mortality and the prospect of eternal life.

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead market

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.

Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (£1.3bn) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines.

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills

‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.”

It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chatting until dawn. The talk laid the ground for what would eventually become Before Sunrise, a star-crossed romance that channelled an off-screen bromance as it sent Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around mid-90s Vienna, walking and talking and stopping to kiss. “Yeah, that was the moment. That set the tone,” says Linklater, remembering. “Meeting Ethan backstage, then flying out to Vienna.”

Twenty years after the first face transplant, patients are dying, data is missing, and the experimental procedure’s future hangs in the balance

In the early hours of 28 May 2005, Isabelle Dinoire woke up in a pool of blood. After fighting with her family the night before, she turned to alcohol and sleeping tablets “to forget”, she later said.

Reaching for a cigarette out of habit, she realized she couldn’t hold it between her lips. She understood something was wrong.

We would like to hear from people who could be affected by the new council tax surcharge on homes worth £2m or more

Rachel Reeves has announced that from April 2028, owners of properties in England valued at £2m and over in 2026 will be required to pay an annual council tax surcharge.

The value of qualifying properties will be determined next year by the government’s Valuation Office Agency, with four price bands. The surcharge will rise from £2,500 a year for properties valued between £2m and £2.5m, to £7,500 a year for those valued in the highest band of £5m and above.

If you have a question about the budget, let us know here and we’ll try to answer it

Rachel Reeves has set out her budget, in which she has scrapped the two-child benefit cap, brought in a new “mansion tax” on high-value properties and introduced higher income tax rates on savings, dividends and money earned from property.

As expected, the chancellor also announced that income tax thresholds would be frozen until the 2030-31 tax year. Basic rates of income tax, VAT and national insurance will not go up, which Reeves says means Labour has kept its manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people.

As Sean Duffy has urged passengers to mind their manners, we would like to hear about the worst breaches of airline etiquette that you’ve seen

The US transportation secretary Sean Duffy has started a “civility campaign” for air travel, urging passengers to dress smartly instead of wearing PJs and slippers, keeping children’s behaviour in check and remembering their manners.

With this in mind, we would like to hear about the untoward airline behaviour you’ve witnessed. What is the worst breach of aeroplane etiquette you’ve seen?

Guardian column the Pet I’ll Never Forget is returning and we’d like to hear your stories about the amazing pets that you’ve loved

After a one year hiatus - and due to popular demand - the Guardian will soon be resuming the Pet I’ll Never Forget, a column celebrating the magnificent creatures and mischievous critters who have left an indelible mark on their owners.

It’s a real who’s who of pet royalty. There’s Nelson, the unapologetic one-eyed cat; Verity, the kleptomaniac pug; Thumper, the frisky rabbit who got pregnant through her cage; Rambo, the Dexter-watching tarantula, to name but a few.

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The Hong Kong tower block fire, Russian drone strikes in Kharkiv, floods in Thailand and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists