What’s so life-affirming about collecting and trading miniature animals, keyrings, stickers and pins? We visit one of the 1,500 trinket exchanges to find out

I’m standing, holding a thumbnail-sized glass owl, in front of a pink box filled with a boggling kaleidoscope of colours, shapes and textures. There’s a plush elephant wearing a green and pink sombrero; a rubber oval that is part doughnut with sprinkles, part frog; a bubble tea keyring; stickers and pins; a sparkly tangle of bracelets and much more. My mission? To swap my owl to experience first-hand the buzz of trading at a trinket exchange.

Boxes filled with tchotchkes that visitors exchange for their own trinkets are popping up everywhere. Emerging in the US last autumn (Philadelphia had one of the first using a ready-made electrical junction box, a popular format), they’re a new iteration of a phenomenon that started with Little Free Libraries and diversified during the pandemic into myriad neighbourhood installations.

Ronnie is using Billy’s name to register for free streaming services and gyms, which Billy objects to. You get to preside over this trial
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Unlike the kettle or the wifi, my contact details aren’t for communal use. Plus it’s annoying

The actor on dealing with disruptive drinkers in his pub, what he’d ask Shakespeare, and being urged by Alec Guinness to withdraw from Stonewall

In more than six decades of acting, what has changed the most? eamonmcc
My first job, in 1961, was at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry, the first British civic theatre built after the second world war, with public funds and a subsequent Arts Council grant. My weekly wage was £8, enough to pay for my flat, which cost three guineas, and to eat well enough. Every city of similar size had a repertory company, presenting a new production every two weeks, and crucially providing employment for tyro actors in need of a prolonged apprenticeship in the company of senior players. You learned what you could and couldn’t do and what you could aspire to. Today, alas, there is not a single rep company in the UK and no comparable system for training new talent.

My Belgrade flat, built to house a member of the disbanded company, now holds the council’s office of outreach and education. What is unchanged since 1961 is the enthusiasm of audiences for lively theatre, classic or newly written. Going to live theatre is still one of the principal amusements in the UK.

She hit the big time with 4 Non Blondes, then penned hits for everyone from Christina Aguilera to Courtney Love. But as an intimate new film about her life shows, she’s had to confront illness, family trauma and an identity crisis

When Linda Perry agreed to let the director Don Hardy film her at work in her studio, she had no idea what she was getting into. Perry – the singer, producer and wildly successful songwriter-for-hire – had been friends with Hardy since she scored his 2020 film, Citizen Penn, about the actor Sean Penn’s charity work in Haiti. If nothing else, Perry hoped she might use some of Hardy’s footage as content on her Instagram account: “So he just started showing up and I soon forgot he was there.”

After a few weeks, Hardy told Perry he had edited 30 minutes of footage and shown it to colleagues. “He said: ‘We think there’s an incredible documentary to be made here,’” she recalls. “And so I said: ‘OK, go ahead but don’t talk to me about it. I don’t want to know anything. Just do what you’re going to do and if I said it or did it, I’ll stand by it.’ And then things just started to go cuckoo for me.”

Exclusive: Documents obtained by consortium of journalists show role of Moscow university in training operatives in military intelligence

Last April, Vladimir Putin visited the campus of Bauman Moscow state technical university, set on the banks of the Yauza River in the east of the city and home to some of the country’s brightest scientific minds.

He toured the campus, met undergraduates and boasted about Moscow’s ambitious plans for space missions to the moon and Mars. “You have everything it takes to be competitive,” Putin told the students.

Interactive or imaginative, educational or just plain fun – whatever toddler you know, these gifts are parent, kid and play-expert approved

• The best toys for one-year-olds: 25 fun, skill-building ideas

Children really start to become little people by the time they’re two, with strong opinions on what they do (and don’t) like. Most are walking and running around – often at high speeds – as well as climbing and pulling themselves up on anything they can get their hands on.

They’re also a lot of fun, constantly learning and developing physically, with fine and gross motor skills, along with verbally mastering new words every day.

The outbreak has been linked to a birdwatching expedition in Argentina joined by two passengers before they boarded the ship

Meanwhile, Hungary’s incoming prime minister Péter Magyar has arrived for talks at Palazzo Chigi in Rome, where he is due to meet with Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni.

Since he is not the Hungarian PM yet – he will take his role this weekend – he was officially welcomed outside the Palazzo by a senior adviser to the Italian PM instead.

Tory leader tells Sun that there won’t be council tie-ups as Farage’s party is not ‘serious’ as votes under way in England, Wales and Scotland

And here is the eve-of-poll statement that Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, issued yesterday.

Service is a value which has always sustained Wales. It’s a value instilled in me from a young age by my parents, both teachers. It’s a value I’ve sought to pass on to my children - the gift of giving back to the people and places who gave us so much.

Tomorrow is a chance for the people of Wales to choose who serves our nation for the next four years. It’s Plaid Cymru’s deep sense of service to Wales - focusing just on our needs and our future - that first drew me to politics.

Today is Scotland’s opportunity to choose a better future by voting SNP for real action on the cost of living, to lock Nigel Farage out of power, and to secure a fresh start with independence.

I urge people in every part of Scotland to unite behind the SNP to make it happen.

The SNP is the only party that has set out a positive vision for Scotland’s future - and we are the only party with a serious plan to support people with the cost of living.

We have set out our plans to bring down food costs, give families more support with the cost of childcare, lower the cost of your daily commute and provide more support for first time buyers.

The SNP wants to lower your bills – but all the other parties want to do is stop us.

They have no plan of their own and nothing to offer. They want you to vote for an opposition to stop things happening. I am asking people to vote for an SNP Government to get things done.

By casting both votes for the SNP, Scotland can elect a strong majority SNP government that will always stand up for Scotland, prioritise the cost of living, and deliver that fresh start of independence that Scotland needs.

That opportunity of a better future is now within touching distance. Let’s make it happen today by voting SNP.

Holder went back to woman’s Cheltenham flat after night out and refused to stop assault even when she began crying

A co-founder of the clothing company Superdry has been jailed for eight years for raping a woman after a night out in Cheltenham.

James Holder, 54, had been due to get a taxi back to his home in the Cotswolds with a male friend. Instead, the pair got into the victim’s taxi and went to her flat in the Gloucestershire town, where Holder raped her.

Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

Towie star Hall, 35, found unresponsive with head wounds reportedly caused by shards of glass at villa on Spanish island

The Only Way Is Essex star Jake Hall has been found dead in Mallorca.

The former reality TV show personality was found unresponsive with head wounds reportedly caused by shards of glass at a villa on the Spanish island.

The US and Iran have offered conflicting messages over the likelihood of a deal being reached imminently

The European Union is set to tell airlines the impact from the Iran war on tourism is not yet severe enough to justify emergency measures for the sector, draft EU guidelines seen by Reuters showed.

“The current situation does not point to the need for dedicated measures for the tourism sector, unlike during the COVID-19 crisis,” said the draft EU guidelines, which the European Commission is due to publish on Friday.

British Medical Association says review into gender identity services was ‘robust’ after previously rejecting findings

The trade union representing doctors across the UK has dropped its opposition to the findings of the Cass review of gender identity services across the NHS.

The British Medical Association (BMA) had previously rejected the findings of the landmark review of transgender healthcare, with the medical body refusing to endorse the report’s findings.

• Fifa association with Panini goes back to 1970

• 2030 World Cup will be final tournament

Panini World Cup sticker albums will become a thing of the past following the centenary finals in 2030 after Fifa announced a new partnership on Thursday.

The Fifa association with Panini already stretches back more than 50 years, with the first World Cup sticker book published ahead of the 1970 finals in Mexico, and will have reached 60 years by 2030.

Exclusive: Documents show Modella Capital, which bought the chain last year, is so far owed £2.9m in royalty fees

The investment company that owns the former WH Smith high street stores is charging the retailer millions of pounds in licence fees for the right to use its widely derided TG Jones name, the Guardian can reveal.

Modella Capital – which bought the chain from WH Smith’s parent company last year – on Wednesday blamed weak consumer spending as it laid out a restructuring plan that could shut 150 of its 450 shops. It also said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”.

Court in Hanover says man entitled to payout after he and his family had to lie on concrete

A German holidaymaker has won a payout of almost €1,000 after being unable to find a sunlounger for himself and his family because other guests had got there first.

The man, whose identity is not known, holidayed on the island of Kos, in Greece, with his family in 2024. He said that, despite waking up at the crack of dawn every morning to carry out a 20-minute search, he had not been able to lay claim to a lounger.

Stansted passengers disagree that stopping airports serving alcohol before early flights will reduce bad behaviour

For most people, the idea of a pint with breakfast is pretty grim. But at the Wetherspoon’s in Stansted’s departure lounge on Thursday morning, it appeared to be the beverage of choice.

“It’s a holiday ritual,” said Dee Wood, 60, a waste policy officer, who was enjoying a pint while waiting to board her Alicante-bound morning flight. “It’s like the start of holiday,” said her friend Rachel Almond, 59, a community planner, who was treating herself to a lager. “We don’t get drunk, we just have a pint, say cheers and off we go.”

Powerful radar system is providing new data on city’s subsidence, which experts hope will draw more attention to it

Walking into Mexico City’s sprawling central Zócalo is a dizzying experience. At one end of the plaza, the capital’s cathedral, with its soaring spires, slumps in one direction. An attached church, known as the Metropolitan Sanctuary, tilts in the other. The nearby National Palace also seems off-kilter.

The teetering of many of the capital’s historic buildings is the most visible sign of a phenomenon that has been ongoing for more than a century: Mexico City is sinking at an alarming rate.

Bigger cars including electric can cause multiple harms, yet resistance to rise of US-style vehicles has had mixed support

On a brisk winter’s evening in Europe’s automotive heartland, a cyclist who had pushed for safer streets went out on his bike for a final time. Andreas Mandalka had documented dangerous driving and shoddy cycling infrastructure for years, measuring the margins at which cars zipped past him and posting videos of blatant violations. While quick to remind readers that only a small proportion of drivers behaved badly, the 44-year-old blogger in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, had grown frustrated with authorities for failing to act. He felt they viewed him as a nuisance.

As he cycled down a straight stretch of renovated road that runs parallel to a forest path he had flagged for poor quality, lights bright on his bike and helmet firm on his head, he was fatally struck from behind by a car.

For 400 years, The Hare and Hounds in Bowland Bridge offered a warm welcome to locals and travellers. Then the rent doubled. With two pubs a day closing in England and Wales, can the community save this 17th-century gem?

The Hare and Hounds in Bowland Bridge, a few miles from Windermere, is exactly how you’d want a Lakeland pub to be. A pretty 17th-century stone building, whitewashed, with a couple of dormer windows poking up from the slate roof and a view of the fells, it was originally a coaching inn on the route from Manchester to Glasgow.

It is not, however, looking its best today. We arrive in a proper Cumbrian downpour. It should be warm and welcoming, with a place by the wood-burner to dry out and down a pint of Wainwright, perhaps. But the door is shut, the curtains drawn in one of the downstairs windows and no sign of life through the other. Attached to the front of the building is a sign; not a pub sign (the name of the pub is painted elegantly in grey over the door), this one has another message: FOR SALE.

Specimen from 1983 lay forgotten at Natural History Museum until recently, when spotted by a volunteer and identified as new genus

He has lizards, bats, frogs, weevils, flatworms, snails and spiders named after him. But now Sir David Attenborough can celebrate his 100th birthday with an entirely new genus named in his honour.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum in London have paid tribute to the world-renowned broadcaster for his 100th birthday on 8 May by describing a new genus of parasitic wasp and a new species found within the museum’s collections.

Would you know how to respond if someone was taken critically ill? Experts explain the basic skills we can all learn and how to perform them with confidence

“If you learn one thing, it should be how to resuscitate,” says Richard Webber, an associate clinical director of St John Ambulance and practising NHS paramedic in the south of England. “We know that for every one minute delay in restarting the heart, there is a 10% reduction in survivability.”

Whether your skin is dull, dry or sensitive, these are our expert’s favourite formulas from her test of 25. Plus, dermatologists share their top tips

• The best eye creams for banishing bags, puffiness and fine lines

Moisturiser is a crucial step in any skincare routine. It supports barrier function and repair, helps protect your skin from environmental stress, and even forms the base of a flawless face of makeup.

However, the market is flooded with options – Boots has more than a thousand listings under facial moisturisers – and finding the right formulation for your needs can be a nightmare. Admittedly, I found the task of writing this page far more daunting than anything I’d tackled before.

Best face moisturiser overall:
Haruharu Wonder Black rice 5 ceramide cream

Best budget moisturiser:
Simple hydrating light moisturiser

Rush-released in the same year as Prince of Thieves blockbuster, this gritty British movie battled winter weather and chronic illness – and it still holds up

Thirty-five years ago, two films about the legend of Robin Hood – stealer from the rich, giver to the poor – met and duelled in cinemas; we all know who won, Kevin Costner’s big-budget blockbuster, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But what about the other one? It was titled simply Robin Hood, directed by John Irvin and starring Patrick Bergin in the title role alongside a pre-Pulp Fiction Uma Thurman as Maid Marian.

“It was very much a stand-alone film with the aim of giving Kevin Costner’s version a good kicking if we could,” says Irvin, now 85. “The studio wanted to go immediately because they wanted to pre-empt the Costner.”

A new show of this Welsh-born artist’s mesmerising portraits is worth visiting for one nude alone: a painting of an eyes-closed, long-legged, elegant brunette, inspired by Sleeping Venus

Sylvia Sleigh wouldn’t paint people if she didn’t find them interesting – and by interesting, I mean attractive. She didn’t idealise nudes like the old masters. Instead, the naked bodies she depicted were really, truly beautiful. Many were friends, among them artists and critics. Others were paid models. Scrolling through images of her radical, realist artworks online, I find myself humming along to the REM song: “Shiny happy people …”

It was surely part of the appeal of Johanna Lawrenson, the elegant brunette with enviably long legs who posed for the 1963 painting The Bridge. Few exhibitions are worth visiting for a single artwork alone, but this monumental canvas is special. Sleigh kept it until her death in 2010, at which point it was donated to a not-for-profit theatre company in New York. Now it’s for sale, and before it’s snapped up there’s a rare chance to see it on show at Malarkey, a small space overlooking Russell Square in London.

Global game celebrates centenary event in London as players of all ages showcase their skill, style and speed

“Table tennis is very good for the mind as well as the body, whatever age you are,” says 73-year-old Wang Qi, the oldest competitor at the Table Tennis Team World Championships in London.

Incredibly the Fiji player, who hails from China, is 61 years older than the youngest player, Enya Hu, from Switzerland. Age is evidently no barrier in this increasingly popular sport.

Dimitrije Levajac of Serbia plays a defensive shot in his victory over Luka Mladenovic of Luxembourg in the early round robin stages at the Copper Box Arena.

In my constituency, volunteers chat with people in deprived areas – most of whom find they are to the left of their voting intentions. The results are exhilarating

Most people have made up their minds, and nothing you can say will change them: that’s the credo of parties such as Labour and the Democrats. Don’t challenge voters on the doorstep. Use focus groups to find out what they want, and give it to them. Follow, don’t lead. But all that’s on them, not us.

It’s true that conventional attempts at persuasion fail. A meta-analysis and original experiments by the political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising” in US general elections “is zero”. But this says nothing about voters and everything about the useless approach of the parties trying to reach them.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

There’s no better way to stay relevant than to stop looking over your shoulder and instead live for the present. Unfortunately my mindset is the complete opposite

An eminent talent agent and manager, Professor Jonathan Shalit OBE, was asked how he kept his company successful over so many years in the ever-changing world of show business. I’m sure the reasons are many, but the one he advanced on this occasion was his loathing of a particular bit of stinking thinking. He said that if anyone in a meeting said anything along the lines of “The business isn’t what it was” or “Things aren’t like how they were”, he would bring the meeting to an end.

I loved this. What better way to stay relevant, stay positive, than to waste no time lamenting a past that may or may not have been any better in the first place. What’s the point? What actually is the point? Yet so many of us think of nothing else. Life was better then, the world was better then, I was better then, blah blah blah. No wonder so much political discourse seems to echo this.

Let’s not draw the wrong conclusions from Hungary’s election or the US president’s troubles

Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in last month’s Hungarian election has led to an outbreak of democratic optimism. Across the globe, democrats are drawing lessons from the results and speculating about the decline of the far right. There is simultaneously a consensus that Donald Trump has gone from inspiration to “liability” for the global far right.

While the fall of Orbán has great symbolic significance and important consequences for EU politics (see the EU-Ukraine deal), we should be very careful not to read too much into it for three reasons.

Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today

As the traditional route of school, university and entry-level job is ever more precarious, it’s no wonder parents are feeling the strain

Called on to do long division, how would you fare? I had no illusions going in. I couldn’t do it the first time round and, four decades later, it seemed unlikely the situation had improved. (For a split second I thought AI might help, but it was like listening to street directions, only worse.) And so, while parents of 11-year-olds offer sympathy and support for their children ahead of year 6 Sats exams next week, let’s not lose sight of the real victims here, which is us parents who have been forced to revisit multi-stage maths problems when we had made large and deliberate life choices to avoid them.

Of course, Sats “don’t matter”, or if you’re a more liberal parent, exams as a whole don’t matter – a statement that, if it was a consoling lie at one time, seems to be becoming ever more true. Arguments around the value of testing have been going on for ever, but as AI eviscerates the entry-level job market and university degrees become increasingly expensive and at odds with the skills young people may actually need, you have to wonder whether the old systems of education are still fit for purpose – and if they’re not, what exactly should replace them?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Decades of complacency cannot be magicked away by drilling in the North Sea – or even by hoping that renewables will quickly power everything

• Ewan Gibbs is a historian of energy at the University of Glasgow

First it was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now it is the blockade of the world’s petroleum artery in the Gulf. For the second time in four years, Britain is facing an energy crisis that has been made much worse because of the absence of preparation by its political leaders.

The fact is that our energy politics were conceived for a world where convulsive, global events were a thing of the past. The notion that it would be difficult to access supplies of oil or liquefied natural gas from the international markets did not figure in the understanding of the politicians and officials who shaped our perilous current moment. But even today, the advocates of energy sovereignty on the left and right appear to lack knowledge, understanding or power over this very foundational matter.

Ewan Gibbs is a historian of energy, industry, work and protest at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland

Europeans must urgently seek to close their security gaps in case Russia attacks – and the US refuses to defend its allies

Donald Trump’s war in Iran and tirades against Nato allies are accelerating moves to develop a plan B for European security in case the US is no longer willing to help defend allies against a Russian attack. Europe must prepare for sudden vulnerability gaps if the fickle US president decides to pull out key military enablers before Europeans can develop their own alternatives.

European countries have already taken over financial and political responsibility for supporting Ukraine in its struggle against Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, as Trump has increasingly sided with Moscow in trying to force Kyiv to hand over swathes of territory to Russia. After four years of war in Europe, most leaders have come to recognise Ukraine as a military and technological asset for European defence rather than a burden or a risk factor.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

With her eye on No 10, the former deputy PM is apparently shedding bad habits. But isn’t a proudly imperfect leader just what we need?

Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, is the bookmakers’ favourite to be Keir Starmer’s successor. She is also someone who has recently given up vaping, according to the government minister Steve Reed, who had dinner with her at the weekend and told Sky News about it. These two facts about her – wanting to be PM and quitting vaping – are almost certainly connected.

Plainly, giving up vaping is preparation for the highest office. Rayner loves vaping: who can forget that fabulous photo of her, in the middle of the tax turmoil that led to her resignation last year, vaping in a dinghy off Brighton beach? You can get away with a huge amount of vaping as a middle-aged woman, owing to your fabled cloak of invisibility. I have vaped in committee room 10 in the House of Commons. I have vaped in the middle of an interview about whether or not vaping is bad for you. But I draw the line at vaping in the middle of the actual sea.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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

Local and devolved elections will reveal fragmented party allegiances that cannot be fairly represented in parliament via first past the post

Some results in local council and devolved elections this week can be forecast with confidence, but none with precision. Labour will have a torrid time everywhere. Reform UK will probably do well, continuing the trend of recent years. The Greens will surge in parts of London. Plaid Cymru will enjoy a breakthrough in Wales. Those trends could produce a wide spectrum of outcomes in terms of seats on councils and in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Much depends on the way that tight races involving many parties are filtered through different electoral systems.

The first-past-the-post model used to elect local authorities in England is ill-suited to multiparty politics. It was already flawed in the era when political competition was defined by the rivalry between Labour and the Conservatives. Smaller parties were locked out. Too many voters felt their ballots counted for nothing in safe seats.

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.

For nearly a century, the Guardian has been challenging and delighting its readers with these puzzles. Here’s to 30,000 more

Late in 1928, the Guardian made plans to give its readers a weekly cryptic puzzle.

At the time, crosswords were considered a waste of time; other newspapers campaigned against them as a distraction keeping the working man from his duties, but the cryptic was different.

Readers respond to George Monbiot’s article on party funding

George Monbiot is surely right that large private donations poison democratic trust, whether or not corruption can ever be shown (Political donations are poison to our democracy – but there’s an easy antidote to that, 30 April). The damage lies not only in any favour bought but in the suspicion created. When one billionaire can appear to sustain a political party, politics begins to look less like representation and more like private ownership.

Monbiot’s membership-based model has moral weight. It would force parties to organise among citizens rather than flatter wealth and it would make politicians seek members, not patrons. That alone would change the culture.

A reader recalls her experience of trying to obtain a vasectomy for her husband on the NHS in the 1990s

Reading this article (Woman denied permanent birth control on NHS wins case with ombudsman, 1 May) reminded me of my husband’s and my experience of trying to obtain sterilisation on the NHS in the 1990s. At the time we were in our 30s and neither of us wanted to have children.

Rather than for me to continue taking the pill, we decided that the best option for us was for my husband to have a vasectomy. At the hospital consultation, I was flabbergasted when the doctor said that he was not going to approve the procedure on the grounds that at some time in the future my husband could leave me and want to have children with another woman.

Dr Stephanie van Eeden on a UK-wide research programme that is aimed at young adults. Plus a letter from Kenneth Low

With reference to the article by Hugh Davies about his experiences of having been born with a cleft lip (A moment that changed me: I cried about my cleft lip for the first time in my 60s, 29 April), it is fantastic to see cleft experiences given national attention, especially when there is still so much misunderstanding about what a cleft truly is. It is often assumed to be a small cosmetic difference. In reality, it shapes feeding, hearing, speech, dental development, facial growth and emotional wellbeing from the very first days of life. Someone in their 60s speaking openly about the lifelong impact of this is powerful.

The reforms that regionalised cleft care in the early 2000s have meant that experiences have changed since Hugh’s childhood. Today’s children benefit from coordinated surgical care, better speech and hearing support, and a far stronger understanding of psychological needs.

Paula McInally responds to an extract from Gemma Correll’s book on her relationship with booze

I read your article (Welcome to Anxietyland: I used alcohol to hide my fear – but booze became a very bad friend, 3 May) with the particular recognition of someone who is still in the middle of it.

I’m 37. I’ve spent the past few weeks signed off work with burnout and depression. And like Gemma, I found that alcohol was very good at taking the edge off. Until it wasn’t.

• Discover and buy more of Ben’s cartoons here

• Order your own print of this cartoon from the Guardian Print Shop

Seamer has been given the cold shoulder since February 2024 but is back in the conversation this summer

Pop quiz: in the last five years, who is the only England seamer to have sent down 50 overs in a Test match more than once?

The answer, if the headline and picture haven’t given the game away, is a certain Ollie Robinson. Yep, the same seamer who has been overlooked by England since February 2024 on account of not being fit enough for the demands of the job.

The tiny Italian club are flying high with the help of the former Arsenal player, ambitious owners and a scouting guru inspired by Football Manager

The serene sound of lapping water is broken only by the whir of a seaplane engine swooping to land. Outside the hangar to which the aircraft will soon return, a crowd has gathered well before kick-off. Later, most will scale the steep steps of the adjacent Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia.

To the right sits Villa Carminati, a new private members’ club that also houses hospitality guests on matchdays. It is a unique setting for a unique football club. When bathed in sunshine, as was the case for last Sunday’s goalless draw with Napoli, Como 1907 is a waterside paradise. Or, as their president Mirwan Suwarso puts it when drawing parallels between the club and Disney, it is the “theme park” division of the “main brand … Lake Como”.

Double Tour de France winner makes his debut when race begins on Friday and is the outstanding favourite for victory in Rome

Jonas Vingegaard’s bid to complete a rare Grand Tour grand slam by winning the 2026 Giro d’Italia begins in Bulgaria on Friday when the double Tour de France winner makes his debut in the Italian race.

Vingegaard, the winner of the 2022 and 2023 Tours de France, has been eclipsed by the achievements of Tadej Pogacar – winner this season of nine races in 11 days of racing – but is the outstanding favourite for victory in Rome on 31 May.

• Jamaica striker decides to go when contract ends in June

• City could not match other offers to the 29-year-old

Khadija “Bunny” Shaw has decided to leave Manchester City this summer at the end of her contract, the Guardian understands, after extensive talks over a new deal concluded with her opting to pursue a new challenge.

The Jamaica striker, who is on course to win the Women’s Super League’s Golden Boot for a third consecutive season, was close to agreeing a new deal in March and is understood to have told City she wanted to stay, but negotiations on the finer details hit a number of stumbling blocks, including the proposed length of the extension, and the WSL leaders are preparing for life without their star player.

• 700 riders will be in initial testing pool for weekly race

• Testing is part of wider programme of integrity measures

First came the boom in virtual cycling, with thousands of people from across the globe competing against each other. Then came cash prizes. Now one major online platform has taken the next logical step by launching anti-doping testing for e-racers.

MyWhoosh, which hosts the UCI Esports World Championships, has told the Guardian that the top riders in its weekly Sunday Race Club competition will now face random drug tests after they compete.

• Entain wants no operators unlicensed in UK as sponsors

• Two clubs did not advertise such companies this season

The Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has been urged to stop Premier League clubs from accepting sponsorship from gambling companies unlicensed in the UK in the latest public consultation over its licensing regime.

Entain, the global sports betting company that owns Ladbrokes and Coral, has submitted a response to the IFR asking for a clarification of its guidance that would prevent clubs from doing commercial deals with operators unlicensed in the UK.

The Wellington Phoenix coach reflects on the aftermath of the Olympic spying scandal and leading her team into a first A-League Women’s finals campaign

Football is not the kind of profession that lends itself to time off for birthdays and the like. Especially when one is preparing to lead the Wellington Phoenix into their first A-League Women’s finals campaign, as Bev Priestman was last week. Yet, especially when contrasted with the year prior, when she was still in the midst of a one-year Fifa ban after the spying scandal that engulfed Canada women’s football team during the Paris Olympics, being among “her people” turned out to be a gift in and of itself.

“It was my 40th birthday [last week],” Priestman tells Moving the Goalposts. “And it’s those moments, I think to a year ago, and how I felt. And then how I felt in the club [this year], around my staff, around the team. I do this job because I love people. I love the game, obviously, but it’s working with people, getting your energy with people, and trying to inspire people and help them find a better version of themselves.

• St Andrews club opened membership to women in 2014

• Dowling will serve as club captain from September

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews has appointed amateur player Claire Dowling as the first woman captain in its 272-year history.

The club, based at the “home of golf” on the east coast of Scotland, opened its membership to women 12 years ago.

Briton, who defends his WBO title against Daniel Dubois, talks Fury-Joshua, doping and his punditry sideline

“The only expectation I have is that it will end in a knockout,” Fabio Wardley says cheerfully as he looks ahead to his dangerous first defence of the WBO world heavyweight title against Daniel Dubois in Manchester on Saturday night. “Don’t Blink” is the promotional tagline for a battle between two powerful yet vulnerable heavyweights and, for once, this is less boxing bluster than reasonable advice for anyone watching a fight which could be the most dramatic heavyweight contest this year.

Wardley and Dubois are devastating punchers who also often look at risk of losing. Dubois has been beaten three times in 25 fights while dispatching his other opponents with brutal efficiency. Two years ago, the unbeaten Wardley came close to defeat against Frazer Clarke in their first fight, which ended up being a draw after a damaging bloodbath for both men. He knocked out Clarke after two savage minutes in the rematch but then lost every round against Justis Huni before producing a chilling late stoppage of the skilful Australian last June.

Ryanair says that unlike others it will not be cancelling summer flights, as it hedged fuel contracts before Iran war

• Business live – latest updates

Airlines that cancel flights because of fuel shortages this summer will still have to compensate passengers under European law, the EU transport commissioner has said.

Apostolos Tzitzikostas told the Financial Times that jet fuel prices or shortages do not meet the criteria that protect EU airlines from passenger claims.

London Waterloo services particularly hit after radio network problem prevented communication between drivers and signallers

Trains in parts of southern England have been severely disrupted after a fault in a radio system.

Services out of London Waterloo, one of Britain’s busiest railway stations, have been particularly delayed.

IOPC has launched investigation into one serving and four former police officers for potential misconduct

A serving Metropolitan police officer and four former officers are being investigated over their handling of allegations of sexual abuse made against Mohamed Al Fayed, according to reports.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has launched an investigation into the five individuals for potential misconduct following complaints against the former Harrods owner, who died in 2023 aged 94.

At least three households in Barry, south Wales, identified as having contracted the liver infection

Health authorities have asked parents and carers to be “vigilant with their children’s hand-washing” after a hepatitis A outbreak in Barry, south Wales.

Public Health Wales said at least three households in the seaside town had been identified as having contracted the same liver infection, and there were worries it was spreading locally.

World is approaching point where no one can shut down a rogue AI, says director of body behind research

It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.

In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.

Debate continues to rage over whether a strange carcass found in 1937 was a new species or a basking shark. Either way, the case reveals how little is known about what lies beneath the waves

Its head resembled a dog’s, its downturned nose a camel’s, and at the end of its reptilian body was the tail of a horse. Witnesses say it was covered in a thin white film. When the remains of a strange creature were pulled from the stomach of a sperm whale, most of those present agreed: it was a sea monster – or at least something unknown living in the depths off Canada’s west coast.

Crews at the whaling station in the archipelago of Haida Gwaii assembled a platform of wooden boxes and laid out the 3-metre (10ft) carcass, using a white sheet to display the curiosity that had baffled veteran whalers.

Julie, once a circus elephant, and Kariba, from a Belgian zoo, are to be moved to a former ranch in Portugal

Europe’s first large-scale elephant sanctuary, which is opening to offer a more natural environment for some of the 600 animals still held in captivity across the continent, is to receive its first arrivals.

Julie, Portugal’s last circus elephant, will be moved next month to the animal charity Pangea’s multimillion pound sanctuary in the Alentejo, 200km (124 miles) east of Lisbon, close to the border with Spain.

US war with Iran drives diesel fuel prices up during spring planting season, ‘hitting us at the wrong time’, farmers say

It has been a tough few years for American farmers.

Squeezed last year by tariffs, they lost an estimated $34.6bn when former trade partners stopped buying. Now, the war with Iran has not only depleted crucial fertilizer stores but has also driven diesel fuel up to record prices. Like the trucking industry, agriculture relies heavily on diesel to run machinery, as diesel-powered engines are more fuel efficient than gasoline-powered ones.

Intervention for farming and flood risk changes the unique systems as communities grapple with how to live alongside the vital waterways

When British settlers started building Christchurch city 170 years ago, they largely ignored the nearby Waimakariri River, which twists from the South Island’s alps towards the eastern shore.

But rain and glacial shifts compelled the braided river – a globally rare form of river with many woven channels – to take on a new shape, occasionally flooding land and depositing tonnes of shingle in its wake.

Jason Atherton, who has restaurants in Dubai, St Moritz and now Tuscany, says it’s tough to stay afloat in UK hospitality industry

A British Michelin-starred chef says he is opening restaurants abroad to subsidise his UK venues against a backdrop of high taxes and a struggling hospitality sector.

Jason Atherton is now in Forte dei Marmi, on the Tuscan coast in Italy, where he is preparing his newest opening, Maria’s, which will be in the Principessa hotel. The Sheffield-born chef now has restaurants all over the world, including in Dubai and St Moritz.

Ministers to mandate use of tools that record individuals’ cumulative exposure to harrowing incidents

Policing in England and Wales faces a reckoning over the levels of trauma experienced by officers and staff as “trauma tracker” tools are to be mandated by ministers to ensure the psychological toll caused by exposure to death, abuse and neglect is recorded.

A Home Office white paper published in January outlined a legislative push to make trauma monitoring systems mandatory across all 43 forces in England and Wales.

About 120 journalists and broadcast staff expected to protest about pay freeze as STV invests in new radio station

• UK politics live – latest updates

Coverage of Scotland’s election counts by STV, the commercial broadcaster, is expected to be heavily hit by strike action in an escalating dispute over pay.

The National Union of Journalists and the technical union Bectu have targeted STV’s election reporting for their second strike this year in protest at its decision to impose a company-wide pay freeze after a significant fall in revenues.

Reform UK leader has registered wide range of financial interests on top of his Commons salary since July 2024

• Cameo, speeches, pushing gold bullion: how Farage has made millions since becoming an MP

Nigel Farage’s income since he was elected as an MP has now reached £2m on top of his parliamentary salary, analysis of the register of MPs has shown.

Farage’s earning power sets him alongside a small number of MPs who have been able to leverage their status for external income alongside their day jobs – drawing comparisons to Boris Johnson, who made about £5m on top of his MP’s salary in the six months after he resigned as prime minister.

Case against Kacy Claassen joins series of others in the US, calling to mind movies such as 1999’s Never Been Kissed

A 28-year-old woman pretended to be age 16 and enrolled at a Bronx high school under a false identity before New York City police jailed her recently, according to officials.

Kacy Claassen pleaded not guilty to charges of criminal impersonation in the second degree as well as trespassing on 28 April, the day after her arrest, Bronx court records show.

As Trump ramps up pressure by cutting off fuel to the island, Havana’s refuse is rarely collected, forcing residents to burn it in the streets despite the pollution

As thick smoke spread through the narrow streets of Havana, seeping into homes, schools and shops, Carlos Blanco, a chef, opened his bedroom window to see what was going on. “I saw a mist. But it wasn’t mist – it was smoke,” he says, describing the toxic smog emanating from a smouldering mountain of rubbish.

As the US oil blockade on Cuba enters its fourth month, choking off most of the island’s fuel supplies, growing mounds of waste lie on street corners across Havana. Amid fuel scarcity, authorities have opted to ration petrol by reducing waste collection, leaving less than half of Havana’s rubbish trucks operational.

Authorities investigate Florent Montaclair over award given to himself and others including Noam Chomsky

At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of language in historical contexts – from an international society of the same name.

Organisers of nationwide protest say its aim is to stop the government turning young Germans into ‘cannon fodder’

Tens of thousands of pupils across Germany are expected to boycott the classroom and take to the streets in a nationwide protest organisers say is to stop the government’s rearmament policy turning young people into “cannon fodder”.

Despite threats from teachers’ associations and education ministries, which have said anyone who demonstrates during school hours could risk penalties and even expulsion, organisers say they expect the number of participants at Friday’s school strike to be at least as high as the estimated 50,000 who attended each of the first two.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• Climate campaigners attack Shell over ‘windfall’ profits from Iran war

The Danish shipping giant Maersk has maintained its profit guidance for the year, even as it reported a spike in fuel costs and warned that traffic through the strait of Hormuz “remains at a near standstill”.

The company, which transports goods around the world via sea, road, rail and air, said demand for shipping containers remained strong, but that war in the Middle East was ramping up costs.

“The reopening of the strait of Hormuz, whether it happens in the days to come or the months to come, will have limited impact on cargo flows.

What really are the most important factors to consider: first is our ability to mitigate the cost increases we have been suddenly faced with. And I would say so far we have been successful with both our cost measures and the revenue, the commercial measures that we have put in place to mitigate the impact of these increases to our financials.”

“The secondary effect from this is actually whether these increased costs are eventually going to lead to inflation and demand destruction as a result, which could create a softened market environment in the second half of the year.”

Powerful property and farming firm Grosvenor Group says knock-on effect of Iran war could arrive next year

Fertiliser shortages caused by the Iran war have driven up costs for UK farmers by up to 70% and will have a “dramatic” impact on food prices globally next year, according to one of Britain’s most powerful property and farming companies.

Mark Preston, executive trustee of the 349-year-old Grosvenor Group, controlled by the Duke of Westminster, said fertiliser “was already quite expensive” before the 50% to 70% surge in prices since the start of the Iran war in late February.

Zilis, an executive at Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, served on OpenAI’s board from 2020 to 2023

Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.

Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm.

Profits jump to £122m at ticketing retailer but it expects flat or declining revenues over the coming year

• Business live – latest updates

Trainline has said the US standoff with Iran is hitting its revenues, with rail ticket sales to foreign visitors to Europe affected.

The UK-based international ticketing agent said it expected revenues to stay flat or decline over the coming year, citing “the effects of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East on inbound air traffic into Europe”.

A trip to a museum becomes an unexpected adventure in a new immersive family show by Theatre-Rites and Factory International

This astounding true story, written by Neil Forsyth, asks the question: what if the A-Team was comprised entirely of disgruntled customs officers?

Imagine The A-Team but instead of a band of wrongfully convicted US army commandos who become soldiers of fortune, it’s a group of dissatisfied baggage searchers and VAT investigators who have taken their ties off. Are you sold? Good! Because Legends is a six-part thriller by Neil Forsyth based on the true story of a group of ordinary men and women recruited from the rank and file of Her Majesty’s Customs in the early 90s, given three weeks’ training and sent undercover to infiltrate and bring down two massive drug cartels that were filling Britain’s streets with heroin and really pissing Mrs Thatcher – head of the party of law and order, don’t you know – off.

Steve Coogan – possibly in need of a spot of emotional relief after a career spent playing losers or Jimmy Savile-shaped villains – stars as former undercover police officer Don Clarke. He puts the team together for the home secretary (Alex Jennings – this is statutory) and HMC’s director of investigations Angus Blake (Douglas Hodge) despite neither of them seemingly offering any money or support for the project.

The late playwright was also a great actor and pianist who combined all three talents in Chasing the Moment, which flowed like real life

Jack Shepherd’s plays have such an easy way of doing things, a kind of structure I really hadn’t experienced before. I had seen and admired him directing his own play, In Lambeth, in 1989 at the Donmar Warehouse. So, in a spirit of entrepreneurship after we set up Southwark Playhouse in London in 1993, I asked him to come on board. He gave us – and acted in – Chasing the Moment.

What you see in the play is a group of jazz players arriving one at a time into the basement of a pub. The pianist is there already, this old geezer from Leeds called Les. Jack, who sadly died in November, was a pianist himself – he always played Les. Then we’re waiting for the old, slightly drugged up double bass player. His instrument is bigger than he is, coming down the stairs is slow. Then the drummer and his kit arrive, one piece at a time.

Eight birds play the lead in Hen – one for running scenes, one for pecking, one for staying still. And there’s even a cockerel love interest. Director György Pálfi explains why it’s his most normal movie yet

If oppressive regimes inadvertently give rise to striking artistic works of resistance, then Hen might just be a parting gift from Viktor Orbán’s far-right regime. This compelling, original film, told from the perspective of a hen, was only made because Hungarian film-maker György Pálfi could no longer create anything in his home country. Orbán’s 16 years of cronyism banished any chance of funding a film in Budapest, so Pálfi – who has directed eight wildly original films, from his near-wordless 2002 debut Hukkle to 2006’s visually striking and grotesque Taxidermia – was driven into exile. Searching for a universal story he could tell even when filming in a culture or country he didn’t fully understand, he and co-writer and partner Zsófia Ruttkay settled on a biopic of a factory-farmed chicken.

The hen escapes her gruesome, industrial birthplace in Greece and, through her naturally comic beady eyes, we witness the unfolding of a modern-day Greek tragedy, whereby a down-at-heel restaurateur is drawn into the brutal world of people-smuggling.

Sir David is joined by celebrity fans and cast members to give the much-loved sitcom a proper send-off. Plus: suspicion falls on a bride-to-be in Bergerac

8pm, U&Gold
The shop doorbell tinkles as David Jason steps on to the set of Open All Hours a whopping 50 years after the sitcom first aired. Diane Morgan narrates this two-hour special that looks back at the show with Jason, along with fans such as Johnny Vegas and cast members including Maggie Ollerenshaw. There’s also a new concluding scene that has been recorded to give the show a proper send-off. Hollie Richardson

Ahead of her new album, Bitch, we rate the best of a singer who expertly suffuses self-empowerment anthems with humour and party-starting energy

Lizzo’s contribution to the Barbie soundtrack fitted the film’s opening scene perfectly: fluffy, wilfully lightweight disco-pop, with lyrics that split the difference between being knowingly daft and offering a self-empowerment message. If you’re not in the market for high-camp positivity, try the Pink (Bad Day) version, which flips the track’s mood on its head.

This 15th-century royal romp of intrigue and courtly conspiracy is given extra charismatic verve by John Hollingworth’s rambunctious narration

It is 1483 and 10-year-old John Collan is living on a farm outside Oxford with his father, Will, and waging war on an aggressive goat that keeps trampling him. His mother is long dead and his older twin brothers, Oliver and Tom, have left home to begin apprenticeships. One morning John overhears the dairy maid Jennot discussing how Edward Plantagenet and his younger brother Richard, sons of the late King Edward IV, have been imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Later, a well-dressed man arrives on a chestnut horse for a meeting with his father. John learns that the man is his benefactor who has paid for him to be tutored. “A bright future!” Will tells his son. “But secret for now.”

A dramatic imagining of the true story of the royal impostor Lambert Simnel, Jo Harkin’s novel tells of a farmboy who is told that he is Edward V, 17th Earl of Warwick, rightful heir to the English throne and the elder prince in the tower. Having been tutored in great literature and courtly ways, our protagonist becomes a hapless pawn in the games of ambitious conspirators and is sent to Ireland where he becomes the figurehead of the Yorkist rebellion against the so-called usurper Henry VII.

(4AD)
Lyrics about naked owls and eating rocks might be irksome to some – but there’s no denying that the alt-rocker’s fifth album is beguiling, tightly written and richly melodic

Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”

The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs; the weird costumes; the videos filled with her pulling faces and engaging in awkward choreography; the preponderance of mannered vocal tics and funny accents when she sings, noticeable on Train on the Island’s Worms (vaguely Gallic vowel-stretching) and closer Coats (strangulated girlish voice); the halting, elliptical interviews: for fans, this is evidence of true originality in a cookie-cutter era.

(Sony)
The pianist binds Schubert’s D850 with Schumann’s Kinderszenen with playing of warmth and crystalline technique

Arcadi Volodos records infrequently, making each album something of an event. The two works here, both staples of the Romantic piano repertory, couldn’t be more different, and yet he manages to bind them together, bringing elasticity and a dash of fantasy to Schubert’s D major sonata, D850 while investing Schumann’s evergreen Kinderszenen with a dose of Schubertian longing.

In the sonata’s opening Allegro vivace, he’s far less headstrong than, for example, Alfred Brendel or Radu Lupu, but notably more flexible – daringly so at times. Measured phrases are shaded with supple rubato, the line enlivened with tiny dynamic emphases. The expressive slow movement, laced with musical question marks, exudes a calm benevolence. Volodos can be playful, too, with a mischievous take on the disorderly scherzo and a dainty finale that borders on the coquettish.

A dead poet’s cluttered mansion is the setting for a heady brew of magic, mystery and mushrooms

“Man,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the first time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, perhaps, is a self-deprecating wink in a novel full of them – a novel that throws the (ancient, sinister, rusted taps coughing a disquieting red-brown liquid) kitchen sink at the problem of writing a good old-fashioned piece of gothic-flavoured weird fiction.

The present of the novel – though as things proceed and what David Tennant’s Doctor Who would call “timey-wimey” stuff starts to happen, the phrase gets harder to sustain – is the summer of 1993. Alex Lane stays on alone in his university’s hall of residence after the other students take off for the holidays. He’s broke. He’s lonely. He’s a bit freaked out by a sinister pale boy who seems to be the only other student left on campus. He can’t go home because of an unspecified family trauma involving what he alludes to only as The Last Day and The Annihilator. And now he’s receiving warnings that he’s about to be kicked out and charged for overstaying.

O, uncountable span I now surpass,
Incessant grey hours, turgid.
Noble opportunity wasted. Gone, alas!
In nullity endless deserted.

Lerone Martin’s new book offers fascinating insight into the civil rights icon’s younger years

Lerone Martin, a prominent scholar of Black religious history, leads the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. His new book, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr, grew from “professional and personal” roots.

Professionally, Martin “started coming across things that I had never seen before” about the civil rights leader’s childhood in Atlanta, his years at Morehouse College, and his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. One key episode happened in 1944, when King was 15. Travelling north from Georgia, he spent a summer working in the tobacco fields of Simsbury, Connecticut. It’s known as a transformative stay, vital in King’s eventual decisions to follow his father as a preacher and to fight for civil rights. Nonetheless, Martin found an underexploited resource.

The feverish interiority of a young woman abroad is captured with offbeat wit and disarming candour in the first novel from the translator of Butter

Without meaning any disrespect to the now defunct noughties R&B trio Mis-Teeq, one would be hard pressed to think of many novels that open with an epigraph from their oeuvre. “You know you wanna sing with us (baby). That’s why you know you should be scared of us (baby),” from their 2003 single Scandalous, greets readers of Polly Barton’s debut novel, What Am I, a Deer? It hints at several of the book’s central preoccupations – romance, the disquieting force of desire, and the devotional catharsis of belting out a pop song.

Barton has written two nonfiction books – Fifty Sounds, and Porn: An Oral History – but she is a writer readers are likely to have encountered by accident. Primarily a translator of Japanese fiction, her work includes bringing Asako Yuzuki’s bestseller Butter into English.

A history of the social and cultural impact of DH Lawrence’s novel shows how it inspired comedy as well as controversy

Not known for his humour, DH Lawrence thought of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a serious novel about the sacred nature of sex. But some of the activity between Connie and the gamekeeper Mellors is funny, either unintentionally (as in the scene where they garland each other’s naked bodies with flowers) or with a playful recognition of carnal absurdity: his penis is “farcical” and intercourse involves a “ridiculous bouncing of buttocks”. More comic still was the fallout from the book: customs officers seizing banned copies, high court jinks, innumerable skits and cartoons. As Guy Cuthbertson shows in his entertaining book, “It’s not a comic novel as such, but one way or another, it created laughter.”

On a steam railway in Devon, you can ride in a carriage called Lady Chatterley. Boots, blouses, thongs, earrings, pens, postcards and saris also bear her name and there have been endless jokey variations on the title: Lady Chatterley’s Pullover, Lady Chatterley’s Loofah, Lady Loverley’s Chatter and so on. Allusions to the novel turn up everywhere from lonely hearts ads to fancy dress parades. And as John Profumo and David Mellor discovered, if you were caught with your pants down in a sex scandal there’d be jokes about the new moral decrepitude that followed the unbanning of the book.

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

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

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

Enchanting and a little eerie, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth is the second great game in as many years based on the classic children’s books

Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right.

Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.

James Bond games have always fallen short of capturing the precise feel of the classic movies. But Amazon’s first dip into the 007 mythology seems to have a character of its own

In the wake of the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, there was a surge of articles asking whether it should spell the end for Ian Fleming’s secret agent. In that movie, Daniel Craig played the character as a fading force, mentally and physically exhausted, and out of touch. “The world has moved on,” Lashana Lynch’s younger agent told him at one point, and in a lot of ways she was right. A product of the cold war era, 007 was a sociopathic misogynist addicted to booze and amphetamines – Craig tried to play all that down, creating a more rounded character and, controversially, giving Bond the ultimate redemption arc at the end of his final outing.

But five years later, with the franchise’s new owner Amazon still trying to pull the next film together, we’re about to get what looks to be the best Bond game since GoldenEye. Created by the Danish developer IO Interactive, famed for its Hitman series of anarchic open-ended assassination sims, 007 First Light follows a fresh-faced Bond from his early career as an aircrewman to his first mission as a double-0 operative. The games press was recently given a three-hour hands-on demo to play, and reports suggest that it combines elements of the Hitman games (Bond navigating a gala event, either sleuthing or punching his way to the mission objective) with major set-piece shootouts, chase scenes and miraculous gadgets. (For more on its making, read this piece about how developer IO Interactive brought it together.)

More than a quarter of 20- to 34-year-olds still live with their parents. No wonder they are escaping into virtual properties that they can decorate and furnish as they like

Name: Cosy gaming.

Age: Has its origins in social simulation games such as Harvest Moon (1996) and The Sims (2000).

Theatre Royal, York
Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s story of high competition in a long family line of female stage tricksters loses its powers as it goes on

Sheila Gold, supposedly Britain’s most accurate psychic, wants to be taken seriously by her new clients. “This is not theatre,” she warns them, as she lights seven candles for a seance.

This is an insider joke. Theatre is exactly what it is.

Glee Club, Glasgow
The masc lesbian comic from New York delivers a superb set with big laughs and twisty logic

Old-school standup celebrating the traditional masculine virtues? It’s fallen a little out of fashion. But it’s a different story when a masc lesbian comic delivers that material – a story of gleeful iconoclasm, big laughs and twisty gender logic. Ashley Gavin was a jobbing standup who blew up online during the pandemic, and whose output – including viral “crowd work” clips and the podcast We’re Having Gay Sex – has secured an ardent, largely queer fanbase. She’s like their best pal or big sis tonight, recounting how a woman who dresses like a teenaged wannabe car mechanic (and who – tongue firmly in cheek – considers more feminine women to be “a bunch of pussy-ass bitches”) came to be freezing her eggs.

The pleasure is in how Gavin lays siege to gender convention, with one routine after another scrambling the signifiers of what we expect men, women, or indeed masculine lesbians, to do and be. The opener finds “lesbian with a Brazilian” Gavin submitting herself to a waxing treatment. Elsewhere, the New Yorker ventures the argument – while savouring the discomfort it generates – that the clitoris is essentially a “tiny dick”. Later, she muses on penetration (might it not equally be seen as “envelopment”?) and contends that two “boy lesbians” hooking up with one another is “against God”.

O2 Arena, London
The ambition of 2025 album Lux is scaled up even bigger by the Catalan megastar, delivered with operatic vocals and en pointe ballet moves as well as funny asides and glasses of wine

Wrapped in a vast white sheet, Rosalía is telling the audience a story about her youthful dreams of performing in London, undaunted by the fact that her English is, as she puts it “a little bit rat-a-tah”. It turns out her real ambition was to sing at the Royal Albert Hall – “which I’ve never done” – but no matter: “I have sold out two nights at the O2!” she cries triumphantly. “Crazy, crazy,” she adds, shaking her head.

You can understand the Catalan singer’s surprise. We are supposed to live in a hopelessly risk-averse era for pop, where what audiences are deemed to want is more of the same. While you might have expected her fourth album, Lux, to be greeted with critical hosannahs, the fact that she’s managed to fill one of the UK’s biggest venues twice off the back of a song cycle based on the lives of various female saints, sung in 13 different languages, and set to music that conjoined lavish orchestration with leftfield electronica – and provoked a debate about whether the results should be filed under classical rather than pop – seems pretty improbable.

Sadler’s Wells, London
Men in tutus and pointe shoes loving and parodying their art form never ages; it’s both simple and very sophisticated

Depending on how you look at it, drag ballet troupe the Trocks offer either lighthearted camp, an in-joke for dance megafans, or an existential question about the very nature of ballet and beauty. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, to give the company its formal mouthful of a name, has been going since 1974, five decades in which the perception of drag, and of gender, has transformed. The 14-strong all-male company (or gender-skewering, they now usually say) dresses in tutus, pointe shoes and greasepaint, dancing mainly extracts from the classical ballet repertoire: Swan Lake, Paquita, etc.

They do it in a way that mixes slapstick comedy, hammed up to the hilt, with a deep love and knowledge of the art form. It is both broad and subtle, a bathetic tightrope act that apes and satirises the ideal of the ballerina; it mocks ballet tropes while also pulling off fouettés and arabesques and allegro pointe work. The technical feats are somehow more impressive because these aren’t otherworldly ballerinas but an assortment of bodies that feel real, imperfections and all. It’s a reminder how hard this stuff is, and that the drive to do it is really exceptional; we’re rooting for them.

Exclusive: Taped conversations also cover playwright’s relationship with fame, self-doubt and communism

He was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century and she was one of the greatest actors. In newly unearthed recordings made over a period of nearly three decades, Arthur Miller opened up about his short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe, saying she wanted a husband who was a “father, lover, friend and agent,” and the child she longed for would have been an “additional problem”.

In taped conversations with his friend and biographer Prof Christopher Bigsby, Miller said he had felt “death was always on her [Monroe’s] shoulder – always”. He had believed that if he did not “take care of her life” she would come to a “catastrophic end”.

The iconic fashion photographer has been crowned a master at this year’s Photo London – a rare exhibition of his stunning work in the capital proves why

Demonstrators, angered by Russia’s inclusion at arts festival, shouted ‘Curated by Putin, dead bodies included’

The Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale was forced temporarily to shut its doors on the second day of the preview after the activist group Pussy Riot staged a chaotic protest against the country’s inclusion in the art festival.

Wearing pink balaclavas, the protesters ran towards the Russian pavilion where they gathered outside and lit pink, blue and yellow flares while playing punk music and shouting slogans, including “Blood is Russia’s Art”.

In a rare interview, the director has said he wants to do justice to Homer’s ‘original non-linear narrative’. How will that translate on screen?

• New trailer for Nolan’s The Odyssey released online

The excitement around Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film of the Odyssey has been taken up a notch this week with the launch of a new trailer and the director appearing on Stephen Colbert’s US chatshow to give a rare interview.

With fresh information emerging about the film, which is scheduled to be released on 17 July, it’s worth taking stock of what we know about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. And how faithful to the original poem is it likely to be?

A lot of fitness advice is based on research into people who don’t have periods, give birth or go through menopause. How much of it should be modified – or even thrown out?

I can’t remember when I first became aware of the phrase: “Women are not small men.” But once I’d heard it, I started hearing it everywhere. Fitness types on social media kept alluding to it. Friends would talk excitedly about the new strain of female-specific exercise research, which was smashing the template we had all held dear for years. And the originator of the phrase, Dr Stacy Sims, was suddenly on every podcast you cared to name. A highly credentialed sports scientist with a huge social media following, she’s hard to avoid, if your algorithms skew vaguely towards self-optimisation content.

While her stance remains divisive in the sports science world, it has the kind of splashy, audacious quality that mainstream exercise advice does not. As a result, it has taken hold in a big way. You might say that Stacy Sims is to women’s exercise what Dr Chris van Tulleken is to ultra-processed foods: changing the conversation almost single-handedly while undaunted by any pushback.

Warm weather got you itching for new greenery? Our expert shares the dos and don’ts of plant shopping with the planet in mind

• The best places to buy plants online, according to top gardeners

With spring in full swing, it’s time to go shopping for plants. While adding to or creating a garden has obvious green credentials, some plants are more sustainable than others.

Whether it’s hidden peat, throwaway plants, high water and energy use, transport emissions or plastic pots that can’t be recycled, here’s what to avoid – and what is better to buy instead – for a truly sustainable plot.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The actor talks well-brewed tea, never lending books, and the joy of dining at home with the Filter

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Kim Cattrall shot to fame when she played the sexually liberated Samantha Jones in the TV series Sex and the City. Her film roles span comedy, drama and thrillers including Police Academy, Mannequin and The Ghost Writer. She also appeared to rave reviews in stage productions of Private Lives and David Mamet’s The Cryptogram.

Born in Liverpool, she moved to Canada as a child and now divides her time between New York City, London and Vancouver. Cattrall is the face of a new Designer at Debenhams campaign, a collaboration between the retailer and the British designer Ashish.

From jugs to sticks, portable to refurbished models, which blenders are worth your money (and your fruit)?

• The best (and worst) chef’s knives – tested
• In the US? Check out our top-rated blenders there

Eating your five-a-day can be tricky – let alone the 10 a day recommended by some. However, a decent blender can push you in the right direction by blitzing up healthy, wholesome soups or nutritious smoothies to start the day right.

Unlike many kitchen appliances, most blenders are economical to run – so won’t increase your bills dramatically. Some can even heat your soup for tuppence (and we’ve tested them all to make sure that they’re energy-efficient). However, the difference in functions, versatility and maintenance can be startling. I put 10 blenders from some of the most well-known manufacturers through their paces to separate the smooth operators from the far-from-brilliant buys.

Best blender overall:
Braun PowerBlend 9 jug blender JB9040BK

Best budget blender:
Kenwood Blend-X Fresh blender BLP41.A0GO

Our changing diet, which increasingly revolves around vegetable, makes wine-matching a bit trickier, but there’s no need to overthink it

At a recent tasting, I got chatting to a winemaker from Australia’s Clare Valley as I bravely made my way through his wares: a ripe, leathery shiraz and a deep, dark cabernet sauvignon that put me in mind of blackcurrant bushes. These were serious wines – and good value, too. A generation ago, such gutsy New World reds were all the rage, but now, lamented the winemaker, gen Z was more interested in lighter, cooler-climate wines, lower on the alcohol and brighter on the palate.

He had two theories on this. One was vanity: no one on Instagram or TikTok wants to drink a red wine that stains their teeth, which is bad news for producers of high-tannin wines such as malbec and cabernet. And, two: it’s also to do with the changing western diet. Aussie shiraz is the archetypal sausage-on-the-barbie wine; Argentinian malbec is a steakhouse cliché; and, in France, malbec is mainly grown around Cahors in the south-west, land of heavy cassoulets and fat-tastic maigrets de canard. You need something with a bit of muscle to stand up to all that.

Softly braised vegetables combine with crisp-skinned chicken thighs in this reliable, versatile dish

The weather lately has been as temperamental as peas in pods. But peas are even harder to read than the sky: some pods contain sweet things no bigger than peppercorns, which explode when you bite them; the contents of others, however, are closer to small ball bearings, their size very likely a sign that all the natural sucrose has been metabolised and transformed to pea starch. The best thing for the tiny ones is to snack on them alongside a bit of cheese, whereas the path for big ones is the same as for dried peas, so pea and ham soup or a long-simmered puree.

Prepared for all the above, I first checked that there were frozen peas in the freezer. It was a packet I used to take for granted until my son, aged 14 (and having finished all the biscuits, crisps, cereal and milk) decided that peas were a decent late-night desperation snack. Fortunately, there was a packet, because I needed a good portion of it to make up for the pea shortfall caused by the huge and tiny ones found in one kilo of pods.

It’s all about finding bottles that speak the same language as the food, whether for sharp citrus salads, spiced lamb or lemon chicken

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I have been pouring a lot of wine over this past month, talking a lot about wine, and tasting my fair share, too – or perhaps a little more than my fair share. It’s one of the perks of opening a wine bar on London’s Great Portland Street, a project that’s been brewing (although fermenting may be a more appropriate term) for years.

For ages, my wife, Sarit, and I have been pondering what to serve with Middle Eastern food and, as more and more of us bring the flavours and spirit of this region to our homes, maybe that’s a question you’ve been asking yourself as well. The instinct has always been to match dish by dish but, as anyone who has ever sat down to a Levantine spread knows all too well, that doesn’t really work. A Middle Eastern meal is a rush of different flavours; it’s a table of contrasts, not courses.

Transform this tough offcut into an intensely delicious compound butter that’s perfect with eggs, bread, gnocchi or anything else you can think of

Asparagus butts are a particularly tricky byproduct to tame because they’re so fibrous. I usually cut them very finely (into 5mm-thick discs, or even thinner), then boil, puree and pass them through a sieve (as in my green goddess salad dressing and asparagus soup), but even then you’ll still end up with a fair bit of fibrous waste. Enter asparagus-butt butter: a recipe that defies all odds, making the impossible possible by transforming a tough offcut into an intense compound butter that’s perfect for grilling or frying asparagus spears themselves, or for eggs, bread, gnocchi or whatever you can think of. The short fibres brown and caramelise in the butter, and in the process become the highlight of the dish, rather than the problem.

When I became pregnant, all I wanted was a healthy baby. Discovering I would be having a son gave me a new perspective on the narratives around masculinity

At the 20-week ultrasound, because of the baby’s position, my partner and I didn’t get any proper pictures to take home. Instead, the sonographer printed us a shot of the genitals. So, there it was, in black and white: I was having a boy.

Growing up, boys were a slightly alien concept. Our household was female-heavy – a mum, two sisters, a dad with no interest in conventional “boy stuff”. We did have two male cats, neutered, extremely fluffy and ironically named Mr White and Mr Orange by my dad (“Reservoir Cats”).

Vibe Check, a free and anonymous alternative to AI, talks teens through consent, boundaries and apologies

Val Odiembo volunteers at her former high school a few times a month, teaching teens about consent and healthy relationships. Now a sophomore at Rhode Island College, 19-year-old Odiembo isn’t much older than the students she’s teaching – which she thinks makes it easier for the high schoolers to come to her with their questions. But she knows she isn’t the only source they’re consulting.

“A lot of them confide in AI,” she said. A recent UK study found that one in 10 young adults has consulted AI for sexual health information, and a 2025 Pew Research Center report showed that one in five teens have had a romantic relationship with a chatbot.

I always knew my Vietnamese pot-bellied pig was smart and special – and he has brought love, chaos and happiness into my life

We have lots of animals in our home in Sacramento, California – a dog, two chicks, a pigeon, a bearded dragon, three rats and two rescue cows. But our pig, Merlin, is special.

I had a pig obsession for a while. I remember going to visit some animal sanctuaries and getting emotional when I saw the pigs. There’s just something about them that I felt a connection to. I knew how smart they were. I remember telling myself that one day I’d have a pig.

Linda lost her sexual appetite after a hysterectomy, but making a list of sex cues with partner Elias helped her regain her desire
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Since everything on the list is something we both like, when he sends me a suggestion it turns me on

I’ve received 77 unpaid PCNs from TfL but it won’t accept they weren’t from my vehicle

Someone cloned my car number plate back in October and racked up £8,500 in Ulez fines. I appealed, but this was rejected.

Unfortunately, the cloned car is the same make, model and colour as mine. I’ve now received 17 “order for recovery of unpaid penalty charge” notices from Transport for London (TfL). The bailiffs will arrive next week, according to their letters.

Charges set out in a new contract for Aver Healthcare’s homes appear to contradict advice from the regulator

I hold power of attorney for my aunt who is in a care home run by Avery Healthcare. Avery recently sent relatives its new contract, which states that care home fees are payable for 14 days after a resident’s death, and levies an upfront £595 charge for “dilapidations” (damage or wear and tear).

These charges contradict advice given by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and are probably unenforceable.

After subscribing to the Claude chatbot, mystery payments started to appear on one family’s credit card bill. They are not alone

David Duggan* was so impressed with the ability of the Claude chatbot to answer medical questions and organise family life, that a $20-a-month (£15) subscription seemed like money well spent.

But then his wife spotted two $200 payments on his credit card bill for gift cards to use the artificial intelligence tool.

From a quintessential ‘chocolate box’ cottage to part of a grand stately home

While some are using AI to tailor programs better suited to their needs, others warn ‘it can be wrong, confidently so’

People have mixed feelings about AI. While many people regularly use it – 62% in the US and 69% in the UK – trust in the technology is low. In the US, only 26% of people have a positive view of AI, according to one NBC poll, and in the UK, 78% say they worry about negative outcomes from AI.

So it is perhaps no surprise that readers’ responses to our callout about AI and fitness were varied. Some said they rely on AI to shape their workouts and diets while others said they refuse to use it at all because of its impact on the economy and the environment. And many were somewhere in between – they found it a useful tool, but were less than thrilled about the technology’s impact overall.

Scores of women have told how they were affected by placenta accreta spectrum for an awareness campaign

Women have had to undergo major emergency surgery, including a hysterectomy, when medical staff failed to detect they had a rare but potentially fatal complication of pregnancy.

Scores of women have come forward to tell their stories of how they were affected by placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) since the launch in February of a campaign to raise awareness among NHS staff and mothers-to-be of the dangers it poses.

Three people have died after an outbreak of hantavirus onboard a cruise ship travelling from Argentina to Cape Verde. The World Health Organization says a total of seven cases – two confirmed by laboratory testing and five suspected – have been identified on the cruise ship so far. It is also investigating whether rare human-to-human transmission of the virus could be behind the cases. Madeleine Finlay talks to Prof Jonathan Ball from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to find out where the virus comes from, how it is transmitted to humans, and what health agencies will be doing to try to contain it

British crew member in need of urgent medical care amid suspected hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship

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My girlfriends and I have more fun, more adventures, more independence than ever before. And as for the sex …

I met my boyfriend when he was playing Bach in the park. I was taking my usual jog past London zoo and around the Regent’s Park boating lake when I was stopped in my tracks by the most beautiful music. Wafting across the rose garden was an exquisite guitar rendition of Bach’s prelude in E major. When the final notes hung in the air like gossamer, I congratulated the musician. A twinkly-eyed bloke smiled up at me. “Ah, no bother,” he said in a soft Irish burr.

At the sound of his mellifluous, velvety voice, my heart beat so loudly I felt as though it was coming through stereo speakers. His eyes seemed to smoke their way into me. I stared at him for what I estimate to be about, oh, a decade, but was probably only two seconds, before asking him for coffee. Pathetic, I know. A romcom “meet-cute” like this is not just cheesy; it’s deep-fried Brie in a bechamel sauce on a bed of melted cheddar.

The key lesson from Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style is to keep the messaging simple

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has been an insider style icon for ever, but this year she has flipped from under-the-radar reference to global phenomenon. Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, a glossy dramatisation of her doomed romance with JFK Jr, gave us nine delicious hours of lingering closeups of her white tank tops and jeans, her simple black dresses, perfect black oval sunglasses and tortoiseshell headbands. If you didn’t know you wanted to dress like CBK before you started watching, you did by the end.

Carole Radziwill, who was friends with Carolyn, has pointed out that copying CBK’s style is pretty much the least CBK thing you could do. Her friend, she told the Deuxmoi podcast, “pulled her hair back in a headband because she didn’t want to wash it every day. She did what felt natural to her and she dressed in things that made her feel comfortable and most like herself. Mostly jeans and button-downs and T-shirts. The takeaway is not to mimic her style, but to do and wear what feels most authentic to you. Be yourself. She was very much herself.”

Products that strike the right balance of wearable coverage with adequate sun protection

There are two things I invariably reach for at this lovely time of year: a trench coat and tinted sunscreen. The life-changing appearance of sunlight – if not quite blazing heat – means that most of us are venturing outdoors for longer periods while perhaps lightening our makeup load a little to be more seasonally appropriate. A tinted sunscreen in the right formula can kill two – or even three – birds with one stone, offering some makeup coverage, lighter moisture and high-factor sun protection in one portable product.

Garnier Ambre Solaire makes lots of terrific facial sunscreens at very good prices. The newish Vitamin C Wonder Tint SPF50 (£9.99) is among their best. Available in light, medium and dark, it’s a silky sunscreen that packs enough glycerin to moisturise skin as well as protect it, making it a good choice for drier skin types. The pocket-friendly bottle is compact and practical if, like me, you’re likely to throw on your makeup on the move. The three shades are inadequate, but give a sheer, natural-looking tint to most wearers.

Opening of ‘the dressed body’ show inspires Beyoncé, Kardashians and Skepta, as others pay tribute to fashion moments in art history

• Met Gala 2026 red carpet: the best looks in pictures

Two assets the modern 1% love to show off are their designer wardrobes … and their expensive bodies. The Met Gala opening of an exhibition about “the dressed body” presented an opportunity to do both, and it proved irresistible. The evening raised a record-breaking $42m (£31m) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the lead sponsors Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos thought to have contributed $10m, and individual guests writing cheques for up to $1m in order to make the Anna Wintour-approved final cut.

The official dress code was “Fashion Is Art”. But the golden rule in fashion, as in life, is that those with the gold make the rules, and this elite crowd bent Wintour’s diktat according to their will. The red carpet was divided between looks that paid tribute to famous fashion moments in art history, and others that celebrated the body itself as a very modern masterpiece.

There are many online techniques for self-cutting a fringe – but would I end up looking like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction or a low-budget Grimes?

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I have had a fringe since I was 15 years old. I will never forget this life-altering haircut. For years before it I had been suffering lingering effects from a bob cut I received unwillingly in primary school.

You were not a cool person if you had a bob as an adolescent in the early 2000s. But finally my hair had grown sufficiently for styling and I got it cut to sit neatly on my shoulders with front bangs.

The West Sussex village of Amberley, near Arundel, is easy to reach by train and offers great hiking in the national park, castles and a newly reopened pub with a focus on local food

Wisteria and clematis hang from weathered cottage walls. Tulips and pink apple blossom spill out of several gardens. Thatched animals decorate the rooftops. There’s a Norman church, a medieval castle and an 80-hectare (200-acre) nature reserve. Amberley is the kind of place people assume you can only reach by car, but the village has its own railway station with regular direct trains, along the scenic Arun Valley line, from Bognor, Horsham and London Victoria.

This spring, the Black Horse pub reopened in Amberley. The new owners are the gourmet Gladwin brothers, Oliver and Richard, returning to their Sussex roots near Nutbourne Vineyards. Having founded five Local & Wild restaurants in London, the Black Horse is their first country pub and first place with rooms.

Butcher’s shops and dive bars sit side by side in a district where you can swap the touristy beer halls of the city centre for raw creative energy

In the south-west of Munich, Schlachthofviertel is an area in flux; a jarring district that is home to a theatre, a techno club and a controversial active slaughterhouse.

This traditional neighbourhood ‘across the river’ is where the city’s creatives are heading as the centre heats up

Madrid’s current boomtown dynamics are driving the city centre way upmarket, pushing the average punter to outer barrios in search of cheaper rent. As seen in New York and elsewhere, the creative class is moving too – crossing the River Manzanares to open studios in the former factories and metalworks of Carabanchel. Now the city’s most populous district, this used to be a separate municipality, which was annexed to the capital in 1948 and built up into canyons of high-rise flats to house the postwar influx from the provinces, and later from Latin America.

After decades in the shadows, the residents of this historic quarter came together to launch local businesses and make the area an attractive proposition once more

My favourite way to enter Rione Sanità is by elevator: descending from a bridge into cobblestoned streets buzzing with mopeds and flanked by opulent but decaying 18th-century palazzi. Through the grand doorways of these once noble palaces are courtyards where bakers, butchers, cobblers and the odd contraband cigarette vendor do business.

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

Welcome to the Thursday news quiz, where it pays to listen carefully – although not necessarily to the extent of developing a question mark for an ear, as our illustration by Anaïs Mims may suggest. Have you been paying attention to the week’s events or just hearing half the story? Fifteen questions await on topical news, pop culture and general knowledge, generously sprinkled with some in-jokes. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 246

Inkpen, Berkshire: There is far less birdsong now than in Lillian Watts’s day, but it is down to her that there is any at all

Lillian Watts’s bench has fallen into disrepair, so instead I sit on Arthur’s Seat on the common. Warmth rises from the heath, even on this chilly spring morning, and a lizard creates curvaceous lines under the dry, still-dormant heather.

It is both Lillian’s and my birthday, though she died in 1989, aged 93. I play a recording of her from 1975, from the village’s history society. Poet, potter, English teacher, naturalist and formidable campaigner, she, along with villagers such as Arthur Cooke (1898-1980), saved this place from development. Lillian’s voice is measured, soft and annunciated, with the clipped vowels of her time.

The author has become acutely aware of how the climate crisis is affecting women – and, in her new book, she argues that it’s time for mainstream western feminists to join the dots

Natasha Walter is halfway through explaining how she came to be politically radicalised when a young woman approaches the cafe table. We two middle-aged women look like “the most trustworthy people here,” she says, so could we watch her baby while she grabs a coffee? Like the solid citizen she is, Walter doesn’t take her eyes off the pushchair parked by the cafe steps for the next five minutes, though all we can see of the occupant is a tiny swinging foot. Sorry, where were we? Ah yes, the groundbreaking feminist writer who famously argued in her 1998 book The New Feminism that Margaret Thatcher had broken down barriers for women was explaining why she no longer really believes it’s possible to be rightwing and a feminist, as Theresa May or Amber Rudd insist they are.

“I can’t support just any woman getting into power, because I think a system that leaves too many women in the shadows – that condemns too many women to poverty or worse – is not a feminist system, and I don’t think you can call yourself a feminist if you’re going to prop up that system,” she says, eyes still glued to the baby for whom we are briefly responsible. “It’s not my kind of feminism.” Her younger self, she admits, would have thought her too uncompromising. But something in her seems to have hardened, facing a world she sees as threatened by the rise of far-right authoritarianism on one hand and a climate emergency on the other. “In the past I always wanted to be a broad church, I always thought any woman can be a feminist, but now I really am feeling … maybe I’ve been radicalised.”

In this age of crisis, technology is pulling us apart. At its best, journalism can bring us together again, writes Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner

I have a confession to make. It has taken me years to write this article.

For a long time, I have felt that something was missing in the public conversation about human connection and community and how they are being eroded. And yet I haven’t been able to articulate it. Thinking and writing have become harder. It’s as if the neurons in my brain don’t connect with each other in quite the same way. I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone. I find myself unable to devote time to thinking and writing like I used to.

All signs point to a record-low performance for Labour in May in what will be a moment of high jeopardy for Keir Starmer

Labour is on track for its worst local election performance next Thursday, data analysed by the Guardian shows, in a blow that will pile further pressure on Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Barring a drastic change in fortunes, Labour’s vote-share could fall to historic lows across elections for councils in England and devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland on 7 May, with big gains for Reform, the Greens and nationalist parties, according to recent polling.

Jet fuel has doubled in price since the start of the war on Iran. How bad will the disruption get and could this accelerate the route to jet zero?

What happens to flights if the world runs out of oil? Well, obviously they will be grounded. To be more specific, is it possible, if the war in Iran does not resolve and the strait of Hormuz remains blocked, that airlines will simply run out of aviation fuel?

It’s not a question anyone has had to ask before. Air travel has hit some hurdles this century that nobody could have seen coming – Covid, of course, but also the Icelandic volcano in 2010, which closed much of European airspace for eight days, cost an estimated €3.75bn (£3.2bn) and caused untold supply chain chaos. There have been problems contained within a country or region – the Heathrow substation outage and the Iberian energy crisis, both last year, both closing airports – but since air travel began, it has never been globally impeded by a fuel shortage.

If you’re affected by the National Savings and Investments lost funds scandal, we would like to hear from you

This month the state-backed National Savings and Investments (NS&I) bank will share its plan to reunite thousands of bereaved families with their missing money.

In March it emerged that 37,500 people faced delays because of problems tracing the premium bonds of deceased customers. The families are collectively owed nearly £500m.

We would like to hear from people who converse with AI chatbots on a personal level

Lots of people now use chatbots as personal assistants, sometimes to the extent that they have formed an emotional attachment to them.

We would like to hear from people who converse with AI chatbots on a personal level. Have you formed an emotional bond to an AI chatbot?

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

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

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

Share a tip on a great train journey you’ve taken, whether long or short. The best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

Whether it’s a short hop across the Channel on Eurostar or a long-distance adventure crossing several countries, more of us are rediscovering the excitement and romance of rail travel. We’d love to hear about your favourite train-based trips in Europe.

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

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