The author of Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, explains the many reasons people are having fewer children, from dating apps to unaffordable housing and the climate crisis

Generation Maybe is the most tactful possible title for Camilla Cavendish’s bracing new book – because the trend she’s describing is anything but a “maybe”. “The wave of childlessness that is sweeping the globe is extraordinary,” she writes. It’s in the UK, where the fertility rate hit 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest on record. It’s across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, visible in so many measures – nearly half of Canadian women surveyed in their 40s said they’d had fewer children than they would have liked. But it’s also a global story. “The UAE, Chile and Tamil Nadu in India have even lower birthrates than Germany,” Cavendish writes. “China is growing old before it gets rich, and Russia has maintained its population size purely by annexing Crimea and parts of Ukraine.” In fact, when it comes to falling populations, “only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now”.

When I meet her in central London, Cavendish is tailored, self-possessed, you might even say poised, but very open – she never gives an opinion without asking yours, she talks very freely about her family and she is upfront about what she sees as her faults. Now 58, she started her career at McKinsey, the mega-management consultancy, having done PPE at Oxford at the same time as David Cameron, for whom she worked as policy director when he was in government and to whom she remains intensely loyal (every time his name comes up, we have a fight).

Cans of tuna, sparkling water and an old torch – if the end of the world came for me now I’d struggle, but it’s hard to know how to prepare for an unknown threat

It’s been three weeks since the government advisory urging us to start stockpiling in case of emergency – how’s your prep coming along? The Prepare campaign, backed by Wes Streeting, who one imagines gliding through the apocalypse, quiff undisturbed, listed nine essential items, among them wet wipes, first-aid kits and batteries. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, suggests budgeting for 15 litres of water per person per day, so a family of four will need to store upwards of 180 litres to cover the recommended period of three days. The chances of this actually happening seem to me, intuitively, to be considerably lower than the disaster they’re supposed to forestall. But hope springs, so let’s see.

The first step towards stockpiling is stocktaking. This is where I’m at: one mega-torch (uncharged), which I bought in prepper mode after surviving the terrifying New York blackout of 2019 when for about an hour we couldn’t charge our phones; lots of very large sticking plasters and a handful of small round ones, the normal sizes having long been used up; two cans of tuna, which will go down to one after lunch; two litres of sparkling water, so for the first hour or so after a nuclear strike, assuming it happens this afternoon, we’ll at least be able to enjoy some bubbles; and three OxyContin saved from my c-section almost 12 years ago, which are probably less powerful than homeopathy at this point but I retain a vague hope I can use for barter when money breaks down.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Ayaan thought she was lending money for something essential. Ahmed says the lender doesn’t get to dictate what it’s spent on. You decide who is on the money

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I thought I was lending Ahmed money for something vital, not a trip to Greece

Winger was one of the first big-money academy transfers, part of a child labour market that has barely been questioned

“What’s your name?”

“Raheem.”

Does your child’s favourite show give them a chance to reflect, or does it move too quickly for its lessons to sink in?

• A version of this piece was originally published on Aeon as The bombarding of childhood

I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee. A small boy sits very still beside his mother. He holds an iPad close to his chest, almost in a cramp, clutching the screen as if it might otherwise run away. I hear loud clapping hands and squeaking children’s voices. I lean over and see a cartoon character in green snatch a toy from another character in pink. The pink character begins to cry, tears splashing like sprinkles from its enormous eyes. The green character shouts sorry. Instantly, the tears stop and a wide smile replaces them before I have blinked. And, before I have even worked out whether the characters are speaking English or Arabic (as the mother does to the boy), the scene has changed and the two characters are rowing a boat with a random song in the background. The boy’s eyes dart on the screen from right to left, centre, down. His body is still but his attention is being hurried from cue to cue.

This is the problem I have come to think of as the pace of children’s media.

Readers describe feelings of rejection after submitting hundreds of applications but getting a handful of interviews

Hundreds of job applications, exhausting searches and relentless rejection – the experience of attempting to get back into the workforce after losing their jobs in their 50s and 60s has proved an ordeal for some Britons.

For some, those efforts prove fruitless and lead jobseekers to reluctantly take early retirement. Others may have to rely on benefits to pay the bills while they continue to job hunt.

Exclusive: PM, who is facing pressure over whether to approve North Sea oil and gasfields, makes strongest comments yet on issue

• British people understand the climate crisis threat. Today I’m empowering them to tackle it

• UK politics live – latest updates

The UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050, Andy Burnham has argued in his strongest comments yet on the issue, saying it is no longer possible for Britons to believe they are not already affected by a changing climate.

Writing for the Guardian about new plans for a mass of community-led local green energy projects, the prime minister said the UK must “believe in itself”, and set out his determination to reach net zero targets, which have been rejected by the Conservatives and Reform UK.

Banker, 44, was arrested in connection with 2017 incident but family say ‘no credible evidence’ he was involved

The family of Nicholas Brandram have denied he was the so-called “Putney pusher” and said he “took his own life after months of immense pressure caused by a Metropolitan police investigation”.

Brandram, 44, was found unresponsive at a property in Chiswick, west London, believed to be his home, on Tuesday evening.

RNLI facility had been targeted by activists trying to stop asylum seekers landing in boats from the Channel

A lifeboat station on the south coast of England near the spot where far-right activists tried to stop asylum seekers landing has been forced to temporarily close, it has emerged.

The station in Portsmouth shut after it and other sites run by the RNLI were targeted by people objecting to the lifeboat charity going to the aid of people trying to get to the UK on small boats.

Cambridge previously paid £5,000 compensation after an investigation partially upheld allegations against Dr James Orr

A former student of James Orr who was found to have been bullied by the suspended senior Reform UK figure is reopening a case against the University of Cambridge, after apparent discrepancies emerged over the university’s handling of the incident.

The former student alleges that the academic’s claim not to have been disciplined contradicts assurances they say they received from the institution.

Review expected to say patients in England should be ‘triaged’ and offered support without formal diagnosis

Proposals to limit the number of patients being formally diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have been attacked as “rationing” healthcare and pushing children and adults to self-diagnosis via social media.

The comments came before a government review due next week, which is expected to say that patients with ADHD symptoms should not automatically be formally diagnosed, but should be “triaged” and offered support without the need for a formal diagnosis.

It comes after the Green leader, who is standing as a candidate in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, recorded a campaign video in Urdu

Andrew Griffith has delivered his speech, and he is now taking questions.

Q: You want the government to pause the making tax digital programme. Is that an admission that the last government got this wrong when it introduced it?

It is an admission that despite [good] intentions, the execution of that has left a lot to be desired.

In fact, coming to parliament from business, I can confess the law that we pass the most often is the law of unintended consequences. And I think making tax digital is a good example of that.

The truth is that Burnham and Miliband ignored the advice they were given – which was that if they were determined to sanction Israel, they should not do so before the Israeli election on 27 October.

It may not be surprising that this was the message from the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, when Miliband called him on 11 August to warn sanctions were imminent. ‘He said postpone it until after the elections,’ a diplomatic source confirms. It was also the message the Israeli embassy in London – and its new chargé d’affaires Chris Cantor – was relaying to the Foreign Office. ‘Their message was clear: why do it now? Wait until after the elections, because something might change,’ a senior Labour figure says.

Facebook told it was wrong in leaving up AI-generated videos of a Labour councillor and Muslim campaigner, amid calls to curb fakes

Meta’s “supreme court” has ordered the tech company to take down deepfake videos of a UK politician and a young Muslim woman from Facebook and do more to tackle AI-generated fake imagery.

A fake video showing a Labour party councillor in Scotland making inflammatory comments about refugees should not have been left up by Facebook, the board said. It also ruled that an AI-generated video of a Muslim campaign volunteer should have been removed after it falsely depicted her offering health advice while carrying out absurd exercises or eating junk food.

Ireland joins Netherlands in refusing to take part in 2027 song contest, in second consecutive year of protests

Ireland is to boycott Eurovision for the second year running over the “appalling” ongoing killing in Gaza, the national broadcaster has said.

Ireland was one of five countries, along with Iceland, Netherlands, Spain, and Slovenia, that refused to take part in the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.

‘Terrible thing’ happened to infant boy found under the floorboards at a house in Bishop Auckland, says coroner

A baby boy who was found with twine looped and knotted round his neck and wrapped in a 116-year-old newspaper was unlawfully killed, a coroner has concluded.

Crispin Oliver on Thursday said the child, known only as Baby Auckland, had been garotted by an unknown person.

Rhys Woods says there are ‘no words’ for family’s pain after Noah’s body was found in pond near Suffolk playground

The father of Noah, the three-year-old boy who was found dead after going missing from a playground, has spoken of his heartbreak and thanked the community who launched a tireless search for his son.

Rhys Woods said there were “no words to describe the pain of this loss”, adding that the family was “absolutely heartbroken”.

From ‘there were three of us in this marriage’ to ‘recollections may vary’, a lot can be conveyed with a carefully worded phrase

As denials go, King Charles’s response to Earl Spencer’s allegations that Charles said after Diana’s death, “We’ll forget her soon enough”, was a masterclass in the diplomatic royal rebuke.

Rarely has Buckingham Palace responded to claims in countless books on royalty. But it was straight out of the block on this one.

Former Bank of England economist Andy Haldane said the markets regarded this government as ‘a pretty traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos’. Harsh criticism or truth? As pressure mounts on the chancellor, John Healey, to rule out tax rises, what options do they have left? Plus, what can the government do to tackle AI warnings?

Please keep sending your comments and questions to Pippa and Kiran on politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com

The genre-fluid singer answers your questions on being funky v lonesome, his infamous MTV interview with Thurston Moore and why he said yes to performing with a chain-smoking alcoholic robot

• Read Alexis Petridis’s 5* review of new album Ride Lonesome

You’ve been performing since the late 80s. What keeps you going? AmongstTheWaves
It’s a good question. I don’t really know any other life. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to create a body of work, and out of that, maybe there’s a few songs at the end that are not bad. So I just keep going down into the mine, trying to come back with a couple of things worth keeping. It’s a lot of digging. If I had to stop and get a job painting houses or something, I would still make songs just for myself, because that’s how it started.

You tend to alternate between styles from album to album. What do you feel is closer to your intrinsic self, funky Beck or lonesome Beck? Mazzini
Probably lonesome. But the other side of things gets me out of my shell, stops me from being a little too ponderous, which I’m apt to do. The other side of what I do – Loser or Odelay – was more of a fluke. At the time that was what people liked. Now it’s kind of reversed – they prefer the more introspective, quiet songs, and stuff that’s a little more genreless. I don’t have any songs that they play at weddings, like Uptown Funk. I remember telling Mark Ronson, “Hey, you made a wedding song.” He was like, “Yeah, finally.” That’s a very elite category of song.

As concern about loneliness and social isolation grows, we spoke to people who have joined groups and set up activities

Amid growing concern about loneliness and social isolation, new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found the number of young people in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with one in 20 now reporting having none at all.

Making new friends as an adult is not always easy. We spoke to people who have taken deliberate steps to make new connections about what worked for them.

To mark 50 years since the director and choreographer’s death, we count down his best fantastical, kaleidoscopic numbers, from erotic silhouettes to sinister tap dancers

So you thought Cats (2019) was tacky? Wait until you see Ruby Keeler (AKA Mrs Al Jolson) gambolling around as a fluffy white feline, being wooed by an ogling tomcat, or chasing Billy Barty, a child actor with dwarfism, costumed as a mouse.

Bush theatre, London
Titas Halder’s coming-of-age monologue is set against the 1984 Bhopal toxic gas leak – but the poetic script doesn’t quite capture the horror

Ominousness permeates Darkling. In Titas Halder’s dramatic monologue, we witness a young girl’s coming of age set against the backdrop of the 1984 toxic gas leak in the Indian city of Bhopal, an environmental catastrophe that remains one of the worst industrial disasters in global history, leading to thousands of deaths.

Actor Linnea Berthelsen – best known for her role as Kali in Netflix series Stranger Things – makes her UK stage debut and gamely takes on the singular role in a tightly wound, physical performance. Leaping across Simon Kenny’s artful, soil-filled set, Berthelsen embodies childlike wonder as she recounts her early years playing in the rain, savouring bowlfuls of plain rice and idolising her older sister.

The writer and editor shares memories of a creative powerhouse who was generous with her time and expertise

• Bonnie Greer, writer and cultural commentator, dies aged 77

Bonnie Greer personified courage, humour, principle and generosity. Before knowing her in person, I met her work. Her 1994 debut novel Hanging by Her Teeth – about a Black American woman travelling through the US and Europe in search of her father – was sent to me for endorsement by its publisher, and I commented unhesitatingly: “Writing with sharpness, wit and poignancy, Bonnie Greer gathers the sequestered memories behind one Black woman’s bitter-sweet blues.”

The scope of Bonnie’s own life is beyond anything fictional, encompassing highs and lows, triumphs and challenges, her trajectory starting in the West Side of Chicago and ending up navigating iconic areas of London – whether Holland Park or Covent Garden or Soho – as if to the manor born. It was an honour to become her friend, sharing many a good time, offering a consoling shoulder if needed. An added bonus was to meet her husband David Hutchins. What a wonderful mutually supportive team they made.

Loop and tube bands are cheaper than a gym membership and take up less space than weights – our exercise buff put 18 to the test

• The best treadmills for your home

Movement breeds motivation, not vice versa. If you want a fast ticket to a regular training habit, you need to remove the friction between you and that first rep. When the sofa looks more appealing than getting a sweat on, it pays to have a simple, quick, convenient way to kick into workout mode. That’s where resistance bands come in.

Portable, lightweight, compact and convenient, the right set of bands could be the path of least, er, resistance to easy home workouts and reaching your fitness goals.

The manosphere says this type of suffering is targeted neglect, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But your suffering gives you the ability to make your part of the world better.

• Read more Leading questions

I’m approaching 30 and I’m still a kissless virgin.

I’ve suffered with depression and anxiety since childhood and my family isn’t the most functional or supportive. I don’t really have friends either, as I find it hard to connect with others due to being bullied and feeling that I’m not worthwhile or wanted. I was also homeschooled from 14 and moved to a different part of the country at 15 and a few more times since then, so I feel quite rootless and alienated.

Community groups and schools work with Wales’s folk arts organisation to set stories of the area’s people to music

Growing up in Wales, Liz Puleston-Jones was familiar with the country’s rich heritage of storytelling and traditional music, but none of it ever seemed to have much of a connection to her life in Swansea.

Researching the history of the area as part of Cân y Cymoedd (When Valleys Sing), a project in nearby Port Talbot, she came across the story of Isabel Thomas, a 14-year-old girl in the 1940s who left school and lied about her age to work in a tin plate works to support her family.

In early September, OpenAI announced it had solved a major mathematics problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century. The news left mathematicians reeling, and many expressed concern over what will be left for humans as AI becomes ever more adept at unravelling complex problems. Now 25 recipients of the Fields medal – often called the Nobel prize for maths – have signed an open letter expressing their fears of a ‘severe misalignment’ between AI companies and their field. To find out how AI is likely to upend maths – and how mathematicians might respond – Ian Sample speaks to Colva Roney-Dougal, professor of pure mathematics at the University of St Andrews

With nearly £30m of funding, I’m giving communities power over local energy. They know the gravity of global heating, and they want to be part of the solution

• Andy Burnham: UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050

On the day I became prime minister, I pledged to bring power to every postcode. Today, we begin to make good on that promise in the most literal sense. With nearly £30m of funding for People’s Power projects, communities across every nation of the UK will soon have the chance to build and control their own clean energy supply.

This investment means villages, towns and cities can harness the natural resources around them with solar panels on libraries, publicly owned windfarms, hydro schemes in their rivers, or whatever else works for them. The purpose is to put money back in people’s pockets while giving them a direct role in tackling the climate crisis.

Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom

It’s all very 2026: with a stadium owner on one side and angry support acts on the other, the cornered star will have to pick a side

Ed Sheeran, seeking to stay out of politics, has become, in this moment, the most political artist in the world. And in trying to leave himself room to manoeuvre, he has backed himself into a corner. Since the rapper Macklemore was dropped as a support act on Sheeran’s Loop tour on Monday, every other opening act has pulled out. Finneas O’Connell kept it brief on Tuesday: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed. I stand with Palestine and its people.” Aaron Rowe was already out, saying: “I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence … rightful voices.”

Beoga, Sheeran’s actual backing band, then pulled out, along with the Danish band Lukas Graham, who probably made the mildest statement, managing to not even mention any countries: “We should be able to speak about war, about civilians being killed, about children who deserve to grow up. Wherever they live. Whatever flag flies over them.”

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.

For so long I wondered why I survived while family and friends were killed. Now I know the only difference between life and death may have been an AI algorithm

The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?

That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.

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.

In towns and in the countryside, I see SUVs and pickup trucks driven without care or conscience. It’s the Magafication of transport

Where is lawbreaking not just visible, but designed to be seen? Where is antisocial behaviour worn as a badge of honour? Where is pleasure gained directly from causing distress? And where is reckless endangerment often ignored by the police or treated with the mildest of punishments? The answer is on the roads.

Last month, three men in the West Midlands were convicted of street racing. Two were driving at over 80mph in a 40mph zone. The third clocked over 90mph in a 30mph zone. The West Midlands has long been blighted by organised racing, sometimes involving 200 cars or more and hundreds of spectators. The result is a long catalogue of deaths and life-changing injuries, including some caused when racers have left the road and ploughed into onlookers or pedestrians. And there are plenty more accidents where the police have little idea whether racing is to blame, for as soon as they happen, the drivers disperse.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

My coccyx still hurts from an extreme cycling challenge almost two decades ago. Is there anything it’s good for?

‘Welcome to middle age.” This is what my GP said to me 10 years ago when I asked her why I needed this pill or that. Being then just shy of 50, that hit home. Now being just shy of 60, I mutter those words to myself at least once a day. There’s a long list of aches, pains and assorted maladies about which to mutter. High up on that list are my shoulders. Bloody agony, both of them. Picking something off a high shelf or fishing for something on the back seat of the car have had to become planned events to be undertaken only if absolutely necessary.

I interviewed Prof Alice Roberts this week. A writer, broadcaster, academic, anatomist, archaeologist and sometime medical doctor, she knows her bones, and no mistake. I noted with interest that her PhD thesis was titled “Rotator cuff disease in humans and apes: a palaeopathological and evolutionary perspective on shoulder pathology”. I’ve rarely felt so connected with my ancestors, so human, and indeed so ape-like. In an instant my shoulder pain became easier to bear, as I felt at one with a caveman wincing as he reached up to apply the finishing touches to some wall art.

Beyond the morale boost and Mark Carney’s stardust, ‘associate membership’ means little

Ursula von der Leyen brought a new mascot to her annual State of the Union address to the European parliament: the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney.

The leader of a plucky, like-minded liberal democracy, locked in an unsought trade war with its much bigger bully of a neighbour, Carney crossed the Atlantic and attended this flagship event of Europe’s political calendar to demonstrate his country’s shared values and desire to get closer to the EU. He was rewarded with a standing ovation and the first ever offer of an (invented) status of “associate member” of the EU.

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

The extraordinary success of the rebels, and Saudi counterstrikes, threaten economic havoc. But the country’s civilians are paying the highest price

Even in a region beset by turmoil and learning to expect the unexpected, the lightning advance of Yemen’s Houthis along the Red Sea coast has shocked observers. More than 100,000 people have been forced to flee in a country where immiseration and displacement have become routine and half the population depend on humanitarian aid. But outsiders are paying close attention, because by claiming thousands of kilometres in a matter of days, and seizing strategically important islands, the Iran-backed rebels now control the Bab al-Mandab strait – the other major regional energy chokepoint after the Hormuz strait.

The Iran war has forced Saudi Arabia to rely on moving oil via its east-west pipeline to Red Sea ports. Now drone strikes – blamed on an Iran-backed militia in Iraq – have shut the pipeline: on one estimate, a month-long closure could cut global crude supply by 120m barrels. The halt to shipping through the Bab al-Mandab strait could be much more protracted. Taking the oil north is a far slower and more expensive route to Asian markets, and does not preclude attacks by the Houthis, who are also targeting oil facilities.

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.

After a desperately tight race, voters rejected the prospect of the far right in government. A potential centre-left coalition needs to seize the moment

European progressives searching for reasons to be cheerful have been finding them hard to come by this autumn. In Germany, the dramatic rise of the Alternative für Deutschland party is threatening the liberal values that underpin the identity of the federal republic. In France, polls continue to point to a likely Marine Le Pen victory in a presidential election, which is months away. Across mainland Europe, centre-left parties are failing to muster an adequate response to nativist movements that have colonised swathes of the working-class support that they once relied on.

In such an ominous political landscape, the outcome of a cliffhanger Swedish election provides a much‑needed source of optimism – albeit one that comes with heavy caveats. Prior to last Sunday’s poll, the outgoing prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, was explicit that if his rightwing alliance won the largest number of seats, he would invite members of the far-right Sweden Democrats party (SD) to become ministers in the next government.

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

Readers respond to an article by Zoe Williams in which she argues that university has become a scam

Having read Zoe Williams’ article on student loans (Why has university become such a scam?, 14 September), I went and checked my student loan statement. What a depressing read that was. I went to university in 2012 as a slightly older student, at 22. I had been to drama school before that, but decided I wasn’t cut out for the harsh reality of show business and that a law career – a barrister perhaps – was more up my street. I wanted to keep the performance element.

After one law degree totalling £56,000, a career development loan of £15,000 to cover the cost of my bar course and a £12,000 postgraduate loan to cover my legal practice course (solicitor training), my student debt remains at £70,000.

Social care reform must reflect the variations in the type, intensity and duration of care provided, says Dr Louise Lawson

Patrick Butler’s article on the rising number of people leaving employment to provide unpaid care resonated with me, both as an unpaid carer and as a researcher in this field (About 1,500 Britons a day quitting their jobs to become unpaid carers, 16 September). The juggle between paid work and caring responsibilities is a daily reality for millions. The report from Carers UK is a welcome reminder of this often-hidden issue, highlighting not only the growing care needs of older people but also the increasing numbers of younger people who rely on unpaid care. The midwife Jacqui Hylton’s observation in the article that caring for her mother is “harder than working in the NHS” deserves serious attention.

What is often missing from these debates, however, is recognition of the diversity and number of caring responsibilities. There is no such thing as a typical unpaid carer. Caring roles vary enormously, whether supporting a disabled child, a working-age adult with a progressive condition or an older relative with dementia.

Without the unflinching commitment of managers, social workers and those who work in them, they won’t be proper homes, writes John Burton

I congratulate the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for exposing the disgraceful state of residential childcare and the use of illegal children’s homes (Councils pay more than £125m a year placing vulnerable children in illegal care homes in England, 8 September). However, this is a symptom not a cause.

While there are good private children’s homes (I’ve worked with some), they are defined by personal and family commitment, not profit. The same relationships are required whoever runs a children’s home, whether a charitable organisation or local authority. Without the personal, unflinching commitment of councillors, managers, social workers and, crucially, the grownups who work in the home, it can’t be a loving home.

David Redshaw responds to a letter on the bond markets and economic pressures afflicting the UK

Neil Kinnock’s timely letter (9 September) reminds us that we are not alone in suffering high gilt yields and borrowing costs. We are still feeling the fallout from Covid, and it needs mentioning that our national debt is similar to America’s and much less than Japan’s, and it never gets mentioned that Italy routinely runs 100% of GDP debt. But as Kinnock observes, the policies of several Conservative governments (including Brexit) have made things worse, and the problem for us is not so much the actual debt but our direction of travel. The aforementioned will make the bond markets view us with a more jaundiced eye.

It was predictable that Jamie Dimon would pop up at this point (JP Morgan boss meets Burnham and Healey to warn against bank tax rise, 10 September). He talks about potential lack of investment by the banks. What investment? We aren’t even a nation of shopkeepers any longer; we’re a nation of pizza deliverers.

It is hard to know whether haters will ever accept manager’s failed tactical shift against Argentina but positive start to preparation for Euros might help

Thomas Tuchel has been back around the Premier League grounds this season and it is worth dwelling on one particular interaction he had with a colleague inside a VIP enclosure, which has doubtless been repeated elsewhere. “People are killing me,” the England manager said. At which point he might have added: Still.

It is two months since England’s 2-1 World Cup semi-final defeat by Argentina in the United States and the emotion tied up in it continues to swirl. Heartbreak, pain, frustration; everything in this kind of area has touched everybody with an investment in the team. It was a result to leave scars that may never heal.

Milan’s grand old home turns 100 this weekend, and while it will soon be torn down one of the greatest players to grace it reflects on the noise and power of a unique stadium

Alessandro Costacurta lasted 15 minutes of his first game at San Siro. He was, admittedly, not playing, but tagging along to watch his older brother’s favourite team.

“I grew up in the province of Varese, north of Milan,” he says. “So as a kid I was a Varese fan. It was my brother who supported Milan. The first time I went to San Siro, I was 12, my brother was 14. I think it was Milan-Bologna. But San Siro wasn’t covered back then, and suddenly this downpour started, so much rain. We were with our dad and after a quarter of an hour he just said: ‘No, that’s it, we’ve got to go.’ So that was the first time I saw San Siro.”

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Following the conclusion of this weekend’s round of Premier League fixtures, football fans have what promises to be an exceptionally long, uninspiring and largely inconsequential international break to endure. In most parts of the world, various nations have nothing more exciting than friendlies scheduled. In Europe, it’s the return of the Nations League. A competition apparently conceived for no other reason than to allow Cristiano Ronaldo to spuriously claim he has won two major international trophies, this Uefa wheeze is about to kick off for the fifth time. Almost unique among tournaments that have enjoyed such longevity, its format remains fairly baffling to many of those who will actually be playing in it and all but the keenest students of the game. In truth, hardly anyone cares about the Nations League and quite literally nobody gives two hoots about its opening games.

I met Ludek Miklosko once. In fact, shaking my hand was one of the first things he had to endure after signing for West Ham in the summer of 1990. (The history books say he signed earlier, but he wasn’t officially unveiled until the summer.) I was working in the club shop at Upton Park (a cabin by the gates). He seemed baffled that now he was finally here and had escaped the communist regime, he was being introduced to a child as ‘our new goalkeeper’. He was very nice about it, though; I showed him the new kit, and he went on to meet the groundsman and have a look at the pitch. My lasting memory was of his truly massive hands. Lovely fella” – Jimmy O’Brien.

I was struck by the phrase that Madrid’s Carlos Espí ‘dug his side out of a hole’ (yesterday’s Football Daily). Surely, one cannot dig oneself out of a hole? Digging, by definition, takes you further into the ground. Unless the goal was to arrive in China, climbing out of a hole would be more appropriate” – Christopher D’Cruz.

Amalgamating the themes of yesterday’s three letters, Spurs fans can at least be hopeful about one thing. Since a player who spends much of the time rolling around knacked near the corner flag can’t be interfering with play, then at least none of their forward line will be caught offside much this year” – Jon Millard.

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With Barcelona racking up seven-goal thrillers, Real Madrid could not afford a collapse. Enter the forward quietly turning into José Mourinho’s ultimate secret weapon

José Mourinho called and Carlos Espí came to his side. It was late, it was noisy and it was almost over – the match and maybe even something more – when Real Madrid’s coach took the forward who is also his flatmate to one side on Tuesday night. Standing close, Mourinho had a message to deliver; he also had a piece of paper. Small, folded, half-hidden in his hand, it was not big enough for much more than a single word, shown almost surreptitiously, the request written on it, like what he had whispered in Espí’s ear, left to your imagination. Put ball in goal, perhaps. Or: Help. So he did.

Madrid needed him to, which they should not have. Two goals up inside half an hour at Elche on Tuesday night, they could have added a third or a fourth, maybe even a fifth, before half-time. But, thinking it was as done as it really should have been, their minds perhaps on Sunday’s derby at Atlético too, they had stopped again, drifting. Vinícius Júnior had gone, Arda Guler had gone, Aurélien Tchouaméni might as well have done, barely able to move any more, and now, somehow, the game was going. Goals from Abiel Osorio in the 71st minute and Fer Niño in the 83rd had made it 2-2.

The Patriots owner’s decision to ban the rapper from performing at the team’s stadium brings back memories of the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick

Six years ago, in the middle of a “racial reckoning” that never was, a White House that had begun out of control reached its chaotic apex. Federal officials were sweeping citizens off American streets in unmarked vehicles, surrounding the Lincoln Memorial with armed guards and rolling military vehicles through residential neighborhoods in a fascist reaction to protests against the murder of George Floyd. It was at this point that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, realizing it had all gone too far, appeared on a Zoom and admitted his league was “wrong” for not listening to its players when they had protested against police brutality.

The implication was clear: more than any other sports league, the NFL was harshest in its reaction to the protests that began with Trayvon Martin in 2012 and continued with Ferguson, Baltimore and Colin Kaepernick. By blackballing Kaepernick, sitting by while broadcast partners refused to air the national anthem to undermine the protests, and, most embarrassingly, Goodell’s draconian announcement that teams would be subject to fines if players showed dissent, the NFL had proven itself to act in the most un-American of ways.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He also writes on Substack

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I have been corrected by the Yorkshire press box, the filming at Grace Road was not for a Virender Sehwag biopic but a Sourav Ganguly biopic. Apparently the team have already filmed for five days at Headingley, at Lord’s, and at Scarborough.

They’ve started at Grace Road, are restarting at Headingley, but still delays at Hove, The Oval and Canterbury.

Centre is back in the Prem with Sale after three years in Paris where he says he learned a lot more than the language and is ready to play for England again

Joe Marchant admits he has been a disappointment. Significant developments over the summer gave rise to lofty expectations among his new Sale Sharks teammates but the 30-year-old centre knows he has not lived up to them. “When we’re playing here, people expect me to be good,” he says. “Why would it make me good in any way? I’m not the best.”

Marchant is, of course, referring to his football skills rather than the rugby ones and the added expectation to perform in a pre-training kick-about after former Newcastle and England captain Alan Shearer became his father-in-law over the summer. In every other department, Marchant has done nothing but impress in his new surroundings.

Man behind US college football’s landmark match in London has dedicated his life to improving crowd safety since his daughter was killed in a crowd crush at a concert aged 23

On Saturday afternoon, as he looks out at the crowd of 60,000 he has helped entice to Wembley Stadium, Brian Dubiski’s dream will become a reality. But, as Arizona State and Kansas make history by playing the first US college football game in Britain, Dubiski will think most of his daughter, Madison, who was crushed to death at the age of 23.

Madison and nine other people were trampled and suffocated by a crowd at a Travis Scott concert in Houston in November 2021. Dubiski now dedicates his life to keeping people safe at sporting events and concerts and, since December, Wembley is one of the stadiums that follows the protocols he introduced.

Former Palace head coach has won a cup final in Norway and says chance to challenge for league title was a pull

“When it’s a good day, it’s absolutely stunning, so we’ll take that,” Laura Kaminski says with a laugh about the rainy west coast of Norway. The English former promotion-winning Crystal Palace coach is referring to Bergen, the place she now calls home, whose football club, Brann, she has taken to her heart since her appointment in January.

She could easily be speaking about the job itself. After Brann failed to qualify for the Women’s Champions League owing to a 4-0 second-leg defeat by Austria Vienna, they secured a cup final success against Aalesund, handing Kaminski a first major trophy on the continent. Her team are four points clear at the top of the league with seven games remaining.

Central bank announces surprise plan to sell billions of pounds in government bonds back to the Treasury

• Burnham’s talk of ‘breathing space’ at odds with reality of future rate rises

• Business live – latest updates

The Bank of England has kept interest rates on hold as it warned a continuation of the bitter fighting in the Middle East could force it to raise borrowing costs amid mounting fears over inflation.

It also announced a surprise plan to sell billions of pounds in UK government bonds back to the Treasury to avoid fuelling turbulence in the gilt market, a decision that could have significant consequences for the public finances before next month’s budget.

Fact-finding mission says military strikes on school and sports facility in ⁠February constitute war ⁠crimes

A UN fact-finding mission has determined there are reasonable grounds to believe the US was behind military strikes on a school and a sports facility in Iran in ⁠February that killed 120 children, and that these constituted war ⁠crimes.

The school strike, which killed 156 civilians including 120 children, involved a US Tomahawk missile that collapsed the roof of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, which the UN said was “clearly identifiable”, in Minab, Hormozgan province, on 28 February.

Official results confirmed that his right-leaning bloc lost last Sunday’s parliamentary election

Meanwhile, we are getting some interesting lines from Paris that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened the chiefs ⁠of ⁠the ​different political parties to discuss the ​crises ‌in ‌the Middle East ‌and Ukraine and their consequences on the energy market.

The meeting will ‌be held on Friday morning at 10:30am local time on Thursday (that’s 9:30am UK) and military and intelligence officers will share ⁠the information they have ​provided to ​Macron, his ​office said ​in ‌a ​statement.

The musician is serving a 50-month federal prison term for prostitution-related offenses

Attorneys representing rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs say they are no longer acting for the disgraced star in a dispute over months of unpaid legal bills.

The musician, who is serving a 50-month federal prison term for prostitution-related offenses, has become increasingly belligerent in recent months, causing “a total breakdown in cooperation and communication” with New York law firm Sher Tremonte, one of its partners Michael Tremonte said in a court filing.

After Trump describes associate membership as ‘laughable’, PM says majority of Canadians support closer ties with bloc

Mark Carney has welcomed the goal of Canada becoming the EU’s first associate member, calling for “deep cooperation” between Europe and his country to secure their sovereignty, after Donald Trump derided the idea as “laughable.”

In an address to the European parliament in Strasbourg, Carney said polling showed that an overwhelming majority of Canadians supported much closer ties with Europe.

Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers can draw enough heat from cows’ fresh milk to bring water close to the boil, slashing carbon emissions

In many ways, the world’s oldest cheddar-maker hews to tradition. Since 1833, Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers has operated from the rolling green pastures of south-west England, milking grass-fed cows and fermenting the milk with microbial starters passed down for generations. That heritage has led to award-winning cheese, now popular across continents.

But when it comes to reducing its planet-warming emissions, Barber’s is on the cutting edge. In 2024, the company began to use new ultra-efficient heat pumps from the UK startup Arkaya Energy. The devices quickly cool milk to keep it fresh, and simultaneously heat water used in milking operations, replacing conventional chillers and electric-resistance heaters.

Analysis of global resources reveals depletion in world’s water savings bank to 42% below normal levels last year

Rivers across the world experienced one of their driest years in more than three decades in 2025, a comprehensive study of global water resources has found.

The assessment of the global water cycle by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals a depletion in the world’s water savings bank: the amount of freshwater held on or under the ground, including groundwater, lakes, rivers, snow, ice moisture in the soil and inside plants and trees, was 42% below normal across the world last year.

Sewage, dog carcasses and industrial waste clog Argentina’s second most-polluted river. Meet the activists cleaning it up

Twenty-three years ago, María Monges looked around her flooded neighbourhood and knew something had to be done.

Founded in 1998 in Buenos Aires province’s San Martín district, the community of Costa Esperanza sits on the banks of the Reconquista, Argentina’s second most-polluted river and owes its name to the fictional location of a hit Argentine youth telenovela of the time, Verano del 98. But the real place is very different from the idyllic coastal city where the protagonists of Argentina’s answer to Dawson’s Creek met their first loves or sang around bonfires.

After losing much of its forests in recent decades, ordinary citizens have led the way in planting saplings across the country as part of the government’s Green Legacy Initiative

When Halima Kedir first began planting trees, she was met with scepticism and even mockery. “My neighbours discouraged me,” she recalls, sitting on a wooden chair in her garden, which is lush with the trees and fruits she has planted – banana, olive and grevillea among them.

“They thought I was striving for nothing, but with time, many are realising that trees can be part of the solution to our problems as a way to fight climate change and food insecurity,” she says.

Analysis finds only 955 play professionals supporting 21 million child hospital admissions, leaving many traumatised for life

Children in English hospitals with serious illnesses are being exposed to avoidable trauma because too few health play professionals are being employed, analysis by a leading charity has found.

These workers help to support children through the trauma and anxiety that can come with receiving medical treatment while in hospital by providing play opportunities through games, toys and activities.

Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song, alleges comments were made during argument over Princess of Wales’ funeral arrangements

Prince Charles told Earl Spencer days after the death of his sister Diana, Princess of Wales, that “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”, it is alleged in a memoir to be published this month.

Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, contains the claim that the comments were made by the now king during a heated argument over funeral arrangements.

Thousands with HER2-low advanced breast cancer will have access to Enhertu after ministers strike deal on price

Thousands of women in England with incurable breast cancer will get access to a life-extending drug on the NHS after negotiations over its cost proved successful.

About 1,000 women a year with HER2-low advanced breast cancer will be able to obtain Enhertu from Thursday after ministers and the drug’s makers struck a deal on its price.

Government sources say legislation aimed at China poses a risk to British businesses and must be addressed

The UK government’s EU reset summit will be delayed again unless the bloc agrees to discuss legislation that could lock British business out of parts of EU industry, government sources have said.

The “Made in Europe” legislation – formally known as the Industrial Accelerator Act – is designed to curb China’s increasing presence in European industry, but was not on the reset plan agreed by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, in London in May 2025.

National Park Service lays out concerns that planned 250ft arch could interfere with historic sites in US capital

Donald Trump’s desired triumphal arch in downtown Washington DC will likely contribute “to adverse effects to historic properties”, according to the National Park Service’s planning document, but the construction is still planned to go forward.

The president’s 250ft arch could interfere with some of the most well-known views in the nation’s capital, including the symbolic relationship between Arlington House, the Arlington National Cemetery, the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial, which face each other to represent the reunification of the United States after the civil war.

Exclusive: Internal FBI memo, reviewed by the Guardian, said women wanted to dox and ‘embarrass’ agents, but provided few details

The FBI internally warned that a group of women were creating fake online dating accounts with “tradwife” aesthetics in an effort to lure US immigration agents and “dox” them.

The FBI in Chicago disseminated a brief memo to other law enforcement officials across the US on the potential threat to agents in February, warning that “as of late January 2026, a small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement”. The report, which was shared with the Guardian, provided few details about the alleged scheme and did not explain the source of the information.

Israeli prime minister to pursue new laws as directors of Guardian-produced film face threats from far-right officials and activists

• ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he would seek new laws allowing Israel to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers, escalating the campaign against the Oscar-winning film-makers behind the Gaza documentary NAZA, who have faced threats from senior government and military officials and groups of far-right Israelis gathering outside their families’ homes.

NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, concerns the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza and is named for an acronym used euphemistically by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike. The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian from 2023 to 2025.

Rapper challenged billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft to match donation, with Kraft saying he and Sheeran will give $2m to ‘aid in the region’

Macklemore has announced he will donate the $1m salary he was paid as an opening act for Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour to organizations working with Palestinian people and relief in Gaza, after being dropped from the tour following backlash to his onstage comments in support of Palestine.

The rapper also challenged Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and prominent Israel donor who refused to let Macklemore play at his Gillette Stadium outside Boston, to match his donation.

Union calls for payouts to help cover travel costs and exemption for those living more than 40 minutes away

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Barclays is facing a growing backlash over return-to-office plans, with thousands of staff calling for payouts to help cover travel costs and an exemption for those living more than 40 minutes from work.

Unionised staff represented by Unite are pushing back against plans announced by the bank earlier this summer to get staff back into the office at least three days a week from October, with more senior employees expected to come in at least four days a week.

Lords’ report faces criticism from lobby groups after suggesting ban would be ‘most effective’ way to reduce public harms

The UK should introduce a ban on almost all gambling advertising to protect public health, a cross-party group of peers has urged, prompting fury from the lobby group for bookmakers and casinos.

In a 173-page report, the House of Lords liaison committee said the government had been “too passive” in response to an explosion of digital advertising and social media influencers promoting the gambling sector.

FTSE 100 retailer, which owns UK rights to US brands Gap and Victoria’s Secret, says prices could rise in autumn

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Next has thanked warmer weather for an “unexpected” boost in sales, leading the clothing retailer to raise its profit forecasts for the fourth time this year.

The FTSE 100 company, which owns the UK rights to the US brands Gap and Victoria’s Secret as well as stakes in labels including Reiss and Joules, raised its expectations for full-year profits by £12m to £1.26bn.

Trump urges lower rates after central bank agrees increase by quarter-percentage point to range of 3.75% to 4%

The US Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023 as the central bank continues to fight to tamp down inflation.

The Fed’s open market committee voted unanimously to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 3.75% to 4%. This is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and potentially sets Kevin Warsh, the current Fed chair, on a collision course with Donald Trump.

(Dirty Hit)
The Filipino-British songwriter’s fourth album sprinkles 90s alt fuzz with disarmingly sweet melodies and an impressive host of guests including Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates

Last month, the Guardian published a feature about the demise of the monoculture. It suggested that streaming services, personalised algorithms and the declining influence of radio and television meant we now live in a world where stardom isn’t as universal as it once was. It used Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s single Rein Me In as an example: here was a song that spent a record-breaking 23 weeks at No 1 yet hadn’t attained anything like the ubiquity you would once have expected: to judge by social media, plenty of people seemed to have never knowingly heard it.

If you were looking to advance this theory, you might alight on the career of Beatrice Laus, the 26-year-old British-Filipino singer-songwriter better known as Beabadoobee. To a certain cohort, primarily female and in their late teens and early 20s, she is not just a huge star, but a genuinely iconic figure. The latter is an over-used adjective in 2026, but if social media abounds with tutorials advising female fans how to copy your style and imitate your makeup – if you can be personally held partly responsible for the 2021 outbreak of adolescent girls drawing fake freckles on their faces in imitation of your own – then it probably fits, whether it discomfits Laus or not. The lyrics of Satellite, the closing track on her fourth album Pylon, suggests it does: “I give the generation a new infatuation,” she sings. “If only I knew how to cope with the times.”

Notorious for ultra-violent movies like Drive and The Neon Demon, the Dane had lost the will to direct until ‘the Tom Cruise of surgeons’ saved his life – and triggered an astonishing creative rebirth

Nicolas Winding Refn has his phone out, showing me one of the goriest scenes he’s ever been involved in. Given that the Danish director’s movies have involved hands getting sliced off, eyeballs being gouged out and a son reaching deep inside his mother’s womb, that’s certainly saying something. In this video, the camera is fixed upon a beating heart when suddenly – slash! – it gets sliced open with a knife. We travel into the open chamber, as needles arrive to pierce through the muscle. Unsettling and compelling, could this be a future Palme d’Or winner?

Unlikely. You see, Refn isn’t the director of this footage; he’s actually the guy lying conked out in the operating room while a surgeon attends to him. Requesting that someone films your own heart surgery is a very Nicolas Winding Refn thing to do. “At first they said no,” says the film-maker known for Drive, Bronson and The Neon Demon. “But then they said, ‘As it’s you, we’ll record it.’”

Glen Matlock, Viv Albertine and Rat Scabies revisit the music, clothes and disgusting spitting in a likable documentary marking half a century of British punk

As the majority of them ease into their eighth decade, the overlords of British punk rock get yet another celebratory runout, gently reheating material that has become familiar over the years but never loses its appeal. A subculture that passed almost immediately from tabloid-triggering menace to picture-postcard caricature, punk may have passed into legend as a joyless and even squalid diversion in music and fashion history, but its surviving spokespeople recall their participation in it all with no little enthusiasm, even if they’ve clearly said it a thousand times already. No doubt it is the gen alphas among us who will benefit most; you’d expect their jaws to drop and eyes to roll at some of the stuff deemed perfectly acceptable in the late 1970s: women’s-breasts T-shirts, amateurish pancake makeup, and all that disgusting spitting. (“I didn’t mind it going in my mouth,” says the Damned’s Captain Sensible at one point, out-disgusting everyone.)

There’s a good spread of voices on offer; at least one member of most of the era’s big acts puts in an appearance with Glen Matlock (the Sex Pistols), Rat Scabies (the Damned), Terry Chimes (the Clash), Steve Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees), and Hugh Cornwell (the Stranglers) leading the way. (The latter, though affable enough, is easily the least impressed as to punk’s actual achievements, which is a valuable corrective.) The original punk wave had little space for women (despite the sense that blows were being struck for equality) and that’s the case in the film as well: Gaye Advert (the Adverts) and Viv Albertine (the Slits) get a bit of time on camera though inevitably get a bit lost in it all. Due recognition, however, is paid to designer Vivienne Westwood as punk’s true founding spirit; Sex, the King’s Road boutique she ran with Malcolm McLaren, was a crucible of the British punk scene. Don Boyd, who produced the Pistols’ movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle along with the late Jeremy Thomas, says she “was punk and is punk … it came from her”.

Ronan plays a teacher who finds a way to deal with a disruptive pupil in Jonatan Etzler’s implausible film, but it’s not shocking or funny enough

Here is a strange, heavy-handed and unpersuasive black comedy which owes what success it has to the star-power of its lead, Saoirse Ronan, who is incapable of giving an uninteresting performance. Director Jonatan Etzler has adapted it with co-screenwriter Jess O’Kane from a Swedish novel by Rasmus Lindgren called De Oönskade, or The Unwanted, and is a film that asks you to overlook its plot-holes and implausibilities on the grounds that it is a satire – but a satire saying what, exactly?

The scene is a primary school in the English West Country where Maria (Ronan) is a hardworking, idealistic teacher – but her class is hopelessly disrupted by a violent boy, Danny (Eddie Waller), obnoxious and out of control. He seriously injures another pupil, the nerdy teacher’s-pet Pauline (Nia Brown) whom Maria privately considers a bit annoying. After a chaotic visit to Danny’s home, Maria winds up causing the boy to lose consciousness with an accidental chokehold, and in a panic smuggles him back to her house where she imprisons him in her basement. And then, slowly but surely, the rest of the class, freed from Danny’s hateful presence, blossom and Maria gets a glowing Ofsted report. She looks and feels on top of the world. But what is to be done about her shameful secret?

Documentary director Orlando von Einsiedel on how the real life tale of a man who cycles 6,000 miles from India to Sweden to find his true love will warm your heart

New Delhi, December 1975. It was love at first sight when a Swedish hippy called Lotta von Schedvin sat down to be sketched by an Indian street artist, Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia, known to everyone as PK. In the 10 minutes it took PK to complete her portrait, everything clicked into place for the pair. They were swept headlong in a whirlwind romance, and PK took Lotta to his village in the east of India to meet his family. But soon after, the time came for Lotta to pack up her VW campervan and head back home with her friends.

Heart-stricken PK promised to follow, but a plane ticket to Sweden was an impossible dream. Determined not to lose the love of his life, PK bought a secondhand Raleigh bike, and with $80 sewn into the waistband of his trousers, set off to cycle 6,000 miles to Lotta. He knew the sun set in the west, so that was the direction he took. His plan was to follow the hippy trail, cycling through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, crossing Europe, finally arriving in Sweden.

A shrewd performance by Simon Abkarian leads this blockbuster account of the wartime leader’s career as he ascends to political dominance

The massive and commercially triumphant two-part movie about General Charles de Gaulle comes to end with this second half, which does not, as I half expected it might, go into the complex area of De Gaulle’s postwar career and the issue of French Algeria. Maybe another movie, a part three, can cover this. Liberté takes us from De Gaulle’s growing international celebrity, or indeed notoriety, as the exiled keeper of the Free French flame, the king over the water, in which role his authority is still, however, contested and undermined. It includes the triumph of the D-Day landings and the liberation of France, in the course of which De Gaulle (Simon Abkarian) brings off the miracle of persuading the Americans, in the form of President Roosevelt (Campbell Scott), to back him when they had originally intended to treat postwar France as hardly more than a glorified US dependency, like postwar Japan.

De Gaulle’s stormy bromance with Winston Churchill (who is wonderfully played by Simon Russell Beale), continues from the first half, and the film genuinely has something new to say about Churchill’s Francophilia. It shows us De Gaulle’s foxy cunning, appearing to accept joint status in the provisional French government with General Henri Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte), his rival in the Allied leaders’ affections – and then deftly ousting him. But as in Résistance, the first part, it is in the African theatre of conflict that a new French hero arises; that is General Leclerc (Niels Schneider) whose maverick daring and improvisational brilliance is inspired by De Gaulle. Montgomery, incidentally, is shrewdly played by Pip Torrens, and I was wondering until the last moment if there would be a gamey cameo for Rommel, perhaps played by Lars Eidinger. But no. Germans are apparently not allowed in this mythic retelling.

A fictional British author in Paris sets out to explore Stein through the lens of her own friendships, in this inventive, perfectly paced portrait

It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.)

The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books. Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops. [Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found.”

Opus13
(Alpha Classics)
The young quartet – winners of the Wigmore Hall String Quartet competition – continue to impress in a recording pairing Mendelssohn and Grieg

You would expect good things from Opus13 – current BBC New Generation Artists, and winners at last year’s Wigmore Hall and Bordeaux string quartet competitions – and this assured, distinctive debut lives up to that. The quartet formed in Oslo in 2014 as teenagers, naming themselves after the first piece they played together, and it’s with that work, Mendelssohn’s Op 13 No 2, that they lead off. The brief, soulful introduction breaks into a tense, runaway allegro in which the occasional violin swoop only increases the feeling of urgency. Mendelssohn’s debt to Beethoven in this work is clear, and Opus13 play the slow movement with an intense warmth that make it seem to belong beside that composer’s great adagios.

The Mendelssohn is nicely paired with Grieg’s Quartet No 1, a work full of insistent repetition beautifully handled here so as to create momentum rather than sap it. The folksy style hinted at in the second movement blossoms in the third, which gets a touch of Nordic fiddle, exuberant yet elegant. As encore there’s more Grieg, a characterful version of Solveig’s Song. The arrangement is credited not to a single person but to the entire group equally – which comes as no surprise at all.

The actor and musician spoke at our Guardian Live ‘Honest Playlist’ event at Green Man festival about growing up in Nottingham on the free-party scene, and the healing powers of music

On the Sunday afternoon of Green Man Festival in August, Samantha Morton joined me onstage in the Talking Shop tent to discuss her life in music. The celebrated actor and director is currently in cinemas as the scene-stealing Circe in The Odyssey, but she is also a musician. Later that day, she performed on the main stage later with Everything Is Recorded, the supergroup led by XL label boss Richard Russell, who also collaborated with Morton on her 2024 solo album Daffodils & Dirt. More recently, she voiced her character’s title song on The Odyssey soundtrack. “I love talking about music,” she says. “I never really get asked enough to talk about music.”

For this in-depth conversation with Guardian Live, Morton took us through her Honest Playlist of songs on various themes that have meant something to her, including the first single she bought, Musical Youth’s reggae-pop hit Pass The Dutchie, the song she’d do at karaoke, Michael Prophet and Ricky Tuffy’s Your Love, and a great song to fall in love to (Moments In Love by Art of Noise). She thinks about playlists often, revealing that she makes them whenever she needs to get into character for a role and used to “carry tapes in my back pocket everywhere I went because I couldn’t have bad music.”

From soaring ballads to a song that belongs on every road-trip playlist, these are the tracks that underscore why ‘the Voice’ is a national treasure

In the lead-up to a sold-out tribute concert in celebration of the British-born Australian singer’s music, which is being broadcast at Hoyts cinemas around Australia, we rank the songs that sing to Farnsey’s fans in Australia and around the world.

It’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re heading

Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.

It’s a chaotic time to make sense of the industry that’s reshaping our lives, whether or not we like it. Last week, another AI company employee publicly resigned, warning the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Despite these dire warnings, AI companies have seen “otherworldly” surges in revenue and driven the US stock markets to new highs as they continue to push AI tools into everything from public school classrooms to law enforcement agencies, as well as rushing to put up new datacenters across the country.

What is it that makes books so magical? The Times columnist somehow forgets to tell us in this lofty polemic

While other kids watched cartoons, Times columnist James Marriott would spend his school holidays in bed with piles of books – “a mammoth effort of attention, perhaps the greatest I ever made” – under the spell of his father, a teacher who inculcated in him a literary zeal “not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s”.

Twenty-five years on, Marriott fears smartphones have all but killed reading for everyone. He had to get rid of his own – “George Eliot is no match” – and now, watching the rest of us scroll, he worries not only that we will lose the ability to appreciate Middlemarch, but that we risk falling prey to tyrants and anti-vaxxers forging “a world very different to the one we have known … mystical, tribal and autocratic”.

A bereavement memoir mingles with speculative fiction, in a wise and ragged examination of grief from the author of The Power

In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein alludes to an incident that followed the death of Franz Schubert. He recalls that Schubert’s brother cut several scores into small pieces, each consisting of only a few bars of music, and handed them out to Schubert’s favourite pupils. This, Wittgenstein argues, was a totally understandable act of grief. He goes on to suggest, however, that if, in his grief, Schubert’s brother had left the scores untouched, or even burned them, then that too would be equally legible to us. Such is the disorienting nature of loss – in its wake, anything goes.

In The Strangers, Women’s prize-winning author Naomi Alderman tests this thesis to its limits. How about dealing with grief by writing an uneasy memoir/speculative fiction hybrid about the sudden appearance of a new species of quasi-badgers that seem to improve the quality of local soil?

The president’s former press secretary has learned all the right lessons, but how come it took him so long?

The most interesting chapter in Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves is the one where the hedge funder turned podcaster goes to work for Donald Trump. It’s summer 2017, and he’s been given the job of comms director, which he doesn’t know how to do, but he and Trump think it’ll work out because they’re both from New York. Or maybe he took it because he had “Potomac fever”, which afflicts Wall Street financiers who find themselves on the riverfront in Washington DC thinking they know how to run a country just because they’re “full of power and judgmental insight … about to fix everything”.

This appointment lasts only 11 days, not even enough time to be truly tainted by Trump’s first term, though it is enough time for Scaramucci to miss the birth of his son. The account is a mea culpa soup, with the author full of regrets for his hubris, his impulsivity, his “pride, egotism and asinine stupidity”, the fact that, despite the clear-sightedness bestowed by his humble beginnings, he’d come to assume the collective biases of the rich people he hung out with.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold much less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.

The distinctively British RPG is returning courtesy of the makers of Forza Horizon – with comedy talent such as Richard Ayoade and Natasia Demetriou voicing sweary characters. We had our first play and spoke to its developer

When Playground Games was founded in 2010, its objective was straightforward: to make the best cars in video games. Operating out of an unassuming white building in Leamington Spa, the studio sought to challenge Gran Turismo with its critically acclaimed British racing alternative: the acclaimed free-roaming Forza Horizon series. Yet as the team grew, so did their ambitions. Now they are making the most intriguing British fantasy game we have seen in many years.

For those who have never ventured into Albion, Fable is a quintessentially British role playing game. Created by Lionhead Studios for the original Xbox in 2004, it boasted cheeky charm alongside world-altering player choices, and its droll writing was brought to life in later iterations by national treasures such as Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg. Thanks to its unique blend of farce and fantasy, Fable grew into a globally beloved franchise – before Microsoft unceremoniously shuttered Lionhead in 2016, after mandating that the studio turn its star series into a multiplayer game. The result, Fable Legends, was never released.

We have a first play of the forthcoming Tomb Raider remake and speak with its developers. Can they improve on the gameplay without losing what made the 1996 original such a classic?

We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.

It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

Young Vic, London
Despite a book by the original screenwriter, this stage adaptation doesn’t have the depth – or the songs – worthy of the era-defining feminist parable. And where’s the car?

‘Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” These words were written by Mary Shelley two centuries ago but could apply to the two runaways in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film who turn into highway fugitives in their liberating cross-country road trip after a girls’ weekend goes wrong.

Thelma & Louise, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, did not exactly represent Shelley’s “monstrous feminine” but came to be seen as an era-defining feminist parable on freedom from male strictures and abuse. It caught the cultural zeitgeist, the title becoming a byword for sisterhood, with reams written about its feminist layers, spectacular cinematography – and the shock of its un-Hollywood ending.

An evocative new Tate Britain show captures an era when the UK’s newly flush creative industries teamed up with a generation of skint dreamers to bring the decade into vivid colour

Here is Kate Moss, with pink hair splayed across a pillow, her face scrubbed of makeup, her smile sweet and wonky. Sarah Lucas’s Pauline Bunny artwork with its confrontational hosiery on a charity shop chair. Sean Ellis’s collaborative knights-in-grubby-armour shoot with Alexander McQueen. Here are happy ravers, in a club, or saluting the sun as it stretches and yawns over a litter-strewn hill.

These photos are old. They were taken a long time ago. But they’re young, too. They are curated by Edward Enninful for the Tate’s exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion (Enninful worked at i-D in the 90s) and almost everyone involved is shiny and fresh. The models, whether professional or not, are mostly in their 20s, and the photographers are early in their careers. It gives the photos a youthful fizz, a verve. But the energy also comes from an understanding between photographer and subject. In many of the pictures you can feel the shared mischief, a “yes we’re serious about our ideas” but also a “look, we’re getting away with it!” delight.

Faced with a new concert venue – a vast and beautiful walled garden – John Harris and the Lammermuir festival had to decide how to fill it with sound. Anthony Braxton’s colossal composition was the irresistible solution.

Working in contemporary music, I am used to eyebrows being raised by friends and family when I answer their seemingly innocent dinnertime question, “What are you up to at the moment?”. My responses over the years have ranged from “staging an opera about alien abduction underneath Concorde” to “ensuring that a soprano can get a tattoo live on stage while she sings”. However, I’ve never previously experienced anything like the familial spluttering in response to my most recent answer – “putting on a concert with 100 tuba players in a garden outside Edinburgh”.

I do understand some of their surprise, but to be honest 100 tubas seemed like such a logical solution to the problem I was given that I’m not sure I understand it entirely! James Waters, artistic director of the Lammermuir festival in East Lothian, Scotland – and regular partner-in-crime for some of Red Note Ensemble’s wilder productions, including the aforementioned opera under Concorde – phoned me one day last year to say “I have found an interesting – and very beautiful – place to put on a concert. I just don’t have a clue what music to do. Come and have a look!”

Maggi Hambling, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley … Murray Edwards College houses the Women’s Art Collection, featuring some of the industry’s biggest names from the last 40 years

Museum shows can be expensive. Commercial galleries intimidating. And as for Cambridge colleges? They’re usually marked with signs saying things like “Closed to visitors” and “Keep off the grass”. Murray Edwards College, though, has a magnificent art collection that’s free to visit and open to the public all year round. And Harriet Loffler says you can do whatever you like on the lawn.

She’s the director of the Women’s Art Collection, a permanent fixture of modern and contemporary works by female artists at Murray Edwards, and one of the best-kept secrets in Cambridge. By the time she’s greeting me in the porter’s lodge of the college, I’ve already clocked two Tracey Emin lithographs. In the cafe is a screen print by the Guerrilla Girls and a charmingly clumsy canvas by Rose Wylie. In the corridors and rooms in between we pass pictures by Leonora Carrington, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Walker – and, astonishingly, we’re the only ones around.

It isn’t just Winnie the Pooh – now the star of Blood & Honey II. Budget shockers are treating any story with expired copyright as ripe for murderous exploitation

It is significant that, at this point in our cultural journey, we have become accustomed to film producers jumping on every single property as it enters public domain, so they can make a cheap and exploitative horror film about it. We have seen Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. We’ve seen Bambi: The Reckoning. We’ve seen the six separate horror movies (including Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse of Horrors) that are based on Steamboat Willie. This is just the world we live in now.

But if you zoom out even a tiny amount, it all starts to look a little silly. Not because it suggests the paying public has a fondness for inarguably bad horror films based on loose interpretations of recognisable figures, but because it’s missing the bigger picture. In other words, while producers are watching eagerly for the next newly out-of-copyright property to exploit (by the way, Babar the Elephant will enter the public domain in January), there is an entire ocean of public domain work just sitting there to be desecrated.

The always revelatory dance company is at Sadler’s Wells in London this month with two programmes, celebrating their legacy and presenting ‘heavenly’ new works

Socialist Hotels is the first photography book to focus solely on the architecture of hospitality in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet landscape. These state-constructed buildings were used by visiting government workers and ordinary citizens. Today they are a fascinating legacy of a social and cultural idiosyncrasy.

• Socialist Hotels by Elena Amabili is published by FUEL

After two years shunning the Brisbane portrait prize, several artists are entering again, with some First Nations painters counting on another AI – ‘ancestral integrity’ – to help them win

Poised above the lady in the red dress is a claw. Its metallic fingers grasp to pluck its prize from a jumble of other women while she looks dreamily upward, as if to say “Who, me?”

The woman in the red dress is Australian comedian Alice Fraser, as photographed on stage. The other women – generic superheroes and 1950s housewives – were created using the generative AI software Krea.

From sweaty kit to grubby trainers, here’s how to wash, repair and care for activewear more sustainably

• The best moisture-wicking underwear, socks and base layers

As a running and cycling journalist, I spend a lot of time in sportswear. Lycra is my leg coverage of choice, polyester or merino wool my base layer, and I reach for technical materials like Gore-Tex if the weather isn’t playing ball.

A near-daily workout schedule means my washing machine’s sportswear setting takes a hammering to avoid having a laundry basket overflowing with sweaty, salty, sour-scented clothes. But even then, tops can develop hard-to-shift smells in sweat-prone areas, synthetic materials can start to bobble and lose shape, and my sportswear occasionally gets a foamy detergent residue that hasn’t been properly rinsed out, particularly during wet or intensive training sessions.

Craving cosiness, but too warm for blankets and baths? Try our autumn cheat sheet

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After a record-breaking summer of heat, temperatures aren’t set to drop enough for hot baths, warm tights and roast dinners just yet. But if the darker evenings and falling leaves have got you craving cosiness, here’s our recipe for achieving that comforting autumnal vibe while it’s still unseasonably warm out.

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Want to know the essentials fashion insiders swear by? Whether it’s great T-shirts or forever trainers, Guardian writers and stylists reveal the pieces they rate

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s September style essentials

Whether it’s a great pair of pants or the perfect T-shirt, nailing the basics can make or break your wardrobe. “They have to work harder than anything else,” says British Vogue style editor Funmi Fetto.

I asked Fetto and other stylists and style writers, along with members of the Guardian fashion desk – who all spend more time than most thinking about this stuff – for their most-loved basics. And don’t worry, most of them won’t break the bank.

Want every day to be a good hair day? We tested 22 hair dryers to find the best, from gentle diffusers to high-speed and travel-ready models

• The best hot brushes, tried and tested by our expert

In my years of reviewing beauty tech, it was upgrading my hair dryer that made the biggest difference to my routine. I used to dread hair-wash days: the chore of shampooing, conditioning and rinsing my hair, plus the time – and aching arms – spent getting it dry again.

My clunky, bargain-bucket hair dryer of seven years was weighty, deafeningly loud, and took a painstaking 20 minutes to dry my hair. So happier days really did arrive when I switched to a new model.

After the long hot summer, I’m enjoying September’s back-to-school vibes – and the excuse to create delicious lunches to take to work

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

After an August spent mostly on the road, I’ve found myself unexpectedly enjoying the back-to-school feeling that arrives with September. Usually, I greet it with the sort of enthusiasm reserved for a tax return, but, having been away for so long, it’s actually been rather nice coming home. Of course, there are all the usual inevitable resolutions and to-do lists: go to bed earlier, eat better, take lunch to work. Admirable stuff, although I suspect a summer of one too many honeycomb ice-creams and an irresponsible amount of Irish brown bread and salty butter may also have something to do with it. Taking a packed lunch is, in any case, an all-round win, because eating out is increasingly expensive, and food bought in cafes and restaurants tends to be richer and saltier than a homemade equivalent. Depressingly, school and college canteens don’t fare much better, either.

But a packed lunch needn’t mean a sad sandwich or last night’s tubbed-up leftovers. Nena Foster’s courgette, olive and halloumi muffins are a very good argument for taking your lunch with you: nutrient-dense without being remotely worthy, they work just as well in an adult’s lunchbox as in a child’s, and they freeze brilliantly, too. Add a flask of pumpkin soup or Tom Hunt’s sweetcorn chowder for an excellent autumn lunch.

There is now a wealth of less sugary, more sophisticated nonalcoholic options out there, with flavours clearly aimed at an adult market

I have written recently about several families of nonalcoholic drinks that are having a moment: tonic water, flavoured sparkling water and wine substitutes. It stands to reason that soft drinks are enjoying their time in the sun. Quite literally, too: the heat of 2026 has demanded some serious refreshments and UK booze consumption is at a record low. But it has dawned on me that there is a broader trend in alcohol-free beverages beyond individual categories, namely that we are living in the age of the grown-up soft drink.

By that I mean those with less sugar and more complexity than post-mix drinks, or “soda pop” (as my daughter now calls them, thanks to the KPop Demon Hunters song of the same name), which are clearly aimed at adults. One example is the tribe of “functional” drinks that have hit the market in the past year or so and that have supposed health benefits or performance-enhancing qualities, such as improving focus or helping you to slow down. Sonic Tonics’ CBD-infused 0% drink, for example, promises to shift your mood, and it certainly quenches thirst with a really original flavour profile of bitter hemp root with sweet and floral fig and violet. And while usually sceptical of celebrity-backed products with wellness claims, Gillian Anderson’s G Spot drinks are genuinely delicious. The passion fruit and habanero chilli is my favourite; I can’t support its aphrodisiac claims (allegedly due to its ingredients including butterfly pea and L-arginine, both of which are said to increase blood flow to the sexual organs), but, at £6.50 for four from Ocado, it’s cheaper than trying Gwyneth Paltrow’s sex oil.

Soaring fish prices, labour costs and changing tastes all spell bad news for Britain’s chippies. Is this the end for the seaside staple – or will a few innovators succeed in keeping them alive?

One day in 2007, Darren Sudlow drove past the old stationmaster’s house at Padgate station, in Cheshire, noticed it was empty and decided to lease it. “He just fell in love with the place,” says his son, Kieran, who was 11 at the time. “He said he always wanted a fish and chip shop, for some reason.” Despite having worked as a joiner up to that point, Darren made a go of it, and the Plaice Station, as he named it, was a success from day one. “He worked like mad to get it open and then realised that the hard work hadn’t even started, and he had a queue out the door,” says the younger Sudlow.

The family lived nearby. Kieran Sudlow, who is now 30, worked at the Plaice Station as a boy, peeling potatoes, washing dishes after school, then cooking at the range when he was 16. He went on to become a chef, working in Australia for a few years, then returning to help out at the chippy part-time when needed. Business had always been pretty good. They won local awards and had a loyal customer base. But one day in March, Kieran remembers, his father came in and told him: “‘I think the fish and chip shop’s going to go.’ He said, ‘It’s not making money. I can’t see it carrying on.’”

A 1950s cookbook classic – eat it hot and stringy or firm and flavoursome

Yesterday’s lunch and this week’s recipe is thanks to my friend, the designer Jake Tilson, who gave me a pristine 1977 edition of The Talisman Italian Cook Book. With a cover of red, white and green stripes cover that makes me think as much of seaside rock as Italy’s national colours, the edition was part of the 24th printing of the US translation of Il Talismano della Felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), by Ada Boni. First published in 1950, the abridged translation was sold as a complete guide to Italian cookery, covering all notable dishes. Well, on the cover at least; inside, the introduction is more realistic, warning the reader that, “to criticise the writer [Boni] or translator [Mrs Matilde La Rosa] for failing to include certain dishes is useless”, because no living man or woman can be acquainted with all the variety of dishes of a such variegated country.

The introduction, by a man called Mario A Pei, goes on to explain that the variety of dishes mirrors the wide dialectical array in Italy at the time (1950); its diversity of speech, customs, costumes, psychology and general world outlook. In the next sentence, he notes that this variety was undoubtedly a very bad thing from the standpoint of national unity and progress (the professor and polyglot was an ardent supporter of European fascism and uniting humans under one language). Not that you would guess that from his following sentence: “Variety is the spice of life.” I regretted reading his introduction, and also telling an Italian friend, who said, laughing: “You don’t know the half of it”, in reference to my romanticism about the original Talismano, which may be great, but also (in her opinion) endorses a Stepford Wives fantasy of womanhood; a journey with Boni as patient guide.

We got her as a puppy and she became particularly close to Adam – a blessing when he went into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night

My husband, Adam, and I had always planned to have a big family and that journey began when we got our dog, Polly, five years ago. I’ve loved golden retrievers since I was a child because I grew up with one. We got Polly as a puppy and she was everything we’d hoped for: loving and smart.

She immediately connected with both of us, but became inseparable from Adam. They would go for morning runs together; Polly could always be found wagging her tail by his side. This bond proved to be lifesaving.

Conversations are supposed to be two-sided – but all too often we come up against someone who’s passionately, exclusively in love with the sound of their own voice. Time to fight back …

When I was in my early teens, I was often invited round to a schoolfriend’s house for dinner. Her family struck me as wildly progressive: they were Danish and indulged in all sorts of “out-there” activities – fondues, candle-making and, most terrifying of all, the talking stick.

Before the meal was served, someone would retrieve the sacred broom handle and it would be passed around the table. You could speak only if you had possession of the stick. Despite it being the most stressful thing ever (it meant being in the spotlight, and then remembering to keep quiet the rest of the time), I now frequently yearn for a more convenient version of that stick.

For example, I met a friend recently whom I see infrequently but keep up with via voice notes. No sooner had we sat down than he launched into a long discourse about his new marathon training food plan. He only broke the flow to order an omelette: “Four egg whites, two yolks, is that possible?” (We were in my local greasy spoon, so the request was greeted with mirth.) When we left, 90 minutes later, he finally had the grace to turn to me and ask: “And how are things with you?”
Walking home, I felt a mixture of disappointment and irritation. Had he always been so self-absorbed? So uninterested in anyone else? I couldn’t help wondering if our one-sided virtual updates had played a part in the problem.

There is a name for this type of egocentric behaviour – “conversational narcissism”. Although it was coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in his 1979 book The Pursuit of Attention, the term seems more relevant than ever. “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist. “In face-to-face situations, people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen. And people are chatting on the phone – an activity that at least requires turn-taking in a defined way – much less often.”

A lot of our communication online can feel weirdly transactional, focused on logistics or niche WhatsApp groups. According to Tamu Thomas, a life coach and author, this has damaged the art of improvised conversation. “People have less capacity for meandering conversations that don’t have a purpose,” she says. “A good dialogue is a back-and-forth between two people discovering new things about each other, even if they have known each other for years. Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch, some people are confusing communication with connection.”

Knowledge is power, though. If you can recognise the five types of common conversation hogger, it will be much easier to handle them.

My son was inconsolable and the back seat was an absolute mess. After a few minutes of trying to clean up, a stranger emerged from a nearby house

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Kids always get sick at the worst possible time. For instance: in the middle of a busy motorway, one hour into a three-hour trip.

My husband was away for work and I was driving our two small children to see him, when one vomited in the back seat. I pulled into a slipway just off the motorway to try to clean up as best I could. The kids were too young to be trusted to sit there safely right next to a busy road, so I had to leave them strapped into the car seats while I tried to mop up the vomit with wet wipes. My son was inconsolable and the car was an absolute mess.

Psychology has become one of the most popular courses at university. That’s no surprise as the insights it gives to our behaviour can help in a huge variety of careers

For Niamh Mulcahy, 21, graduating with a psychology degree from the University of Bath has already paid off. After navigating a competitive graduate jobs market this year, she secured a sales role with a FTSE 100 company starting in September.

“My degree involved a lot of data analysis, which has been really useful in job applications,” she says. “The course felt very current. We covered everything from neuroscience to forensic psychology, and my dissertation was on ‘incels’. I’ve always been fascinated by human behaviour and why people make the decisions they do.”

It told me a year ago I had applied for a credit card – now it is it telling me my payment is overdue

A year ago I got an email from Barclaycard stating that my “application was successful” for a credit card. I had made no such application. I immediately reported this to Barclaycard. More emails arrived and I made repeated phone calls to customer service.

I was assured it was a simple typo rather than fraud, and that my email address would be removed. However, I’m now receiving notifications that the latest account payment is overdue.

The cost of living crisis hits students hard. Planning ahead and some self-discipline will help, alongside a sharp eye for a bargain and, if you’re eligible, a bursary

Like late-night study sessions and cramming into a student kitchen to cook up meals, being savvy with money has long been part of the university experience. But with the cost of living remaining high, students are more money-conscious than ever.

“It is one of the most difficult times to make ends meet as a student,” according to Tom Allingham, communications director at Save the Student (STS). He says soaring prices for essentials, such as food and energy bills, have “disproportionately affected” students, while maintenance loans (intended to help cover day-to-day costs) have failed to keep up with high rates of inflation.

With the budget looming, arguments rage over whether ministers should scrap a pledge popular with millions

There were fresh calls this week for the state pension “triple lock” to be ditched as debate rages over whether the UK can afford it.

The triple lock guarantees that the state pension goes up each year in line with inflation or wage increases or 2.5% – whichever is the highest.

Natalie Greenwood says surgery is no ‘magic fix’ for chronic pelvic pain – a view backed up by a new study

“It’s really frustrating to be in this cycle of continuous surgery. It makes you feel helpless,” says Natalie Greenwood, of a condition that affects her so badly she is “non-functioning most of the time because of the constant fatigue”.

Greenwood, 36, needs to have an operation every few years to limit the impact of the endometriosis that gives her chronic pelvic pain, as well as extreme tiredness and brain fog.

Collagen powders, gummies and pills have boomed in popularity in recent years boosted by claims that they smooth wrinkles, promote glossy hair and help with joint pain. Amid the noise it can be hard to figure out whether there’s any actual science behind the promise of looking younger for longer. Luckily Dr Xand van Tulleken has spent the past three years writing Make me well: a quest to understand the confusing world of wellness, and his chapter on collagen dives deep into the evidence. He tells Madeleine Finlay what collagen does in the body, how we can get it without splashing out on expensive supplements, and why getting to the truth behind wellness claims can be so hard

Handstands display a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt – and they look cool. Experts share their advice for building up strength and practicing

My aspirations in life are modest: I want to write, spend time with my loved ones, and someday find a lipstick that flatters my skintone. But perhaps my greatest ambition is this: I want to be able to do a handstand.

Why? It turns the world upside down. It seems fun. It displays a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt. And it looks cool! Maybe it has to do with that one time in third grade when all my friends could do a handstand and I couldn’t, but that’s for me and my therapist to sort out later.

Seeing a pallid, washed-out face in the mirror? Prepare to be diagnosed …

Name: Ferritin face.

Age: The name is new, but the symptoms are old.

Let your legs enjoy the last of the summer’s breeze while a thick top or jacket keeps away the autumn chill

This is the most enjoyable time of the year to get dressed because clothes can just be clothes. They don’t have to function as a personal air-conditioning and sweat-disguising system, as they did for the summer, nor do they need to double as a portable central heating unit yet. Your outfit does not need to “take you from day to night” until party season starts, and it doesn’t have to jigsaw itself into a hand-luggage-sized capsule wardrobe until next summer. There is little in the way of functional heavy lifting, so you get to just wear nice clothes.

And this benign early part of autumn is more fun to dress for than the equivalent weather in spring, because we still have a bit of summer swagger. The summer habit of wearing shorts and halter tops and even swimwear has gotten us a little loose, a little more laid-back about flashing a bit of skin here or there. It is about more than bare flesh, though. There is something about summer that flexes the flashy dresser in everyone – whether that’s fancy dress for a festival, or just the way that putting on a pair of sunglasses brings out your inner movie star.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of painting on the gloss, but thanks to a range of fresh formats in sophisticated shades and textures, my head – and lips – have been turned

I’m deeply suspicious of people who never change their minds. To be so completely sure of anything as to be permanently entrenched in any position isn’t something I admire, which is why I shove an olive into my mouth every couple of years and hope it finally takes.

I do the same with lip gloss, with historically similar results. Fashion has, until recently, been on my side. Less sophisticated than lipstick, overshadowed by TikTok trending lip oils, less effortless cool-girl than tinted lip balm, gloss has barely had a look-in these past few years, but new formulas steal from other formats for a better user experience and, well, like everything eventually, lip gloss is back in vogue.

Experts don’t know exactly what causes dandruff, but if you’re seeing light flakes on your scalp, over-the-counter products can help

You spy a scatter of white flakes on your collar. Or you’ve got an itch that won’t quit, no matter how much you wash your hair. Dandruff isn’t glamorous, but it’s common: about half the world’s population has it.

An itchy, flaking scalp is rarely dangerous, but it can be annoying. Here’s what you need to know about what might be causing your flakes, what you can do about it, and when it’s time to get help.

Weekenders from Zagreb head to the rolling green Samobor Hills for nature, vineyards, delicious local food and Habsburg-era architecture

‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I was more than willing – happy, even – to follow everyone’s suggestions to try kremšnita in Hotel Livadić’s Kavana Livadić, in Samobor’s main King Tomislav Square, a mere half-hour drive west of Zagreb.

It lived up to the hype – delicately rich, creamy and with a light touch. After spending a few weeks in sun-bleached Venetian Dalmatia, amid the scrubby, limestone Dinaric Alps, I had swapped empires and was firmly in Habsburg Croatia. Here, in Zagreb County’s prettiest town, handsome baroque houses in pastel shades of buttery yellow, apricot and pistachio, festooned with stucco, line narrow King Tomislav Square, whose umbrella-shaded cafe terraces were filled with Croatians getting their morning fix of coffee and chatter.

Hiking alone in the countryside can be joyous, but for women it can sometimes feel unnerving. Here’s how to enjoy it safely, plus four stunning routes to walk solo

I did my first solo hike during a sunny September, seven years ago. After a summer of feeding and ferrying four noisy teenagers (and their friends) around, I was exhausted. But despite being bone tired, I had barely moved. I yearned, above all, for time on my own, for the chance to walk without interruption (and at the pace I chose), and for the silence of some empty wilderness.

But I was nervous. Not of being on my own, but of what might happen to me with no one around to help (breaking a bone, encountering a psychopath, being chased by a bull, getting fatally lost). I could have found a companion or joined a group, but my need for silence and solitude outweighed my fears.

It’s the birthplace of the popular cheese, but the Barletta-Andria-Trani province in southern Italy has an array of local delicacies – from olive oil and yellow tomatoes to goat prosciutto

‘I don’t eat mozzarella outside Puglia,” says our friend Savio. “It’s not the same.” Savio is a very opinionated foodie, so I take his words with a pinch of good Puglian sea salt (see below). He was adamant about the superiority of the stretched-curd cheese from his home turf.

Puglia is also the birthplace of ingredient du jour burrata, which originated in Andria, a few miles from Savio’s home town of Barletta. Andria forms one part of the triangular Barletta-Andria-Trani (BAT) province, but despite the cheese connection and Barletta having miles of palm-backed, sandy beaches, it is often passed over for better-known parts of Puglia. So I asked Savio’s company, Unexpected Italy, an app that calls itself the antidote to overtourism, to organise a trip to the area.

Chefs in the east of the country are shunning imported produce for local ingredients, reinforcing how food is intertwined with a region and its people

‘It’s a magical place, and not just because of the hotel.” Standing outside the greenhouses at Högbo Brukshotell, two hours north of Stockholm, Stefan Johansson is talking about far more than hospitality. The former head chef, now responsible for sustainability at Högbo, has spent much of the past decade helping reshape the way this corner of Sweden grows, cooks and thinks about food.

The catalyst was disarmingly simple. Years ago, a journalist asked Johansson why he was cooking the food he was cooking. Like many ambitious Swedish chefs, Stefan trained in Stockholm’s top restaurants, where ingredients from around the world were only a phone call away. The question lingered long after the interview ended.

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

At the very moment this week’s Thursday quiz launches on the website, the quizmaster fully intends to be supping a pint of beer at Stansted airport en route to Istanbul, and will presumably overfly Syldavia on the way. In between packing their books on Byzantine history, reading the rules on transporting feral hogs and fretting about the prospect of someone the size of Gary Barlow’s massive son reclining the seat in front of them, they still found time to write 15 questions on topical news, obscure pop culture trivia and general knowledge for your delight. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 265

Initiative aims to keep alive age-old skill, and at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset improve habitat for rare shrill carder bee

It sounds like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel: a merry band of men and women roaming the West Country cutting meadows by hand in exchange for hunks of bread and cheese.

But the conservation charity English Heritage is recruiting a team of volunteer scythers to maintain 21st-century meadowland in the old-fashioned way.

She was born with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. After my decades working in film PR, I now face the biggest campaign of all: the fight for her life

My daughter Elsie has beautiful curls – blond like a little Botticelli cherub’s, hair that someone dark like me could only ever dream of. She laughs a lot, has a cheeky sense of humour and soaks in all the sounds around her – rustling leaves, the sea, a dog barking, children playing around a pool, me impersonating the alarm clock every morning, me impersonating monkeys. Indeed, me impersonating any animal.

Sound is important for Elsie because she has a visual impairment and, while we know she has some peripheral vision, is legally classed as blind. As a result, she uses her tongue to check her environment. When she’s excited it sticks out, tasting the air around her, licking anyone close, sensing space. And when she likes the taste of something she keeps her tongue out until you give her more. This is how we know she likes lollies.

For years, my vitiligo controlled my life, and I was constantly trying to disguise it. But one day, I realised I could take a very different and extremely liberating approach

The microphone felt heavier than I expected. As I stood on stage at a London comedy club last December, I looked out at a room full of strangers sitting quietly, waiting for me to make them laugh. It felt nerve-racking and surreal. I had spent years hiding my vitiligo, hoping people wouldn’t notice it. Now I was about to joke about it in my set.

I was three years old when I developed my first patch of vitiligo on the back of my hand, which later spread to my arms, legs, face and other parts of my body. By the time I was six years old, 70% of me was covered. I was too young to understand what was happening.

From Elizabeth I’s backing of early voyages to royal investment in trafficking companies, generations of monarchs were central to Britain’s slave trade

Enslaved African people were seared with hot metal brands bearing the royal crown, according to research by historians who have documented the monarchy’s centuries-long involvement in Britain’s slave trade.

The Register of British Slave Traders identifies thousands of people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans, including kings and queens.

Rotherham has 46 online vacancies for every 1,000 young people but there are 288 in Cotswold district council area

Young people in Rotherham face a local jobs market with the fewest suitable opportunities in Britain, according to a report that warns stark regional divisions are fuelling a crisis in youth work.

As ministers push to combat rising youth unemployment, the analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) showed young people faced a tougher challenge in some parts of the country to find work than in others.

Thousands of children in state care were evacuated when Russia invaded. Kyiv wants them back – but many resist

When he first arrived in his new home in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022, 15-year-old Denys* says he felt homesick and confused. He had been put on an overnight bus and relocated along with more than 100 other children from his orphanage in Berdiansk, in eastern Ukraine, which was one of the first areas to be invaded by Russian troops.

“Ukraine was all I knew,” says Denys. “I had never left it my whole life.”

We would like to hear about your favourite moments and storylines from the documentary series

As the 7 Up documentary series airs its final episodes with 70 Up, we would like to hear your highlights from over the years.

The ITV series started following the lives of 10 boys and four girls in England, beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old, and has returned every seven years since.

We would like to hear your experience of seeing the Bayeux tapestry exhibit at the British Museum

The British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry exhibit opened on Thursday 10 September, and has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in one day.

Have you seen the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum? How far did you travel to see it? Tell us all about your experience below.

From renting and troublesome landlords to buying or selling a home, send us your UK housing questions

Are you dealing with a problem with your landlord or tenancy, wondering about buying or selling a home, or facing another housing issue?

We’re planning to launch a new column answering readers’ questions about housing in the UK and helping them understand their options.

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached. Whether you are 16 or 100, we want to hear the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to live as a single man today.

Are you trying to find love? Or are you happy living life as a bachelor? Do you find the experience of modern dating – with all its red flags and height requirements – to be a minefield? Or are you attracting more attention than ever before?

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