The Celebrity Traitors drew to a magnificent close this week – and proved that these lying double-crossers are of a far finer calibre than our MPs

• This article contains spoilers about the final episode of The Celebrity Traitors

The Celebrity Traitors final was so good that the TV moment of the year (Nick revealing he’d written Joe’s name on his slate) only held its crown for six minutes before the actual TV moment of the year (Alan revealing he’d been a traitor all along) completely stole it. Epic congratulations to Alan, a full-spectrum entertainment booking, who from the first minutes of this season catapulted himself to the status of high-value national treasure, while Joe Marler also leapfrogged 27 stardom categories in the public imagination and should now be made Duke of York. And look, it wasn’t all bad for historian and Guardian Scott Trust board member David Olusoga. Thanks to the deputy PM and justice secretary, he was only the second most spectacularly wrong David of the week.

But why am I bringing politics into it? After all, one of the most remarkable shifts I haven’t been able to help noticing during this epic first run of The Celebrity Traitors is that no senior politician has attempted to refer to the show as a way of currying public favour. They’d certainly get short shrift if they tried. But this represents a radical break with the past 20 years, where politicians and prime ministers became transfixed by the popularity of reality TV. In the first twisted heyday of the genre, politicians really thought it was the answer and they could steal its best bits to succeed in their own trade. Now I think that even they realise a show like The Celebrity Traitors is the thing people escape to in an age when none of our leaders have any answers.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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

After 16 years, Cave’s scandalous book The Death of Bunny Munro about a sex addict on the run with his son finally lands on our screens. He and star Smith talk Kylie regrets, bad dads … and how to do a strip club scene with a nine-year-old

Nick Cave claims that at least four different production companies have tried to turn his frequently hilarious, always disturbing, sex-filled novel The Death of Bunny Munro into a film or TV show in the 16 years since its release. The problem? “No one would play the character!� he says, sitting, impeccably suited as always, in a room at London’s Corinthia Hotel. As it turns out, the material was just waiting for the right actor. Step up Matt Smith to play the titular sex-addicted travelling makeup salesman.

It’s not surprising that it ended up being Smith. Since his Doctor Who days, he has tended to pick roles that trend slightly twisted – and the role of Bunny, who in Cave’s book is depicted as a borderline animalistic misogynist who sweats pure ethanol, fits the bill entirely. “I think it’s important to tell stories that feel challenging and difficult and polarising, and I thought this would be all of those things,� Smith says animatedly, clad in head-to-toe black in contrast with Bunny’s rakish suit. “But actually, at its heart, it’s about a father and son, and it’s really beautiful.�

The Maga machine is clicking into gear to ensure that defeat is all but impossible in next year’s midterm elections

After the joy, the trepidation. Or at least the preparation. Democrats, along with many others around the world, cheered this week’s wins in a clutch of off-year elections that saw Donald Trump’s Republicans defeated from sea to shining sea. But now they need to brace themselves for the reaction. Because Donald Trump does not like losing. And he will do everything he can to ensure it does not happen again – by means fair and, more often, foul. Indeed, that effort is already under way.

For now, the Democrats are still clinking glasses, enjoying a success that tastes all the sweeter for coming exactly a year after they lost everything – the House, the Senate and the White House – to a returning and triumphant Trump. The most dramatic win was Zohran Mamdani’s history-making victory in America’s most populous city, New York, but there was success too at the other end of the continent, as voters in California backed Democrats on an apparently technical measure that could prove hugely significant. In between, Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by healthy, double-digit margins.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and host of the Politics Weekly America podcast

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

Coventry’s manager on rejuvenating the Championship leaders, coaching highs and lows, and why the ‘golden generation’ debate is overplayed

“I’ve got a bit of a fat ankle, you can probably see the swelling,� Frank Lampard says, legs crossed, looking towards his right foot. At first glance it could be mistaken as evidence of his hands-on approach at Coventry training, collateral damage from partaking in those snappy rondos. The reality is a world away from frontline coaching. “I twisted it playing with the kids in Hyde Park on a Sunday,� he says, breaking into a broad smile.

It is Lampard down to a T. As a youngster he was ticked off by his late mother, Patricia, for wearing football boots to bed and once spent a weekend in Bournemouth at his uncle Harry Redknapp’s housebreaking in a pair of moulds. Lampard has always been immersed in the game, from joining Heath Park boys’ club and fulfilling his dream of pulling on a West Ham shirt to cementing his place as one of England’s greatest midfielders across 13 years and countless trophies at Chelsea. Those days have gone – Coventry represents his fourth club as a manager – but the 47-year-old still believes in being in the thick of things.

Dogs and cats aren’t always good at communicating to their humans what they want or need. Here, experts reveal 15 ways to make sure your furry friends are at their best

Half of UK adults own a pet, with 28% opting for a dog and 24% a cat, according to vet charity PDSA. How can we ensure these animals are in good health? From feeding to fireworks, vets share their advice on how to keep our canine and feline friends healthy and happy.

Iraq 2003-2004

Exclusive: Environment secretary says global tipping points are possible as he rejects far-right climate ‘defeatism’

Tackling the climate emergency is one of the key issues that could turn the tide against hard-right populists across the world, the UK’s energy secretary has said.

Speaking on the eve of the UN’s climate summit, Ed Miliband said it was the cause progressives could rally around, because most people recognise populist parties have got it wrong.

Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, who was accidentally released on 29 October, arrested in north London on Friday

A convicted sex offender who was released from prison by mistake a week ago is back in custody.

Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, from Algeria, was accidentally freed on 29 October from Wandsworth prison in south London. He was arrested in Finsbury Park on Friday after police said they had received a call from a member of the public.

Israeli PM, ministers and army chief accused of crimes against humanity ‘perpetrated systematically’ in Gaza

Turkey has issued arrest warrants for alleged genocide against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and senior officials within his government.

Among 37 suspects listed were the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the army chief Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, said a statement from the Istanbul prosecutor’s office, which did not publish the complete list.

The £5.5bn model was classified as fit for army deployment in September but soldiers continue to raise health fears

Soldiers had to be given medical treatment for hearing problems this summer during final testing of the British army’s new Ajax armoured vehicle, whose introduction has been delayed for several years amid concerns about deafness.

The model, which costs £5.5bn for 589 vehicles, was nevertheless classified as fit for deployment in September. An investigation concluded there were “no systemic issues� – but there remain health concerns among the troops involved.

Director general under pressure after release of memo criticising reporting on Trump, trans rights and Gaza

• The Tube presenter, the former ballerina and the banker: the BBC board’s members

Boris Johnson and figures linked to him are engaging in an effort to undermine the BBC’s leadership, insiders fear, after the leaking of a memo criticising its reporting of Donald Trump, trans rights and Gaza.

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and other senior editorial staff are under pressure after the criticisms made in the document by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to its editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC).

Former footballer guilty over posts directed at football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko, and broadcaster Jeremy Vine

The former footballer Joey Barton has been found guilty of six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.

A jury at Liverpool crown court found that Barton, 43, of Widnes, Cheshire, had “crossed the line between free speech and a crime� with a series of posts made to his more than 2 million followers on X between January and March 2024. He was cleared of a further six counts.

Robert Purkiss appears in court after his arrest in relation to the death of 21-year-old Agnes Wanjiru in 2012

A man has appeared in court as extradition proceedings began in the case of Agnes Wanjiru, a Kenyan woman who was killed near a British army base in 2012.

Robert Purkiss, 38, who is originally from Greater Manchester, appeared before Westminster magistrates court on Friday and told the court he intended to contest the extradition to Kenya. He was arrested on Thursday night in Tidworth in Wiltshire by specialist officers from the National Crime Agency’s national extradition unit.

Sprinklers could save 500-year-old tree that had branches cut off without authorisation in April, says expert

The restaurant chain Toby Carvery is being urged to pay for life support for an ancient oak tree that its owner had chainsawed last spring to widespread public dismay.

Experts say the trunk of the 500-year-old tree, on the edge of a Toby Carvery car park in Whitewebbs Park, Enfield, has shown signs of regrowth, despite its branches being sawn off by the restaurant’s contractors in April.

Local council contacts Mandy Young about animals she kept at her home 10 miles from famous racecourse

It is known as the “headquarters of horse racing�, with its equine heritage stretching to the 17th century. But one resident near Newmarket has apparently had enough – and complained to the local council about the neighing horses.

Mandy Young, a horse owner based about 10 miles from the racecourse, said she received a notice of the complaint in the post and was told it was linked to the “constant neighing� of her animals.

Julia Wandelt deluged McCanns with calls, messages and letters – and even ambushed them at their home

• Woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann found guilty of harassing family

For two years Julia Wandelt ran an Instagram account claiming to be Madeleine McCann – arguably the world’s most famous missing child – who disappeared from the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz in 2007 at the age of three.

Then in January this year the 24-year-old said she no longer believed she was the missing British girl.

Exclusive: Darren Jones says Labour has to convince young people it is ‘modern party of the future’

The Green party is offering “simple solutions to complex problems� and making “undeliverable� promises to voters ahead of the next election that could leave them disappointed, the prime minister’s chief secretary has said.

Darren Jones, one of Keir Starmer’s most powerful ministers, said the resurgent Greens were “a bit like the populist left version of the populist right� of Reform UK, and that both were in danger of letting down voters.

After nine weeks of inquiry evidence, a picture has emerged of systemic breakdown and poor information sharing

Of all the professionals who studied Axel Rudakubana before his murderous attack in Southport last summer, the notes of a rookie police officer in 2019 may be the most prescient.

The actions of Rudakubana, then aged 13, showed “potential for huge escalation�, wrote PC Alex McNamee after spending just 20 minutes with the teenager when he admitted taking a knife to school to attack a bully. The risk, he wrote, was “high�.

The heartstopping finale was so brazen it almost felt like performance art – but it certainly showed the charm and chutzpah of a true champion

Looking back, there was only ever really going to be one winner of The Celebrity Traitors. True, Jonathan Ross might have had all the showbiz pizazz, and Joe Marler the aggression of an unfed labrador – but when you look at the series as a whole, you have to admit that Alan Carr was the only deserving victor.

This much was evident at the heart-stopping climax of Thursday’s finale, when Carr managed to pull off a feat so brazen that it almost came off as performance art. This was a man who had spent the previous eight episodes slashing away at the contestants – gleefully murdering them behind their backs or, in two cases, as he looked them straight in the eye – and not only did he evade defeat, but he also convinced his fallen enemies to comfort him. That’s a level of skill only a true champion can achieve.

Cashmere and wool tees will keep you warm, cool and stylish during the festive season

When it comes to dressing for a party, a T-shirt is usually something you change out of rather than put on.

But this party season, the casual tee is experiencing a metamorphosis. Enter: the cocktail T-shirt.

Three of Australia’s most acclaimed writers have teamed up to write The Mushroom Tapes, about the weeks they spent at the triple-murder trial, picking apart lies, media ethics and evil

“None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants to not write about it.�

The profound inner conflict of the three narrators begins on page two of The Mushroom Tapes and never quite resolves, lingering as an ethical tension that colours almost every page.

Invest in the right pieces in your first house (clue – it’s not a sofa), let teens have some say and make spare rooms work harder when the kids move out … interiors experts share their tips for every age

The keyboard player on his heroin overdose, how Kurt Cobain wanted to be gay and why his memoir will ruin his Christian relatives’ Thanksgiving dinner

When Roddy Bottum began work on his remarkable autobiography The Royal We, the Faith No More keyboard-player knew exactly the book he didn’t want to write. “The kind that has pictures in the middle,� he says, via video-call from Oxnard, California, where he’s completing a new album by his group Imperial Teen. “I’m not a big fan of rock memoirs – they’re the most predictable, name-droppy, sub-literature experiences.�

The Royal We certainly isn’t name-droppy – Bottum doesn’t even use the surnames of his bandmates. And while he outlines the group’s origins and early development, this takes a back seat to his “youth escapades� in San Francisco, “before the internet, before that city got ruined�. Much of the focus is on his sexual awakening, and how the related secrecy and shame have affected his life. “I was having sex with men when I was very young, 13 or 14,� he says. “It was such a taboo, and that set the tone of my life.� In the memoir, episodes involving his cruising public toilets and parks as a teenager are recounted unflinchingly and unapologetically. “I had sex with older men in bushes,� he writes. “Shamefully at first, proudly later. Fuck off.�

From pro athletes to parkrun faithfuls, runners of all stripes told us what gifts they would love to unwrap

• The best gifts for cyclists

According to the Global Institute of Sport, running is experiencing a “massive resurgence in the UK�, including record-breaking entries for the London Marathon, with more than 840,000 people applying for a spot in the prestigious race in 2025.

More than a quarter of Britons now run at least one to three times a week, with trail running gaining in popularity. And chances are you know somebody who likes to lace up their running shoes, whether for a social jog at parkrun, to get fit via couch to 5k, or to add to their ultrarun medal collection.

The 28-year-old’s platform, Hidden, offers a Tumblr-like sensibility in an industry roiled by slop and lets adult content creators earn without burning out

Stella Barey has an hour for lunch. At 1.30pm, she loads her banged-up Tacoma with her three Belgian malinois and drives to a secret Los Angeles hiking trail. There, she gulps down a tapioca pudding and laces up her sneakers. After checking over her shoulder for foot traffic, she pulls down her brown sweatpants and jiggles her bare ass for the camera. Then come the undies. Her coiffed landing strip hovers above the rocks as a rush of urine floods the trail. Every mile she walks, she films another video: a flash, a moon, a finger up the ass.

When Barey decided in 2020 to pursue porn full-time, she did not imagine that at 28 she would spend more time hunched over a desk – not in the fun way – making flow charts, scheduling Zoom calls, and sending pitch decks. “I’m at my happiest when I’m making a video like putting a strawberry in my butt and pushing it out,� she says. “Now I’m on calls all day and I have tech neck.� Known online as the “Anal Princess�, with large, blinking Shelley Duvall eyes and an American Girl doll pout, she will try anything once – even the title “tech founder�.

The 30 Patterns of Harm report draws on evidence from within the Metropolitan police. That’s hard to dismiss, and gives us an opportunity for hope

When I first read Shereen Daniels’ report 30 Patterns of Harm, a damning review of anti-Black racism within the Metropolitan police, I didn’t feel outrage – I felt recognition. The report lays bare what Black Londoners have long known: racism in policing isn’t a case of occasional failures. It is structural – and, left unexamined, it reproduces.

I also felt something else: the faint possibility of change. For perhaps the first time, the Met has chosen to see itself clearly. Following claims that the review had been “buried�, the service has finally published Daniels’ report and companion guide. What makes this different from the 1999 Macpherson and 2023 Casey reports is that it turns the lens inward. Those earlier reviews drew on public testimony and external critique, while Daniels’ analysis uses the Met’s own internal correspondence, policies and governance papers to expose how racial harm is reproduced through decision-making, culture and leadership. And crucially, the commissioner allowed it to be released “without dilution or internal sign-off� – a level of transparency that neither previous inquiry achieved. That act of honesty is the beginning of transformation.

Keith Magee is a writer and academic and chair of the Guardian Foundation. He is a co-chair of the Black Community Policing Advisory Panel, through which he received a pre-briefing on the Daniels report and participated in early discussions around the Met’s response

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

The service is a symbol of our shared values as a nation. No wonder divisive forces in politics and the press are working to undermine it

Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest ever level, according to the most recent British Social Attitudes survey: just 21% of patients are quite or very satisfied with the state it is in. Deep analysis of the feedback makes for grim reading. Jim Mackey, the chief executive of NHS England, now warns: “We have damaged our relationship with the population and it’s their service. We only exist at their will.� Public satisfaction is one of the most important of all targets, he said, along with the NHS staff survey, which shows that only 64% would recommend their service to a family member.

He was speaking at the King’s Fund annual conference this week, where graphs showing public attitudes cast waves of gloom. Access to GPs, hospital appointments and A&E were top public concerns; social care has only 13% approval; and the young are more dissatisfied than the old. On quality, the public is a little more forgiving: 51% were pleased with the quality of NHS care. But people are perverse. Nearly three-quarters think the NHS doesn’t get enough money and it needs more staff – yet people are evenly split on whether to pay more tax to fund the NHS, or stay as we are. People use an easy excuse for not paying more for public services: 51% claim the NHS doesn’t spend its money well. One incident, one pointless letter sends a message of inefficiency.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

On price, is £1.6bn the most the media and entertainment arm could fetch? The other hurdles look just as immense

• ITV shares soar as it holds talks to sell television business to Sky

Do a sum-of-the-parts analysis on ITV, City analysts have been saying for years, and you can come up with valuations way above the depressed share price. It’s just a question of someone making a decent offer for one of the two halves of the corporate entity – either ITV Studios, the production side that makes programmes such as Coronation Street, or the division that actually broadcasts the content and sells the advertising slots.

Now someone has turned up: Sky, which was bought by the US giant Comcast for £30bn in 2018, has made a £1.6bn approach for the broadcasting operation. ITV’s share price gained 16% on Friday but, at 78p, it still stands way below some of the misty-eyed theoretical valuations. Why?

Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work

In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully�; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …�

Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.

Prince opens up in a personal essay before Remembrance Sunday. Plus, David Beckham finally gets his knighthood

The bond, the banter, the bravery, the bacon – all the b-words that render us British. Just as the era of the personal essay seemed finally to have been put to rest, a surprising new voice emerged this week in the form of Prince Harry, contributing some touching thoughts and a lot of alliteration to the public sphere to coincide with the run-up to Remembrance Sunday. Unlike his blockbuster memoir, Spare, the essay, which runs to 650 words, seems to be all the prince’s own work and, as well as his observations about the role of veterans, offers us a poignant insight into his life in California.

When I heard it was dumbing down education, my heart sank. In fact, it’s outspoken about the chaos of Michael Gove’s reforms and the changes needed

Schooling in Britain today is where medicine was in the days of bleeding and leeches. It is trapped in the past, between teachers wedded to their subjects and politicians obsessed with tests. Doctors generally know if they have cured you, lawyers know if you are found not guilty. Educators have only exams to measure their professional success. The result is that English schools cower beneath an examination mountain – a global outlier in terms of the volume of assessment.

This week’s report on reforming the curriculum in England was greeted by conservative critics with cries of wokery, dumbing down and falling standards. My heart sank, until I read its 200 pages. As a former education correspondent, I can only say I found it uplifting. There was the odd reference to diversity but it was hardly “woke�. What shocked me was its outspoken commentary on the existing system, a curriculum that is overly academic and culturally barren, and with teachers treated as robots.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The increasing ferocity and frequency of tropical storms imposes an unbearable burden on countries including Jamaica

The geographically uneven risks from increasingly extreme and dangerous weather grow ever starker. As Jamaica and other Caribbean countries clear up after Hurricane Melissa, and Typhoon Kalmaegi heads west after killing nearly 200 people in the Philippines and Vietnam, the case for more international support to countries facing the most destructive impacts from global heating has never been stronger.

Last week’s five-day rainfall in Jamaica was made twice as likely by higher temperatures, according to initial findings from climate attribution studies. The current death toll across the Caribbean is at least 75. The economic and social costs are hard to quantify in a region that is still recovering from 2024’s Hurricane Beryl. Crucial infrastructure has been destroyed before the loans used to build it have even been paid off. Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister, estimates that the damage there is roughly equivalent to one-third of the country’s gross domestic product.

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.

It might be darker than usual, but this year’s festive offering reflects our fears for boys growing up today

We need look no further than this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad to see that one of the most urgent national conversations is the crisis of boyhood. Fears around the rise of the manosphere, spiralling mental health problems and loneliness among young men have made headlines, from Sir Gareth Southgate’s Richard Dimbleby lecture, in which he expressed fears that “toxic influencers� are replacing traditional father figures, to the phenomenal success of the hit Netflix series Adolescence. Now these anxieties have even crept into the UK’s reliable cultural barometer, the department store’s annual ad.

As this festive institution itself turns 18, it is fitting perhaps that it tells the story of a middle‑aged father and his silent, headphone-wearing teenage son. The gift of a vinyl record of Alison Limerick’s 1990 dance anthem Where Love Lives transports the dad back to his 90s clubbing days, until the pace changes and father and son see each other over the chasm of years. The boy, in true adland style, becomes a toddler and then a baby. We return to their immaculately stylish living room for a hug and a few tears in homes across the country – if Saatchi & Saatchi has done its job.

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 Jonathan Liew on rightwing condemnation of the capital

Regarding Jonathan Liew’s article (Say what you like about ‘Sadiq Khan’s no-go hellscape’ – Britain’s cities prove the rightwing agitators wrong, 3 November), my experience of London has been one of welcome and joy in its people and cultural venues. I am 80 and have chosen to retire to north-east London to live in this very multicultural, vibrant environment in my final years.

I have in the past enjoyed the peace of Devon and Hampshire, but in both I missed a certain heartbeat – the joy of art and music – and now these and more are on hand in London. I find the people friendly, the young polite and, because I walk with a stick, just about everybody makes space for me to get along the pavements. On the tube, young men, particularly those of Asian descent, immediately offer a seat, and bus passengers do the same.

Barbara Esstman shares a memory of chatting like friends with the author in front of an audience at the Smithsonian Institution, while Jane Crossen is intrigued by Atwood’s Norfolk connection

A line from your recent Margaret Atwood interview (‘It is the scariest of times’: Margaret Atwood on defying Trump, banned books – and her score-settling memoir, 1 November) – “She has a reputation for ‘eviscerating interviewers’� – prompts me to write a thank you to her that I’ve been thinking about since September 2000.

Ms Atwood was scheduled to be interviewed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The person who usually did the literary interviews had heard of this reputation, chickened out, and asked me to replace her. I agreed, though I had never interviewed anyone and was moving house that week. At the time, I didn’t even know in which box my decent clothes and shoes were packed, and had no business agreeing to anything but unpacking.

Ian Flintoff champions live performances and Val Mainwood argues that great art should challenge us. Plus a letter from Ross Speirs on snap-happy gallery visitors

The case that you brilliantly make for seeing actual paintings rather than reproductions (Editorial, 2 November) also goes wholeheartedly with seeing real and actual performances by live human beings rather than the two-dimensional screen reproductions which are now accepted as the norm.

Humans benefit enormously from seeing live performances, and they benefit even more from taking part in them. We have the greatest theatre legacy and culture since ancient Athens. Let all witness this, but also take part. The buoyancy and creativity of our country, and therefore its true economy, will bounce like never before.
Ian Flintoff
Oxford

Sara Rydkvist, the Hong Kong programme director of Amnesty International, and Francis Bown on the threat from China to academic freedom on British campuses

Your report (UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China, 3 November) is deeply alarming. Amnesty International UK’s own research shows that attempts by the Chinese state to intimidate and silence people extend far beyond its borders: a clear case of transnational repression, where governments reach across borders to stifle dissent.

We have documented how Chinese and Hong Kong students in the UK live in fear of surveillance and retaliation. Some have changed the focus of their study, avoided “sensitive� topics, or dropped research on human rights altogether. Universities are often reluctant to speak up. When student Tara Zhang was detained in China for her overseas activism, Soas University of London’s only public comment was that it was “aware of the reports�, without any public condemnation or calls for her release.

• Winner faces Elena Rybakina in Saturday’s final

• Get in touch! Send your thoughts to Niall

First set: Pegula 2-2* Rybakina (*denotes next server) Rybakina had started the stronger but lost her way in that last service game. Can Pegula back up the break? An early double fault doesn’t help matters, and Rybakina outlasts her in a rally to earn break point. From the middle of the court, Rybakina lands an inside-out forehand on the line, and we’re back on serve.

Cam Norrie is playing in the Metz semi-finals; he’s trailing Lorenzo Sonego 6-4, 0-1. In Athens, Novak Djokovic is facing Yannick Hanfmann; it’s on serve in their semi-final.

• ‘Fans will understand if we go out with pride’

• Tuchel ‘re-energised’ after 13 months in charge

Thomas Tuchel has opened the door to staying on as England’s manager after next year’s World Cup and has said his future does not necessarily depend on leading the team to glory.

Tuchel, who handed recalls to Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden on Friday, signed a contract with the Football Association in October last year only till after the tournament. That arrangement gave a short-term feel to the role, but the German has hit his stride in recent months and has said managing England has rejuvenated him after draining spells at Bayern Munich and Chelsea.

• Manager has win-rate of 71.57% across coaching career

• He hails Sunday’s opponents, Liverpool, as ‘best’ rivalry

Pep Guardiola will manage his 1,000th game when Manchester City host Liverpool on Sunday, with the manager thanking “the universe� for having the perfect opponent to mark the milestone.

In 999 matches leading Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, Guardiola has earned 715 victories, a win-rate of 71.57%, and claimed a staggering 39 trophies. While the 54-year-old agrees with Sir Alex Ferguson that his success has somewhat depended on having outstanding players, Guardiola believes his own stellar qualities are behind his longevity and success.

Having not beaten New Zealand in 32 attempts spanning 120 years, Scotland sense an opportunity despite the surprise absence of Duhan van der Merwe

It is 100 years since Scotland played their first match at Murrayfield, but that is the least of the monuments confronting them this weekend. New Zealand’s unbeaten record against them stands at 120 years and counting. Which is to say, Scotland have never beaten the All Blacks, and Saturday represents their 33rd attempt.

The good news is that Murrayfield’s centenary celebrations will culminate in its showcase fixture of the autumn with Scotland given as healthy a chance of victory as they ever have been against these tourists. True, that means little more than that victory has not been ruled out, but recent contests between these two (all at Murrayfield, it should be said) have seen a narrowing of the usual margin of defeat. At times over this past century, those defeats have been hideous to behold. Not so any more.

Goalkeeper is staying grounded despite club equalling clean sheets record that has stood for 122 years

After yet another relatively quiet night at the office, David Raya sprang into action. As soon as the referee pointed to the spot at Slavia Prague on Tuesday, Arsenal’s goalkeeper sprinted to the touchline to confer with the coach Iñaki Caña in a routine that began when the pair first worked together at Brentford. No matter that Arsenal were cruising at 3-0 up with five minutes remaining and on their way to a 10th straight victory – Raya was on the verge of creating history if he could save the penalty and keep the team’s eighth successive clean sheet.

In the end, the video assistant referee came to Arsenal’s rescue and the penalty was overturned, although Raya did have to save a simple effort from Youssoupha Mbodji in injury time from Slavia’s only shot on target. It was only the seventh save he has made in four Champions League ties, in which he has yet to concede a goal. Incredibly, since Nick Woltemade scored past Raya for Newcastle on 28 September, Arsenal have conceded only 12 shots on target in 12 hours and 56 minutes on their way to equalling a club clean sheets record established over two seasons in 1903 when they were a team from south London playing in the old Second Division.

• Incident took place during February game with Burnley

• North End criticise FA’s decision to dish out punishment

Preston have been left “extremely disappointed� by the Football Association’s decision to ban Milutin Osmajic for nine matches over allegedly making racist comments to Burnley’s Hannibal Mejbri.

Mejbril alleged Osmajic made the comments during last season’s Championship derby between the two Lancashire sides at Deepdale in February, which ended 0-0. The FA said an independent regulatory commission found the allegations to be proven after Osmajic was charged with an “aggravated� breach of their rules over conduct, while the Montenegro forward denied the charges.

Arsenal travel to Sunderland aiming for a sixth consecutive league win while Manchester City host Liverpool on Sunday

Saturday 12.30pm TNT Sports 1 Venue Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

• Jockey returning to Britain after licence suspended

• Banned in 2007 for passing information for reward

The former top Flat jockey Robert Winston, who made an unexpected and successful return to race-riding in Bahrain last week, has had his licence to ride in the country suspended and is believed to have returned to Britain while an investigation continues into the circumstances surrounding his departure.

Winston, a former champion apprentice, was on course to be crowned champion jockey on the Flat in 2005 when he suffered serious injuries in a fall at Ayr, and while he has two Group One winners to his name – most recently aboard Librisa Breeze in the 2017 Champions Sprint at Ascot – he was also banned for a year in 2007 by the British Horseracing Authority’s independent disciplinary panel for passing information for reward.

US president also praises Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration during White House summit

Donald Trump has suggested that he could exempt Hungary from sanctions on importing oil from Russia as he praised Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration during a cozy White House summit.

Trump also called on European leaders to show more respect to the Hungarian prime minister, who has clashed repeatedly with fellow EU heads of government over issues of migration, democracy and rule of law.

Chatbot was first used for ‘general help’ with schoolwork or research but ‘evolved into a psychologically manipulative presence’, plaintiffs say

ChatGPT has been accused of acting as a “suicide coach� in a series of lawsuits filed this week in California alleging that interactions with the chatbot led to severe mental breakdowns and several deaths.

The seven lawsuits include allegations of wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter, negligence and product liability.

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

North Sea oil and gas rig staff need to be under 124.7kg so they can be safely winched on to helicopter in emergency

Thousands of North Sea oil and gas workers risk losing their jobs on offshore rigs unless they lose weight within the next year.

Workers who weigh more than 124.7kg (19.5 st) fully clothed will need to shed some pounds by next November or risk being barred from working offshore, according to the industry’s trade body.

Almost one in five school-leavers in West Midlands town are not in education, employment or training and chancellor is under pressure to deliver promised ‘youth guarantee’

It is a rainy day in Dudley and Alex Jones and his friends are taking shelter under some trees in the car park of the college of technology. Clad in blue overalls on a mid-morning break, the students are hopeful their automotive qualifications will stand them in good stead for finding work.

Here in the heart of the Black Country, however, that is not always guaranteed. “Trying to find a part-time job is like trying to find a needle in a haystack,� says the 17-year-old trainee mechanic.

New Zealand film-maker became a Hollywood fixture in the 90s and 00s, including making Pierce Brosnan’s last 007 movie, before returning to his home country

Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.

In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home�.

From Sierra Leone to Milan, cities are introducing their own rules and innovations in the face of rising temperatures

Wooden stakes bearing pictures of young men were driven into the yellow sands of Copacabana beach this week, opposite Rio de Janeiro’s swanky hotels on Avenida Atlântica where 300 mayors and their entourages were staying during the C40 World Mayors Summit.

Smiling up at the mayors in their hotel suites were photographs of four officers killed in what was the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history, just a few days before the summit. A further 117 people were killed in the operation in two of Rio’s largest clusters of favelas – the Complexo do Alemão and the Complexo da Penha – in what the police said was a clampdown on organised crime.

From night walks with children to switching off streetlights and rewilding areas, naturalists are working to save Europe’s dwindling populations

An hour or so after sunset, green twinkles of possibility gleam beneath the hedgerows of Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset. Under an orange August moon, the last female glow-worms of the season are making one final push at finding a mate.

For almost 20 years, Peter Bright and other volunteers have combed the village’s shrubberies and grasslands, searching for the bioluminescent beetles as part of the UK glow-worm survey. Most years, they have counted between 100 and 150, rising to 248 in 2017.

Ben Cooke, a National Trust ranger, places a glow-worm trap near Winspit Quarry in Dorset. Photograph: P Flude/Guardian

A pilot scheme where students eat nutritious breakfasts using donated surplus food builds on the ‘folkhem’ welfare model to boost health and sustainability

Students at Mariebergsskolan, a secondary school in Karlstad, Sweden, make their way to the canteen to grab a juice shot. This morning’s options include ginger and lemon, apple, golden milk, lemon and mint, or strawberry and orange. There’s also the choice of overnight oats with caramelised milk.

It’s just after 9am and the space is usually empty, but thanks to a project launched in 2018 by Vinnova, Sweden’s national innovation agency, students are starting their day with a boost from the energy bar. All the ingredients are donated by local supermarkets which are giving away surplus fruit and vegetables to minimise food waste.

Guerrilla groups have seized control of mining areas, exploiting Indigenous people and fuelling environmental ruin on the border with Colombia

For months, Brig Gen Rafael Olaya Quintero, commander of the Orinoco naval force, has been chasing tin and coltan traffickers across the waterways at Colombia’s border with Venezuela.

His mission has become more urgent since the global shift towards clean energy has generated an unprecedented rush for rare earth elements and critical minerals. These materials are vital components in electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, fighter jets and guided missiles, with demand also driven by increased defence budgets in the EU, US and China, and throughout the world.

Broadcaster says on new BBC podcast that perimenopause made her feel like she had lost her identity

Emma Barnett has said experiencing perimenopause at the age of 38 felt as if she had been “mugged, robbed� of her identity.

The broadcaster, now 40, said on her new BBC podcast, Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett, that it was the “first time in my life I haven’t really wanted to be a woman – it’s the first time I’ve thought, I’d really quite like to be a bloke�.

‘Trust me, I had no idea’ about potential wrongdoing in Scottish National party, says former first minister

• Nicola Sturgeon on leadership, scandal and trolling the trolls – podcast

Nicola Sturgeon has said she fully understands why many people find it hard to believe she had no idea about alleged embezzlement within the Scottish National party given the close links to her domestic life, but has insisted this is the case.

Speaking to the Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast, the former Scottish first minister said her relaxed demeanour in the period directly after she stepped down as first minister, weeks before police searched the home she shared with her then husband, Peter Murrell, would have been impossible if she had suspected things were amiss.

Spycops inquiry hears James Thomson lied to superiors and deceived two women into relationships

Managers of an undercover police officer believed he had concocted a plot in which animal rights activists purportedly sought to obtain a gun to inflict a revenge attack on a political opponent, the spycops public inquiry has heard.

The officer, James Thomson, claimed he had uncovered the plot while he infiltrated animal rights groups. But his managers later came to doubt whether it was genuine, with one of them appearing to call it “bollocks�.

Eve Smith and Darcy Ross, 21, and Rafel Jeanne, 24, found dead at scene of incident on A48 in St Mellons in 2023

Six police officers will face disciplinary proceedings for misconduct in relation to a crash that claimed the lives of three people.

Eve Smith and Darcy Ross, both 21, and Rafel Jeanne, 24, were found dead at the scene of the incident on the A48 in the St Mellons area of Cardiff in March 2023 – almost 48 hours after they were all last seen.

A police sergeant has a case to answer for gross misconduct for their supervision of the missing persons inquiry.

A police constable has a case to answer for gross misconduct for allegedly failing to carrying out basic inquiries, including not recording and sharing information with their supervisor.

Two police constables have a case to answer for gross misconduct after allegedly failing to conduct house searches and then giving dishonest accounts to their supervisor and IOPC investigators.

A police constable has a case to answer for misconduct for allegedly not carrying out adequate house searches.

A police sergeant has a case to answer for misconduct relating to allegations of failing to review all available information at the time of conducting a risk assessment for the missing women.

Move follows ‘escalating hybrid attacks’ by Russia and other foreign powers spreading fake articles across social media

The EU executive plans to create a Centre for Democratic Resilience to counter disinformation from Russia and other authoritarian regimes, according to a leaked paper.

The European Commission intends for the centre to bring together expertise across the EU and from countries seeking to join the bloc to fight foreign information manipulation and interference. The idea forms the centrepiece of the “democracy shield� pitched by the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, when she sought a second term before the 2024 European elections.

Upstate New York institution is the fifth university under government investigation to bow to White House demands

Cornell University announced a settlement with the Trump administration on Friday, becoming the fifth university under investigation by the US government to do so.

The agreement will see more than $250m in federal research funding restored. In exchange, the university will share admissions data with the government, pay $30m and invest $30m more in research programs benefiting farmers – a reflection of the university’s longstanding record of agricultural research. Cornell also agreed to continue to “evaluate the campus climate�, particularly for Jewish students, and use the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws, which views diversity initiatives as unlawful race-based discrimination, in training materials.

Karolis Peckauskas of Drogheda and Garrett Pollock of Annalong in Northern Ireland charged with possession of explosives

Irish authorities have charged two men with possession of explosives in relation to an alleged planned terrorist attack by a far-right extremist group.

Karolis Peckauskas, 38, of Drogheda, County Louth, and Garrett Pollock, 35, of Annalong, County Down, Northern Ireland, appeared at Portlaoise district court on Friday after being arrested in a cross-border police operation.

Accusations of violent interceptions and human rights violations levelled at EU-funded Libyan services by NGOs

More than a dozen NGO rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean have suspended communication with the Libyan coastguard, citing escalating incidents of asylum seekers being violently intercepted at sea and taken to camps rife with torture, rape and forced labour.

The 13 search-and-rescue organisations described their decision as a rejection of mounting pressure by the EU, and Italy in particular, to share information with the Libyan coastguard, which receives training, equipment and funding from the EU.

Making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire appears to fit a US investment culture of backing high-flying innovators

For all the headlines about an on-off relationship with Donald Trump, baiting liberals and erratic behaviour, Tesla shareholders are loath to part with Elon Musk.

Investors in the electric vehicle maker voted on Thursday to put the world’s richest person on the path to become the world’s first trillionaire, despite the controversy that is now seemingly intrinsic to his public profile.

European Commission confirms reports it is looking at postponing parts of landmark legislation

The European Commission is considering plans to delay parts of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, after intense pressure from businesses and Donald Trump’s administration.

The commission confirmed that “a reflection� was “still ongoing� on delaying aspects of the regulation, after media reports that Brussels was weighing up changes with the aim of easing demands on big tech companies.

US telecom firm Comcast aims to buy media and entertainment arm for £1.6bn but analysts question valuation, potential job cuts and regulatory concerns

• Three big problems with ITV’s talks with Sky: price, politics and regulation
  

ITV has said it is in preliminary talks to sell its broadcasting arm to the parent company of Sky in a £1.6bn deal, sending shares soaring.

Comcast, the US telecoms company that own Sky and NBCUniversal, hopes to snap up ITV’s media and entertainment operations, which include its free-to-air TV channels in the UK and ITVX streaming platform.

The Nasdaq is poised for its worst weekly performance since March.

ITV’s bosses and investors will be delighted that Comcast might buy its broadcasting arm, explains Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell:

“The jewel in ITV’s crown has long been its production arm which makes TV shows for broadcast on its channels as well as licenced to third parties. This part of its business, called ITV Studios, was always seen as the most likely bit to receive a takeover offer.

“The fact the media and entertainment arm has attracted a suitor, rather than Studios, is a surprise. There was a lot of uncertainty over whether anyone would want to relieve ITV of this ball and chain, so to see interest from Sky is Christmas come early for management and shareholders.

Midway through the Broadway run of Waiting for Godot with his Bill & Ted co-star Keanu, the actor-director talks about his new film, Adulthood, overcoming the abuse he endured as a young performer, and why we’re wrong about artificial intelligence

Six weeks ago, Alex Winter was on stage at the first night of previews for Waiting for Godot – the latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, in which Winter plays the puttering Vladimir to Keanu Reeves’s equally aimless Estragon.

Winter is an old pro at live performance: he spent almost all of his middle and high school years on Broadway, eight shows a week. He and Reeves, his longtime friend and most righteous co-star of the Bill & Ted movies, had the idea for the revival three years ago and have been prepping ever since.

While promoting new film Eternity, the actor outlined a specific end-of-life scenario that should be cold, wet and include one cheese shop

Over the last few years, the promotional circuit for movie stars has transformed entirely. Where once you could expect sit-down interviews and hagiographic magazine profiles, now any time an actor makes a film they have to be subjected to a flurry of YouTube parlour games; eating weird sweets and trying to remember lines from their old films or, in the case of Hot Ones, willingly giving themselves diarrhoea.

Now the goalposts have shifted again. Elizabeth Olsen was recently at the premiere of her new movie Eternity, about a woman who has to pick a partner for the afterlife. And rather than hitting the usual circuit, Olsen has decided to promote the film by expressing her belief that she’s going to die alone.

When I was in high school, I dreamt of being a very old lady on the coast of England, alone actually. I might have had an animal, and it would be like foggy and wet and kind of cold, and I would go on long walks and I would be in a small town that had like one of each thing you need like one bakery, one coffee shop, one fishmonger, one cheese shop, one like community centre, one theatre. It was always just me because I like meeting new people and I like being a part of a community, and I always imagined I would die alone.

The passionately inclusive politics of the newly-elected New York mayor have clear echoes in boundary-breaking movies such as Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding

When Zohran Mamdani was elected as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and the youngest since 1892, headlines naturally focused on his groundbreaking political rise. But for many, the spotlight also turned to a name that had already long resonated on the global stage – his mother Mira Nair.

A pioneering film-maker with a career spanning more than three decades, Nair has continually reshaped how south Asian identity is portrayed on screen. Now, with her son taking a major public office, the cultural legacy she built appears to echo in the next generation.

The Bend it Like Beckham director has already created cross-cultural versions of Pride and Prejudice and It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, she is reworking Dickens’s classic – with an Asian Scrooge

To begin with, Gurinder Chadha was wandering through the Charles Dickens Museum in London, trying to commune with the author’s spirit. “If you were alive today,� the film-maker asked him, “what story would you tell?� And, she wondered in the same breath: “What can I bring as my own vision to this wonderful story of yours?�

While Dickens’s ghost didn’t materialise, she found her answers and, during lockdown, wrote her own version of his ghost story A Christmas Carol. Giving it the title Christmas Karma, the 65-year-old Londoner has created an energetic, flamboyant musical film starring The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar as Mr Sood – her modern-day Scrooge – alongside Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The rest of the cast is stacked like decorations on a Norway spruce, with Hugh Bonneville, Danny Dyer and Pixie Lott further illuminating proceedings.

One of the new Paramount ownership’s first acts has been to end the Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto series of Trek movies. But surely they can’t stop making them forever?

There have been many Star Treks over the decades. First up we had a 1960s morality play performed on cardboard sets; then it became a billion-dollar movie saga about space diplomacy. More recently we’ve been gifted an ever-expanding collection of streaming spinoffs, each one more determined than the last to prove itself the true keeper of the sacred flame. Now we have a franchise that no longer has any idea what to do with itself. According to Variety, its producer Paramount has shelved the most recent film trilogy, known unofficially as the “Kelvin-verse�, that starred Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the more pertinent question here might be whether this grand old sci-fi saga is now really suited for the big screen at all. The recent films – 2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond – won critical plaudits, yet were also criticised by fans for trying to turn a utopian thought experiment about empathy, cooperation and the perils of militarism into a knockabout space opera.

Echoes of Inside Out and Coco in streamer’s engaging enough caper about a brother and sister journeying through their dreams

Once upon a time, Pixar had the kind of winning streak that most companies could only dream of. The studio didn’t just maintain a robust production line that won over both critics and crowds, they also managed to change our concept of what animation could achieve as an art form. Radically expansive visuals were matched with surprising, weighty ideas, conjuring the kind of magic that had been largely absent from Disney’s output in the years prior.

While many blamed the ensuing fade on Covid, in truth it had already started before then. Like the rest of the industry, the company had become overly reliant on sequels, with the four years before 2020 seeing one original versus four follow-ups and as cinemas shuttered, their latest offering, Onward, was middling enough to suggest that even superfans should be concerned about the future. It’s been a case of ongoing underwhelm ever since, a low point reached by this year’s Elio, a patchworked mess that had the lowest opening ever for a Pixar film (their only bright spot Inside Out 2 has left their upcoming slate looking predictably sequel-heavy).

Rapper receives nominations in all top categories while Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter and Leon Thomas are also major nominees

• Grammys 2026: the nominations in all the major categories

The Grammys’ love continues for Kendrick Lamar. The rapper, who took home the most trophies at the 2025 music awards with five, leads the nominees for the 2026 awards.

Lamar is up for nine awards, including album of the year (for his most recent, GNX), best rap album, record of the year and song of the year. He faces competition for the night’s top award – album of the year – from Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter, Lady Gaga, Leon Thomas, Tyler, the Creator and Clipse, Pusha T & Malice.

With a towering new album about female saints in 13 languages, she’s pop’s boldest star – and one of its most controversial. She revisits her spiritual breakthroughs, and explains why we need forgiveness instead of cancel culture

Rosalía Vila Tobella is just as bored as you are of pop music functioning as gossip column fodder, with lyrics full of hints of rivalries and betrayal. “I’m tiring of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities,� she says. “I’m really much more excited about saints.�

The 33-year-old Catalan musician and producer’s monumental fourth album, Lux, draws on the lives of dozens of female saints, inspired by “feminine mysticism, spirituality� and how lives of murder, materialism and rebellion could light the way to canonisation. Rosalía reels them off. Her gothic, operatic new single Berghain borrows from the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (cited like Madonna these days by experimental female musicians). “She had these visions that would pierce her brain. There’s also Vimala, who wrote poetry but was a prostitute, and she ended up becoming a saint because she was one of the first women who wrote in the Therīg�th�,� an ancient Buddhist poem collection written by nuns.

Perich’s work, performed with McVinnie at Royal Festival Hall, is the latest addition to today’s canon of boundary-pushing pipe organ music

From New York and London
Recommended if you like Kali Malone, Éliane Radigue, Caterina Barbieri, Burial’s Comafields
Up next Infinity Gradient album out 21 November

There’s something about the pipe organ that keeps experimental musicians going back for more. No other acoustic instrument pierces and shakes the air in quite the same way.

Whately/Phan/Tilbrook
(Signum Classics)
A superb survey of Clarke’s lyrical, long-overlooked songs reveals a composer of depth and drama

Rebecca Clarke’s songs have been edging on to the radar recently, but this recording, led by the mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Anna Tilbrook, is the first time they have all been assembled together.

It’s quite a body of work – nearly 60 songs, dating from the early 1910s to the 1940s, after which Clarke largely stopped composing. Around a third of them are recorded for the first time, several are settings of German poetry that Clarke wrote as a student in London; some show her feeling her way towards her own sound, but the best – for example, the quietly imaginative Aufblick – are already distinctive.

There Is no Antimemetics Division by qntm; The Merge by Grace Walker; Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel; Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin; The Strength of the Few by James Islington

There Is no Antimemetics Division by qntm (Del Rey, £18.99)
There have been stories before about mysterious alien entities existing, hidden, within our world, and secret government departments tasked with protecting humanity. This debut novel by software engineer Sam Hughes writing under the pen name qntm pushes the idea to the most terrifying extreme: the antimeme. Memes are ideas that easily spread; antimemes are literally unthinkable, “self-keeping secrets�, impossible to record or to remember. Some feed on memories and pose an existential threat. But how is it possible to win a war when there’s no identifiable enemy, and every attack is immediately forgotten? Against these odds, the Antimemetics Division somehow exists, part of a secret organisation with bases deep underground in the English countryside, as related in this unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel.

The Merge by Grace Walker (Magpie, £12.99)
In a near-future, dystopian Britain, population pressures on scarce resources have resulted in a new technology that promises to cut the problem in half. Any two people who agree to “merge� by having the consciousness of one transported into the other’s body will be rewarded with lower taxes and a better standard of living. The promise is that the two minds will gradually meld into one new person, preserving the best of both. When Laurie is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, her daughter Amelia signs them up to join a trial group, hoping the merge will preserve Laurie’s mind. They have three months to learn how the process will work, and if they are still doubtful they can call it off – but it seems no one ever does. Moving between the viewpoints of the two women, this is a compelling and disturbing story of love and sacrifice, control and resistance.

From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desire

Eva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu�. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet� novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.�

From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight�. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Judith Butler’s theories of gender are buttressed by a deft analysis of Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish hero of the Rutshire chronicles by the late, great Jilly Cooper.

The former England coach could’ve written a great book – instead he’s produced an AI-style word-sludge of generic leadership chat

This is an oddly dull, oddly irresistible football book. Even its title is confusing. Dear England is already the name of a hit Gareth Southgate play, a forthcoming Gareth Southgate TV show and an open letter to the nation authored by Southgate himself in 2021.

This Dear England isn’t formally related to any of those. It is instead an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a classically dull elite football manager trope that Southgate sticks to doggedly, using the words “leader�, “leading� or “leadership� at least 500 times in 336 pages. “What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?� he asks early on, setting out his stall, but stopping short of Why are leaders, How are leaders, or When are leaders?, questions he will presumably touch on in volume two.

This hit debut from Finland is intensely readable, but could have delved more deeply into the links between human progress and environmental destruction

In November 1741 Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist, and curious man�, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigas, nine feet long and soon to be known as Steller’s sea cow. Having made it through the winter, largely by eating the sea cows, the following August Steller and the remaining survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.

Having described these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom are touched in some way by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There is Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, in search of a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there’s Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in the reconstruction of birds’ eggs, who is tasked with preparing a sea cow’s relics for exhibition.

The hugely anticipated sequel was due to arrive in May of next year but has been pushed back to November 2026

Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto VI, which was due to release on 26 May next year, has been delayed again – this time to the end of 2026. It has now been nearly two years since the game was announced, and more than 12 years since the release of Grand Theft Auto V.

“Grand Theft Auto VI will now release on Thursday, November 19, 2026,� reads Rockstar Games’s statement on X. “We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve.�

Crammed with cameos, this recreation of Springfield in Fortnite’s evolving virtual playground is a delight for long-time fans of the show. Shame it’s not here for long

After years of collaborations with Disney on Marvel and Star Wars, it’s finally happened: The Simpsons have arrived in Fortnite. Whereas most of these crossovers comprise themed skins and emotes, this is a complete takeover, with an entire stylised map based on Springfield to explore. It’s a smart way of introducing American TV’s longest-running sitcom to a younger audience – especially with news of a second movie on the way – but for millennials, this is the culmination of a year-long campaign to catch our attention, if previous collabs with Power Rangers, Scream and Mortal Kombat are anything to go by.

Though this could have been a quick ploy for those who grew up on a diet of afterschool BBC Two repeats to open their wallets, it’s no lazy cash-in. The familiar sights of Springfield you’d expect are here: there’s the Simpsons home on Evergreen Terrace, the sloping lawns of Burns Manor, and a town square with Moe’s Tavern and a statue of Jebediah Springfield, detachable head and all. Towards the edge of the map is the nuclear power plant, pumping cartoon steam into the sky, featuring meltdowns that you can avert by tapping a control console to the tune of “eeny, meeny, miny, moe�. Cletus’s farm and a Slurp factory (the game’s spin on Duff – no beer on tap here) sit on the corners of the island, and every match starts with a charming recreation of the show’s intro, complete with parting clouds, title card and iconic theme song, before you thank Otto as you leave the battle bus and descend on to the map.

It may look like an unnecessary sequel, but even as someone who played the original cleaning game for a record-setting 24 hours straight, I’m hooked all over again

Does the world really need another PowerWash Simulator game? No, some will say. Probably people who have never played the original and don’t understand the appeal, but like to tilt their head with a mixture of bemusement and condescension and say: “So what do you do in the game? Just wash things?�

(It feels unfair that other pastimes don’t have to justify themselves like this. No one ever says, “Wait, you just run around the park in a circle for five kilometres?� Or, “So you just kick the ball with your foot?�)

Sports Interactive; PC (version tested), PS5, Switch, Xbox
After a two-year wait, Football Manager 26 upgrades every aspect of the football sim, but it may take some getting used to

You can imagine what the home fans are singing in the Stadium of Light: “Top of the league, you’re having a laugh!� Your Liverpool team, who until this afternoon were five points clear at the top of the table, trail by two goals in the 82nd minute. You wonder where Mo Salah left his shooting boots, or why Virgil van Dijk seems to have forgotten the whole concept of tackling. But this isn’t on the players, it’s on you – or so you’ll tell the press – as you stare at the tactics screen trying to figure out which of the dozens of potential tweaks will change the tide of this depressing spectacle.

Football Manager was always the data-driven alternative to the visually opulent Fifa series (now EA Sports FC), but the latest instalment starts to bridge the graphical gap. The 3D-rendered match highlights have been given an upgrade via the new Unity engine, and the results are impressive. Premier League derbies, Champions League finals, and even away matches in the north-east have visual gravitas now, even if the replays and so-called important moments often overstay their welcome. There are no Fifa-style authentic chants ringing around the stadia, but the atmosphere is palpable and your imagination fills in the blanks.

Sadler’s Wells East, London
Akeim Toussaint Buck’s bass-heavy production invites the audience to get up and lose themselves in the music

A must for reggae lovers, and anyone in the market for an hour of low-key skanking, Free belongs to the category of shows that try to blur the boundary between dancing yourself and watching dancing. It’s something that is hard to pull off, melting the fourth wall and fusing those two experiences. Not just giving people permission to dance, unselfconsciously, but to tap into what the performers are expressing – in this case, the hopeful freedom and defiant joy of reggae culture.

There are five main dancers but these Sadler’s Wells East shows also have a supporting cast of students and elders. It’s a splendidly diverse setup, making the point that everyone is invited. They get us on our feet (there are seats for people who need them), but also arguably form a kind of curtain between audience and the main performers. Still, they’ve got a good vibe.

David Zwirner Gallery, London
From cruel pictures of elderly widows to a shocking image of motherhood, the American photographer’s genius is on full display in a show that finds ugliness all around her

In 1971, at the age of 48, the American photographer Diane Arbus killed herself. Someone should have seen the clues, for her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species. Here is a woman nursing her baby, a modern Madonna – except the woman’s limbs are as thin as an addict’s, her face wizened and the infant resting in her arms, dressed in baby clothes, is a monkey. Just to make clear that this is an absurd, miserable travesty of Madonnas and motherhood Arbus captioned it: “A woman with her baby monkey, NJ, 1971.� It is an utterly pitiable image of desperation, of someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. And the despair mirrors that of Arbus herself.

You might want to see her many images of gender-blurring positively. There’s a photograph called Transvestite at Her Birthday Party, NYC 1969: she lies on her bed laughing, double chinned and gap-toothed in a blond wig, in a shabby hotel room with balloons. But Arbus actually said how macabre and pathetic she found the occasion: “She called me up and said it was her birthday party and would I come and I said, ‘How terrific.’ It was a hotel on Broadway and 100th Street … I’ve been in some pretty awful places but the lobby was really like hades.� The elevator was broken so Arbus walked up to the fourth floor. “You had to step over about three or four people every flight. And then I came into her room. The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.�

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Initially buckling under the world’s weight, seven dancers shed fear and hold on to joy as they replace climate anxiety with collective action

Eulogising a show for its scene changes may seem like damning with the faintest praise. But South Korean choreographer Sung Im Her’s sparky sequences for Paradise Now! at the Bush theatre in 2022 were not just strikingly inventive but also perfectly attuned to playwright Margaret Perry’s satire.

Alongside movement direction for theatre, her dance productions have considered the sway of social media and #MeToo in her home country. She now confronts another headline issue, the climate crisis, in the Southbank Centre’s Kunsty performance series.

Joseph Wright of Derby’s shining innovation, Diane Arbus’s haunting portraits and an Uzbek angle on the end of the USSR – all in your weekly dispatch

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows
Two of the greatest paintings ever done about science – in which audiences are transfixed by lectures on an Orrery and Air-Pump – are brought together in this small but luminous show.
• National Gallery, London, until 10 May

It may be a midlife crisis, says the man behind seven-metre installations of the Earth, moon and Sun who has planted 365 trees in a 100-year project in Somerset

Luke Jerram, whose art installations have travelled the world, is philosophical about his latest project bearing fruit beyond his time on Earth.

Known for his Play Me I’m Yours street pianos project and his Museum of the Moon artwork – a seven-metre diameter sculpture of the moon featuring detailed Nasa imagery of the lunar surface – Jerram is now working on Echo Wood, a living, breathing installation made of native British trees.

In documentary Coexistence, My Ass!, Noam Shuster Eliassi uses humor and honesty to turn a one-woman show into something politically radical

In the late 2010s, Noam Shuster Eliassi was working at the United Nations, the latest step in a lifelong effort to build peace between Israelis and Palestinians, when she had an epiphany. In Ukraine, a Jewish comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made the improbable leap from sitcom about accidentally becoming president to actually becoming president. Perhaps, if she were to take her political career seriously, she should start writing jokes.

It worked. As an Israeli Jew fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Shuster Eliassi could nimbly weave between different audiences, and what started as short comedic videos on social media soon became an invitation from Harvard to develop a full-on stand-up routine skewering the idea of coexistence as it’s often used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The show would riff on her upbringing in one of the only joint Israeli-Palestinian communities in the country, threading a fine needle with self-deprecating humor and an activist’s edge. The aim, she told the Guardian, was to “unpack� the idea of coexistence, “and say, like, ‘this is how I grew up, there are so many funny kumbayah moments, and I propose something else.’�

The film for which the actor, who has died aged 85, is best-remembered is also that in which she was afforded most airtime. If only more film-makers had managed to channel her warm, sharp charm

Pauline Collins was the smart, funny, cherubically sexy female actor in the 1970s who became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic in the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, the pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past, who has a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved and which carried on into spinoff shows Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Choral depicts an amateur choral society in wartime Yorkshire taking on Elgar’s trailblazing and controversial work. But how much does Alan Bennett’s fiction reflect actual fact?

Nicholas Hytner’s new film, The Choral – in UK cinemas today – culminates in an unconventional rendition of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Alan Bennett’s screenplay is an affectionate portrayal of a choral society in a small Yorkshire town during the first world war. Searching for non-German repertoire, the chorusmaster Dr Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) settles in desperation on Gerontius.

Perhaps it is Elgar’s reputation as a pillar of the British establishment – he appears briefly in the film, a cameo from an extravagantly moustachioed Simon Russell Beale – that reassures Bennett’s fictional committee members that this will be a safe choice. But as Guthrie starts to teach the unfamiliar score, they realise Sir Edward’s patrician persona has deceived them. They expected something staidly English, but instead encounter music they find disturbingly Catholic, foreign and theatrical.

Pay homage to the best of the 1990s with our favourite throwback treats – no dial-up needed

• The best home gifts: 28 inspiring ideas for Christmas and beyond

Nostalgia never goes out of style and, right now, the 90s are having their most powerful revival yet – from the return of the side parting to disposable cameras to the John Lewis 90s-soundtracked Christmas ad. This isn’t entirely surprising given our information overload and increased burnout rates. When the present feels overwhelming, we tend to look back to eras that feel simpler, more familiar, even comforting.

The 90s are a kind of cultural palate cleanser: pared-back style, analogue pleasures and a reminder of life before never-ending notifications and algorithmic scrolling. Beauty was playful – think Pamela Anderson’s frosted lips or Gwen Stefani’s hot pink hair; fashion swung between supermodel glam and DIY-infused rebellion started by the grunge music scene; and technology was charmingly clunky but endlessly fun, from Tamagotchi pets to digital watches.

Our menswear expert reveals the knits, from responsible cashmere to cool-guy cuts, that are worth your money. Plus, how to wear and care for them

• How to look after your knitwear: expert tips

Knitwear is a lifelong investment. Choose well, and you’ll be wearing it for years. But how do you make sure you’re buying something that’s built for longevity and won’t fall apart after just a few wears?

As a menswear writer and stylist with years of experience, I’m clued up on the brands that know what they’re doing when it comes to knitwear (from high-street hitters and independents to family-run Scottish mills and luxury labels) – and I’m well versed in how to make it look good, too.

Our reviewer braved Peak District downpours to see which brollies – from budget to mini to windproof – stayed standing

• 10 stylish and practical ways to look good in wet weather

I noticed something while testing umbrellas over pavement and muddy hilltop: people are more likely to smile at you. Or perhaps I was more likely to smile at them, while feeling content and dry-headed under the canopy.

We Britons have loved brollies – previously an aristocratic luxury – since about the turn of the 19th century. Today, they’re a broad tent covering tight budgets and expensive tastes alike. You’ll see them sprout like mushrooms whenever rain hits the high street.

Best umbrella overall:
London Undercover Classic

Best budget umbrella:
Doppler Zero 99

Whether you want memory foam, inflatable or a full-on cuddle loop, these travel pillows passed the (very bumpy) test

• 13 travel packing hacks to save you space and money

There are many reasons why we struggle to sleep while travelling. Gentle motion can be lulling, but jarring movements such as sharp cornering, braking and acceleration can interrupt sleep. And then there are the seats. In many trains, buses, coaches and planes, they are simply not accommodating to sleeping passengers.

Travel pillows can reduce these obstacles to sleep – so much so that you might catch a few winks on the go. Nowadays, you can choose from myriad designs to suit your preferences, including rectangular pillows, wraparound models and even whole-head designs, as well as classic, U-shaped neck pillows. Depending on which pillow you choose, you’ll gain support from the back, sides or front, and there’s various fill options including memory foam, polyester, microbeads and air-filled plastic, all of which have their own feel.

Best travel pillow overall:
Infinity Pillow

Best budget travel pillow:
Boots Travel Deluxe pillow

Our tech expert is back with an updated guide to the top-tier Android phones, from budget buys to the best for battery life

Need an Android phone, but not sure which to go for, or whether to buy new or refurbished? With lots to consider, let me be your guide as you trek through the process of picking the best handset for you.

The latest flagship Android phones come in various sizes, at different prices, and with varying hardware and software features, all powered by the fastest chips. Whether your priority is battery life, camera, screen size, software support or value for money, there is more to choose from than ever. And if you’re thinking of buying Apple instead, we have a guide for iPhones, too.

Best Android for most people:
Google Pixel 10

Best Android for camera:
Google Pixel 10 Pro

‘Tonight or never,’ the men helping me said. ‘Meet us in the alley. Eight-thirty’

In 1965, I was 19 and living in East Berlin. West Berlin was glamorous. They had ­everything: shoes, cars, food. But we had almost nothing. When bananas were imported once or twice a year, the queues stretched further than I had ever seen.

My brother and I were desperate to get out. We’d hang around the checkpoints, hoping to befriend a West Berliner. Occasionally, they took pity and sent us packages. But escaping was rare – and expensive. Most who managed it had paid thousands of marks.