Thikra: Night of Remembering is Akram Khan Company’s last touring show. Here, the choreographer and dancer’s collaborators recall how he motivated them

Nitin Sawhney, composer, collaborated on multiple projects with Khan, including Kaash (2002), Zero Degrees (2005) and Vertical Road (2010)

As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him

“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career.

One of the most prolific and popular actors of his generation, he reflects on therapy, homophobia, why he suspects now is the worst time in history for trans people, and his secret life as a geek

Russell Tovey’s best characters often seem to have it all together, typically as a barrier to further interrogation. Take his recent projects: in surreal BBC sitcom Juice, Tovey plays Guy, a buttoned-up therapist with a seemingly perfect life, hobbled by an aversion to recklessness. Then there’s the closeted Andrew Waters in award-winning American indie film Plainclothes, a well-respected married man of faith who secretly cruises New York shopping mall toilets. Even in the forthcoming Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, Tovey’s character, Barclay, is an ordinary office clerk who is swept up into a planet-saving mission while trying to keep his family from falling apart. In each performance, Tovey anchors his characters with a beguiling mix of strength, empathy and vulnerability.

In interviews, the immaculately put together Tovey, 44, often seems similarly well-adjusted, speaking eloquently about his acting, his passion for art (he co-hosts the successful podcast Talk Art and has co-written three books on the subject) and his advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. Flaws, if there are any, are carefully stage-managed.

Toxic male behaviour of David Szalay’s protagonist reflects real-world concerns about a ‘crisis of masculinity’

In the immediate aftermath of David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker prize, one feature of the novel stood out: how often the protagonist utters the word “OK”.

The 500 times István grunts out the response is part of a sparse prose style through which the British-Hungarian Szalay gives the reader few insights into the inner workings of a man whose fortunes rise and fall.

Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

From flood protection and encouraging wildlife to fixing doors and reducing fuel bills, a new initiative aims to empower residents and make their homes more comfortable

Link Road is home to an unassuming row of Victorian terrace houses in Ladywood, a deprived district of inner-city Birmingham. But inside one of these two up, two downs, a domestic revolution is happening.

At No 33 Link Road, a property bought by community group Civic Square and named Retrofit House, it’s open week. Events include a series of talks, classes and performances – there’s a timetable pinned by the front door so you know when to head to the back bedroom to learn about biomaterials or into the garden for a workshop on mending doors.

He played china mugs, bells, rattles and car horns for everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Benjamin Britten – and once got Laurence Olivier to bang a broomstick. We go behind the scenes of a Radio 3 celebration

Saturday night and the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings is filling up with 300 chattering punters. We are about to record a show that will go out “as live” on BBC Radio 3. This is a one-shot wonder: for one night only, in this drama-documentary, we are exploring the work of percussionist James Blades. Our setup neatly combines the most stressful elements of a live show, plus the key aspect of audience participation which we have – obviously – no proper chance to rehearse. Nerves are fraying. How did it get to this? And who is James Blades anyway?

Born in 1901, Blades was one of the great percussionists of the 20th century, whose life spanned the century itself – he died in May 1999. His blazing talent combined with a startling capacity for hard work took him to the top of his profession and later made him a mentor to music stars as varied as rock drummer Carl Palmer, percussionist Evelyn Glennie and a young Simon Rattle.

The Frattini Bivouac is part of a Bergamo gallery’s experiment to ‘think like a mountain’. But in the thin air of the Italian alps, curatorial ideas are challenged in more ways than one

At 2,300 metres above sea level, Italy’s newest – and most remote – cultural outpost is visible long before it becomes reachable. A red shard on a ridge, it looks first like a warning sign, and then something more comforting: a shelter pitched into the wind.

The structure stands on a high ridge in the municipality of Valbondione, along the Alta Via delle Orobie, exposed to avalanches and sudden weather shifts. I saw it from above, after taking off from the Rifugio Fratelli Longo, near the village of Carona – a small mountain municipality a little over an hour’s drive from GAMeC, Bergamo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – the closest access point I was given for the site visit.

After serving time in jail, actor Allison Mack opens up about her experiences in a group with links to sex trafficking. Plus, a deep dive into Jane Austen

Former Beatle and artists including Sam Fender, Kate Bush and Hans Zimmer record silent LP Is This What We Want

At two minutes 45 seconds it’s about the same length as With a Little Help From My Friends. But Paul McCartney’s first new recording in five years lacks the sing-along tune and jaunty guitar chops because there’s barely anything there.

The former Beatle, arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies.

Museum director and curator of the People’s Palace in Glasgow who reshaped it into a living record of the city’s social history

Elspeth King, who has died aged 76, changed the course of Scottish museum practice by insisting that the everyday lives of working people deserved the same care and attention as fine art or aristocratic relics.

As curator of the People’s Palace museum in Glasgow from 1974 to 1990, she reshaped a fading municipal institution into a living record of the city’s social history, showing that museums could speak in the voices of the communities they served.

Navigation aid from 16th century was on seabed for centuries before being bought and sold in US and Australia

It spent hundreds of years languishing on the seabed off the Isles of Scilly in the far south-west of Britain before being hauled back to the surface by divers and setting off a circumnavigation of the world.

Finally the Pednathise Head astrolabe – a rare example of a 16th-century navigational instrument once used by sailors to determine latitude – is back on Scilly after being rediscovered on the other side of the Atlantic.

Daughter of immigrants advocated for people with disabilities to have full autonomy over their lives

Alice Wong, a writer and disability rights activist who was born with muscular dystrophy and whose independence and writing inspired others, has died. She was 51.

Wong died on Friday at a hospital in San Francisco due to an infection, said Sandy Ho, a close friend who has been in touch with Wong’s family.

Influential musician who created Americana hits had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia

Todd Snider, the influential alt-country singer-songwriter who created Americana hits such as Alright Guy, has died at 59.

His passing was shared through announcements on his official social media accounts. Although no cause of death was provided, his family shared on Friday that he had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia.

Viral plush toy is heading to big screen after a deal was signed with details still unclear over whether it would be live-action or animated

Labubus could be headed to the big screen. Sony Pictures has acquired the screen rights to the plush toy sensation and is in early development of a feature film which, if successful, would anchor a new franchise.

The deal, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, was signed this week between the Chinese toy makers and Sony Pictures, whose animation division is fresh off the global success of KPop Demon Hunters. No producer or film-maker is attached to the project yet, and it’s still unclear if the film would be live-action or animated.

In January the island’s beaches were inundated with waves of plastic pollution, a phenomenon that has been getting worse by the year. Photographer and film-maker Sean Gallagher travelled to Bali to document the increasing tide of rubbish washing up on beaches and riverbanks, and the people facing the monumental challenge of cleaning up. His portraits are on show as part of the 2025 Head On photo festival at Bondi Beach promenade until 30 November

The Cop30 climate summit, blackouts in Kyiv, immigration raids in Chicago and super-typhoon Fung-wong: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

There are shades of Gossip Girl, Desperate Housewives and everything Nicole Kidman has appeared in for the last five years. Put your brain aside, and enjoy

That its ultra-wealthy characters live in a place called Richford Lake tells you almost everything you need to know about the glossy new thriller Wild Cherry. Yes, it’s another entry in the increasingly popular eat-the-rich genre. Yes, it has shades of The White Lotus and everything starring Nicole Kidman for the past five years. Yes, most of the budget has gone to wardrobe, with any woman over the age of 30 apparently allergic to synthetic fibres and every actor seemingly cast primarily for her ability to carry off swagged silk and cashmere in warm beige tones. Yes, you should have bought shares in the colour camel years ago but it’s too late now. Yes, the insular community and soapy vibe suggests an ancestry that includes Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl. Yes, in short, it’s trash with pretensions. But trash with pretensions is as fun a way to spend the long winter evenings as any, so why not set your brain aside and enjoy it?

We begin with the obligatory the-future-as-prelude scene, which here involves four women – two older, two younger – standing in a well-appointed bathroom in their underwear scrubbing blood off their hands. We then flashback to begin the six-part journey to finding out what the jolly heck is going on.

A chance viewing of the comic’s World Tour of Scotland made me swap Australia for the Highlands, although things didn’t quite go to plan …

I was 23 and thought I had found my path in life. I’d always wanted to work with animals, and I had just landed a job as a vet nurse in Melbourne. I was still learning the ropes, but I imagined I would stay there for years, building a life around the work. Then, five months in, the vet called me into his office and told me it wasn’t working out. “It’s not you,” he said, “I just really hate training people.” His previous nurse had been with him for decades; she knew his every move. I didn’t. And just like that, I was out of a job.

I drove home crying, feeling utterly adrift. I wasn’t sure whether to try again at another vet clinic or rip up the plan entirely and do something else. After spending a few days floating around aimlessly, trying to recalibrate my life, I turned on the TV, needing something to take my mind off things. And there he was: Billy Connolly, striding across a windswept Scottish landscape in his World Tour of Scotland documentary.

After a decade, the Netflix hit is bowing out. Ahead of its last episodes, the show’s creators and cast talk about big 80s hair, recruiting a Terminator killer – and the birds Kate Bush sent them

How do you finish one of the biggest and most popular TV series of the last decade? Three years after season four came out, the fifth and final season of Stranger Things is about to make its way into the world. Millions of viewers are getting ready to find out what happens to the Upside Down and whether the plucky teens of Hawkins, Indiana can fight off Vecna for good, but it is early November 2025, and its creators Matt and Ross Duffer are finding it difficult to talk about. It’s not just because they’re feeling the pressure, or because the risk of spoilers and leaks is so dangerously high. It’s because the identical twin brothers from North Carolina are just not ready. “It makes me sad,” says Ross. “Because it’s easier to not think about the show actually ending.”

A decade ago, hardly anyone knew what the Upside Down was. Few had heard of Vecna, Mind Flayers or Demogorgons. In 2015, the brothers – self-professed nerds and movie obsessives – were about to begin shooting their first ever TV series. Stranger Things was to be a supernatural adventure steeped in 80s nostalgia, paying tribute to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. Part of their pitch to Netflix was that it would be “John Carpenter mashed up with ET”. Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine were in it, so it wasn’t exactly low-key, but it was by no means a dead-cert for success, not least because it was led by a cast of young unknowns. The first season came out in the summer of 2016, smashed Netflix viewing records, and almost immediately established itself as a bona fide TV phenomenon.

James Blake speaks to young men about ‘taking the red pill’. Plus: Celebrity MasterChef returns with added Grace Dent. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Three
James Blake meets the online community of alpha influencer Hamza Ahmed. “No one respects the nice guy,” says Shayne, who “took the red pill” after a breakup. “I don’t worship [Andrew Tate] but I crave what he represents,” says Jack, who is 57 days into his “100-day semen retention journey”. It’s an insightful, honest hour in which even Blake needs to address his past beliefs. Hollie Richardson

This revival of the classic BBC drama strand is utterly lacking in the innovative spirit of the original. The next Dennis Potter might be out there somewhere … but they certainly aren’t here

Fantastic news! Channel 5 has revived the BBC’s wildly influential and much romanticised drama strand Play for Today. Well, it seemed like fantastic news until it became clear that the broadcaster has merely copied the name and necessarily broad premise – a collection of standalone dramas by different, often unestablished, writers and directors – and duly trumpeted a return for the trailblazing television format.

Trading on this cherished cultural heritage with no connection to the original is a brazen move. Will the programmes themselves be as audacious? The BBC’s Play for Today, which concluded 41 years ago, had a radical spirit, pushing the boundaries of contemporary taste and confronting the viewer with topics rarely seen on TV at the time.

The X-Files star is at his charismatic best as a ruthless multimillionaire who hires Jack Whitehall as a sinister nanny. It’s like The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr Ripley

I can’t say I had “Jack Whitehall stars with David ‘The X Files/ Californication’ Duchovny in glossy TV thriller” on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are, and a good time with it can be had by all. Alongside, perhaps, a smidge of national pride to see the daft lad from Fresh Meat, Bad Education and Travels With My Father all grown up and holding his own.

The glossy thriller in question is Malice, in which Whitehall plays Adam, a tutor promoted to manny (male nanny, for those not au fait with rich people’s terms), who is bent – for reasons as yet unknown – on ruining high-rolling businessman Jamie Tanner (Duchovny). Whether he has it in for the rest of the Tanner family and friends, or they are just doomed to be collateral damage, is not clear, but that doesn’t spoil the machiavellian fun.

When dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was imprisoned, her husband went on hunger strike – to force Britain to act. Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes reveal how they brought their nightmare to the small screen

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened – but within 100 days, we had the contours of the story. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, held a press conference. He had amassed 780,000 signatures on a petition for her release, and delivered a letter urging the same thing to former PM David Cameron. This, it transpired much later, was after murky meetings with the Foreign Office in which civil servants insisted that the best thing, both for Nazanin’s release and the safety of her parents and brother in Iran, was to lay low and let diplomacy take its course.

“It was state hostage-taking,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard Ratcliffe in the BBC’s four-part drama Prisoner 951. “It clearly goes on, and innocent people and families are completely disrupted and tarred for life. And now I’ve told this story, I look at anyone that might be accused of something, and I don’t quite believe it.”

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence

John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.

As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

This sprawling tale of college kids who summon evil with lifelong consequences is a fantastic read

Six oddball but doughty kids fall into the path of a vast and terrible supernatural evil which has come into our world from the outer limits of darkness. They must spend their lifetimes battling it, facing horror after horror in the process.

This is the plot, roughly, of Stephen King’s novel It (his best; no arguments). It is also the plot, roughly, of King’s son Joe Hill’s new horror doorstopper, in which six friends summon the ancient, infinitely malicious dragon King Sorrow from the Long Dark to help them defeat some baddies. Needless to say, their supernatural ritual backfires.

The bestselling author champions female trailblazers in an enjoyable anthology for all ages

Women make up roughly 50% of the population but only feature in about 0.5% of recorded history. In Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, Kate Mosse, the bestselling author of Labyrinth, celebrates can-do women and gives history’s trailblazers their due. Aimed at teenage readers but just as enjoyable for adults, this anthology comprises bite-sized stories of female achievement and the centuries-old fight for equality. As Mosse notes in the introduction, it is about women “who refused to accept the limitations put on them, who campaigned and marched, battled and challenged the status quo to change the world for the better”.

The book features a mixture of famous and lesser-known figures: artists, writers, scientists, academics, sportswomen, educators and politicians. There’s primatologist Dian Fossey; avant garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil; Britain’s first black headteacher Beryl Gilroy; Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai; Ethiopian politician and humanitarian Senedu Gebru; racehorse trainer Florence Nagle; computer programmers Ada Lovelace and Dorothy Vaughan; and actor and music hall star Josephine Baker, who was also a pilot and agent in the French resistance during the second world war. Not all the assembled achievers are straightforwardly heroic – Marie Stopes may have founded Britain’s first ever birth control clinic in 1921, but she also believed in eugenics.

Available via Pan Macmillan, 10hr 16min

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody-mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.

Sofie Benoot’s film opens out from the film-maker’s medical problem to a diverting reflection on humankind’s deep roots in ancient minerals

The elegant, humorous, susurrating Welsh voice of Siân Phillips sets the keynote for this whimsical essay documentary from Belgian film-maker Sofie Benoot about the nature of rock and stone, and the mysterious interrelation between our bodies and the landmass of Earth.

Benoot’s starting point is the kidney stone that has just been removed from her body, an intriguingly smooth and worn pebble; it’s a personal event she assigns to her offscreen alter ego, voiced by Phillips. This quasi-fictional narrator musingly notes that once upon a time she provided the voice for nature documentaries; quite true, Phillips has indeed narrated some nature documentaries, which appears to be the reason why Benoot cast her.

This story of emancipated young women escaping draconian social strictures brims with enthusiasm and features a cameo from Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Based on a true story, Bill Guttentag’s rousing drama attests to the resilience of women who dare to dream despite draconian social strictures. The film follows Roya Mahboob (Nikohl Boosheri), a trailblazing coach and businesswoman in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) who assembles a robotics team of Afghan girls for international competitions. The young dreamers hail from different walks of life but they all share the same zest for engineering. They face the same dangers too; in a country where women are not encouraged or even allowed to pursue higher levels of education, their quest for medals sees opposition from their own families as well as public scorn from conservatives.

Rule Breakers is at its most thrilling during the competition sequences, which splice together real-life documentary footage of the events with fictional re-enactments. (There’s even an appearance from Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a host.) A breathless enthusiasm thrums through the film, as the camera swirls around the young competitors, all energised by their love for science. These spaces are portrayed as a haven that encourages camaraderie rather than competitiveness, and in a world divided by military conflicts and war, they offer a utopiian vision of international collaboration and solidarity.

She’s Hollywood’s biggest character actor who terrified a generation of men with her ‘bunny boiling’ turn in Fatal Attraction. Now, Close alternates the glamour of the red carpet with living in a red state. She talks about the joy of her ‘undefined’ life

Most of us don’t live our lives in accordance with a governing metaphor, but Glenn Close does. The 78-year-old was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, a town in the north‑east of the US that, to the actor’s enduring irritation, telegraphs “smug affluence” to other Americans. In fact, Close’s background is more complicated than that, rooted in a childhood that was wild and free but also traumatic, and in an area of New England in which her family goes back generations. “I grew up on those great stone walls of New England,” says the actor, chin out, gimlet-eyed – Queen Christina at the prow of a ship. “Some of them were 6ft tall and 250 years old! I have a book called Sermons in Stone and it says at one point that more energy and hours ran into building the New England stone walls than the pyramids.”

If the walls are an image Close draws on for strength, they might also serve as shorthand for the journalist encountering her at interview. Close appears in a London hotel suite today in a military-style black suit, trim, compact, and with a small white dog propped up on a chair beside her. For the span of our conversation, the actor’s warmth and friendliness combine with a reserve so practised and precise that the presence of the dog in the room feels, unfairly perhaps, like a handy way for Close to burn through a few minutes of the interview with some harmless guff about dog breeds. (The dog is called Pip, which is short for “Sir Pippin of Beanfield”. He is a purebred Havanese and “they’re incredibly intelligent”. Most dog owners in the US have the emotional support paperwork necessary to get them on a plane but, says Close, laughing, “That’s really what he is!”)

Philip Barantini’s single-take special follows the star mooching around Manhattan, guitar ever ready for ad hoc turns, ahead of his evening show

Ed Sheeran floats through New York on a cloud of his own sunny high spirits in this hour-long Netflix special. He is the Candide of the music business, smiling benignly, strumming and singing, seamlessly pausing for selfies and fist-bumps and high-fives; he almost visibly absorbs energy from the saucer-eyed fan-worship shown by gobsmacked passersby and radiates it back at them.

Maybe you have to be a Sheeran fan to really appreciate it, but this is another single-take bravura special from film-maker Philip Barantini (who directed Netflix’s searing single-take drama Adolescence) and his director of photography Nyk Allen. With no cuts (though there’s an allowable fast-forward bit, and the audio might have been tweaked in post-production) they follow the unselfconscious Ed as he completes a late-afternoon soundcheck at the New York theatre where he’s playing a concert later on, and then for the next hour, and with fans pretty much always swarming around him, he wanders through the city with his guitar for various encounters, some planned, some (supposedly) not.

Jackson’s songs are back on charts and biopic trailer racked up 116m views in 24 hours, yet there is a certain hesitation

Michael Jackson’s voodoo classic Thriller was high on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the week of 15 November, handing the 16-years-gone King of Pop a record for having a Top 10 hit across six different decades. Simultaneously, Jackson also broke records for receiving 116m views in 24 hours for the trailer of a new biopic, Michael, set for release in April.

Millions of fans may be excited and primed for a Jackson biopic. For comparison, the trailer beat out Taylor Swift’s Eras tour preview and it will join a procession of recent music biopics about Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Elton John. The most successful of all – the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – took in nearly a billion dollars at the box office.

Bonhams is selling over 400 items from the estate of the late Oscar-winning actor, from a draft script of The Silence of the Lambs to his own unique artwork

He was Lex Luthor to Christopher Reeve’s Superman. But could he have been Hannibal Lecter to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling?

The intriguing prospect is raised by an unlikely 33-page draft script for The Silence of the Lambs lurking in a collection of the late actor Gene Hackman’s possessions that goes up for auction later this month.

The actor and the director of Train Dreams – a quietly powerful tale of a logger in 1900s Idaho – on the slog of getting it made, the joy of motel living and why human-made things will always beat AI

America was built by men like Robert Grainier, the stoical lumberjack at the heart of Train Dreams. Grainier cuts the trees and tames the forest and lays the ground for railroads and towns. Technically, then, Train Dreams is a western. But he never once ropes a steer, shoots a bandit or circles the wagons ahead of a Comanche attack on the plains. The small print tells a different kind of story.

It was a hard film to pitch, admits the actor Joel Edgerton: an uphill struggle; plenty of studio trepidation. “You go into the meeting and say: ‘Well, it’s a movie about a guy who’s not really making choices for himself. He’s kind of pushed around by life.’”

Royal Opera House, London
In an engaging triple bill, a new work from Cathy Marston explores the emotional charge of Britten’s Violin Concerto, while works by Justin Peck and George Balanchine showcase the simple joy of dancing to great music

When choreographer Cathy Marston was commissioned to make a new one-act work for the Royal Ballet, she intended to create something abstract, just dancing to music – admittedly not the usual style of the woman who brought us Jane Eyre, Hamlet, Atonement and other narratives – but in the end the music she chose wouldn’t let her do it. Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto was written from 1938-39, his backdrop; the beginnings of the second world war, Britten – a pacifist – moving to the US with his lover Peter Pears, and the death of the composer’s mother. All these things have found their way into Marston’s piece, Against the Tide, and all for the better.

William Bracewell plays the unnamed protagonist, his dancing instinctive as ever, the whorls of his mind played out in the twisting and untangling of his body. Here come military men, with rigid demeanour and clenched fists, and Matthew Ball with satin shirt and seduction; there is Bracewell torn between duty, beauty and freedom. You can feel his torment, it reads like one long dark night of the soul.

Royal Court theatre, London
Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s drama toggles between digital and physical worlds as it traces a scholar’s grim compulsion

‘It’s not that deep,” Ani’s friend assures her. Who cares if she watches a lot of extreme pornography? But after the light is switched off, Ani can’t get through their impromptu sleepover without masturbating to porn on her phone. The friend wakes up next to her and exits in disgust.

The same scenario has already led Ani, a 30-year-old academic, to break up with her partner. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, she was using porn next to her boyfriend in bed. Fleabag darkly regaled us with her voracious YouPorn habit but Ani, despite her robust reasoning in their argument, is deeply troubled by her behaviour. So, too, is her father when Ani hides away in her old childhood bedroom with her laptop.

Bush theatre, London
Performed by an exceptional cast, Sophia’s Griffin’s debut play paints a vivid picture of men – and a system – in crisis

The heat rises slowly, and then suddenly reaches boiling point, in Sophia Griffin’s debut play. Set in a secure hospital in Birmingham – walled off from the rest of life – occupational therapist Naomi (Aimée Powell) starts hosting weekly Caribbean cooking classes. Believing in the meditative power of food, she hopes to engage the men with memories of home-cooked meals and maybe even provide a space for difficult conversations to flourish. But, with Ty, Leroy and Daniel’s simmering histories at play, the room can tip into conflict with one wrong step.

Over the course of the sessions, the men’s pasts gradually become less hazy. The youngest, Ty (a witty, bravado-infused performance from Corey Weekes), is desperate to get out and return to prison. Leroy (David Webber) has been on the ward for what feels like for ever and fears leaving as much as he longs for freedom. The newest arrival, Daniel (Darrel Bailey), just wants to get fixed quick and reconnect with his family. Griffin holds back the details of the characters’ offences until just the right moment, letting us get to know them first. When we finally hear snippets of them, it feels like a punch to the skull.

Theatre503, London
A young woman loses her grip on reality in writer-performer Tanya-Loretta Dee’s unsettling monologue

At what point does infatuation tip over into something darker and more destructive? There’s actually a term for it – limerence – and this is the unsettling undercurrent of Tanya-Loretta Dee’s promising debut monologue, in which she also stars. There are very interesting ideas at play here, particularly to do with the fine line between sexual desire and something much wilder, more animalistic and untameable. But the production needs more fire and intensity. It unfolds at a slight distance and never quite pulls us deep inside this young woman’s fevered breakdown.

The story revolves around Bex, who works in a Peckham party shop by day and has an awful lot of sexual fantasies by night. Into Bex’s life walks James. With his middle-class wardrobe and middle-of-the-road job, James is from a different world. At first, he is Bex’s fantasy prince. But as their relationship fractures and warps, Bex’s fantasies turn in on her, separating her from real life and the people who care about her.

At Theatre503, London, until 29 November

The Royal Ballet’s Perspectives brings together a George Balanchine classic, a new work by Cathy Marston and Peck’s Everywhere We Go, with music by Sufjan Stevens

All photographs by Tristram Kenton

What is the effervescent new boss at Pitlochry theatre planning for his first season? Huge names, undersung stars – and a King Lear played by ‘the woman who changed my life’

‘Holy shit!” This was the instant response of one venerable theatre critic when Pitlochry Festival theatre sent round embargoed copies of the plan for Alan Cumming’s inaugural season. The man himself sits back in the cavernous workshop behind the theatre building, dapper in a grey plaid suit. “I loved that,” he says gleefully.

When the Hollywood star was announced as the new artistic director of Scotland’s only major rural theatre last September, there was widespread shock – not least that Cumming answered an open recruitment call – followed by feverish speculation over which A-list pals he might charm away from London or New York to perform in Highland Perthshire.

EFG Jazz festival, Royal Festival Hall, London
The pioneering 81-year-old vibes player, keyboardist and percussionist creates a controlled whirlwind of experimentation and excitement

Absolutely nothing about this set feels predictable: at 81, Mulatu Astatke is still pushing the boundaries of genre. Even on his farewell tour, there is no easing in, either. The father of Ethio-jazz and his band immediately play Tsome Diguwa as if conjuring a thunderstorm, which in turn crashes straight into Zèlèsègna Dèwèl, a piece written in the 4th-century Ethiopian tradition, its harmonic minor tonality sounding almost Arabic.

Astatke has a serious demeanour. Unsentimental, he speaks only to introduce songs or instruct the band like a schoolteacher. But he views his vibraphone with care and bewilderment, playing with intense familiarity yet almost as though discovering it for the first time. His fascination with his instrument holds the audience captive in turn. During Yèkèrmo Sèw – which fittingly translates to “a man of experience and wisdom” – Astatke’s solo fills the room, water-like in its shapeshifting.

Official Trump social media accounts have been using The Life of a Showgirl snippets to promote his agenda. Why has Swift, who once wanted ‘to be on the right side of history’, said nothing?

In the last two weeks, the Trump administration has used music from Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in three posts on social media. The first, shared by the official White House account on TikTok, was a patriotic slide show of images set to lead single The Fate of Ophelia. As Swift sings “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”, the video cuts to pictures of the US flag, President Trump, the vice-president, JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The second and third were posted by Team Trump, the official account for the Trump Campaign. One, set to Father Figure, riffs on the lyric “this empire belongs to me” with the caption “this empire belongs to @President Donald J Trump”, while the other, celebrating Melania Trump winning something called the Patriot of the year award, is soundtracked by Opalite.

The Trump administration has found itself in dicey waters for using popular music in the past. The White Stripes and the estate of Isaac Hayes have both attempted to sue the administration for using their music without permission, while artists including Celine Dion, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Abba and Foo Fighters have released statements demanding Trump stop using their songs at campaign rallies and public appearances. Most recently, Olivia Rodrigo condemned the administration after the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram account used her song All-American Bitch on a video promoting its controversial deportation efforts (the song was later removed by Instagram).

With his murder conviction overturned, the Jamaican star is back performing. He talks about his illness, regrets, and how he felt about dancehall going global while he was behind bars

There’s a moment when I’m interviewing Vybz Kartel in the courtyard of the Four Seasons hotel in Tower Bridge, London, and the UK government emergency alert test rings on my phone. He is panicked by it and jumps up. “Me ready fi run you know!” he says, which has us both laughing.

It is a funny moment, but also a jolting one considering that it arrives in the middle of him discussing the lasting psychological effects of prison. Kartel, 49, real name Adidja Palmer, had been incarcerated across different institutions in Jamaica following his conviction for the 2011 murder of his associate Clive “Lizard” Williams. Following a lengthy appeal process, he was released in July last year after the ruling was overturned by the UK privy council (which is the final court of appeal for Jamaica due to the nation being a former British colony).

Fuelled by a loathing of Trump, the war in Gaza and anger at ‘the same old chauvinistic crap’, the 75-year-old – who cut her teeth with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and more – has no plans to stop protesting

When I speak to Dee Dee Bridgewater, the jazz singer is preparing for a concert that evening in Des Moines, Iowa, performing classy selections from the Great American Songbook. But even though she has also recorded this material for her recent album Elemental, Bridgewater is not really in the mood. “I just don’t feel like it’s the time to be doing love songs and whimsical songs from the 1920s and 30s,” she says. “They’re beautiful, but there’s some kind of spirit and energy pushing me to sing songs saying: people, we have to protect our democracy.”

Bridgewater is one of American jazz’s foremost voices. Capable of crooning and confronting, the two-time Grammy winner has a career that spans six decades and has never stopped evolving. She cut her teeth sharing the stage with several of jazz’s greatest band leaders – Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon – before branching out into acting; singing pop and disco; and working out of France, the UK and Mali, always with a determination to create on her own terms.

As she prepares to release No Lube So Rude, her first album in a decade, the Canadian dance-punk icon will answer your questions

Whether crowdsurfing inside a giant condom or singing alongside a vulva-headed dancer, Peaches has left us with some indelible on-stage images over the years – and there are set to be a few new ones as she goes on tour and releases her first album in a decade. As she does so, she’ll join us to answer your questions.

Peaches, AKA Merrill Nisker, emerged from Toronto’s underground scene in the late 1990s – her peers included Feist, her flatmate above a sex shop – but really came to fame in the early 00s after she moved to Berlin. Her debut EP, Lovertits, was a cherished item on the era’s electroclash scene but it was the a joyous, profane dance-punk track Fuck the Pain Away, from her debut album The Teaches of Peaches, that really took her into the mainstream.

As he moves into film production with the thriller Game, the musician – also known for Beak> – answers your questions on Myspace rappers, Bristol greats and whether Portishead will ever make new music

What made you decide to make a film, Game, and can you tell us a little bit about it? Zoe2025
As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself having more film ideas than musical ones. Having an independent label, Invada Records, I wondered if I could actually make a film. I was at school with [co-writer and actor] Marc Bessant, I’ve worked with [director] John Minton for 20 years and I met [co-writer] Rob Williams – a scriptwriter for Judge Dredd and stuff – when he moved to Portishead [Somerset]. The idea of someone trapped in an upside down car comes from JG Ballard’s Concrete Island. Initially it was gonna be a horror film where the character was attacked by rabid dogs, but instead we set it during the end of rave culture. I immediately thought of Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods for the role of a poacher and it turned out that his dad had rabbited. He’s brilliant in it.

How easy was it to recreate the sense of the 90s rave scene on film? k4ren123
There are only a couple of sequences, but we wanted to capture the way the rave scene went from free festivals to something more corporate where the drugs were really organised. All my mates in Portishead [the town] were ravers. I wasn’t. I went to a couple, but for the film I looked at lots of old footage and bought most of the clothes for the film on eBay. Nineties rave wasn’t fluorescent outfits. They were ordinary kids in street gear, so I’d think: what kind of trainers were they wearing?

(Young)
After 2018’s mellow Honey, the beloved Swede’s heady comeback pairs production worthy of Daft Punk and Moroder with deep romantic realism

At the end of last year, during her triumphant gig at the O2, Charli xcx brought Robyn out onstage. In a sense, it was just the latest in a series of guest appearances on the Brat tour: a string of collaborators from the album and its ensuing remixes – Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and Addison Rae among them – had turned up at different shows to perform their parts live. But as well as contributing her verse to their remix of 360, Robyn also took centre stage, performing her peerless 2010 single Dancing on My Own. Released when at least some of Charli xcx’s audience were still in nappies, it didn’t sound remotely like a throwback even in the context of a gig based around one of 2024’s most acclaimed and agenda-setting pop albums: the star of the show’s willingness to cede the spotlight to her felt like evidence of Robyn’s influence over contemporary pop.

You can see why the Swedish singer-songwriter carries so much clout among pop stars of the mid-2020s. When she opened an album with a track called Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do, she wasn’t joking: after launching as a 90s teen-pop star produced by Max Martin, she rejected the usual strictures placed on female pop – walking away from not one but two major label deals due to lack of artistic control – and seemed intent on following a more idiosyncratic, complex, messy path. She never saw being in the centre of mainstream pop as antithetical to making music with depth, or that touched on contentious issues. Despite the worldwide success of her debut, Robyn Is Here, her second album, My Truth, went unreleased outside Sweden because her US-based label baulked at Giving You Back, a song about an abortion she’d had in 1998: when asked to remove the song, Robyn refused.

(Château de Versailles Spectacles)
Vincent Dumestre and his radiant ensemble bring theatrical flair and exquisite detail to a joyous celebration of England’s patron saint of the baroque

It’s heartening to see European ensembles exploring the work of Henry Purcell, Britain’s very own baroque national treasure. This album, by crack French ensemble Le Poème Harmonique and conductor Vincent Dumestre, centres on one of his absolute masterpieces: Hail! Bright Cecilia, a lavish, celebratory ode to the patron saint of music.

Composed in 1692, its spirited text is full of allusions to musical instruments, including the idea that St Cecilia invented the organ. Purcell’s fertile imagination responded with a dazzling array of illustrative arias, duets and choruses full of sprightly violins, cooing flutes and martial kettledrums. With added harp in the continuo and richly characterful woodwind, Dumestre leads one of the most luxuriant accounts on disc, full of felicitous detail and theatrical flair.

Bertrand Chamayou, Leif Ove Andsnes
(Erato)
Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou find lyrical intimacy and finely tuned emotional balance in Schubert’s late masterpieces for four hands

Schubert’s late works for piano four hands have attracted some starry pairings over the years, from Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter to Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia. Pulling them off requires an affinity for the composer’s distinctively private soundworld and a willingness to share a single instrument, often requiring a different way of thinking about the mechanics of making music.

Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou are thoughtful musicians, and it’s immediately apparent from these affectionately searching accounts that they possess an emotional synergy. The great F minor Fantasia finds the Norwegian spinning seamless lyrical lines over the Frenchman’s cushioned bass. Dynamics are impeccably sculpted; the central Largo is weighty with perfectly balanced trills throughout. They can be playful, too, though their instincts turn inwards, probing the music’s spirit. The return of the poignant main theme is a heart-stopper.

Wigmore Hall, London
In a deftly curated programme, youthful compositions rubbed shoulders with music from her most productive period, the 1920s

Among the plethora of female composers finally receiving their due in recent years, Rebecca Clarke stands out for sheer quality and consistency of inspiration. Born in 1886, she studied with Stanford, worked with Vaughan Williams and, as a virtuoso violist, became one of the first professional female orchestral players in London. Relocating to the United States, her output declined, but her spirited chamber music and more recently her rediscovered songs, have proved fertile ground for today’s performers.

In a deftly curated programme, the culmination of a Wigmore Hall Clarke study day, youthful compositions rubbed shoulders with music from her most productive period, the 1920s. Ailish Tynan opened proceedings, her soaring soprano and snappy diction illuminating songs that suggested the influence of Vaughan Williams. Ravel, in Orientalist mode, hovered over settings of Chinese poetry, perfect material for Kitty Whately’s fresh, flaming mezzo-soprano with its cushioned lower register. Ashley Riches’ warm baritone embraced Clarke’s memorable melody for Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens while raising a smile in The Aspidistra, a melodramatic song about the calculated murder of a pot plant.

Fröst/Nordberg/Kobekina/Dubé/Andersson
(Sony)
The virtuosic musician’s effortless phrasing and imaginative collaborations make this collection short but sweet

Perhaps every musician worth their salt turns to JS Bach sooner or later. The German composer was dead before the clarinet as we know it today was established, but Martin Fröst, his playing as silkily eloquent as ever, makes the short but sweet selection on this recording very much his own.

There’s an intimate feel to the whole thing, which was recorded at Fröst’s studio in the Swedish countryside, with the fellow musicians sleeping over. The tone is set by the aria from the Goldberg Variations, with a hint of a jazz sensibility thanks to Sebastián Dubé’s bass, Fröst’s melody seamless on top. Fröst duets with his viola player brother Göran on two Inventions, and with himself, double-tracked, on the G major Sinfonia; fair enough, few others would be able to keep up. Yet though this is lightning fast, it still holds to the quiet, unassuming mood.

Activision; PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC
With a deafening onslaught of massive shootout set-pieces in exotic locations, an evolving campaign mode and excellent multiplayer offerings, this maximalist instalment of crazed carnage is a hoot

It seems like an anachronism now, in this age of live service “forever games”, that the annual release of a new Call of Duty title is still considered a major event. But here is Black Ops 7, a year after its direct predecessor, and another breathless bombard of military shooting action. This time it is set in a dystopian 2035 where a global arms manufacturer named the Guild claims to be the only answer to an apocalyptic new terrorist threat – but are things as clearcut as they seem?

The answer, of course, is a loudly yelled “noooo!” Black Ops is the paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed cousin to the Modern Warfare strand of Call of Duty games, a series inspired by 70s thrillers such as The Parallax View and The China Syndrome, and infused with ’Nam era concerns about rogue CIA agents and bizarre psy-ops. The campaign mode, which represents just a quarter of the offering this year, is a hallucinogenic romp through socio-political talking points such as psychopathic corporations, hybrid warfare, robotics and tech oligarchies. The result is a deafening onslaught of massive shootout set-pieces in exotic locations, as the four lead characters – members of a supercharged spec-ops outfit – are exposed to a psychotropic drug that makes them relive their worst nightmares. Luckily, they do so with advanced weaponry, cool gadgets and enough buddy banter to destabilise a medium-sized rogue nation. It is chaotic, relentless and stupidly pleasurable, especially if you play in co-operative mode with three equally irresponsible pals.

Announced in 2020 by the Game Awards as an inclusive programme for the industry’s next generation, the Future Class initiative has now been discontinued. Inductees describe clashes with organisers and a lack of support from the beginning

Video games have long struggled with diversification and inclusivity, so it was no surprise when the Game Awards host and producer Geoff Keighley announced the Future Class programme in 2020. Its purpose was to highlight a cohort of individuals working in video games as the “bright, bold and inclusive future” of the industry.

Considering the widespread reach of the annual Keighley-led show, which saw an estimated 154m livestreams last year, Future Class felt like a genuine effort. Inductees were invited to attend the illustrious December ceremony, billed as “gaming’s Oscars”, featured on the official Game Awards website, and promised networking opportunities and career advancement advice. However, the programme reportedly struggled from the start. Over the last couple of years, support waned. Now, it appears the Game Awards Future Class has been wholly abandoned.

The Fortnite tie-in is only the latest in a longstanding relationship between The Simpsons and video games, showing how the hit sitcom has survived as a cultural icon

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And so Fortnite has done it again. Over the past five years, developer Epic Games maintained the relevance and awareness of its ageing online shooter by churning out pop culture collaborations, from Marvel to John Wick to Sabrina Carpenter. For limited periods, players get to take part in the game as their favourite movie characters and music artists, an arrangement that provides refreshed audience numbers for the game – and a tidy revenue stream for the brands.

Now it’s the turn of The Simpsons. This month, the Fortnite island has become a miniature Springfield, complete with popular characters and well-known locations. If you want to play as Homer and shoot up Moe’s Tavern, you can. If you want to take Bart to Kwik-E-Mart for a squishee, go ahead. Everywhere you look there’s a fun little Simpsons Easter egg, from the fact that the Battlebus (which delivers players on to the island) is now driven by Otto to the presence of Duffman, Seymour Skinner’s steamed hams and drooling aliens.

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Is the pranksy artist’s latest show a worrying comment about Britain’s discarded rope problem – or a joke at the expense of the buy-anything art world?

How long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can’t answer that, but he can tell you how much it weighs: 10 tons, apparently. His latest installation is literally an exhibition of 10 tons of old rope, accumulated by him over months, and left in towering mounds in this swanky gallery in London’s Mayfair. Most of it is marine rope, destined for landfill. It’s hard to recycle this stuff, it seems, and there’s an endless supply of it dumped around the world. So Shrigley scooped up as much of it as he could find, piled it up and put a massive price tag on it.

The work can be yours for £1m. And that’s the point of the show: this is literally money for old rope. It’s not that deep – it’s just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, an idiom taken too far, a pun taken too literally.

The American takes strange film stills and turns them into monumental watercolours, full of Catholic guilt and paranoia – and it’s made him the most talked-about painter of the moment

‘All paintings are in their own way accusations and confessions,” says Joseph Yaeger. “It’s what Polygrapher is about.” This is the title of the artist’s new exhibition, his first since joining the prestigious London gallery Modern Art in 2024, for whom it marks the opening of new premises in St James’s.

Honesty is important to Yaeger, whose upbringing in the US in Helena, a town that he says ambitiously calls itself the capital of Montana, was as decent as it was unremarkable. “We’d sit down for dinner together every night, we’d go to church every Sunday, we’re polite almost to a fault, and traditional in almost all senses of the word.”

Hambling and Lucas join forces, Roger Fry gets a rare show and an aerial daredevil captures stormy Scotland – all in your weekly dispatch

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
These two very different artists became friends after meeting at the Colony Room (where else?) and now show together in an encounter of British art generations.
• Sadie Coles HQ, London, 20 November to 24 January

The UK’s culture sector needs financial, political and public support to survive. Funding is not a ‘favour’. It is an investment in imagination, in our shared experience – and in inspiration and joy

Durham is a small, beautiful city in the north-east of England that sits in a region of rising poverty and inequality. About 45,000 people, a cathedral, a castle, a university and streets that glow every two years when the Lumiere festival fills them with light and art.

Since 2009, Lumiere has brought more than 250 artists from across the world to work in this extraordinary city. Ai Weiwei in the Cathedral’s Chapter House. Fujiko Nakaya on the riverbank. Chila Kumari Singh Burman in the market square. The festival has reached more than 1.3 million people, drawn £43m into the local economy, and involved nearly 14,000 people in community projects. It worked because it was free, exciting and good. A rare combination.

Starting in Jamaica in the 1950s, sound system culture has become a feature of artistic spaces

When visitors make their way into Peter Doig’s House of Music show at the Serpentine, they’re confronted with not one but two sound systems.

The north gallery sports a vintage Western Electric and Bell Labs system that was used in cinemas in the 1920s and 30s, while Doig’s own set of Klangfilm Euronor speakers (which he acquired from Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) also pump music into the space. Doig’s Maracas painting features towering speaker stacks.

In our always online, AI-imperilled lives, simply looking at a painting can improve wellbeing and offer creative guidance. For my new book, artists and writers shared their advice on how to live life artfully

How many times a day do you reach for your phone? Do you jump at a notification, spend journeys locked in on your tiny black mirror? What about during meals, or when you wake up? Does it make you feel enriched, alive? I am just as guilty as the next person: swiping, liking, scrolling. But in a world built to distract us, how can we take five or 10 minutes away from that, and instead add something enriching to our lives?

I like to look at artists for the answers. They get us to slow down and think about different ways of looking; to notice nature and beauty; time changing in front of us. They remind us of the joys of making, and in a world where AI is attempting to outsource our creativity to machines – the delight of discovering something for ourselves. Artists see the potential in something: like a word that can be joined up into a sentence that can grow into a paragraph, or book; or a tube of paint that can be used to create an image. Not only can these get us to see something from a different perspective, or teach us something about their world, but hold our attention, and invite stillness, too.

Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison

It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.

The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.

When Nicola Thorp was growing up in Blackpool, the ‘kebab girl’ who had gone missing less than a mile away, aged 14, was spoken of as a cautionary tale. But what really happened to her? For the last three years, Thorp has been finding out

It has been more than 20 years since 14-year-old Charlene Downes went missing in Blackpool. Last captured on CCTV on a Saturday night in November 2003, Charlene still hasn’t been found, and the truth of what happened to her remains unsolved. Nicola Thorp, an actor, writer and broadcaster, who grew up in the town, describes Charlene’s disappearance, considered to be murder, as “a wound for Blackpool”. Over the last couple of decades, the case has been clouded by rumour, far-right rhetoric and police failures. In a new podcast, Charlene: Somebody Knows Something, she has set out to clear up some of the speculation, and expose how Charlene was repeatedly failed by those around her.

Many in the town, she says, still believe the two men who were first tried in 2007 – a retrial was ordered, which then collapsed amid “grave doubts” about the evidence – got away with murder. That in itself, she says, is an obstacle to finding out who is really responsible.