Suing his record label and sick of being a sex symbol, the singer spent 1992 working on the Trojan Souls for stars including Aretha Franklin and Bryan Ferry. Now, newly released studio footage shows him in his creative prime

• Wham! special: read Andrew Ridgeley on their bizarre 1985 trip to China

The George Michael album that never was began in defiance and ended in grief. It was 1992. Mired in a toxic dispute with Sony Records, Michael chose to keep busy and declare his independence by making an album of songs to be sung by several of his musical heroes, including Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Sade Adu, under the alias the Trojan Souls. Michael worked on the album for months until his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa died of Aids in March 1993 and he lost interest in music. It was never revived.

Tracks from the sessions have since leaked, along with some of the fly-on-the-wall footage filmed by Michael’s close friend and informal adviser Andros Georgiou, who has spent years trying to get unauthorised clips removed from YouTube and TikTok. Now, months before the 10th anniversary of Michael’s death, he is releasing 90 minutes of unedited video as Trojan Souls – not exactly a film but an unfiltered view of Michael in his creative prime. “I thought these fans were making money from my rights so I decided to stop fighting and get it out there,” Georgiou says. He hopes it will open a door on what he calls, with characteristic hyperbole, “the greatest album never made”.

Coming to fame in The Goodies, Oddie was later known for his wildlife expertise and presented BBC Springwatch

• Bill Oddie – a life in pictures

The writer, comedian and conservationist Bill Oddie has died aged 85. Having come to prominence with the comedy group The Goodies, Oddie later established himself as an authority on wildlife, presenting television series including the BBC’s Springwatch and Autumnwatch.

Oddie’s agent paid tribute to his “intelligence and wit”. In a statement, David Foster said: “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Bill Oddie, the country’s best-loved birder. Bill was a multitalented celebrity – wildlife presenter, broadcaster, comedian, writer, songwriter, musician and conservationist. Yet it was never fame that he valued.

Speaking to the Dish podcast, it is unclear which films he was referring to, though the Spider-Man and Odyssey star said he was ‘super proud’ of both of those

Spider-Man and Odyssey star Tom Holland says that some of his films are “shit” and that people “shouldn’t” see them.

Holland was speaking on the Dish podcast and was asked by co-hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett about his experiences promoting his movies. Holland responded by saying: “When you’re doing press for movies that you’re really proud of it’s really easy because when they ask you questions about why should people go and watch this movie, you’re not lying to anyone.”

Pop star is celebrated as ‘one of the defining cultural figures of her generation’ by gallery, which acquires Brat-era portrait by Harley Weir

A portrait of Charli xcx has been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, in the week that she hopes for a No 1 chart position for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.

The photograph by Harley Weir was taken in 2023 and became one of the key images associated with Charli’s Brat era: the 2024 album that became a pop cultural phenomenon for its candour and debauchery.

The latest in our series of writers’ most pleasurable comfort films is a journey through US airports with George Clooney

Airports have always been my happy place. From shiny citadels jutting out of the desert to shoddier European hubs located 120 miles outside the city they’re designated to serve; I love them all. With so many stories to be told, all those connections and people colliding, it’s a first-class seat to life itself. Which should go some way to explaining why I hold such a deep admiration for 2009’s comedy-drama Up in the Air.

Directed by Jason Reitman and based on the book of the same name by Walter Kirn, it stars an Oscar-nominated George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a US corporate downsizer who spends 322 days a year flying state to state doing the job cowardly employers prefer to outsource, leaving him with “43 miserable days at home”. That is until graduate Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) enters the firm with a cost-saving idea of firing people by video call, and hits the road with her older colleague, who is suddenly forced to grapple with the future of his own industry while re-evaluating his nomadic lifestyle.

The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games. Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces

It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”. The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall. Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation.

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins. For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors. Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side.

This crime drama about a female serial killer is enormously entertaining TV that demands you pay attention

Furious is well named. It is powered throughout its eight-episode run by an unfaltering current of female rage. It is the creation of Elizabeth Meriwether, who gave us last year’s astonishing Dying for Sex (starring Michelle Williams as a woman with terminal cancer discovering the range and depth of her sexuality for the first time) and 2022’s brisk, brilliant The Dropout (the tale of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing company, Theranos). They were both based on true stories. Furious was apparently inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow, starring Theresa Russell and Debra Winger, but it has jettisoned the marry-and-murder-for-money plot and contemporised the rest so thoroughly that the result hardly seems to merit the dutiful hat-tip the publicity has given it.

Meriwether is the writer of the first three episodes, the rest are divided among four women and one man. The drama itself is dominated by three complicated and fascinating female characters, played by Emmy Rossum, Lola Petticrew (who gave an extraordinary performance in 2024’s Say Nothing) and Quincy Tyler Bernstine. A fantastic supporting cast and a dense, lean, evocative script make this television for grownups, television to pay attention to and to entertain you enormously.

Furious is on Disney+

His mother was an Oscar-winning actor who had been exploited from a young age; Astin appeared in The Goonies at just 13. Now, he has followed in his mother’s footsteps again as a union leader. He talks Stranger Things, AI and why playing Samwise Gamgee cost him his house

Sean Astin is showing me around his new office. There’s framed movie prints on the walls, piles of paperwork and a stack of boxes of Stranger Things Funko Pops. “If you were here, you could look out this window and see a 10-storey building with our iconic Sag-Aftra logo on it,” he says proudly on video call, gesturing out of the window to the Los Angeles skyline. “But you just have to trust me that it’s there.” He shows me a framed photo of his mother, Patty Duke, aged 16, with the best supporting actress Oscar she won in 1963 (for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker), and even more proudly, a framed copy of Duke’s business card from when she was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-80s – the role he now occupies (Sag merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2012). The 10 months of his presidency “has been a whirlwind”, he says.

It’s still slightly jarring to see Astin in a suit and tie, lanyard around his neck. We’re more accustomed to seeing him in the handwoven cloak and hairy feet of Samwise Gamgee, loyally accompanying mister Frodo into Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Or as Winona Ryder’s short-lived partner in Stranger Things (before a Demodog got to him). Or as never-say-die college football underdog “Rudy” Ruettiger in the 1993 biopic. Or, for viewers of his own vintage, as plucky leader Mikey in The Goonies. Astin has been a member of the union he now represents for 45 of his 55 years, but he seems to have survived the perils of child stardom and a Hollywood upbringing remarkably unscathed. In fact, you could see it all as preparation for the role.

A high-quality pirated version of the summer’s hit movie was leaked on Elon Musk’s X platform and viewed more than 3m times before being removed

A leaked copy of The Odyssey has been taken down from Elon Musk’s X platform but only after a post flagging it gained millions of views.

A high-quality pirated version of the film went viral at the weekend after an account linked to it saying “Someone uploaded ‘The Odyssey’ full movie on X. Can you believe it?”. The post flagging the film was viewed more than 3m times before the account hosting the apparently leaked film was suspended by X.

Ghost Ranch exhibition at Courtauld in London will look at how artist’s New Mexico home shaped her life and work

As soon as Georgia O’Keeffe was shown Ghost Ranch, she knew it was her place.

The remote property in the shadow of the mountains north of Santa Fe in New Mexico would become the artist’s summer residence for decades – a setting that fascinated her, inspired several paintings and is where her ashes were scattered. “I knew the minute I got up here that this was where I would live,” she once said.

Director Ryan Coogler announces British actor in lead role alongside co-stars Letitia Wright and Winston Duke

The British actor David Jonsson has been unveiled as the new Black Panther by the film’s director, Ryan Coogler.

Jonsson, 32, known for roles in Industry, The Long Walk and Alien: Romulus, will play the son of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in the third Black Panther movie.

Singer rebukes Trump administration after it uses her song Firework over footage of missile striking Iranian naval ship

Pop star Katy Perry has condemned the Trump White House after it used her hit song Firework in a TikTok video showing US military strikes on Iranian targets, saying she never approved the use of her music.

The White House video, which featured Firework playing over footage of a missile striking an Iranian naval ship, has amassed more than 6 million views. The post was captioned: “Iran has been warned.”

Union calls for museum to become accredited London living wage employer and let staff carry water during shifts

Workers at one of the world’s leading art and design museums are balloting for “heatwave” strike action.

The ballot at V&A is taking place because of concerns about soaring temperatures and access to drinking water, along with pay and conditions.

Film-maker who reshaped The Mask as an exuberant comic spectacular and launched the film careers of Cameron Diaz and the Rock

The film-maker Chuck Russell, who has died aged 74, described himself as “a thrill junkie with a sense of humour”. The proof was in the pudding: his madcap comedy The Mask (1994) resembled a cinematic knickerbocker glory overflowing with colour, vitality and fun. Its star Jim Carrey called it “one of the jewels of my creative life”.

Before Russell was attached to the project, The Mask had been doing the rounds in Hollywood for several years as a horror script. Once he came on board, he persuaded the studio New Line Cinema to let him reshape it as an exuberant comic spectacular. “I wanted to take the various things I know about special effects and apply it to dance and comedy,” he said.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Lucas and Arthur Jussen brought fun and energy to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and John Adams’ Harmonium was monumental and moving in the City of Birmingham Orchestra and Chorus’ Prom under their chief conductor Kazuki Yamada

American minimalism can punch and thrill, hypnotise and slow your pulse, but how often does it make you laugh? What a brilliant idea, then, from Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to pair John Adams’ formative 1980 epic Harmonium – a sonic wrestle with love and death and desire – with music by the wittiest, slipperiest, most self-puncturing composer in the business, an artist who will break your heart with the cheekiest of grins: Francis Poulenc.

It’s entirely typical that Poulenc can’t even bring himself to call a symphony a symphony. Any delusions of grandeur are seen off at the pass by diminutising his 1948 “Sinfonietta”, which duly unfolds in a series of impeccably shaded and textured dances, marches and melodies that thumb their nose at anything so dutiful as development.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Verdi’s La Forza del Destino felt vital, cellist Jonathan Aasgaard was immaculate in Walton’s Concerto but it was John Wilson’s wizardly conducting through Respighi’s Roman Trilogy that brought the audience to their feet

Another Sinfonia of London Prom, another five-star concert. Admittedly this programme of Technicolor masterpieces played into the wizardly hands of John Wilson, a conductor whose respect and enthusiasm for the golden age of MGM is legendary. None of this was movie music, however, and Hollywood panache is only a part of what makes this hand-picked ensemble one of the finest orchestras on the planet.

First, there’s that full-fat sound, where every musician is a potential soloist, yet the blend is to die for. Then there’s the parade ground discipline and a willingness to follow Wilson – who seldom lingers – into the very fires of Mordor. The spirit, too, is palpable. Whole sections sway as one, occasionally with broad grins on their faces, such is their delight in the music making.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Sueye Park’s poetic, enthralling Proms debut in Sibelius’s violin concerto was followed by an effervescent late-night concert from Thomas Dunford’s Jupiter Ensemble with Laurence Kilsby

A late-night Prom can sometimes serve as a musical Rennie, a soothing digestif after 90 minutes of heavyweight orchestral fare. Fortunately, none was needed here. In the early evening programme John Storgårds kept the BBC Philharmonic sufficiently light on its feet, while Sueye Park made the most poetic of Proms debuts in Sibelius’s violin concerto, a cornerstone work she owned from start to finish.

If the opening wash of strings was barely audible over the whirr of the Royal Albert Hall air-con, it wasn’t long before the South Korean violinist grabbed our attention, her lean, silvery tone penetrating and intensely lyrical. In fact, Storgårds seemed to worry unnecessarily, keeping the orchestral volume on a low simmer for much of the work’s span. Park, an enthralling musical raconteur, imbued the first movement with a forthright romantic sweep before conjuring the kind of laser-focused, ethereal fireworks that set the finale dancing.

A Sunday morning Prom showcases the magnificent RAH instrument, but the organ’s not just for Bach – check out pioneering musicians from Jonny Greenwood to Kali Malone. Plus, Igor Levit is cancelled – and at the top of the German charts

It has 9,999 pipes, it’s 155 years old and 21m high. You can see it, but not always hear it, at every single London prom. I’m talking of course about the Willis organ in the Royal Albert Hall, which takes centre stage this weekend on Sunday morning’s recital by French organist Olivier Latry.

With his mostly Bach programme, Latry’s recital represents the core of the organ’s repertoire, music that has been heard in cathedrals and on concert hall organs for centuries. It will be magnificent in the building-shaking flesh on Sunday morning, but my assurances might not be enough to convince non-organ fans that they should forgo a lazy Sunday morning and head to South Kensington.

Observed annually on the fourth Saturday of July, International Cowboy Day celebrates the history, culture and legacy of the American west, and has a growing following in Kenya and other parts of Africa

Wildfires in Europe, Russian missile strikes in Kyiv, cockroach protests in New Delhi and the World Cup final – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

It’s set in a UK racked by an unbearable heatwave and the rise of extremism – this adaptation of the 2010 novel feels horrifyingly apt

When The Rapture by Liz Jensen was first published, in 2010, it was set in a near-future when temperatures in the UK are rising to unbearable heights, culty-Christian groups with apocalyptic bents are springing up all over the place and there is a growing sense that the world is going mad. Swap out “culty-Christian” for “political extremists bent on embracing the apocalypse rather than trying to save us from it” and it would be a deluded soul indeed who wouldn’t place it among fiction’s more prescient offerings.

The adaptation that has arrived on our screens 16 years later – a study in physical and mental discomfort – is the perfect accompaniment to our current record-breaking, fear-inducing heatwave, and gains a lot of power from our growing collective awareness that the future is finally here.

Cheetahs forced to cross roiling rivers, owls battered by storms … the tone of this look at how extreme weather affects animals is all a bit disaster movie. Subtle, it is not

You have a thick neck and poorly defined calf muscles and you live in South Dakota with your feckless partner and your five expressionless children. You are an owl. Your days consist of lengthy stretches of nothing, punctuated by sudden bursts of unimaginable terror. Coyotes, badgers and snakes are all bent on reducing your beak to marmalade.

But it’s the weather that poses the biggest threat. Specifically, shouts Force of Nature, it’s the “MONSTER STORMS” that rumble ominously across the prairies, each of which forces you and your family to scurry into your burrow, whereupon you will stand with your trembling backs to the wall, legs wide apart and fluffy britches a-flap, like anxious viscounts in the court of Charles II. Will you survive? Or will you be eviscerated by the “cluster bombs of tornadoes” that churn with increasing frequency through the midwest?

Not even a grisly hand injury could halt the rise of the Saturday Night Live UK comedian. And soon he’ll get to parody the prime minister every week. So why can’t he enjoy the good times?

The day before I’m supposed to watch Paddy Young perform a work-in-progress version of his new show Will Sir Be Laughing Alone?, I’m told the gig has been cancelled; the standup has sliced his hand open and is about to have surgery. Soon after, Young shares a photo of himself on Instagram in a hospital gown, thanking the Australian comedian Sam Campbell for “bringing the sword to my home” – a post quickly rehashed by the tabloids (The Mirror: “SNL UK star Paddy Young hospitalised after samurai sword accident”). When I finally see him on stage a fortnight later, he’s dosed up on codeine, his arm is in a sling and he’s in the uncertain early stages of refashioning this bizarre anecdote into a routine.

“You’re getting an exclusive on the hand,” he tells me in an east London coffee shop the next day, after I’ve opened a bottle of water for him. Young and Campbell, who recently collaborated on the winningly madcap Channel 4 series Make That Movie, were preparing to host their occasional comedy night Floggers, which involves them dressing up as old men (fat suits, wigs, prosthetics) and helming a real daytime TV-style auction. Campbell had ordered the sword online as a prop, and when the pair’s Uber arrived Young hurriedly picked up the bag it was in. “Blood splattered up the wall like Kill Bill – we all laughed initially.” When his housemates removed the tea towel they’d wrapped around his hand “they could see yellow, which I think is tendon or muscle. Then I fainted.” He went to A&E for stitches but still did the show afterwards – “I cringe thinking about it because I was basically juggling [in the show]” – returning to hospital later to learn that one tendon was 90% lacerated and required an operation. Just before surgery, Young passed out again.

Chris Packham gets to the bottom of things in the fantastic Evolution. Plus, has reality TV found its next big star? Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
Which animal was the first to poo? Chris Packham’s belting biology lesson continues with the story of the bat – and the origins of its insatiable hunger are in the urbilaterian, an animal that floated about in the waters of the Ediacaran period, about 570m years ago. Food entered and exited through one hole … until a vital mutation: “The anus was a breakthrough!” Hollie Richardson

This show tries to grapple with the fact that three people associated with the reality juggernaut have killed themselves. But it forgets that the dating series doesn’t exist in a vacuum

In summer 2015, ITV revived its 00s reality format Celebrity Love Island, a show that was remembered mostly as a drunken, downmarket rival to Big Brother. Its new, slick, civilian Love Island was a slow-burn at first, but by 2017 it was one of British TV’s biggest hits. While it remains among ITV’s hottest properties, viewing figures are now more modest, with 600,000 people tuning in for its 2026 launch. Tastes have changed, but the fact that three people associated with the show – former contestants Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon, and Caroline Flack, the presenter for five series – took their lives, may also have made viewers wary.

Timed to coincide with the finale of the latest series of Love Island on Monday, Prime Video has released this two-parter about the apparent “curse” that stalks the programme. It opens with former contestant Anton Danyluk, who appeared on the show in 2019, declaring that there is “no higher high than the summer you’re preparing for Love Island”. But a stint in the show’s Mallorcan villa proved less of a high for some. Luis Morrison – a 2015 Islander – says it feels “disgusting” and “embarrassing” to watch the show back. “Everyone was having sex and stuff,” he says. Malin Andersson, a 2016 contestant, says, looking back, the show feels “quite toxic … so superficial and artificial”. Watching footage of herself coming into the villa for a post-elimination row with her partner, Terry, Andersson alleges there was much meddling on the part of the programme-makers: “The producers are fucking with people who can feel deep things!”

This season’s timeline jumps ahead three years, taking the audience back to the eternal question of ‘will they or won’t they?’

Colin from Accounts is one of those shows that sounds totally unremarkable on paper: a romantic comedy featuring two characters who connect via a meet-cute involving a cute dog (and a car, and a nipple). This triggers the old “will they or won’t they?”, to which the answer too often is: well, who cares? As it turns out, quite a few of us did care once we started spending time with medical student Ashley (Harriet Dyer), brewery owner Gordon (Patrick Brammall) and, of course, their delightfully taciturn border terrier, Colin, whose full name is indeed Colin from Accounts.

Dare I say it: the pooch is in no way essential to, well, anything; that’s kind of the joke. Given Dyer and Brammall are a real-life couple, it perhaps stands to reason that they’d share such effortless on-screen chemistry – but then again Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were married while making Gigli and generated about as much electricity as a couple of filing cabinets.

I was uncertain about expressing my queerness, until I saw the way Zendaya and Hunter Schafer’s characters opened up to each other in HBO’s drama

I don’t remember the exact moment when I started catching feelings for my friend Ellen. It might have been when she trusted me to cut her hair into a feathered bob, or when I noticed she’d taken to keeping my favourite tea at her parents’ house. But in the summer of 2019, a month before our final year of school together, I realised I was falling in love.

We were 17 at the time and had been best friends since our first year of high school, both of us part of the same tight-knit group of girls. Ellen and I knew each other well and were quick to make each other laugh, but we were also very different. Whereas Ellen is reserved and gentle, I’m loud and loquacious. So my sudden attraction to her was confusing – especially since neither of us was openly queer.

Half a century on, this tale of a woman who abandons her children in search of her self remains thrillingly original

There is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but also the children they have made. In the real world, men are the more frequent deserters; the connection of the father to family life is seen as contingent, while motherhood is revered as an intrinsic state. This means that women who “un-mother” themselves are doing something impossible: the connection between a woman and her child is not just emotional, but also creational. Joan Barfoot understands the inside-out nature of the logic involved in maternal obligation: “she created these other people and their need for her,” says Abra, the abandoning mother of Gaining Ground, “and now she must fulfil them.”

Abra neglects to fulfil her children or their needs. The novel is rigorously and meditatively about the business of separation, which is also the business of becoming a single and undivided self.

The academic’s ambitious guide to the ethics of tech falls short of its promise to provide meaningful answers

The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too.

More than seven decades after they were first released, the dark novels of Osamu Dazai have become a publishing sensation, as a new generation of readers engage with his bleakness, humour and brilliance

There’s no question that Japanese literature has been one of the outstanding successes for British bookshops in recent years: in 2024 close to half of the bestselling translated fiction titles were from Japan. Much of the Japanese fiction translated into English fits into broad categories – cats, crime, coffee shops – but one surprise bestseller stands alone.

Sales of books by Osamu Dazai, who killed himself in 1948 aged 38, have rocketed in the last few years. His best-known novel, No Longer Human (1948), has sold more than 75,000 copies in the UK alone. An intense semi-autobiographical account of one man’s alienation, it was the last work of fiction completed before Dazai’s death.

Literary agent who established the Garage Press and a volunteer-run community education centre

In 2016, the literary agent Simon Trewin, who has died of a brain tumour aged 60, received a copy of a manuscript by Paul Lynch, a Limerick-born author with two respectfully reviewed novels behind him. No publisher wanted his third. “I want to save your career,” Trewin said.

It took 14 months to make the deal. Grace became the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year 2018. Five years later, his confidence boosted, Lynch won the Booker prize for his dystopian parable Prophet Song. Trewin was the first person he acknowledged: “Thank you,” Lynch said, “for being my consigliere.”

The author and BookTok luminary on the nightmare trope, how to convert a straight man into loving fantasy romance, and words that should never be used in a sex scene

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done for love?

I was working in a bakery on the Gold Coast and across the way was a Go Sushi, and I had a crush on the boy that worked there. I was about 16. We’d close at about the same time in the evening, and I would have to throw away all of the bread that we didn’t sell and he would have to throw away all the sushi. He would always finish first, so sometimes he’d come across and help me – not allowed, by the way. And I thought it would be really funny, on one such occasion, if I did a bit where I hollowed out a cob loaf and put it on my head and stacked loaves of bread up my arms, and I put Vienna loaves on my shoes and started skating around the floor calling myself Bread Girl, thinking that he’s obviously going to find this hilarious. He laughed along, then about five minutes later he asked me if he could have my older sister’s phone number.

From a transporting historical saga to a tale of small-town betrayal, the authors of our favourite page-turners reveal the books they take on holiday – introduced by Jenny Colgan

It is important to follow a balanced diet on holiday. Too many “My Wife’s Sister’s Husband’s Psychopath”, and you’ll get confused and grumpy. Too much sugary romance and your teeth will fall out. Something too big and challenging you’ve been meaning to get round to for ages will make you feel guilty and more liable to give in to scrolling, and if you take too many supposedly upmarket “must reads” of the summer, you will simply prove to yourself just how much overhyped averageness there is out there, when all you want is something satisfying.

You need to be able to chop and change depending on your mood, which means fiction and nonfiction. And finally, you need to be able to throw all of these rules out of the window if you find a sandy old water-stained copy of, for example, James Herbert’s Domain in your holiday cottage and decide to devote yourself to 600 pages of post-nuclear mutant rat-strewn London, or choose to go for a full-on Maeve Binchy sesh.

Maryam Ebrahimi’s documentary about a home for survivors of the war in northern Syria is tender, gentle and incredibly moving

Speaking over footage filmed at the funeral of a female army commander, documentary-maker Maryam Ebrahimi notes that it’s the first time she has seen women carrying a coffin in the Middle East. As they move through crowd of mourners, she adds: “Their sisterhood amazes me.” Ebrahimi is talking about the women of Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous socialist region in northern Syria. At the cemetery, the women dig the soil with their bare hands; it is a tradition in Rojava, a final act of solidarity with their fallen sister.

Ebrahimi’s tender, gentle film is about a home for injured army veterans in Rojava; most are survivors of the war against Islamic State (IS). The house is mixed genders; one of the men living there is Fadakhar, who has had both his legs amputated and is haunted at night by phantom itches and pains. Mostly, though, Ebrahimi’s gaze is drawn to the female veterans, who made headlines a decade ago for their courage on the battlefield. We learn that women started leaving their villages to fight IS in 2011 – though in truth a little more background about the history of Kurdish all-female battalions might have been helpful.

A young woman strives for self-reliance as local people protest the US military communications system that has landed in their rural town

The title of Francesca Scalisi’s documentary evokes a 1950s sci-fi yarn, even if the film’s visuals are rooted in the drama of the everyday. The acronym MUOS stands for Mobile User Objective System, an advanced satellite communications system used by the US military to direct drones, missiles and other kinds of attacks from a distance. One of the key MUOS ground stations is located in Niscemi, a rural Sicilian town that is also home to Valentina, a 27-year-old woman teetering on the cusp of maturity. Politically engaged yet intimate, Scalisi’s film captures two parallel struggles for autonomy: the local people’s protests against the MUOS base, and Valentina’s determination to lead an independent life.

Much emphasis is placed on Valentina’s complicated relationship with her loving but over-protective parents. A sensitive introvert, she doesn’t work and still lives at the family home, unlike her older sister who has established a career elsewhere. Trying to become more self-reliant, Valentina picks up driving and applies for jobs, but her efforts are often met with harsh criticism from her father. Scalisi links these intense moments of familial discord to the atmosphere of surveillance that engulfs the area. Valentina is routinely stopped and questioned by troops stationed at the MUOS base, moments of disruption that turn her home into a land of strangers.

Filled with shots of emerald pastures and gambolling animals, this documentary shows that challenging accepted practices can benefit animals and the environment

A new addition to the ranks of neo-rural cinema that is getting its hands dirty with the realities of the modern countryside, this mellow Scottish documentary lauds the emerging practice of cow-and-calf farming. It focuses on Rainton Farm in Dumfries and Galloway where, instead of the dairy-industry norm of separating calves from their mothers a few hours after birth, owners David and Wilma Finlay allow them to stay together until the youngsters are five or six months old. Having run a fully fledged organic operation since the 1990s, the Finlays have progressive form; Rainton is thought to be the first European site where cow-and-calf has been attempted at commercial scale.

This shakeup breaks dairy-farming orthodoxy, which refuses to waste lucrative milk on calves. Not only are neighbouring farmers sceptical, the cows initially are too: in the 2012 pilot, the animals were stressed out by the sudden change of routine when they were confronted with needy offspring that they had expected to disappear. Milk yields dropped, but rebounded to a 25% increase in subsequent trials, as the mums settled down and extra suckling stimulated production. An even greater revelation are the damaging routines imposed on dairy farmers by old-style methods: a stressed-out factory milking schedule that, ringfenced by intensive veterinary and crop fertilisation, has ecological repercussions in the fields.

The hard-working character actor has over 400 screen credits, from The Thing to Platoon to Rick and Morty, and he isn’t slowing down any time soon

Keith David’s voice precedes him. Deep and resonant, with mellifluous notes that hark back to his boys’ choir days, it has spent decades inhabiting warriors, gods, rogues, fathers and a welter of cartoon oddballs. Before David appears in a Zoom window from his Los Angeles home office, his voice reverberates through my tinny laptop speakers like a foghorn. “Can you see me now?” he booms once our connection is established after fits and starts. “OK. Outside of technology, you know I’m … OK.”

He fizzes about the project he just wrapped: a dark buddy comedy called My Friend Jim, in which he stars opposite Rob Lowe. It’s the latest entry in a seemingly unstinting slew of productions that have kept him booked and busy since the late 1970s, from The Thing to Platoon to There’s Something About Mary to Nope.

Judgment dismissing Charlotte MacInnes’s case expressed doubts about credibility of three key witnesses, and is likely to be appealed

Rebel Wilson’s self-styled brand as a truth teller was put to the test during a fiery defamation feud where rivals called her a bully.

But the Hollywood A-lister, referred to as “very difficult to be around” and “fucking nuts” during an at-times bruising trial, emerged from the federal court battle with the last laugh.

As a stunning 4K restoration arrives in theaters, the director and cast reflect on creating the disturbing descent into a criminal underworld

Michael Mann has shown time and again in films like Thief, Heat, Miami Vice and Public Enemies that he is one of American film’s greatest explorers of the underworld. “It’s like a kind of cultural anthropology,” Mann tells me from his office in Los Angeles. “If you make films, you get to do that in a different place with a different subject every few years. For me, the exploration is the high.”

With its unsettling atmosphere and soaring beauty, Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter reimagined how a thriller could look, sound and feel in an early high point for the director. To commemorate its 40th anniversary Manhunter: The Final Cut, a 4K restoration and director’s cut with three minutes of new footage, will see a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this weekend with a nationwide US rollout to follow.

Bold Tendencies, London
Slaps, beats and bounces underscore the unified collective pleasure of sharing a rhythm in this world premiere of the singular choreographer’s latest piece

Can it be a bit of a curse for an artist to knock it out of the park right at the start of their career? Choreographer Oona Doherty’s astonishing early works, Hope Hunt and Hard to be Soft, marked her as an unique (urgent, unfiltered) voice moving in uncharted territory. Her output since has been more variable, although she’s always utterly her own woman.

Doherty’s last major piece, Specky Clark, was high concept. This new world premiere, Leather Jacket, feels the opposite, not quite enough concept. (I know, you can’t win.) The leather jackets of the title are being worn by eight dancers. Under bright fluorescent lights in the concrete space of Bold Tendencies – the Peckham multi-storey car park turned theatre – the dancers all slap one foot to the ground in a heavy thud, and again, and again, keeping a determined rhythm. It’s a thrill to be up close as foot slaps turn to thigh slaps, then bounces, then into Doherty’s own skewed kind of Irish step dance, matching the shift from electronic score to Cormac Begley’s experimental Irish folk music. (The dancers have shed the jackets by now; they’re just in their underwear.)

With the British dance legend at the helm, this year’s themes ranged from quantum gravity to slightly muted geopolitics

The most memorable performance in the opening days of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale had barely any dance in it at all. Italian choreographer Andrea Salustri’s Invisible is built around movement, but it’s movement of light, air, water and sound waves, with Salustri and co-creator Alice Rende as shadowy figures conducting the elements. They brew up storms like Zeus and Poseidon, with flashing veins of light, sounds of pummelling rain (in fact small drips and bubbles amplified by powerful microphones) and an enormous amount of billowing smoke that ultimately whips itself into a spinning tornado.

Salustri, who won the Italian callout to create a new work for this year’s biennale, is a circus artist and philosophy graduate, and he is also a choreographer – a definition so much wider than one who devises dance. This year marks the 20th dedicated dance festival in Venice (dance was previously seen as part of the theatre or music programmes here until 1999, since when it has been an annual, then biennial, and now annual feature of Venice’s arts bonanza). In a talk to mark this anniversary, current artistic director Wayne McGregor was joined by four former directors to discuss their aims for the event. The question of “what dance is” kept arising as the ongoing line of inquiry, a question “so ordinary that it is still necessary somehow”, said choreographer Marie Chouinard.

A new film, Life Lines, put together by McGregor and filmmaker Ravi Deepres, compiles archive clips from festivals past, showing that the range of dance here has been vast and multifarious, from the fairly conventional to the theatrically wild. There’s clearly no single story of contemporary dance’s development, and McGregor’s theme for this year’s festival is Time Does Not Exist. Influenced by physicist Carlo Rovelli and the theory of quantum gravity, his is not a linear view of time, and without doubt, in dance (and in life), we carry our embodied pasts constantly into the present. That’s no more evident than in Soa Ratsifandrihana’s piece Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (meaning “comparison, transmission, rivalry” in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, from where the choreographer is from). It’s a piece about living in the diaspora and concerned with the sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, memories that link back home – especially the memories stored in our bodies, in songs, stories and dance steps. It’s a gentle piece, conversational between the three dancers and fabulous guitarist Joël Rabesolo, in the sense that like many conversations it meanders, then touches on the profound, then gets self-absorbed, connects again, tails off. But it has its moments.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Hofesh Shechter’s latest doesn’t break new ground, but its exceptional dancers throw themselves into a moody, pulse-quickening celebration of communal movement

It may be 38 years since the second summer of love, three decades since the dance music boom of the early 90s, but on the contemporary dance stage, rave is still peaking. In recent years, you’ve barely been able to move for dancers letting loose to repetitive beats, in tribal gatherings and transcendent ones.

Hofesh Shechter’s dance has always had that rhythmic pull of the dancefloor – he writes his own beat-driven music, after all – but while the early works were more angst-fuelled, now he seems happy to get lost in music. Shechter’s latest, In the Brain, has been developed from a piece called Cave made for Martha Graham Dance Company in 2022. It’s danced by his junior company, Shechter II, a collection of some of the best young dancers under 25, selected from around the world. They have that hungry energy of youth, and they lay it all out on the floor.

In the Brain is not an all-out party, though. It has its quiet moments, its slow build, its not-always-enlightening detours (into a brief swing dance, and a couples’ slow dance, to name two). The feel is subterranean, not least because of Tom Visser’s lighting. Visser is king of the dim glow in all its subtle shades – maximum atmosphere with minimum drama – and Shechter’s score is similarly dusky and moody, rather than party bangers. (There’s also additional music from German techno duo Âme.)

More than anything, In the Brain is recognisably Hofesh: the hunch of the shoulders, the arms raised to the sky, the ritualised groups moving as one – it’s a style that’s inspired many others. This piece isn’t rushing into new territory, but part of the appeal of Shechter’s choreography is that you can imagine it feels so good to dance it. There’s a tangible, visceral pleasure, whether that’s the thick, gloopy curves of movement or an almost violent exorcism, flinging out the body’s demons to a pounding bass. It’s dance that doesn’t seem drastically far from natural movement – so the viewer could feel themselves inside it – except there’s no way you could match the skill of these explosive performers. But the power is in the communal nature of the dance, the fellow-feeling, plugged into something bigger than oneself, surrendering to the universal heartbeat of the dancefloor.

• Until 25 July at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
Tamara Harvey’s production of Chekhov’s final play can seem woolly in meaning and soft-edged tone mutes its force

Laura Wade’s reworking of Anton Chekhov’s final, plaintive play brings a dazzle of big names. Helen Hunt is the aristocratic matriarch Madame Ranyevskaya, Bill Pullman her brother, and Kenneth Branagh (so soon after his lead role in the Royal Shakespeare’s production of The Tempest) their nemesis, Lopakhin, a shopkeeper’s son here who takes over the reins of the family estate and represents the rising forces against Russia’s old order of ossified elites.

But for such a starry cast Tamara Harvey’s production has a disappointing lack of sparkle. You do not feel the story’s charge, its complications around love and its stinging losses. The tone is too soft-edged, almost endearing, and the cast such an ensemble that there is no magnetic centre to hold you.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Platt excels as a crooner looking back on falling for his songwriter-lover – dazzlingly played by Gregor Milne – in a show of beguiling, bittersweet nostalgia and pristine songs

Ben Platt’s sky-gliding voice was made for decades gone by. The Tony, Emmy and Grammy award-winning actor (Dear Evan Hansen, The Last Five Years) is beautifully cast in Mark Sonnenblick’s (KPop Demon Hunters) out-of-time love story, a honey-hearted cabaret-musical of two gay musicians trying to make it in 1960s New York.

With the Menier Chocolate Factory set up as a lamplit cabaret (set by Scott Pask), Platt is Trevor Copeland, a crooning bar-singer reliving the years he spent with songwriter Arthur Brightman, played with plate-spinning brilliance by Gregor Milne. The history of their love is told through stories shaped around American Songbook-style music, only occasionally syrupy, as the pair slip in and out of Sonnenblick’s inventions: now a jaunty knee-bouncing number; now a big-band ballad.

The star of Dear Evan Hansen plays a 1960s Greenwich Village crooner in hit queer musical Midnight at the Never Get. It’s the perfect outlet for his anxiety, he says

In performance, Ben Platt is a mellifluous singer and loose-limbed dancer, with a fizzy back-note of neurotic New York. The stage – most famously, as star of Dear Evan Hansen – is his safe space. In person, in a south London rehearsal room, he is sweet, earnest, nervy. He crosses his legs, knots his arms about him. The chat roams widely, the body language is wound tight.

Platt talks frankly about anxiety, like it’s his constant companion. So, how’s that going? “My relationship with my husband is a huge factor in being able to manage anxiety. There’s still highs and lows, but everything’s more in my sights, because I thankfully have him. And having something creative to focus on is a big help.”

The country-pop superstar loves Abba and secretly listens to Lloyd Webber, but which British heartthrob’s single gets her out of bed in the morning?

The song that changed my life
There’s many critical songs on The Mission soundtrack, but Gabriel’s Oboe [by Ennio Morricone] hit me hard. I had to pull off the road, I cried like a baby. I didn’t realise how powerful music could be until that moment. I was 22.

The first single I bought
At Seventeen by Janis Ian. I reference it in my album Little Miss Twain and it says so much about the emotions of a teenage misfit. I felt like her, I related – but I was also thinking: “Wow, I have to some day write this well.” It gave me a goal; I was so in awe. I made very little money, babysitting, taking care of my neighbour’s horse, singing in bars. I would get like 20 bucks, that I would mostly give to my family, but I got that record for myself.

Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh
Despite his humble persona, the highest-selling country artist of all time has the vocal firepower and heavyweight hits to deliver two hours of crowd-pleasin’ pyrotechnics

The first we see of Luke Combs, the North Carolina-born megastar is walking through the stadium crowd. Cap pulled low, with a bashful look on his face, the stunt is less pap walk, more regular Joe dodging a flashmob on his way to work. Combs is now the highest-selling country artist of all time, but he wears his success with humility: when he finally reaches his saloon-themed stage, with near-70,000 screaming fans before him, he keeps that unassuming presence. “Normally I’d ask how you’re feeling tonight, but I know how you’re feeling tonight,” he smiles.

This week, Combs will perform to more than half a million fans across just seven dates in England, Scotland and Ireland: a remarkable coronation for an artist yet to have a Top 10 single here. Not that you’d know it, from the way the crowd screams every word to his 2016 hit Hurricane, a soft-rock heartacher about running into your ex in a bar, elevated by a cinematic chorus (“moon went hidin’, stars quit shinin’”) that’s closer to early-doors Taylor than any country-bro machismo.

Carson Park, Eau Claire, Wisconsin
At his Eaux Claires festival, Bon Iver dazzles with a one-off set dedicated to the folk legend

After nearly a decade, Bon Iver’s Eaux Claires music festival returns to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this year, rekindling an intersection of art, music and nature in the state’s scenic Northwoods area.

Co-curated by Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner, the festival is a hallmark of collaboration and community in the state’s Chippewa valley, with a lineup this year that includes performances by Vernon and Dessner as well as Aimee Mann, Dijon and Fred Again. This year brings a new location of Carson Park. “Central Park in New York and Carson Park are the top two parks that I know about,” Vernon told locals this spring. “So we’re lucky.”

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.

(RCA/Cult)
Allying the crackpot strangeness of Julian Casablancas’ side projects with his band’s gift for pop minimalism, the New Yorkers are on playful, joyous form

Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture.

The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism.

The New Orleans country-punk duo are on a hot streak, about to release their third album in a year, and the crunchy, literate hooks keep coming

From New Orleans
Recommended if you like Parquet Courts, Sheer Mag, Royal Headache
Up next Holy Cross Tigers out later this year

Not one but two of the year’s best albums so far are authored by a ragtag, deeply charismatic band from Louisiana named Twisted Teens, who bear Pynchonian names – Caspian Hollywell and RJ “Razor Ramone” Santos – a console steel guitar and, in Hollywell’s case, one of rock’s greatest, most soulful voices in many years. Virtuosic when it counts, ramshackle when necessary, Twisted Teens feel like they could slot nicely on to a bill with Parquet Courts and the late, great Royal Headache – crunchy, literary rock bands who seemed to shyly conceal their music’s anthemic nature.

Twisted Teens broke through earlier this year with their second album Blame the Clown, a set of 12 country-punk tracks that’s hooky and effusive enough to give any major-label pop record released this year a run for its money. A couple of weeks ago, they released its followup, the rangier and slightly more introspective Florida Water Blues, and before the year’s out they’ll have dropped Holy Cross Tigers, a release schedule befitting a band on a hot streak.

The pair’s origin story is foggy – the most one can glean from interviews is “they were neighbours, then Santos travelled cross-country to buy a steel guitar” – which feels appropriate for this kind of grimy, mythic music, which is raw and self-consciously handmade. Part of that feeling can be put down to Hollywell’s voice, a gritty and pockmarked thing which he uses to great effect, interspersing deadpan meditations on life and love with a rich, almighty howl that’s ostentatious but unpretentious. In other words, Twisted Teens are two of 2026’s true originals – a breakout band whose kooky, ultra-clarified vision outstrips the hype. Shaad D’Souza

(Carrier)
US composer Keir GoGwilt’s collaborative album uses poetry and atonal music to trace the roots of Spain’s sarabande dance: a fascinating listen, though not easy

Classical music aficionados will be familiar with the stately form of the sarabande – a Spanish dance adopted into a languorous and tender musical style favoured by baroque composers such as Bach and Handel. For American composer Keir GoGwilt, however, the sarabande contains something far more radical. On his collaborative project The Zarabanda Variations, he enlists a 10-piece ensemble that combines free jazz with baroque strings and spoken-word poetry to delve into the colonial Latin American roots of the dance before it was popularised in 17th and 18th-century Spain.

On first listen, it’s hard to hear how this music could relate to the classical sarabande at all. Scrapes of atonal strings, clattering percussion, guttural vocalisations and sharp whistles create a cacophony of tension throughout, as if mirroring the passionate, whirling energy supposedly contained in the original forms of the dance. In fact, rather than creating a baroque sarabande fusion, GoGwilt’s compositions embrace its lesser-known historical references to produce something entirely new.

BBCSSO/Woods/Wallfisch
Signum
The late pianist and composer deserves a wider audience for the edgy, lucid soundworld of his compositions

John McCabe, who died in 2015, made some important recordings of other people’s music – he championed Carl Nielsen, and his survey of the complete Haydn piano sonatas has held its place in the Decca catalogue for half a century – but when it comes to his own works there are still gaps to be filled. Alongside the Symphony No 2, completed in 1971, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Kenneth Woods here supply the overdue premiere recordings of McCabe’s 2007 cello concerto Songline and his 1978 Symphony No 3.

The Symphony No 2 is tense and edgy, musing on the cyclical nature of violence; the cello concerto, its title inspired by ancient Aboriginal pathways, is restless in a different, searching way, which the soloist Raphael Wallfisch captures eloquently. What is striking and gratifying about both is the lucidity of McCabe’s music, its textures remaining clearly defined through writing of enormous colour and scope. The Symphony No 3, Hommages, inhabits a lusher soundworld, densely weaving in nods to Haydn and Nielsen while also looking in other directions – one passage with muted strings and celeste could almost be Shostakovich reimagined by the Strauss of Der Rosenkavalier. Vividly energised and expressive throughout, the performances do all three works justice.

Decca
There are no major surprises in this live recording, just the simple but sublime sense that the music is being handed from composer, through pianist, to us

Twenty years ago, Mitsuko Uchida released a studio recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas that remains a benchmark. Now comes this performance recorded live in Tokyo last October.

Those who have loved her previous recording won’t find big surprises – her interpretations remain similar, albeit at times a little broader or more elastic, and with less obvious urgency in, say, the brief second movements of Op 109 and 110. Yet, even from a pianist who has been playing these pieces for so many decades, the music emerges as if new: nothing sounds predetermined. Nor did Suntory Hall, which seats about 2,000, get exactly the same performance as she had given to a much smaller audience at Wigmore Hall in London, two weeks earlier. Most audience noise has been edited out, but the atmosphere of collective concentration remains.

Glyndebourne, East Sussex
The director hits perfectly all the comic marks of Strauss’s opera about an opera, but there’s few insights in a work that should be moving as well as frothy and fun.

Glyndebourne’s new productions this summer have followed a theme: first Tosca, about a fictional opera singer; then L’Orfeo, about the mythical musician. Now comes Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos – an opera about an opera. It starts with the shenanigans backstage as two troupes – one high art, one low – prepare after-dinner entertainment for their rich patron, then the performance that ensues when they are forced to combine their acts. The real subject is, of course, love – and that comes across only partially in Laurent Pelly’s production.

The first part finds Pelly at his witty best. We’re in the house of the richest man in Vienna, whose taste is immediately in question; Massimo Troncanetti’s set has a huge doorway of gilded, inlaid wood clashing with a very 20th-century statement chandelier. William Relton’s fearsome Major-Domo pops up everywhere, cowing even Michael Kraus’s classily sung Music Master; Ru Charlesworth’s chainsmoking Dancing Master slinks around dressed as a sequined, velvety advert for Silk Cut. Samantha Hankey, her mezzo-soprano mellow but gleaming, plays the Composer as an irascible would-be genius; Zerbinetta, the comic leading lady, teeters in stockings and suspenders. Buoyantly conducted by Robin Ticciati, the players of the London Philharmonic, reduced in number as per Strauss’s stipulations, revel in the characters’ grand hopes and small tragedies, and Pelly plays to the stereotypes brilliantly, hitting the comic marks without sending things up.

Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

Renovate rooms, investigate the supernatural and watch people burst into song in this surreal British ghost story

A young American man arrives in a dilapidated British seaside town to take on the renovations of an equally run-down hotel, inherited from a mysteriously absent father he never knew. His power tools talk to him in a Scottish accent, the local people speak in baffling slang, and occasionally people burst into song. Oh, and there are ghosts.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a novel mix of genres – no bad thing in these times of sequels and remakes – but, according to the creative director of independent developers Friday Sundae, Anil Glendinning, it grew organically from a single goal: to tell a very British ghost story.

Nintendo Switch 2
The single-player offshoot of the quirky and colourful multiplayer series is disappointingly run-of-the-mill

Splatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooting games whose paint-splattered turf war nature means being bad at shooting is just as valuable as – if not more so than – being good. It is also blessed with an abundance of personality, with vibrant characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only dream of achieving. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.

The first spinoff in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is advertised as a single player-focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play through the entire game solo just fine – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed cooperatively with up to three others. Players start each session on a hideout ship where they can upgrade their equipment and tweak their play style before heading out on bite-sized repeatable missions, and this structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping out strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works towards creating their ultimate squid-kid avatar of chaos.

Splatoon Raiders is out 23 July; £41.99

Stratospheric costs could prevent the fire-damaged landmark from returning to its former glory. Now, unless a wealthy patron is found, the building seems destined for ‘soulless’ facade retention or ‘curated decay’

Doubly destroyed by two fires, Scotland’s finest piece of architecture, the Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), cuts a lamentable sight.

A 12-year saga of destruction, rebuilding and yet more destruction, all underscored by an unedifying seam of political and institutional wrangling, reached an apologetic conclusion of sorts, with the recent announcement that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s exquisite art nouveau creation is unlikely to be rebuilt in its original form because of stratospheric cost.

Their eye-popping designs burst out of Sheffield in 1986, making them the toast of the music scene. Founder Ian Anderson reveals why some fans think his art is worth remortgaging the house for

Forty years ago in Sheffield, Ian Anderson founded one of the most influential UK design companies by mistake. “The name the Designers Republic was a joke, because we weren’t designers,” he recalls. “Early on, everything we did was in black and white because we didn’t know how to make it colour.”

With co-founder Nick Phillips, The Designers Republic (TDR) quickly became synonymous with music, designing record covers, packaging, logos and campaigns for everyone from Aphex Twin to Autechre, Pulp to Nine Inch Nails. They worked on groundbreaking video games, such as Wipeout and Grand Theft Auto, collaborated with brand behemoths like Coca-Cola and Adidas, and their work is held in the MoMA and the V&A. There exist such obsessive collectors of their work that Anderson cites one person who remortaged his house twice to keep up with their output.

The terrifying visions of Richard Dadd, UFOs, aliens and Van Gogh’s troubled peasant woman – all in your weekly dispatch

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam
Terrifying creatures of the night and surreal dreamscapes galore – and those are just the “sane” canvases this Victorian artist painted before he was confined to Bedlam, where his visions became truly unsettling.
• Royal Academy, London, 25 July to 25 October

The painter, sculptor and performance artist has devoted his life to making art available to the masses. Now with a new exhibition, the centenarian discusses inequality, inspiration, and why he won’t be stopping any time soon

‘Life is short, art long,” says Ken Turner, reading from a book of aphorisms by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. And he’s half right, really, because at 100 years old – and very possibly the world’s oldest performance artist – art might have been long, but life hasn’t been all that short for him, either. And he has filled those years to the brim with radicalism, experimentalism and a singular dedication to pushing ideas as far as he can make them go.

In the 1960s, Turner moved from painting towards a socially conscious form of public art, creating giant inflatable sculptures that visitors could inhabit and interact with decades before immersive art became a thing. He was taught by Fernand Léger, he was mates with John Berger, he made frames for Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Last year, he drove a tank over a Tesla in a performance meant as a damning indictment of corporate greed and rising fascism. His has been a life of rebellion and revolution, of obstinately following his own artistic path no matter what obstacles he encounters, no matter how much easier it would have been to walk down a more well-trodden one.

Ray Exworth spent his life filling Cornish sheds with breathtaking sculptures – but wouldn’t let anyone in to view them. Now, after his death, his secret body of work has been revealed

Ray Exworth spent six decades creating one of Britain’s most extraordinary bodies of sculpture – and almost nobody has seen it. Hidden inside a labyrinth of sheds on a remote Cornish smallholding, his vast, obsessive constructions have remained locked away from the world, visited only by a fortunate few. Even his wife Susie, 92, was largely kept out. “I could not visit without an invitation!” she recalls.

Exworth, who died in 2015 aged 84, had just one major exhibition in his lifetime, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975. Since then, the man who might belong among Britain’s most notable artists has disappeared almost entirely. His works – sprawling, intricate and wildly ambitious, assembled from an array of salvaged materials – have remained exactly where he left them: filling seven studio sheds and a scattering of shipping containers, unseen.

‘Manal suffered severe burns to her arms and face after a missile explosion in Iraq. Yet in many ways she seemed just like a regular young girl’

When I started to take photographs about 18 years ago, I was more interested in the aesthetics. Then came a moment when I realised the power of the camera as a tool. On 3 October 2013 there was a huge shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa. More than 250 migrants from Eritrea lost their lives. I was sent to cover the event, and it was during that assignment that I understood I was interested in telling stories about social injustice, about people’s lives post-conflict.

At first I worked mostly on stories about refugees in Sicily, where I am from, but a few years later I had the opportunity to travel to the Middle East with a friend, the journalist Marta Bellingreri, who is an expert on the region. She was living in Jordan and I joined her there for six months . That is how our project, The Hospital of All the Wars, about the patients at the Médecins Sans Frontières Al-Mowasah hospital in Amman, began.

Author Alexander McCall Smith’s new series is an attempt to use short fiction to make listeners feel better about the world. Plus, what happened when two London gangsters decided to make a film?

While he is best known for his No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, Alexander McCall Smith has something of a soft spot for short stories, which can “cover a whole sweep of history in a couple of paragraphs”. His new series features a selection of short original works that he hopes will make listeners feel better about the state of the world, beginning with a pleasingly twee tale inspired by a friend’s miniature helicopter landing pad. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

After 20 mutilated animal corpses were left outside a rural primary school, the creators of award-winning podcast Buried began investigating – with a little help from Chris Packham. It plunged them into organised crime, the dark web and Line of Duty-esque rumours of police corruption

In 2024, a village in Hampshire woke up to something truly disturbing. A mound of dead animals had been dumped outside a school, and blood oozed out on to the streets before children’s classes started for the day. There were about 20 carcasses, including rabbits, hares, pheasants, a fox and a muntjac deer with its head severed. The village was dumbfounded, and the biggest question was: why?

The husband-and-wife investigative journalist team of Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor – the pair behind the award-winning BBC podcast series, and now forthcoming documentary, Buried – found themselves wondering the same thing. Their new 10-part podcast, Buried: Dead Rabbit, delves into this and finds them plunged into the shady world of illegal bloodsports. Specifically, hare coursing – where dogs hunt hares to kill them, an activity that has been banned in the UK since 2005 – and its links to organised crime and the dangerous, violent characters who are terrorising villages across the country.

Buried: Dead Rabbit is on BBC Sounds now.

With its gushing interviewees and weird (y’know) ways of talking, the BBC news flagship show I used to present now has me harrumphing at the radio

It’s seven years since I stopped presenting the Today programme and started listening to Radio 3 instead. Or at least, that was the plan. On the first day it lasted for almost an hour. By the second day I’d given up on it. I suppose it was inevitable. You can’t spend 61 years as a news hack – more than half of it presenting the same programme – and then just erase it from your memory and start a new life.

What you can do in my own case – or, rather, can’t help doing – is mutate into a “new” listener. How to describe this “new” listener? I suppose if I were Today’s editor, the phrase “pain in the arse” might come to mind. Having been the one on the radio informing (and possibly sometimes annoying) the listeners for 33 years, I’m now the man shouting at his radio about how irritating the programme has become.

John Humphrys presents The Odd Couple podcast with Matthew Norman