Table of contents for 1450 in The Week

What happened The former nurse Lucy Letby was jailed for life this week for what the judge called a “cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder”. On Friday, she had been found guilty of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more while working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. Two of her surviving victims were left severely disabled. Letby, 33, is only the fourth woman in British history to receive a whole-life sentence that prevents her from ever being released. The others were Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer, who died in 2002, and the serial killers Rose West and Joanna Dennehy. In what victims’ families described as “one final act of wickedness”, Letby refused…

“One of the hardest parts of growing up is learning that life is not fair,” said the Evening Standard. This year’s cohort of A-level students, though, will have grasped that lesson with no difficulty whatsoever. This is the generation who lost critical months of schooling in Years 10 and 11 due to pandemic closures, and weren’t able to sit their GCSEs. Their A levels this year were their first public examinations – yet, unlike the previous three years, they missed out on the more generous teacher-assessed grades: the Government decided that a return to tighter pre-pandemic standards of A-level marking in England was needed (Wales and Northern Ireland put it off for another year). As a result, said Tara Cobham in The Independent, the proportion of A* and A grades…

Fine dining, with the news that Michel Roux Jr is permanently closing his renowned two-Michelin-starred London restaurant, Le Gavroche, next year. It was opened in 1967 by Roux’s late father, Albert, and uncle, Michel; but the chef, 63, says he now wants “a better work-life balance”. Craft beer enthusiasts, with reports that more than 100 small brewers have gone out of business in 18 months. The closures were blamed on a combination of Brexit, Covid and tax reforms that penalise drinks with higher alcohol content (see page 41). British honeybees, which entomologists warn could be under threat from a new predator. Asian hornets, which kill, dismember and eat bees, are rare in the UK, but have been spotted in their greatest numbers yet this year in areas such as Dorset…

Parma, Italy Cheese chips: Italian parmesan-makers have begun embedding microchips into the rinds of their cheeses, in a drive to distinguish their produce from copycat versions. The hard cheese must be matured for at least a year and made in northern provinces such as Parma and Reggio Emilia to qualify as Parmigiano Reggiano under EU rules; but in recent years, the market has been flooded by counterfeits. In response, the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium has announced it will fit cheese wheels with digestible micro-transponders, which are about the size of a grain of sand, and can be scanned by buyers to verify the cheese’s authenticity. Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain Raging wildfires: The Canary Islands saw their worst wildfire in at least 40 years last week when a blaze in a…

“Mattel plans to maximise on Barbie’s popularity by making films based on Hot Wheels, Polly Pocket, Boglins, Matchbox cars, Uno, Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and the Magic 8 Ball. And before Barbie came along, the highest-grossing film of the year was The Super Mario Bros. Movie, based on a Nintendo video game. Nintendo is rumoured to be working on movies based on The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong. This is just where we are now, isn’t it? Every movie we ever go and see for the rest of our lives is going to either be based on a toy or a game. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the Marvel superhero films. Barbie has become death, destroyer of worlds.” Stuart Heritage in The Guardian…

Keir Starmer’s missing ingredient Andrew Rawnsley The Observer “I wake up every morning imagining the ways in which we could still f**k it up.” So a senior member of Keir Starmer’s team recently confided to me, says Andrew Rawnsley. Labour enjoys a double-digit poll lead, and “virtually everyone” assumes they’ll win the next election, but four consecutive defeats and 13 years in the “wilderness of opposition have left deep psychological scars”. Hence their obsession with reassuring swing voters and closing off Tory lines of attack, described as a “small target” strategy. Labour has postponed some of their more ambitious proposals, such as the green prosperity plan, and reversed many others, such as their commitment to strengthen workers’ rights. The danger is that it is “becoming best known not for the…

A revolution in physics? The behaviour of a tiny particle might prove that the theoretical foundations of modern physics are incomplete. This particle is the muon; an unstable cousin of the electron, it spins with a slight wobble when placed in a magnetic field – but not quite as the current theoretical framework would predict. To study the muon’s wobble, scientists at Fermilab, a particle accelerator laboratory near Chicago, blasted the particles around a 15-metre magnetic ring at nearly the speed of light; their wobbling was measured as they went. It should have been possible to predict the size of the wobble using the Standard Model, the theory physicists use to explain the subatomic world, which posits that there are four fundamental forces of nature, governing the behaviour of everything…

Arguably the least interesting thing about Leonard Bernstein, the great American composer who wrote the music for West Side Story, was his nose, said David M. Perry on CNN. Unfortunately, that nose has become the focus of a furore. Netflix recently released a trailer for Maestro, its upcoming biopic of Bernstein, showing Bradley Cooper (who also directed and produced) in the title role – wearing a large prosthetic nose. It sparked accusations of antisemitism and reignited the debate over so-called “Jewface”: the exaggerated portrayal of Jewish people by non-Jewish actors. Bernstein did, it’s true, have “a pretty big nose”. But any non-Jewish person putting on a fake nose in order to portray a Jew “is colliding with a grim history”. I felt “enormous irritation” on seeing Cooper with his fake…

To The Times The Lucy Letby case focuses attention on what happens when concerns are raised by hospital doctors. Internal investigations are frequently set up and conducted by investigators who are both unqualified and inexperienced. The outcomes of these investigations are often predetermined by hospital managers. The person who has been the subject of the concerns is encouraged to then raise a grievance against the complainants. Doctors have to apologise or else their registrations with the GMC will be threatened. Often straightforward clinical concerns are turned into team issues, following which the hospital employs external mediators at vast expense. Clinicians are accountable through their respective regulators – it is surely time that NHS managers experienced similar levels of scrutiny. Marjan Jahangiri, FRCS, professor of cardiac surgery; chair, speciality advisory committee,…

by Anne Enright Jonathan Cape 288pp £18.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99 Anne Enright’s eighth novel is the “finest I have read in a long time”, said Luiza Sauma in The Daily Telegraph. Like her 2007 Booker-winner The Gathering, it explores “ancestral trauma”, telling the story of three generations of women, and that of Phil McDaragh, a “long-dead, not terribly famous” Irish poet, whose influence looms over them. The novel mostly alternates between the perspectives of Phil’s daughter Carmel and his twentysomething granddaughter Nell, who never knew him but tattoos her body with references to his poems. The Wren, The Wren is a “surprising and complex” book, lifted by the beauty of Phil’s verse (written by the novelist), with a “dark, lurking humour”. “Damn, Enright can write,” said John Self in…

Alexander Gorlizki at Lyndsey Ingram The British artist Alexander Gorlizki (b.1967) has spent much of the past 25 years immersing himself in the art of the Indian subcontinent, creating work that responds to its aesthetic styles with the kind of nuance that only a comprehensive understanding of the subject can provide. His particular area of interest is miniature paintings, a form that demands exacting precision. Although he executes his paintings with visible reverence for traditional technique, he brings a wealth of personal touches – strange hybrid animals and Mexican wrestlers, to name a few – into these energetic, densely patterned and populated compositions, as well as more modern elements, notably found photographs. This show, Conversation Pieces, presents two dozen of Gorlizki’s recent works alongside a series of staggeringly beautiful Indian…

Minimalist menus As someone who writes about food, I find that “every single day I have to do something that completely boils my urine”, says Tim Hayward in the Financial Times: “I have to read bloody restaurant menus.” At the moment, I’m particularly exercised by the trend for a “kind of adjective-free, mannered minimalism”. Had Botticelli ever been asked to pitch Nascita di Venere on a sheet of A4, I doubt he would have typed: “Paint, Canvas. Woman. Scallop.” So what explains the terse brevity – “Pork, potato, leaves, ferment” – that so often characterises menu descriptions today? Do chefs think that underselling their dishes will help them “exceed expectations” when they’re eaten? Do they imagine a series of “nailed-together nouns” will somehow convey the message “that they are artists”,…

● Don’t buy currency at the airport, unless you order online in advance. In many countries you don’t need cash any more, and you can use your debit card in a cashpoint on arrival if you do need cash. ● Avoid taking cash out on a credit card abroad, it’s better to buy directly with the card, and you’ll get legal protections too. ● Foreign retailers often offer a conversion to sterling when you pay by card. It’s likely to cost more; choose the local currency. ● If you can’t easily convert a currency in your head, use a currency conversion app or your phone calculator. Watch out for extra noughts being added to bills. ● Overseas transaction charges vary wildly. A Monzo card has no charges, and Which? also…

Crest Nicholson: builders’ droop Safe as houses? After 14 consecutive rises in interest rates, that old adage is “being tested a bit”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. The latest “to ramp up Britain’s housing jitters” is one of the nation’s biggest housebuilders, Crest Nicholson, which has just issued a whopper of a profits warning. In June, Crest’s “gung-ho” boss, Peter Truscott, assured investors that full-year profits would be “in line” with forecasts of £73.7m. Now we learn they’re more likely to be £50m. Cue a big sell-off that knocked 14% off Crest’s already whacked share price – and caused knock-on damage across the sector, said Riya Makwana in The Daily Telegraph. Shares in Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Barrett, Vistry, Redrow and Berkeley all tumbled. In the ongoing standoff between house…

China won’t spoil America’s party… Irwin Stelzer The Sunday Times The US economy continues to surprise on the upside, says Irwin Stelzer. Inflation is falling even as economic growth accelerates to an annual 4.1%, there are jobs “available for all who care to work” and “new factories are breaking ground at record levels”. This is partly due to “the sugar high” created by a spend now, pay later fiscal policy that will pile new deficits on top of the nation’s $32.7trn debt mountain. But that’s a worry for future generations. For now, it’s a case of “the Fitch downgrade be damned” – party on. What might threaten this happy state? “No economy is an island entire of itself” and even a successful one is susceptible “to the ills of less…

What happened England’s Lionesses flew home from Australia this week, after their historic appearance in Sunday’s World Cup final ended in a 1-0 defeat to Spain (see page 22). Olga Carmona’s first-half goal at Sydney’s Stadium Australia sealed Spain’s first-ever women’s football World Cup win, ending England’s hopes of replicating their triumph at last year’s Euros. Defeat “hurt”, admitted England manager Sarina Wiegman, but the Lionesses should still be “very proud” of reaching the final. The match was watched by a peak television audience of 14.4 million in the UK, a record for a Women’s World Cup final. Rishi Sunak and Prince William – who is president of the Football Association (FA) – were criticised for not, like Spain’s Queen Letizia, attending the match. Sunak was mocked for telling the…

Waitrose and John Lewis are offering free hot drinks and discounted food to on-duty police officers, in a bid to cut soaring shoplifting and violence against staff. It’s hoped that the “Thanks a Latte” initiative may discourage thieves from targeting a branch, if they see a police car parked outside. Assaults on Waitrose employees have roughly doubled since 2020, according to the British Retail Consortium. The cost of the average British wedding has risen from £18,400 last year to £24,069 this year, driven in part by couples paying for drone camera-operators to immortalise their big day. “Every detail now matters and will be captured,” explained Hamish Shephard, founder of the Bridebook wedding app.…

A new Covid-19 variant that is causing concern among scientists has been identified in a patient in London, who has been placed under surveillance by UK health officials. Although there is no evidence to suggest that the strain, known as BA.2.86, causes more serious illness or is more infectious than other variants in circulation, scientists have discovered that it shows a particularly high number of mutations (34). The person who is known to have contracted the variant was tested in a London hospital on 13 August and had no recent history of overseas travel, suggesting the variant is circulating freely within the UK. It has already been identified in the US, Israel and Denmark.…

Kelowna, Canada Mass evacuations: About 30,000 people were ordered to flee their homes in British Columbia, as the worst wildfires in Canadian history continued to rage across the country this week. Officials declared a state of emergency covering the whole province as fires charred homes in West Kelowna (pop. 36,000) and left nearby Kelowna (pop. 150,000) choked with thick smoke. Some of the flames from the fires reportedly reached 400ft high. About 1,000 miles north, more huge fires were edging towards Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, where about 19,000 of the city’s 20,000 residents had evacuated by the time an official deadline had expired last Friday. It is not yet clear when they will be able to return. In all, more than 1,000 fires are still burning in…

Michael Parkinson 1935-2023 For several decades, Michael Parkinson, who has died aged 88, “was one of the most ubiquitous figures on national television”, said Stephen Bates in The Guardian. He was not the first to host a chat show in the UK, but he was the most versatile and enduring. “With his wry, confiding demeanour and his characteristic facial twitchiness, asking polite but occasionally convoluted questions in his soft Yorkshire accent, often while fiddling self-consciously with his hair or scratching his nose, he interviewed more than 2,000 guests over 20 years”. They included many of the biggest names of the age, from Lauren Bacall to Madonna, David Bowie to David Beckham, W.H. Auden to Henry Kissinger, Miss Piggy to Nelson Mandela. Parkinson’s technique was sometimes criticised as deferential, even starstruck.…

NIGERIA The case for not invading Niger The Guardian (Lagos) Is history repeating itself, asks Bisi Olawunmi. In 2011, Nigeria’s then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, used his role as chair of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) to make the case for invading Ivory Coast to oust its strongman leader, Laurent Gbagbo, who had been defeated in the 2010 election. Luckily for Nigeria, French and UN soldiers did the job instead, and Ecowas was not sucked into Ivory Coast’s internal conflicts. Twelve years on, however, a similar story is playing out, as our current president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, makes the case for Ecowas to intervene militarily to depose the army officers who ousted Niger’s elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, in July. He seems “gung-ho” about such an operation, although most Nigerians…

Rishi Sunak visited a nursery in North Yorkshire this week, where his attempt at painting a bee led some to wonder if he had ever seen one, and others to advise him to stick to politics. The Times’s chief art critic Laura Freeman, however, was more generous in her assessment of the Prime Minister’s creation. “There’s a pleasing freedom to Sunak’s picture. Not just a copy of a bee, but a bee with bizazz,” she decided. “A touch of Picasso, perhaps, in those distorted features?” In his new memoir, Born at the Right Time, the screenwriter Ray Connolly recalls a series of starry encounters from the 1960s. In 1969 he interviewed Germaine Greer, who “talked non-stop” about sex. “I finally asked her, as a joke, if she ever thought of…

“Whatever you do, always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood.”Bill Murray, quoted on The Knowledge “Q: How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Do your own research.”Comedian Darren Walsh, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”Mae West, quoted in The Independent “There are some things a chancellor might like to say, but only a novelist can.”Martin Walser, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “When you make people laugh, you open the door.”Jean-Claude Carrière, quoted in the Financial Times “An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”Colombian politician Enrique Peñalosa, quoted in Toronto Storeys “If you would not be forgotten as soon…

Athletics Zharnel Hughes won Great Britain’s first World Championship 100m men’s medal in 20 years, taking bronze. Tennis Coco Gauff claimed her biggest career win at the Cincinnati Open, beating world No. 1 Iga Swiątek for the first time in seven matches in the semis. Novak Djokovic took the men’s title. Football Manchester United announced that forward Mason Greenwood will leave the club. The decision follows a lengthy internal probe after criminal charges, including attempted rape, were dropped against the 21-year-old.…

The British Museum has sacked one of its senior curators over suspicions that he has stolen artefacts from its collection, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. Peter Higgs (pictured), 57, who was sacked earlier this year as the curator of Mediterranean cultures, is a leading authority on ancient Greek and Mediterranean antiquities who had worked at the Museum for more than 30 years. The items, jewellery made of gold, semi-precious stones and glass that dated from between 1,500 BC and the 19th century AD, went missing from the institution’s vaults over a period of years. Some of them were sold on eBay. Higgs’s son, Greg, said at the family home in Hastings that his father had “not done anything… He’s lost his job and his reputation and I don’t…

At Grey Gables, Adil tells Oliver they need an event planner for the launch, but not Lynda – she’s unmanageable. Tracy, though, unwittingly suggests the role to Lynda… Ian tells Helen he has accepted the Head of Food role, but awkwardly says he’s considering other cheese suppliers. George offers to take Henry to the County Show; later, Henry tells George that his stepdad has been texting and they plan to meet there. David gives Ben a pep-talk ahead of his return to uni. Pip is tetchy when Ruth invites Stella on a family roller-skating outing; Ruth can’t understand what’s up with her. Learning of Henry and Rob’s history, George tries unsuccessfully to head off their meeting. Rob tells Henry he’s dying and asks him to bring Jack to a future…

Above Below Devon’s woodland camp on Dartmoor is the original cross-country swimming break. Their routes offer a mix of hiking, scrambling and open-water swimming, following the coastline (from £334; abovebelow.sc or on eventbrite.co.uk). Swim Wild Wales runs weekend breaks with swims and walks along the Pembrokeshire National Park coastal path, and offers the chance of spotting seals and dolphins (£330; swimwildwales.com for future dates). Local guide Matt Lowe leads a three-swim circular route from Maenporth in Cornwall, with a sea-swim past caves and a swoosh down Porthnavas Creek to end at a pub (full day £100; email hello@agoodadventure.co). Immerse Hebrides offers half-day swim-hikes and more adventurous swims out to small islands (from £175; immersehebrides.com). Jurassic Coast Swimming runs day swims with scrambling and ledge-jumping around Durdle Door, Beer and Branscombe,…

The secrets of Orford Ness A 12-mile spit of shingle and reed marsh caught between the River Alde and the sea, Orford Ness in Suffolk is a National Trust nature reserve of “stark” and “fragile” beauty. But the hulking remains of concrete buildings across it testify to a darker past, says Simon Ingram in the Sunday Times – as a testing ground for some of the 20th century’s key military technologies, including radar and the atomic bomb. These structures – from the windmill-like Black Beacon to the “sinisterly derelict” Control Room – lend a surreal and unsettling edge to any visit, and there’s an excellent exhibition, Island of Secrets, for anyone interested. Still, “shingle, sky and sea” are powerful presences too, and so is resurgent nature, with sea pea and…

Michael Burry Batten down the hatches, says The Times, there’s a crash coming. At least according to Michael Burry – and he has form. The trader, who called the 2008 banking crisis and was immortalised by Christian Bale in the film The Big Short, has bet $1.6bn on another Wall Street crash by the end of the year. A former medical student, who spent his nights studying investment, Burry dropped out of college to form Scion Capital and started betting against subprime mortgage products in 2005. It was like “watching a plane crash”, he later said. As America’s “pre-eminent prophet of doom”, Burry has been warning about a “passive investing bubble” – inflated by the trillions that have poured into index-linked funds – since 2019. Two years ago, he predicted…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1377 An Ettinger pass holder and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 4 September. Send it to The Week Crossword 1377, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass holder in assorted colours, which retails at £115, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 It’s an old assembly, says senior army officer (6-7) 10 Current cuts change Italian city (5) 11 Pair cited in trouble as it makes father late (9) 12 Kitchen equipment for a racecourse by the sound of it (7) 13 Red-faced graduate in a…

Oliver Anthony, a previously unknown country singer who has made an unprecedented leap straight to No. 1 on the Billboard US singles chart with a lament for America’s working class. Rich Men North of Richmond, dubbed a “right-wing anthem”, blames low pay, taxation and Northern politicians for the hardships suffered by Americans. It has been streamed tens of millions of times. India, which became only the fourth country ever to land a spacecraft on the Moon, and the first to land one near the lunar south pole. The Chandrayaan-3 craft touched down on Wednesday in an area deemed to be of special interest, owing to the presence of water ice, which could be useful for further space exploration.…

Labour now has a 28-point lead over the Tories among women in England and Wales, compared with a 22-point lead among men. 60% of women who say they’re “very worried” about their finances plan to vote Labour, six times more than intend to vote Conservative. Labour Together/YouGov Fewer than one in four people believe that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. 49% want the country to remain a member; 28% want it to leave, and 23% don’t know. The Times/More in Common 34% of adults in Great Britain say that if they are alone at home and see a big spider, they capture it. 29% leave it be; 23% kill it; 5% hide or run away. YouGov…

The £25,000 stairwell A disused stairwell, encased in dirty glass and backing onto a southwest London car park, is not something that would send most people’s pulses racing, says Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. But for Simon Squibb, the entrepreneur who snapped up the stairwell for £25,000 at an auction earlier this month, it is the most exciting thing he has ever bought. “I’ve got a nice house and a nice car, but this is different,” he says. “It really resonates.” At 15, Squibb slept in a stairwell just like it, having seen his father die of a heart attack, then been made homeless after a “catastrophic” falling out with his mother. “It was a traumatic time and I left with nothing, not even a bag,” he says. “I…

There were times when Parkinson’s easy rapport with his guests failed him. He outraged Helen Mirren in 1975 when he introduced her as the “sex queen” of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and asked if her “equipment” – her “bosoms” – hindered her acting. (She later called him a “sexist old fart”, to which he responded curtly: “I’m Yorkshire.”) More notorious still was his run-in with Meg Ryan in 2003, when the actress bristled at every question. In exasperation he asked her: “What would you do now if you were me?” She replied: “Why not wrap it up?” Parkinson’s exchanges with Muhammad Ali, whom he interviewed four times, were spiky. The boxer called him a “honky” and told him he was “too small mentally to tackle me on anything I represent”.…

The self-inflicted woes of New York Allysia Finley The Wall Street Journal The Big Apple is in a pickle, says Allysia Finley. Having proudly advertised itself as a “sanctuary city” for undocumented migrants, New York is now struggling to accommodate the 100,000 or so migrants who have descended on it since last spring. Caring for them will cost about $5bn this fiscal year. The city is paying $256 a night on average to shelter migrant families in hotels. That doesn’t include the cost of food, medical care and services, which adds another $127 a day per family. “A New Yorker would have to make around $280,000 a year before taxes to afford what the city is spending on each migrant family. No wonder they’re coming by the bus load.” It’s…

Colourful cereal boxes featuring cartoon characters and the like should be banned to protect children’s health, campaigners have said. Action on Sugar, based at Queen Mary University of London, analysed 116 popular cereals with packaging aimed at children. This showed that 47% contained at least a third of a young child’s daily recommended sugar intake in a single helping; only nine were low in sugar and just four had low amounts of both sugar and salt. Although there are restrictions on the advertising of unhealthy food to children, there are no specific rules on the use of “child-appealing packaging”, and bold action is needed from the Government and food industry, said the campaign group. Will Quince, the Health Minister, said he was not in favour of “nanny-state interventions”, adding that…

Get ready for “a long, dirty election campaign”, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. Until recently, Rishi Sunak has traded on his image as a hard-working, courteous problem solver. But with the Tories trailing 20 points behind Labour, party leaders have decided to take the gloves off. Their unexpected victory in the Uxbridge by-election was the launchpad for a more aggressive approach, led by Sunak, focused on emotive issues such as irregular migration, eco-activism and trans rights. With reference to the small boats, in July Sunak tweeted: “The Labour Party, a subset of lawyers, criminal gangs – they’re all on the same side, propping up a system of exploitation that profits from getting people to the UK illegally.” Some of the PM’s colleagues believe that this more populist tone doesn’t…

“To lose in a World Cup final is one thing,” said Ian Herbert in The Daily Mail. “To do so when your performance is so far below the required level that you will want to shut it out of your mind for all time, is something else.” That was the harsh reality for England defender Lucy Bronze, whose mistake led to athe game’s sole goal. Bronze has now played in three World Cups; at other times, against less lethal opposition, her error might not have been fatal. “But this tournament has revealed the brutal consequences of being way off the pace.” Unfortunately, this was the case for England as a whole, who on Sunday gave the impression of being “stuck on a luggage carousel” as Spain “fizzed passes” around their…

by David Stubbs Faber 416pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99 The British sense of humour is a “source of power, soft and otherwise”, said Joel Morris in The Spectator. As one anthropologist has noted, our national motto should be: “Oh, come off it.” We see ourselves through a comic lens, a “nation of Delboys and Mainwarings, Brents and Leadbetters, Gavins and Staceys”. But despite its central place in our culture, books on comedy are few and far between. So this “nice, fat volume” about the history of British humour from 1917 onwards provides “a valuable record”. As a survey, Different Times has its moments, said Roger Lewis in The Times. Some of the appraisals are “excellent”; I liked the description of Tony Hancock representing the “lumpy gravy of reality”. However,…

Peter Howson is an artist who has spent much of his life “tussling with the beast inside”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born in London in 1958 and brought up in Glasgow, he immediately “stood out” when he first began exhibiting his work in the mid-1980s. For one thing, he had been in the Army, an experience that “clearly did something terrible to him” and inspired more than a few of his earliest, already decidedly “bleak” pictures. Secondly, his paintings could hardly have been further from the tasteful, academic art fashionable at the time: rather, they depicted a frightening, ultra-masculine world dominated by violence and ugliness. And as this “tense, sweaty, unhappy, creepy and, eventually, rather brilliant” retrospective in Edinburgh shows, he has not mellowed with age. The…

The Concise British Flora in Colour by Keble Martin, 1965 (Ebury, available used). The wildflower book I really loved when I was a girl. My botanist father taught me that if I saw 100 plants of one variety, I could pick one flower, which I would then take back to my Keble Martin to identify. His highly atmospheric drawings are both delicate and precise. My favourites were the Flowering Rush and Grass of Parnassus, both of which I love to this day. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, 2022 (Penguin £9.99). Wonderful storytelling about a pair of eccentric chemists. The husband dies and his widow, a brilliant, science-based cook, goes on to star in a TV cooking show à la Julia Child. Plus, it includes the most adorable ever-protecting dog,…

Programmes The Woman in the Wall New drama starring Ruth Wilson. In Ireland in 2015, Lorna wakes to find a dead woman in her house – an apparent murder linked to the town’s Magdalene Laundry. Sun 27 & Mon 28 Aug, BBC1 21:00 (60mins each). A Very British Space Launch The inside story of Virgin Orbit’s failed bid to put Britain in the space race; cameras follow the mission to the ill-fated launch day in January 2023. Mon 28 Aug, C4 22:00 (65mins). The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies Dark thriller about a conman and the two very different women he has duped – his ex-wife and new girlfriend, a famous author. Tue 29 Aug, BBC1 21:00 (60mins). Storyville: iHuman Documentary exploring the current pivotal moment…

Rocky Mountain Wanderer Explore the national parks of the Canadian Rockies. 14 nights incl. accomm., car hire and some meals cost from £2,679pp (excl. flights). 020-7368 1440, trailfinders.com. Arrive September. Portugal escape Seven nights at the five-star Hotel Pestana on Porto Santo, with a miles-long sandy beach, cost from £811pp all-inclusive (incl. Manchester flights). 020-3451 2688, firstchoice.co.uk. Depart 25 September. Maldives sailing adventure Eight days aboard a traditional 90ft sailing boat with a small group visiting idyllic islands cost from £1,976pp full-board (excl. flights). 020-8004 8886, theadventurepeople.com. Arrive 15 October. Five-star beachfront stay Enjoy a 7-night Sharm el Sheikh getaway at the Pickalbatros Palace Resort on the Sinai Peninsula from £570pp all-inclusive (incl. flights). 020-3474 0372, blueseaholidays.co.uk. Depart 28 November.…

First, the good news, said Jack Barnett in The Times: UK inflation “may be easing more quickly than first thought”. Figures from the Office for National Statistics – based on a new model of statistical analysis – suggest that “core inflation” fell to 6.8% in July from 6.9% in June (from a peak of 7.3% in May) indicating that “underlying price pressures are easing”. If the new measure, dubbed the “common trend component rate”, is accurate, it raises the chances that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will be able to make good on his promise “to halve the headline rate of inflation to about 5% by the end of the year”. Now for the bad news, said Chris Dorrell in City AM: warning lights are flashing to indicate that the UK…

The week’s best shares CentralNic Investors’ Chronicle The internet services firm uses AI to convert ad campaigns on search engines into e-commerce transactions. Trading in line with expectations, it isn’t showing signs of a sales slowdown – and is prioritising shareholder returns with a second buyback. Buy. 131p. Checkit Investors’ Chronicle Checkit’s digital workflow platform helps firms manage deskless workers, improve productivity and make efficiency savings. Customers include Waitrose and Compass. Revenues are rising. Buy. 24p. CVS Group The Times The vet group is improving facilities and ramping up acquisitions in the resilient pet market. It has doubled its debt facility and is teaming up with vet schools to prevent staff shortages. Buy. £20.54. Headlam Group The Times The UK’s leading flooring distributor has been hit by Covid and the…