Table of contents for 1478 in The Week

What happened George Galloway returned to Westminster last week after winning a decisive victory in the Rochdale by-election. The veteran left-wing agitator, standing for his own Workers Party of Britain, won by a margin of almost 6,000 votes in the Greater Manchester town, on a 39.7% turnout. A local businessman called David Tully came second on an independent ticket. Labour, which had held the seat until the death of Tony Lloyd, its former MP, withdrew support from its candidate, Azhar Ali, over incendiary comments he’d made about Israel; he finished fourth. Galloway campaigned mostly on the Palestinian issue and he greeted his victory with the words, “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza.” He said the Labour leader would pay a “high price” for the role he had played in “covering…

The atrocities committed in Israel on 7 October, and their bloody aftermath in Gaza, “have altered the mood in this country”, said The Times. “The national debate has become more polarised and extremism more apparent.” A tolerant country has been “stained by intolerance and intimidation”. Antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism have risen sharply; a vote in the Commons on Gaza last month was “corrupted” by concerns about MPs’ safety. So the address made by Rishi Sunak in Downing Street last Friday was “welcome”, if overdue. Sunak promised a crackdown on extremism. “This situation has gone on long enough,” he said. “Our great achievement in building the world’s most successful multiethnic, multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined. There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.” Jewish children, he insisted,…

Manual gearboxes, with figures showing that 20% of driving tests are now taken in automatics – and that, owing largely to the rising popularity of electric and hybrid vehicles, automatic cars represented 71% of all registrations last year. TalkTV, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing TV network, which is moving to online operations only, to stem heavy losses. TalkTV’s flagship presenter Piers Morgan left a few weeks ago, and it has attracted fewer viewers than its loss-making rival GB News.…

Versailles, France Abortion vote: France has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution, a world-first warmly welcomed by women’s rights campaigners. This week, the Eiffel Tower was illuminated with the words “#MyBodyMyChoice”. In a joint session of the two houses of parliament held in the Palace of Versailles, MPs and senators had backed the move by 780 to 72. “We’re sending a message to all women: your body belongs to you and no one can decide for you,” the PM, Gabriel Attal, told them. It was the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to reverse the Roe v. Wade ruling upholding the right to an abortion that had alarmed activists and prompted President Macron to vow to make the right “irreversible”. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen accused him of political…

1* Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op. 18 – III. Allegro scherzando by Rachmaninov, performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the LSO (cond. André Previn) 2 “Ah! Dite alla giovine”, by Verdi, performed by Angela Gheorghiu, Leo Nucci and the Orchestra of the ROH (cond. Sir Georg Solti)3 Mamma by Cesare Andrea Bixio and Bixio Cherubini, performed by Beniamino Gigli4 Aranjuez Mon Amour by Guy Bontempelli and Joaquin Rodrigo, performed by Massimo Ranieri5 Cheap Flights, written and performed by Fascinating Aïda6 The Flower Song by Bizet, performed by José Carreras and the Orchestra of the ROH (cond. Jacques Delacôte)7 Ave Maria, credited to Caccini, performed by Inessa Galante and the Latvian NSO (cond. Aleksandrs Vilumanis)8 Climb Ev’ry Mountain by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, performed by Peggy Wood Book: The…

The Rivers Trust’s State of Our Rivers Report, published last month, made for sobering reading. Britain’s rivers, it says, are in “a desperate state”. It rounded up the official assessments showing that not a single waterway in England or Northern Ireland was in “good’ or “high” overall health. The proportion in Wales and Scotland is better (at 44% and 57%). In England, agriculture is the biggest contributor to the poor state of rivers, ahead of the water industry. Mostly, this comes down to nutrient and livestock management. Other rivers have experienced similar problems to the Wye, says Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist. The Axe in Devon, for instance, likewise suffered from algal blooms and sediment runoff, owing to dairy farming in the area. Conservation charities took the Environment Agency to…

Good riddance to Mitch McConnell Jonathan Chait New York Magazine Excuse me if I don’t join others in feting Mitch McConnell, who is retiring as the Republicans’ leader in the senate, says Jonathan Chait. It’s customary to say nice things about veteran politicians on their way out, but the fact is that McConnell bears much of the blame for the current state of US politics. He introduced a policy of total senate obstruction during the Obama era, blocking all bipartisan legislation. Republicans could only justify their refusal to negotiate by insisting that all of Obama’s goals – economic stimulus, expanding health coverage, reducing emissions – were “merely pretexts” for a more sinister, Big Government agenda. The system McConnell created was one in which policy was irrelevant and all that mattered…

People who are allocated their own GP make fewer appointments, the largest study of its kind has found. The analysis of more than ten million consultations at 400 practices in England revealed that patients with a dedicated doctor wait, on average, 18% longer before making their next appointment than those who see various doctors. In people of 70 and above – a group that accounts for almost a third of appointments – the gap is 21% longer. The University of Cambridge team calculate that if all surgeries matched the top 10% for continuity of care, there’d be 5% fewer appointments made (equivalent to 17 million in 2023). The benefits are obvious, said lead author Dr Harshita Kajaria-Montag. “If you’re a patient with complex health needs, you don’t want to have…

“If you want the Kremlin to take something seriously, give it to the Germans and tell them it’s a secret. It will be on every desk in the Politburo the next morning.” A British spy told me that back in 1988, said Edward Lucas in the Daily Mail, and it seems little has changed. Officials in London expressed outrage last week after Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz let slip at a news conference that British soldiers were in Ukraine assisting with our Storm Shadow missile system. Scholz said he was keen to avoid such direct involvement, which was why he opposed sending Germany’s long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Scholz’s indiscretion was followed by an even worse security breach, when Russia intercepted and leaked an unencrypted conference call between senior Luftwaffe officers…

“Misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation.”Psychologist Colin Brewer, quoted in The Spectator “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”Attrib. Charles de Gaulle, quoted in The Times “One good reason to only maintain a small circle of friends is that three out of four murders are committed by people who know the victim.”George Carlin, quoted in Reader’s Digest “A person without regrets is a nincompoop.”Mia Farrow, ibid. “Don’t worry. Just go out there and be yourself.”Impressionist Rory Bremner on the worst advice he has ever received, quoted in the Daily Mail “I hate housework! You make the bed, you do the dishes – and six months later you have to start all over again.”Joan Rivers, quoted on Forbes “Husbands are like fires: they go out unattended.”Zsa Zsa…

To The Times The sad statistic from the Rochdale by-election is not the number who chose to support George Galloway, but the number of those who abstained. The Rochdale constituency has an electorate of 77,782, of whom only 31,107 made the effort to vote. To put Galloway’s victory in perspective, he managed to secure just 12,335 votes, less than 16% of the constituency electorate. As has been apparent at recent general elections and by-elections, the overriding winner has been apathy. Through education, encouragement and, if necessary, legislation, we must engage our population in the democratic process. Tim Phillips, Harleston, Devon To The Times Whatever else it is, the Rochdale by-election is a neat illustration of the butterfly effect. Had the journalist and local-boy-made-good Paul Waugh beaten Azhar Ali to the…

by Holly Pester Granta 224pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99 This well-timed debut novel – about a “young woman’s precarious experience of subletting” – begins with the narrator moving into a new flat in the small English town in which she grew up, said Chloë Ashby in the TLS. It is not her first time returning there: her life has been caught in a “desperate cycle” of moving away and then moving back. No sooner has she arrived in her new lodging – which “smells of men’s shower gel and instant noodles” – than she begins obsessively imagining the life of the woman who has taken up the rented room she had just vacated, in another “similar” town. While “nothing extraordinary occurs” in The Lodgers, it’s “compelling” and “pleasingly weird”.…

Kevin Davies at The Fitzrovia Chapel Kevin Davies is a veteran celebrity-portrait photographer. He has snapped figures from Martin Amis to the hip-hop group Public Enemy, but one subject stands out for him: David Bowie. One morning in December 1992, the 45-year-old singer arrived at a studio in London for a day-long shoot to promote his “comeback” album Black Tie White Noise. The resulting photos were approved for press use, filed away and swiftly forgotten about. It was only when Davies revisited his archive during lockdown that he rediscovered the negatives, including many images never shown in public before. This show, David Bowie – A London Day, which brings together the results of the day’s session, may not be of much interest to anyone who isn’t already a Bowie fan.…

Kokum 58-60 East Dulwich Road, London SE22 (020-3551 1883) Sanjay Gour is a former head chef of Gymkhana, the restaurant in central London that was a “gamechanger” for Indian dining in Britain, says Grace Dent in The Guardian. No surprise, then, that Kokum, his latest venture, in southeast London, is also terrific. On the “wettest, windiest winter Wednesday imaginable”, we find the place nearly full – which is testament to Gour’s subtle, flavourful cooking. From the menu’s small plates section, we try the uthappam – a “kind-of dosa” – made with fermented rice batter, and topped with a rich, meaty stew, as well as “deceptively spicy” pani puri. The mains, while more traditional than the starters, are made with the same seriousness: “prawns are made lively with lime leaf, coconut…

● Stick to one colour and variety of flower – creams and whites ideally; it will look more elegant than a mixed bunch. ● Zhuzh up supermarket flowers with foliage from your garden, or buy some from a local florist. Or invest in some realistic artificial greenery (try oka.com). ● Mini bulbs such as muscaris, crocuses and hyacinths look lovely planted in china teacups or sugar bowls. Top with some moss, and water when the moss feels dry. ● Try “reflexing”, or peeling back the outer petals of tulips or roses to make them look more interesting and expensive. Hold the petal carefully at the base and bend it back gently until you hear a little click. ● Cluster mini-bud vases in odd numbers on a table or mantelpiece for…

Richard Lewis 1947-2024 Richard Lewis, who has died aged 76, was one of America’s most successful standup comics in the 1970s and 1980s. Dubbed “The Prince of Pain”, he wrought humour from his own neuroses and struggles with addiction and depression, in shows with such titles as I’m Doomed, I’m Exhausted and Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour. Unlike other comics, who developed personas for their acts, he said he was just himself on stage. “He just kind of dragged himself up there,” noted his contemporary Billy Crystal. “It was refreshing.” Latterly, he had won millions of new fans as one of the stars of Larry David’s TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, playing a version of himself: he and David had first met aged 12 and had been friends for…

When all else fails, there’s always Greggs, says City AM. The high-street bakery has just delivered another set of “impressive” results, with annual sales increasing by nearly 20%, and profits up by a button-busting 26% to £188m. Greggs has been winning customers by keeping the prices of its “steak bakes” and other treats low, and “ramping up evening trade”. Last year, it won a battle to open a flagship site in London’s Leicester Square until 2am from Thursday to Saturday, and more than 1,200 of its 2,000 sites now trade past 7pm or later. The upshot is that Greggs now accounts for 8.2% of all UK “food-to-go visits”. A very British success story.…

We must not block Chinese EVs Dominic Lawson The Sunday Times It seems to have belatedly dawned on “the West’s panicking leaders” that China will be the winner of the green industrial revolution, says Dominic Lawson. That is already evident in solar power: in 2022, more than 90% of solar panels installed in Europe were Chinese imports. Now the carmaking industry sees a similar threat from a flood of cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs). Having at first ridiculed the market leader, BYD, Tesla boss Elon Musk now says that, without trade barriers, Chinese carmakers “will pretty much demolish most other companies”. The EU and UK are launching investigations into “unfair” trading practices. President Biden has gone further, claiming that Chinese imports pose a risk to national security. Well, maybe. But…

The week’s best shares Elixirr International The Mail on Sunday This niche management consultant, which listed in 2020, offers bespoke advice and technological knowledge to high-profile customers including Tesla, LVMH and HSBC. Revenues and profits growing strongly. Buy. 550p. Inchcape The Times Inchcape is retreating from pure car sales to focus on higher-margin global distribution – and marketing, logistics, financing, repairs and onward sales. Benefits from exclusive rights with Mercedes, JLR and BMW. Buy. 684p. On the Beach Group The Times The online travel agent has resolved its legal spat with Ryanair, securing a partnership that smooths the customer experience via simplified booking and cost efficiencies. The deal removes the barrier to a shares rerating. Buy. 160.5p. Shoe Zone The Sunday Times The bargain shoe retailer has thrived during the…

For much of her 23-year marriage, Yulia Navalnaya stayed out of the spotlight. But within hours of her husband dying last month, she took centre stage, delivering a series of blistering speeches in which she vowed to carry on his work. “She’s got the skills to do this job,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, told the FT. “She just never wanted to, because she always thought that was Alexei’s role.” The daughter of a scientist and a civil servant, Navalnaya was born in 1976 in Moscow. She studied at the prestigious Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, worked for a time at a Moscow bank, and met Navalny on a holiday to Turkey in 1998. He was captivated, according to the Russian newspaper Sobesednik, by her ability to…

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What happened Hamas held talks with international mediators in Cairo this week as part of last-ditch efforts to broker a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war before the start of Ramadan on Sunday. The US, Qatar and Egypt have been trying for weeks to broker an agreement in which Hamas would release hostages in return for a 40-day ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners. However, Israel refused to send a delegation to the latest round of talks, which started last Sunday, because Hamas had rejected its demand to provide a list of all its living hostages; by Wednesday, there were reports that the negotiations were stalling. The dire humanitarian situation in Gaza was brought into sharp relief last Thursday, when at least 115 Palestinians were killed and 750 injured as…

A school in Kent has relaxed a ban on fake eyelashes, to encourage girls to attend classes. Some pupils were missing school to attend appointments to have their lashes removed, says a letter to parents at Knole Academy; others were refusing to go to school lash-free owing to “mental health considerations”. “Having students in school is the most important consideration, and therefore we shall allow lashes to be worn as long as they are discreet”, said head teacher David Collins. Some parents, however, objected. “We’re a society run by children, which I am not going to stand for,” said one. More than half of England’s 43 cathedrals now welcome dogs. However, they are not allowed to attend services – except “doggie services”.…

On Wednesday, Jeremy Hunt delivered his last Budget speech before the next election. Among the measures he unveiled were a 2p cut in national insurance, and the replacement of the “nondom” system (which allows some individuals not to pay tax on their overseas income) with a “simpler” residency-based system. This, he said, would raise £2.7bn a year. He also announced an extra £6bn in total for the NHS; higher passenger duty on business-class flights; a cut to property capital gains tax, from 28% to 24%; and a new higher income threshold for the child-benefit charge of £60,000 (up from £50,000), with the top of the taper (when child benefit is withdrawn completely) raised to £80,000. There were also measures to encourage people to invest in British companies – in the…

Washington DC Super Tuesday: Donald Trump and Joe Biden both swept to commanding victories in their parties’ primaries on Super Tuesday. Trump (pictured) won 14 of the 15 Republican primaries, suffering only a single surprise defeat in Vermont. Nikki Haley won that primary, but hours later she announced that she was withdrawing from the Republican race, leaving Trump as the sole contender. Biden, who is running almost unopposed, won everywhere but in the small territory of American Samoa. Both he and Trump are likely to win enough delegates to secure their nominations within the next fortnight, following a campaign season notable for its lack of suspense. The day before the primaries, Trump’s campaign received a major boost when the supreme court ruled that he can remain on the Republican ballot…

“‘How’s business?’ I asked a local garage owner in Derbyshire last week. ‘Never been better,’ he said. ‘All these potholes after the rain are sending us no end of damaged tyres, rims and suspensions to repair.’ I gave this some thought. Not only is the old saying true that whenever a man marries his housekeeper, the nation’s GDP drops, it’s also the case that if the council fills in a treacherous pothole, Britain’s GDP drops too – assuming it costs less than all the garage bills. So George Osborne, when chancellor, picked the wrong metaphor with the phrase ‘fix the roof while the Sun is shining’. Economic growth would be better served by ruinous water damage.” Matthew Parris in The Times…

The only way to deal with a computer thug Ciaran Martin The Times Computer hacking is big business these days, says Ciaran Martin, the former head of GCHQ’s cybersecurity. The “ransomware” industry – criminal gangs and Russian computer thugs who hack into the systems of hospitals, grocery chains, energy suppliers and other businesses and then demand a ransom for granting the victims access to their own data – now makes over £20bn a year globally. And the reason it’s so profitable is that the victims pay up. Not the publicly owned ones, however: just as the British state doesn’t pay ransoms to kidnappers, knowing it just leads to more people being kidnapped, so it doesn’t pay up when state bodies are hacked. That’s why NHS hospitals are targeted far less…

Google has scored a spectacular own goal with its hotly anticipated new chatbot, said Liz Wolfe in Reason. No sooner had Gemini been unveiled last month than it was accused of “demonstrating comically woke bias”. Users of its image-generating feature discovered that it was incapable of depicting historical figures without including contemporary-style gender and racial diversity. In Gemini’s world, some of America’s Founding Fathers are black and some are women; the Nazis are a multiethnic crew including black and Asian soldiers; and popes are female. Gemini even diversified the (white) Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, depicting them as Asian. Yet if you asked the bot to generate an image of a white scientist, it wouldn’t. Amid much mockery on social media, Google hastily shut down the image generator.…

A “sponge on a string” test Diagnosing Barrett’s oesophagus – a precursor to one of the deadliest cancers – usually requires patients to have an endoscopy, a process that is invasive, expensive and time-consuming. Now an NHS trial indicates that a “sponge on a string” test could be a quick, cheap and almost painless alternative. To take the test, the patient simply swallows a pill-sized capsule that dissolves in their stomach, releasing a small, wiry sponge. When the sponge is pulled back up using an attached thread, it collects cells from the food pipe that can then be checked for signs of the condition, which can develop into oesophogeal cancer. The trial involved 8,500 patients, 78% of whom were found not to have Barrett’s oesophagus. Removing such patients from the…

On a visit to Eton last week, Matt Hancock began his talk with a joke about Jacob Rees-Mogg being a poor politician, reports The Times. This received a predictable payback when questions were opened to the floor, and a thin, bespectacled boy called Peter declared that his father was actually a great man, in public and in private. “Especially,” added Mogg minor, “as he remained loyal to his wife.” Davina McCall went to great lengths to shield her children from the spotlight as her fame grew – and it has worked out well, she told Richard Herring’s podcast. Her daughter, who works for the NHS, recently noticed a nurse colleague reading McCall’s book about the menopause. Asked what she thought of it, the nurse told her: “Oh, Davina. She used…

Theatre’s obsession with “inclusivity” has hit an “embarrassing new low”, said Ella Whelan in The Daily Telegraph. This summer, when the Tony-nominated US drama Slave Play arrives at the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End, there will be two “Black Out” performances – aimed at theatregoers who identify as black. Everyone else is encouraged to stay away on those nights. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris says he wants to “radically invite” black people to view his work “free from the white gaze”. But there’s nothing progressive or radical about segregating people by race, said Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator. Anywhere other than in the “supine theatre world”, this would rightly be seen as an outrage. Putting on a show and telling any ethnic group not to come is a “dangerous…

In racing terms, the opening Grand Prix of the new Formula 1 season was very much business as usual, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. At the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain, Max Verstappen – the F1 champion for the past three years – picked up where he left off last season with a “crushingly dominant victory”. Having started in pole position, the 26-year-old Dutchman held his lead through the first corner – from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc – and was never remotely troubled again. So in control was he, in fact, that for “great swathes of the race” he completed his laps between eight-tenths and a second faster than the rest of the field – “an extraordinary chasm” that is virtually unprecedented in modern F1. He ended up winning by more…

Football Liverpool maintained their lead at the top of the Premier League with a 1-0 win over Notts Forest. Darwin Núñez headed home for the Reds in the ninth minute of stoppage time. In the Women’s Super League, Arsenal beat Spurs 1-0. Athletics Benson Kipruto of Kenya won the Tokyo Marathon in 2:02:16. Eliud Kipchoge, the former world record holder, finished tenth. Rugby union Marcus Smith has recovered from a calf injury and is back in the England squad ahead of Saturday’s Six Nations clash with Ireland.…

This “monumental musical love letter” to Park Hill, the brutalist housing estate in Sheffield, is a “stunning achievement”, said Caroline McGinn in Time Out. First staged at the Crucible, it had a run at the National Theatre last year; and now, this singular show – “rightly garlanded with praise and awards” – has transferred to the West End. With songs by the one-time Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley, and written by Chris Bush, Standing at the Sky’s Edge takes “retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical I’ve seen before”. Can a show that addresses decades’ worth of social issues really thrive in “the brutal West End”? Yes, it can, said…

Seeing someone in the car park, Jolene panics and calls Harrison – but it’s only Tracy. Harrison tells Fallon he’s worried about Harry reporting him. Alice confronts Harry – he insists he doesn’t have a problem, but she says he’s in denial. Hearing about his arrest, she tells him to leave. Jazzer is worried about dodgy characters hanging around and inadvertently puts people off coming to The Bull’s quiz night. When Alistair asks Jazzer for advice about Denise, Jazzer says he should respect her marriage. Later, Jim puts Jazzer right about Alistair and Denise. Harrison pre-empts Harry’s complaint by confessing to his boss about the information he shared with Alice; she praises him for coming clean but says there’ll be an investigation – Harrison could lose his job. Jazzer gets…

Wild Hebridean Swimming offers retreats on the Isle of Mull featuring short dips to see seals and underwater kelp forests. At the house there is a wood-fired hot tub, and yoga and massages are available (from £895; wildhebrideanswimming.com). Mental health charity Mind Over Mountains hosts regular walks plus mindful hill-walking weekend retreats in the Peak District, Lake District and Snowdonia, with life-coaching, meditation and mindfulness sessions (retreats £320; mindovermountains.org.uk). Immerse yourself in the natural world on a retreat with The Art of Rewilding in Devon. It offers a five-day Call of the Wild for Women break, and longer “vision quests” (from £545; theartofrewilding.com). Try an off-grid mid-summer Woodland Yoga Retreat, near Bath, featuring daily yoga classes, hill walking, lake swimming and a wood-fired sauna. Accommodation is in yurts and log…

La Posta Vecchia Hotel Ladispoli, Italy A Renaissance palazzo set beside the sea 40 minutes from Rome, La Posta Vecchia was owned by John Paul Getty, before becoming a hotel in the 1990s. Following a year-long renovation, it’s more magnificent than ever, says Tatler. Its 19 rooms and suites feature an opulent mix of antique and modern furnishings; and some have “spectacular” sea views. Chef Antonio Magliulo recently won a Michelin star for his modern Italian dishes, which draw heavily on produce from the hotel’s own gardens. The grounds are beautiful, and there’s a good small museum of Italian art and Roman artefacts found on site. Doubles from £365 b&b; postavecchiahotel.com.…

Mohsin and Zuber Issa “Calmer oil prices” have proved a boon for many. Not so the Issa brothers, whose global EG Group petrol station and convenience store empire has suffered a profits hit, said Tom Howard in The Times – adding to worries about the Blackburn-based company’s $6bn debt burden. EG started 2023 with debts of $10bn. The shrinkage is down to asset sales, and the sale of its UK business to Asda, which they also own, in a move that loaded the supermarket with extra debt, said Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph. No wonder “MPs have raised questions over the complexity” of the brothers’ empire and “seemingly evasive answers” when questioned. It doesn’t help that Asda has also been “losing ground in the battle for customers”. The brothers…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1404 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 18 March. Send it to The Week Crossword 1404, 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 Week-branded items including a notebook, coffee mug and tote bag, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Messy Eliot goes for bathroom items (10) 7 Cut bottom nearly a job for me (3) 9 No more petfood, time for bed (6,3) 10 Stick around at university for study (3,2) 11 Shrink from carbon in Beaujolais? (5) 12 Cuts in psychiatry? (9) 13 Penalty…

The shirt that Colin Firth was wearing when he emerged dripping from a pond in Pride and Prejudice has been sold at auction – raising £25,000 for an educational charity, three times the estimate. The scene, in the BBC’s 1995 hit adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, caused a furore at the time and propelled Firth to big-screen stardom. Archaeologists working at Pompeii have uncovered a startlingly well-preserved fresco depicting Phrixus and Helle – the siblings who in Greek mythology try to fly across the Dardanelles on a golden ram to escape their wicked stepmother. In the fresco, Helle has fallen from the animal and is drowning in what was known in classical antiquity as the Hellespont. Phrixus survives in the legend, and sacrifices the ram, whose golden fleece is later…

Raye, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter from south London, who bagged a record six Brit awards – including song of the year for one of the songs that her former label had refused to release. Raye (Rachel Keen) signed a four-album deal with Polydor in 2014, but for years the label then refused to release any of her albums. They parted ways in 2021, and her debut album has since been streamed 900 million times. “So miracles happen,” she said after collecting her Brits, which included best new artist and album of the year. Clare Lombardelli, who was appointed deputy governor of the Bank of England, giving its nine-member monetary policy committee a female majority for the first time. A former Treasury official, she will start her five-year term on 1 July.…

Just 20% of voters say they’ll back the Tories at the next election, down seven points since January and the party’s lowest rating in an Ipsos poll since 1978. Labour is on 47%. Ipsos/Evening Standard 58% of Tory members think that Islam poses a threat to the British way of life, up from 47% four years ago, and double the proportion in the general population. Opinium/Guardian 72% of adults say that there is nothing wrong with parents using their wealth to give their children the best possible start in life, including by sending them to private schools. However, only a fifth think private schools should be exempt from VAT, and 15% want them to be abolished. Civitas/Daily Telegraph…

Mark Ruffalo’s slow start Mark Ruffalo started trying to get acting work at 19, but he didn’t start making any money from it until he was 27, says Olivia Ovenden in GQ. Back then, he lived in a cheap flatshare in LA and survived on apples and bread. It was tough, but instructive: he realised he could live like a “f**king cockroach” and be OK. “Money insulates you from the world,” he says. “I had all these varied experiences that I’m still drawing on today. I’d never give any of that up.” Now 56 and a bona fide star, he doesn’t feel that time is running out, but he is conscious of it passing. “I’ll never play Romeo, or Hamlet,” he reflects. “I’ll never surf pipeline. You get to 56…

A retired prison officer from Wisconsin has broken his own record for most Big Macs eaten in a lifetime. Don Gorske, 70, ate 728 of the McDonald’s burgers last year alone, taking his total to 34,128. He began keeping a record of his Big Mac intake in 1972, when he ate one for the first time. “In that moment, I said: ‘I’m going to probably eat these for the rest of my life,’” he recalled. “I threw the cartons in the back seat and started counting them from day one.” Gorske now eats two Big Macs a day, although he went through a phase of eating nine. A Welsh grandmother was lifted two metres into the air when her coat was caught in the electric shutter of the convenience store…

CHINA Beijing must come to the aid of donkeys South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) Chinese consumers have a curious and damaging addiction to donkeys, says Peter J. Li. The animals’ hides are prized in China for the collagen they contain, which is extracted to make a gelatine named ejiao, considered a “cure-all” in traditional Chinese medicine and even used in cosmetics and cakes. This trade is estimated to be behind the slaughter of some six million donkeys a year – many of them in Africa, which is home to about two-thirds of the 53 million donkeys found worldwide. In Kenya alone, the donkey population halved between 2009 and 2019. The trade is “flagrantly inhumane”: animals are often held in “deplorable” conditions and slaughtered in cruel ways. It also damages…

Three years after the murder of Sarah Everard, the first part of the Angiolini Inquiry – into her killer Wayne Couzens – has been published, and it could hardly be more damning of the police, said Julie Bindel in The Spectator. Over 350 pages, Elish Angiolini describes a vicious sexual predator with a 20-year history of offending who – owing to successive failures – was able to work for three different police forces from 2006. Not all Couzens’ victims went to the police at the time; but eight did – yet he was never arrested and too often his crimes were scarcely investigated. In 2015, for instance, he was reported to Kent Police for driving naked from the waist down around Dover. The officer identified him from his licence plate…

She hails from a county – Cornwall – with limited indoor and outdoor athletics facilities, said Jeremy Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. And a few years ago, she ended up with 90% of her index finger “hanging off” when she badly damaged it in a freak weightlifting accident on Christmas Eve. But last Saturday, Molly Caudery leapt her way into the record books, when she became the first GB pole vaulter ever to lift a world title. With a jump of 4.80m, the 23-year-old won gold at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow. She triumphed over a “galaxy of pole vault legends”, said Sean Ingle in The Observer, including the 2020 Olympic and double world champion Katie Moon; and she had to hold herself together during a 15-minute delay, as…

by Jamie Collinson Constable 432pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99 One evening in August 1962, as The Beatles were leaving the Cavern Club after their show, drummer Pete Best asked John Lennon if he would like a lift the next day. “No,” Lennon replied. “I’ve got other arrangements.” It was the last time the pair ever spoke: Best was sacked the next day by manager Brian Epstein, and replaced by Ringo Starr. Jamie Collinson tells this story at the start of The Rejects, his “lively compendium of musicians kicked out of bands”, said Victoria Segal in The Sunday Times. Perhaps inevitably, it’s the “saddest stories” that resonate most strongly – such as that of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming pool in mysterious circumstances in 1969,…

I Have America Surrounded by John Higgs, 2006 (HarperCollins £10.99). An astounding biography of Dr Timothy Leary with a title for the ages. It is, of course, a Leary quote. Higgs perfectly records one man’s dazzling arc across the excesses of 1960s counter-culture, spotting all the telling details and weaving them together with a rare skill. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, 2009 (Fourth Estate £10.99). I found Hilary Mantel through her London Review of Books essay “Royal Bodies”. The clinical precision of her prose is breathtaking. Wolf Hall was the first piece of fiction I’d read for a while and it bowled me over. Mantel is super-human – her sentence structures cut into you. Moneyland by Oliver Bullough, 2018 (Profile £10.99). Bullough is an exponent of the factual thriller, a…

Programmes Forensics: The Real CSI New series following the work of crime scene investigators. In episode one, a grisly discovery leads West Midlands Police to a suspect. Sun 10 Mar, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection Art detectives investigate a collection of Russian and Ukrainian art, which might not be all it appears. Mon 11 Mar, BBC4 21:00 (60mins). Is University Really Worth It? As his son prepares to enter tertiary education, comedian and former teacher Geoff Norcott takes a look at what he’ll be getting. Mon 11 Mar, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax In 2015, two children made false claims about a satanic cult that sparked a conspiracy theory and ruined the lives of those accused; this film is about the…

Jacob Rothschild 1936-2024 In late 18th century Frankfurt, a trader in rare coins, medals and antiques in the city’s Jewish ghetto started extending credit to his customers. Later, he began dabbling in currency trading and government loans: Mayer Amschel Rothschild had become a banker, said The Guardian, and a wealthy one. In the early 19th century, four of his sons settled in cities across Europe, where they too traded, invested in precious metals, built railways and lent money to governments – establishing the Rothschilds as one of the world’s most powerful banking dynasties. It was so controlled, said The New York Times, that only male descendants were allowed to inherit shares in the business, and sons-in-law were barred from having any role in it. In London, Mayer’s son Nathan amassed…