Table of contents for 1525 in The Week

When Axel Rudakubana appeared in court for sentencing last week, new details emerged about his horrific knife attack on a dance class in Southport last July, when he murdered three young girls. These were so shocking, “the five-hour sentencing hearing was repeatedly paused to offer family members the chance to leave”, said Tom Witherow in The Times. That shock turned to anger when the court heard about the many “missed opportunities” to stop the killer over many years. It’s clear that “every agency that had contact with the troubled autistic teenager” came up wanting “in one way or another”, said Paul Bracchi in the Daily Mail. The police had had “seven known” interactions with Rudakubana following his permanent exclusion from school, aged 13, for bringing in a knife. He was…

Residents of Bristol, who were warned that their black bin collections could be reduced to once every four weeks – a first for an English local authority. The city council says this would save £2m a year and encourage recycling. Universities, with Cardiff and Durham the latest to announce major cuts. Cardiff University said that it had to shed 400 academic staff (7% of its total) to avoid running out of money. At Durham, 200 non-academic jobs are due to be axed. WH Smith, which announced that it is putting its 500-plus high-street stores up for sale. The retailer has been in long-term decline since its 1980s heyday, when WH Smith was the place to go for everything from newspapers and stationery to LPs (see page 35). Liz Truss, following…

Paris Mona Lisa move: President Macron visited the Louvre this week to unveil a major renovation project at the museum. Among other things, this will see the Mona Lisa given its own space, and the construction of another entrance. He said the refurb would cost taxpayers nothing, as it would be funded by sponsorship deals, donations and raised ticket prices. Earlier, the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, had warned in a leaked memo that the museum was damp, crumbling and overcrowded, and that visiting it had become a “physical ordeal”. Nearly nine million people visited the Louvre last year, up from four million in the late-1980s. Vierzon, France Brutal kidnapping: A French cryptocurrency entrepreneur who was abducted with his wife on 21 January was rescued by police last week, following…

This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured the musician and writer Nick Cave 1 Metal Guru by Marc Bolan, performed by T. Rex 2 My Father by Judy Collins, performed by Nina Simone 3 (I’m) Stranded by Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper, performed by The Saints 4 It Serve You Right to Suffer, written and performed by John Lee Hooker 5 Something on Your Mind by Dino Valenti, performed by Karen Dalton 6 Girl from the North Country by Bob Dylan, performed by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash 7* I Am a God by Anand Bakshi, Che Smith, Clifton Bailey, Cydel Young, Derek Watkins, Elon Rutberg, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Harvel Hart, Justin Vernon, Kanye West, Malik Yusef El Shabazz Jones, Mike Dean, R. D. Burman, Ross Birchard, Thomas Bangalter, performed by Kanye West 8 Morning Dew…

The French project was misconceived: initially, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique tried to build a sea-level canal, with a tunnel through the continental divide (the mountainous ridge dividing America’s east from its west). But it was the conditions that doomed it: the heat, the rain, the mudslides and the diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever. Some 25,000 workers were killed, more than half the workforce, including 5,000 French citizens; hiring engineers became very difficult. The US bought the French concession for $40m. Like the French, the US brought most of its workers from the Caribbean, particularly Barbados. At its height, there were more than 45,000 workers, divided into “gold” (mostly white American) and “silver” (mostly Afro-Caribbean) payrolls, living segregated lives in the Canal Zone. The Afro-Caribbeans did the…

The number of children admitted to acute medical wards in England owing to concern about their mental health soared 65% in the decade to 2022, to 40,000 a year. Researchers at University College London said that more than 50% of the cases in 2021-22 involved self harm; 2,938 involved eating disorders – six times more than ten years earlier. In many cases, these patients will have been admitted from A&E because they were deemed at risk of starving. Girls aged 11 to 15 made up the biggest group of mental health admissions: their number had more than doubled from 9,091 to 19,349; there was also a relatively steep rise in patients under ten. The researchers stressed that the Covid pandemic was likely a factor, but noted that the rise began…

“Who saw that coming?” asked The Wall Street Journal. On 20 January, a previously obscure Chinese startup released DeepSeek-R1, a new AI chatbot that can be downloaded for free. A week later, DeepSeek sat at the top of Apple’s download charts, and had caused a rout in US tech stocks, wiping $1trn off their value (see page 36). The reason for this “freakout” is that DeepSeek appears to rival US market leaders, such as OpenAI, when performing maths, coding and reasoning tasks. “More startling, [it] required far fewer chips to train than other advanced AI models, and thus cost only an estimated $5.6m to develop.” By contrast, US AI models now cost in the region of $1bn. The implications are huge. US domination of AI is not nearly as complete…

“Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.” Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, quoted in The Sunday Times “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Iris Murdoch, quoted in The Washington Post “Diplomacy is the art of letting somebody else have your way.”  David Frost, quoted in The Knowledge “My Lords, the sooner [Elon] Musk goes to Mars the better.”  Baroness Featherstone in the House of Lords, quoted in the Church Times “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” John F. Kennedy, quoted in the Alabama Political Reporter “The point of making art is not to win an award. The point of making art is to start a tequila…

To The Daily Telegraph The “ban everything” approach to knives is symptomatic of the flawed approach to crime prevention in recent times. The rise in knife crime in our cities has very little to do with the ability of young people to buy knives: after all, every home has an array of potentially lethal weapons in its kitchen. It is more to do with the massive reduction in stop and search. In the year ending March 2024, the Metropolitan Police conducted 135,739 stop and searches – a 23.2% decrease from the previous year, and down by almost a million from 2011. It is no surprise that London has seen a huge increase in knife-related crime under the current mayor, following pressure from various groups about targeted stop and searches. Until…

Ryan Mosley at Josh Lilley Ryan Mosley (b.1980) lives in Sheffield, but you wouldn’t guess it from his work. The majority of the paintings in this show, entitled Heavy is the Mountain, conjure sweltering Caribbean climes, and are knowingly replete with the clichés that accompany such scenes in Western art. Yet Mosley crams disparate ideas and imagery onto every centimetre of canvas: hundreds of multicoloured swirls of paint might make up a tiny passage of open sky, for example; a musician’s trumpet, composed of commas of grey and white, appears to explode from the pictorial space. A contrast to all this is Western Hills, a large-scale Alpine scene presided over by mountains hewn with anarchic brushstrokes and fir trees bombing the ground with snow: their overloaded branches seem almost globular,…

Showing now Gerhard Richter, Pauline Boty and Peter Blake are among the artists whose work features in Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol, a survey of portraits inspired by photography. Until 5 May, Holburne Museum, Bath (holburne.org). Stephen Mangan and Nicola Walker (the stars of the BBC’s The Split) are reunited in Unicorn, a new play by Mike Bartlett about a married couple seeking to regain their spark. 14 February-26 April, Garrick Theatre, London W1 (thegarricktheatre.co.uk). Book now Anselm Kiefer: Early Works examines the celebrated German artist’s development during the formative years of 1969 to 1982, using rarely displayed works from the Hall Art Foundation. 14 February-15 June, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (ashmolean.org). After 17 years, Ewan McGregor returns to the London stage in My Master Builder, Lila Raicek’s…

Charlotte Raven 1969-2025 Charlotte Raven, who has died aged 55, came to prominence as one of a cabal of rowdy journalists who quaffed champagne in The Groucho Club in Soho and worked on the Modern Review. Offering “low culture for highbrows”, the magazine launched in 1991 and, in its first issue, featured Bart Simpson alongside Roland Barthes, said The Times; a later one had Keanu Reeves on the cover under the line “Young, Dumb and Full of Come”. It was the time of Cool Britannia and Britpop, and Raven was not only a witty and intelligent chronicler of that hedonistic era, she embraced its excesses. As a result, she claimed to have little recollection of her years as a “bad girl” of British journalism. “If you can remember the 1990s,…

Nate Anderson, founder of Wall Street’s top activist short seller Hindenburg, is hanging up his boots – “the latest high-profile investor to call it quits” in a tough sector, said the FT. Activist short selling – the art of betting against and publicly exposing overvalued or fraudulent companies – has become harder in a powerful bull market. Here are some of the players left standing… Carson Block of Muddy Waters Another Wall Street legend, Block began his career focusing on US- and Canadian-listed Chinese companies. A big coup came in 2011 when a “scathing” report alleging fraud at plantation company Sino-Forest pushed it into bankruptcy. A more recent 2020 scalp was FTSE 100 healthcare firm NMC Health. Matthew Earl of ShadowFall Nicknamed the “dark destroyer”, London-based Earl is known for…

Sir Chris Hohn Who is Britain’s biggest individual taxpayer? Step forward hedge funder Chris Hohn – Rishi Sunak’s former boss – who last year contributed over £339m, or almost £1m a day, “to Rachel Reeves’s beleaguered public finances”, says Robert Watts in The Sunday Times. The son of a Jamaican car mechanic, Hohn, 58, founded TCI Fund Management as a part philanthropic venture in 2003, and is still a force in children’s charity-giving. Other headliners in this year’s list include the Done and Coates betting dynasties, retail tycoon Mike Ashley, and the founders of Wetherspoon and discount chain Home Bargains. All are homegrown businesses, representing the ranks of “quiet Stakhanovites” who prop up the country but often fly under the radar. Muhammad Yunus The best moment for me at Davos,…

A couple from Cornwall discovered that it was cheaper to fly via Spain to collect their new car in Crewe than to travel there by train. Kristina and Dan Coulson, who live near Liskeard, discovered that two one-way tickets to Crewe would cost at least £180 – but that flights from Newquay to Málaga, and then from Málaga to Manchester, would cost just £108. So they made the journey that way instead. Factoring in their one-night stay in an airport hotel, their trip cost £153. Nearly half of 18- to 34-year-olds, and one in three 35- to 54-year-olds, no longer drink alcohol, a YouGov survey has found. Among all adults who don’t drink or who have cut down, most say that they mainly abstain in order to protect their health.…

The UK’s population will increase to 72.5 million by 2032, up from 67.6 million in 2022, the Office for National Statistics has projected. This figure is based on the assumption that net migration will remain high; the “natural change” in population – caused by a difference between the number of births and deaths – is projected to be close to zero. England’s population is projected to rise by 7.8% in that period, compared with 5.9% for Wales, 4.4% for Scotland and 2.1% for Northern Ireland. The ONS also projects that the number of people aged 85 and older will almost double by 2047. European customs area The EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič has said the bloc “could consider” allowing the UK into the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (PEM), as part of “reset…

Washington DC A snub for Musk: Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, has been referred to as the “ice maiden”, owing to her reputation for ruthless efficiency. It seems she has already won a major battle in the administration, by keeping Elon Musk out of the West Wing. Musk had reportedly asked to be given a permanent desk close to the Oval Office; instead, the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency will be in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which lies next to the White House. “I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles told a news website this month. Boise, Idaho Pardon declined: A 71-year-old who was dubbed “Maga Granny”, after taking part in the 6 January Capitol riots, has rejected Donald…

“Misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine, but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away. This dynamic plays into the natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has never been so easy.” Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield in The Atlantic…

Getting burnt in a bonfire of regulations Oliver Shah The Sunday Times Watch out watchdogs, Labour is on the warpath, says Oliver Shah. In its desperate drive for “growth”, it has pledged to take on “overweening regulators”. A few weeks ago it was keen to give more powers to the Competition and Markets Authority to crack down on greedy ticket retailers; now, all of a sudden, the CMA is accused of taking far too long to scrutinise deals. And it’s true that, in areas such as banking, the UK could be seen as “over-regulated”. But ministers should beware of overcompensating. “Insufficient friendliness towards business” has hardly been the problem in sectors such as accounting, electricity and water. On the contrary, financial scandals involving energy firms and the likes of Thames…

Musk’s Doge is doomed to failure Kevin D. Williamson The Dispatch Elon Musk is “a pretty smart guy by most accounts”, says Kevin D. Williamson, but don’t expect too much from his new Department of Government Efficiency. Doge, as Musk has called this “vanity hobby project”, was established with the grand ambition of slashing $2trn from the $6.75trn federal budget. Musk recently admitted that he’d settle for $1trn, but he has no legal authority to order any cuts – and he’ll quickly find that Congress will resist anything but superficial snipping. The reality is that you can’t deliver meaningful fiscal reform without making major cuts to welfare payments and defence spending. But President Trump has repeatedly insisted that cuts to welfare are off the table, and at a time of…

Bacon linked to dementia Studies have repeatedly shown that a diet rich in bacon, sausages and other processed red meat can increase the risk of bowel cancer; now it seems that it may raise the odds of dementia, too. For a new study, researchers in the US examined data on 133,771 people with an average age of 49 who’d answered questionnaires about their diet every few years for decades. Those who ate two servings (with a serving being 85g) of processed red meat a week had a 14% higher risk of dementia than those who ate only three servings a month. On a more positive note, the team, from Harvard, MIT and Mass General Brigham, found that replacing one helping of processed meat a day with nuts and legumes or…

Michael Longley, who has died aged 85, was one of Northern Ireland’s most revered poets; but he didn’t always get the recognition he would have liked from his compatriots, reports The Times. His wife, Edna, once penned the clerihew: “Michael Longley/is inclined to feel strongly/About being less famous/than Seamus.” The cliché that footballers are on the dim side is way off the mark, researchers in Sweden have found: in cognitive tests, they consistently outperform the average. Still, they can be pretty ignorant, said Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times. Jack Grealish once failed to identify England on a map of England; and when Peter Shilton was managing Plymouth, he supposedly assured reporters that the struggling side would soon “rise like a pheasant from the flames” – prompting a journalist to…

Could Donald Trump be the answer to Ukraine’s woes, asked Zoya Sheftalovich on Politico. “Only months ago, Kyiv was terrified a second Trump presidency would force Ukraine to capitulate to Vladimir Putin”: the new US president has long seemed sympathetic to the Russian dictator, and his vow to end the war on “day one” of his second term sounded ominous. But Ukrainians had become increasingly frustrated with Joe Biden’s cautious support, and many now see Trump as a “circuit-breaker” who could force a deal, “finally ending three years of carnage”. There are certainly “glimmers of optimism”, said Robbie Gramer and Eli Stokols, also on Politico. Trump has “stacked his Cabinet with prominent Russia hawks”, and last week he threatened Moscow with new sanctions and tariffs if it didn’t “make a…

In 2009, a 14-year-old Madison Keys was tipped for future greatness when she became one of the youngest players ever to win a match on the WTA tour, said Tumaini Carayol in The Observer. From then on, the hard-hitting American was “constantly told she could win grand slam titles”. Yet as the former “child prodigy” settled into her career, she struggled to fulfil her early promise. While on her day she remained capable of beating anybody, in high-pressure situations she tended to seize up – most notably in the 2017 US Open final, which she went into as favourite only to be “crushed” by Sloane Stephens. As she approached her late-20s, and with a major title remaining elusive, Keys had been beginning to wonder “whether the biggest opportunities had passed…

Football Liverpool maintained their lead at the top of the Premier League with a 4-1 victory over Ipswich. Arsenal remain in second place after beating Wolves 1-0, despite having a player sent off. Tennis Emma Raducanu is looking for a new coach after splitting from Nick Cavaday. This week, she lost 5-7, 7-5, 7-5 to world No. 101 Cristina Bucsa in the first round of the Singapore Open. Cricket England’s men are 2-1 down in their five-match T20 series against India, after winning the third by 26 runs. Ben Duckett made his first T20 half-century for England.…

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) “has been accused of nepotism” because it hosted a photography exhibition by a donor, says Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. In November, the NPG launched Legends, a show by Zoë Law, the make-up artist turned photographer, which featured a series of celebrity portraits taken over the past decade, including ones of Sienna Miller (pictured), Kim Cattrall and Orlando Bloom. Law is the recently divorced wife of Andrew Law, a Caxton hedge fund manager, and their trust, the Law Family Charitable Foundation, was a key donor toward the NPG’s £40m refurbishment; Zoë Law served as a trustee until last year. When the exhibition was announced, some expressed surprise that such “pedestrian” work was on show at a national institution. Jesse Darling, who won the Turner Prize…

Hearing that Harrison won’t be captaining the cricket team, Vince considers putting himself forward. An apprehensive Neil decides to look for his biological parents via a website; very soon, a message appears. Brian, Pip and Stella clash over the beaver scheme. Freddie tells Vince he’d have to live in Ambridge to captain the cricket team, giving him an idea. In Stockport, Neil has an emotional reunion with Nelly, the woman who found him as a baby; later, Emma asks if Nelly might be his birth mother. Pip and Stella mark Jenny’s anniversary with Brian. Vince asks Lily and Freddie if they’d object to him moving in with Elizabeth at Lower Loxley; Freddie worries how it will look at work. Over dinner, Elizabeth is lukewarm about Vince’s proposal. Pip, Josh and…

The Spärrows 16 Red Bank, Green Quarter, Manchester (0161-302 6267) This restaurant in Manchester’s Green Quarter – hidden behind a small metal door beneath a railway arch – isn’t the easiest place to find, says Tom Parker Bowles in The Mail on Sunday. But it’s well worth seeking out, because it offers the “most hospitable of embraces”. The food is Middle European, with an emphasis on “those fine Swabian noodles”, Spätzle. They are made fresh every day, “and dear God they’re good”: ours come smothered in Emmental, slow-braised onion, and the most “intense” of tomato sauces. The other dishes on the menu are equally impressive. “Beef goulash, fragrant with cumin and paprika”, comes with nuggets of Knöpfle (grated Spätzle), which add “subtle texture”. A smoked sausage, “fat as a well-fed…

Flight Club is reinventing darts for the 21st century. It has 14 venues in the UK that serve cocktails and food while you play (from £11; flightclubdarts.com). Electric Shuffle is a supercharged game of shuffleboard, with cameras tracking the sliding pucks. The venues (Manchester, London and Leeds) are a mix of restaurant, bar and club (£15; electricshufflecom). Learn the Canadian art of axe throwing at Hatchet Harry’s. A pro will teach you rules and techniques, including trick shots, at one of six indoor locations from Aberdeen to Brighton (from £23.50; hatchetharrys.co.uk). More like a nightclub than a golf club, Junkyard Golf puts the crazy into crazy golf with neon paint, glow-in-the-dark art and cocktails. There are various venues in the UK (from £9.50; junkyardgolfclub.co.uk). Part club night, part bingo hall,…

Les Roches Rouges Saint-Raphaël, France When hotelier Valéry Grégo gave this mid-century motel on the French Riviera a top-to-toe makeover in 2017, he created an “instant classic”, says Chloe Sachdev in Condé Nast Traveller. Located just outside Saint-Raphaël — midway between Cannes and St Tropez — it’s a great place to “disconnect from the high jinks” of the Côte d’Azur scene, with white-walled interiors and peaceful, stone-paved seafront terrace. The furniture is “simple but striking”, and there are two restaurants (one Michelin-starred), a “spectacular” saltwater pool carved out of the rocks, and a ladder that descends into the sea. Doubles from £457; hotellesrochesrouges.com.…

WH Smith: travelling hopefully In 1792, George III was on the throne, the French Revolutionary Wars had just kicked off and the family business that would become WH Smith opened its first newsagent in Little Grosvenor Street, London. Now, after decades of decline, the “once-illustrious” retailer has signalled its departure from the high street, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. It’s hard to mourn the passing. Although “every exit is another nail in the coffin” of Britain’s hollowed-out town centres, Smith’s 500-plus stores have become a “soulless” shopping experience and Britons have voted with their feet. The company will live on through its rapidly expanding travel retail business – now numbering 1,200 stores across 32 countries – which serves “semi-captive customers” in airports and railway stations, said Nils Pratley…

Big rate cuts are finally in sight David Smith The Sunday Times A few weeks back, the financial markets had begun to doubt whether the Bank of England would be able to reduce interest rates further. All change, says David Smith. Nomura economists now expect rates to fall from the current 4.75% to 3.75% by early 2026. Goldman Sachs goes further, predicting “six rate cuts” to an eventual endpoint of 3.25%. Both say that Britain’s “softening labour market” and the likelihood of lower pay settlements support the case for cuts. Lower pay expectations are partly down to an easing in the employment market after an extraordinarily tight period, post-pandemic. Job vacancies, which peaked at more than 1.3 million in the spring of 2022, have fallen to around 812,000. The good…

The week’s best shares Antofagasta The Daily Telegraph Mining shares have fallen, but the Chilean copper miner is investing for long-term growth, and production should rise. The push to net zero via EVs and renewable infrastructure promises increased copper demand. Buy. £17.63. DFS Furniture The Mail on Sunday After shock results in December, there are signs of recovery at the sofa firm, which is benefitting from partnerships with fashion labels and store closures at rival ScS. Gaining market share, with “huge scope” for recovery. Buy. 142p. J Sainsbury The Times The supermarket, which had its “best ever” Christmas, is growing food revenues via both its popular premium range and a new budget range with a price-match initiative targeting Aldi. Forecast yield 5.4%. Buy. 260.6p. Microsoft The Times Huge investment in…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1450 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 10 February. Send it to The Week Crossword 1450, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 9 Clued up regarding the party (2,3,4) 10 A mostly novel fragrance (5) 11 Feign diplomacy when leader’s absent (3) 12 Reconsider Paul’s note of how much medicine is enough? (11) 13 Tackle daughter in a frock (7) 14 Area with English mole or what’ll help the lawn? (7) 16 Learner at heart with inkling to unlock solving…

Deliveries, after Amazon asked permission to use drones to drop off packages for a trial of its proposed Prime Air service. If the Civil Aviation Authority and local council give it the green light, the flights will launch from Amazon’s Darlington warehouse. Erik Satie, the composer, whose 1893-1894 piece Vexations is to be performed in front of an audience for the first time. Vexations is not long, but Satie instructed that it had to be played 840 times in a row. Pianist Igor Levit will perform it at London’s Southbank Centre this spring, directed by artist Marina Abramovic.…

58% of British millennials support the return of the death penalty; 27% are against, according to a More in Common poll taken after the sentencing of the Southport killer. Among all British adults, 55% support capital punishment, up from 50% in the autumn. In a separate poll by Craft, 52% of UK Gen-Zers (aged 13 to 27) agreed that the country “would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections”. 58% of British voters are in favour of “declaring a national emergency in the Channel”, and returning “criminal migrants” to their home countries. 56% support the imposition of taxes and tariffs on other countries to protect UK jobs. Opinium/The Daily Telegraph…

The worst thing about the phone hacking scandal is, of course, the misery it caused to those whose privacy was invaded, said The Independent. But the damage spread further than that: it tarnished the reputation of all journalists, and by further eroding trust in the media, it undermined a fundamental pillar of our democracy. So even those who do not share all of Prince Harry’s views about the press should commend him for his long campaign to bring to account those responsible for tabloid phone hacking, surveillance and other nefarious practices – and welcome the victory he scored last week, when Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) finally admitted that “unlawful activities” had taken place at The Sun. As part of a last-minute settlement, Harry also won “substantial damages” and…

When Ange Postecoglou arrived at Tottenham in 2023, “he seemed refreshingly normal”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Observer. The Australian – who’d just guided Celtic to two consecutive league titles – quickly endeared himself to fans with his “frank and forthright” manner, which always kept the right side of good-humoured. Yet as has been shown many times before, the Premier League “can break even the most apparently robust of managers” – and increasingly, “Big Ange” looks as if he could be its latest casualty. In recent weeks, as Tottenham’s form has plummeted, the once-affable 59-year-old has become ever more “distrustful and resentful”. He has angrily confronted fans who’ve berated his team’s performances, and has often been testy with journalists. “Great way to start an interview, mate,” he recently snapped at…

Our “decrepit” hospitals To The Guardian Hospital bosses are right to point out that “their decrepit buildings will not survive until the date they are now due to be replaced” (“Work on some of Boris Johnson’s ‘40 new hospitals’ will not start until 2039”). Surgeons up and down the country tell us that, too often, they cannot take patients to operating theatres because of flooding, broken lifts and substandard equipment. The knock-on effect is terrible for patients, and for surgeons trying to do their best. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, says he is being honest about the new hospital programme delivery, but there is genuine fear that some have been kicked into the long grass. The £3.1bn capital funding promised for the DHSC in the Budget will take us some…

“It goes without saying that The Merchant of Venice is a desperately difficult play to stage for a 21st century audience,” said Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman. Torn between his desire to give all his characters “a credible and persuasive human voice” and the “ingrained antisemitism” of his time, Shakespeare left them “stranded” between “outward romantic comedy and bitter underlying tragedy”. The “great strength” of Arin Arbus’s production, first seen in New York, is that it embraces this space “as its own territory”, and lays the play out here with “fearless clarity”. Set in an American city in the near future – a place of “boozed-up men in suits where today’s broligarchs” might feel at home – it has at its heart a “remarkable” performance by the black actor John Douglas…

The co-founder of the Hay Festival recommends books to spark debate and change minds. He is director of a new series of events, The Conversation, at St Martin-in-the-Fields (stmartin-in-the-fields.org/the-conversation) Underland by Robert Macfarlane, 2019 (Penguin £12.99). A wondrous book about landscape and the living world that may change for ever and for better how we see our planet and our place here. Give it to everyone you love. Hell, give it to everyone you meet. Two Sisters by Åsne Seierstad, 2016 (Virago £12.99). As in her unsparing study of the terrorist Anders Breivik, One of Us, the Norwegian war reporter and investigative journalist takes us deep into the violent radicalisation of young Westerners, and their journeys out of the societies they grew up in and into the Syrian jihad. The Lives…

Programmes Miss Austen New period drama starring Keeley Hawes. Years after Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra must retrieve her long-lost letters. Sun 2 Feb, BBC1 21:05 (55mins). The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier Thirty years after the Yugoslav wars of independence, Katya Adler returns to Croatia, Bosnia and Albania to explore a rapidly changing region. Mon 3 Feb, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). Walter Presents: Fatal Crossing Danish crime thriller. Following her involvement in a scandal, a journalist returns to her hometown and gets drawn into an unsolved case. Mon 3 Feb, C4 00:05 (55mins). Storyville: Black Box Diaries Director Shiori Ito investigates her own sexual assault by a powerful Japanese TV executive in this documentary, which premiered at Sundance. Tue 4 Feb, BBC4 22:00 (90mins). Can Elon Musk Rule the World? Matt Frei…

Brodet or brudet is a fish stew that for me encapsulates the Adriatic Sea, says Irina Janakievska. Eaten in Croatia and Montenegro, it is a very close relation of the Italian brodetto. There are as many variants of it as there are Adriatic islands; the only rule is to use the catch of the day and at least three different varieties of fish or seafood. It is almost always accompanied by a bowl of golden polenta. 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 5-6 garlic cloves, finely chopped ½ tsp fennel seeds 1 lemon, for 2-3 pared strips of zest, then sliced into wedges to serve 1 bay leaf 2 tbsp tomato purée 1 x 400g tinned plum tomatoes (or 2-3 ripe tomatoes, chopped) 100ml fish stock 75ml…

Dame Joan Plowright 1929-2025 One of Britain’s most acclaimed actresses, Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, had a profound impact on British theatre in the latter part of the 20th century, said The Daily Telegraph. With a “disdain” for social deference, she was “an early exponent” of the social realist school, “which erupted at the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s” with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; subsequently, as the young wife-to-be of Laurence Olivier – “the most illustrious actor of his day” – she provided a crucial bridge between a radical new generation of writers and actors and the traditional theatre that he’d dominated. Born in 1929, Joan Plowright was brought up in Scunthorpe, said The Times. Her father ran the local newspaper; her mother was a…