Isaac Krasner is 'remarkable' as Jamie, a dorky 14-year-old 

Writer and director Corey Sherman's low-budget debut feature "explores a boy's cautious first steps towards sexual awakening with gentle humour and empathy", said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

Jamie (Isaac Krasner) is outraged to discover that his beloved cousin Allie (Dora Madison Burge) has invited her new boyfriend Dan (David Johnson III) to join them on their long-planned family camping trip to California's San Bernardino Mountains. But when the teenager actually meets Dan – a big, brawny dude who wears his baseball cap backwards – he is "immediately smitten, spewing his breathless admiration in an unfiltered rush of chatter and brooding in his tent at night as he fantasises about gruff and manly bonding moments".

The film is "in the same sun-kissed terrain" as "Call Me by Your Name" and "My Summer of Love", said Kevin Maher in The Times. But whereas those pictures celebrated "the liberating possibilities of gay romance", this one dwells on the "heroic levels of self-acceptance that the soft and achingly sensitive Jamie has to access in order to fit into his family's straight and unavoidably macho world".

The performances are uniformly strong (Krasner's in particular is "remarkable"), and the script is brilliantly economical. The "coming-of-age" genre is an overcrowded one, said Peter Debruge in Variety; and some of the scenes here feel rather familiar. Nevertheless, aided by an "endearing" cast, Sherman manages on limited means to make his film memorable.

by Richard Vinen

In this "relatively short introduction to the pair", the historian Richard Vinen offers us something new, said Piers Brendon in Literary Review – "a kind of meditation, drawing out key themes in the lives of the two men who in 1940 embodied the spirit of resistance to Nazism".

Both saw themselves as men of destiny – de Gaulle even more so than Churchill – and both were "iron-willed but not inflexible". Among the book's great strengths, however, is Vinen's sharp observation of the contrasts between them. Churchill, the "aristocratic epicurean", was "squat, extravagant, quixotic and ebullient" – a "cavalier" who saw war as a "glorious adventure". De Gaulle could seem like his "living antithesis", a "bourgeois stoic" – "tall, austere, melancholic and aloof", a "samurai" for whom war was "a stern duty".

One of the "many pleasures" of Vinen's "highly readable" book is his "keen eye for detail", said Margaret MacMillan in The Observer, from de Gaulle "horrifying his aides by giving up cigarettes for chewing gum", to Churchill "turning somersaults in his bathtub". And Vinen also insightfully describes their relationship. No one "enraged" Churchill quite as de Gaulle did. As an exile in London during the War, the French brigadier general was in a "very weak" position. Yet he was relentlessly condescending towards his hosts, and – while fighting, as he saw it, for his country's dignity – he made some "dreadful scenes" (as when the British told him only at the last minute about the D-Day landings). "He thinks he's Joan of Arc, but I can't get my bloody bishops to burn him," Churchill exclaimed.

Even so, each had a grudging admiration for the other, with de Gaulle once noting privately that Churchill was "the genius of this war", though "a little too prone to take refuge in whisky".

Former child refugee who founded a pioneering tech firm

Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley, who has died aged 91, arrived in Britain from Germany as a child refugee on the Kindertransport in 1939. "Early hardship spurred her on to success," said The Telegraph, and she founded a pioneering software company, which she sold for £150 million in 1993. Motivated by her own experiences and the problems she faced in caring for her autistic only child, she set up the Shirley Foundation, which became one of the largest grant-giving organisations in Britain. "By 2003 she had succeeded in her ambition of dropping out of the Sunday Times Rich List, and had made a huge contribution to the understanding and treatment of autism."

She was born Vera Buchthal in Dortmund, Germany, in 1933, to a Jewish judge and his Christian wife; her father was stripped of his position by the Nazis and she was sent to Britain, to live with the Smiths, a loving childless couple in the West Midlands. Her parents survived and later moved to Britain, but showed little interest in her. "My father remarried and had another family. I only heard of his death a year after it happened," she recalled. Excelling at mathematics, she took a degree and went on to work at the Post Office research department developing the Premium Bond computer. Working for the tech company ICL, she realised she had hit the "glass ceiling", and resigned the next day. With just £6 in capital, she then set up a software company, the FI Group (later Xansa) from her kitchen table. She received little interest from prospective clients until her husband, Derek Shirley, a physicist, suggested she abbreviate her name to Steve. "That certainly helped me to get a foot in the door," she said.

Even then, it wasn't easy, said The Times. Shirley recalled promoting products to a civil servant while he tried to pinch her bottom. But in the mid-1960s, jobs started coming in – optimising the schedules of British Rail's freight trains and Tate & Lyle's sugar lorries. Her company boomed, tapping the potential of educated women who had lost jobs after marriage: most of her early employees were mothers, working freelance from home around their domestic responsibilities; Shirley went many years before employing any men at all. Her software designers "developed wiring systems for British Aerospace aircraft in the Falklands conflict, stock control systems for Lyons bakeries and Mothercare", a program for monitoring sewers and another for Concorde's black box.

Shirley ran the business while raising her son, Giles, who was born in 1962. Severely autistic, he was non-verbal and became increasingly violent, needing constant care, which she and her husband shared. As a result she suffered a breakdown, and at one point things were so bad that the couple considered suicide. Giles was eventually admitted to an institution. Shirley later established a home for autistic people, with her son as its first resident, and a school; Giles died from a seizure, aged 35. Shirley retired in 1993, and was made a Dame in 2000. Her husband died in 2021.