Actor plays a science teacher on a mission to save human life

This sci-fi film (from the team behind “The Lego Movie”) tugs at the heartstrings, while also delivering “galactic” levels of good cheer, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times.

Adapted from a novel by Andy Weir (who also wrote “The Martian”), it stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist turned schoolteacher who comes round from an induced coma to find himself stranded on a spaceship 15 light years from Earth, with no memory of how he got there.
Through a series of flashbacks, however, we gradually learn that he ended up on the Hail Mary mission after joining a taskforce to prevent the Sun from being destroyed by highly heat-resistant alien microbes. As Dr Grace battles to fulfil this mission to save life on Earth, he befriends a perky alien critter named Rocky.

The film isn’t wildly original, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph: it’s “essentially ‘Interstellar’ recast as a buddy movie”. But it is gorgeous to look at, with wonderfully “tactile” visual effects, and the story is pretty involving.
It suffers from too many false endings, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but Gosling is on “charisma overdrive” and powers it “to the highest-possible entertainment orbit”.

I’m afraid I found it “a bore”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, not helped by the fact that it runs to a “bladder-challenging” two-and-a-half hours. The cutesy alien seems to have wandered in from another film (perhaps “Guardians of the Galaxy”), and essential elements just don’t ring true. For instance, we are told that Gosling’s character was selected for the mission because he had no friends or lover at home who’d miss him. Yet he is “affable and witty”, and he looks like Ryan Gosling. It makes no sense.

by Alexander Lee 

The word “ghetto” has long been associated with “cruelty, poverty and prejudice”, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times. But it has an innocent origin. The word arose from geto nuovo, meaning “new foundry”, a small island in the Cannaregio district of Venice. The area, once a copper foundry, was selected in 1516 as a living quarter for the city’s 500 or so Jews – a group who were reviled yet “embarrassingly indispensable”, because they were willing to act as moneylenders, an occupation forbidden to Christians. The first Jews had arrived in Venice in the late 14th century – mostly refugees from persecution – and ever since, as Alexander Lee explains in this “fascinating book”, the city had found ways to “reconcile religious prejudice with pressing economic needs”. Previously, Jews had been ordered to wear yellow badges and yellow hats; but this had not allayed fears of “contamination”. So a “more radical solution” was agreed upon: confining all the city’s Jews within Ghetto Nuovo. In charting the ghetto’s history, from the 1500s to the present day, Lee has written an “engrossing tale of cruel prejudice and resilience”.

At first, the ghetto consisted of a few “shoddily constructed houses”, with “as many as five Jewish families” crammed in each, said Frances Wilson in The Telegraph. Yet it evolved into something very different. The guarded gates that confined Jews within the ghetto also made it a “safe haven”, protecting them not only from persecution, but from infection in times of plague. As housing and infrastructure improved, there was an “influx of Levantine and German Jews”. Soon, a second settlement – Ghetto Vecchio – was established, and the two ghettos became “self-sustaining worlds, with synagogues, tailors, barbers, hat makers, kosher butchers, wood carvers”. By 1630, Lee observes, Venice had become “the best place in the world to be a Jew”.

Predictably, it didn’t stay that way, said Jonathan Keates in Literary Review. The Republic’s decline – through a combination of war, plague and competition from new trade routes – caused “Gentile resentments to resurface”. Jews were blamed by “cash-strapped patricians” whenever bad harvests caused prices to rise. The Republic’s collapse in 1797 led to a period of greater equality; but under Mussolini, the ghetto became “re-ghettoised”, and this culminated in “inevitable round-ups” after the Nazis occupied the city in 1943. Lee’s “splendid” book is the “most extensively researched” yet written on this subject; and given its “resourcefulness and variety of detail”, it will be “hard to rival”.

Fearless presenter of ‘Woman’s Hour’ for 33 years

When “Woman’s Hour” began, in the 1940s, the Radio 4 programme featured housekeeping tips and romantic serials, said The Guardian. By the time Jenni Murray took over, in 1987, it had become a platform for serious debate too, on issues ranging from domestic violence to equal pay. Humorous and warm but also razor sharp, Murray, who has died aged 75, was equally at home discussing home furnishings and female genital mutilation, said The Telegraph. With a rare talent for drawing people out, she was sensitive to those who had come on air to discuss tragedies and traumas, but politicians found her well prepared, tough and fearless. Famously, Murray asked Edwina Currie when she’d last had a smear test, Gordon Brown whether he had shown his wife his tax return, and Hillary Clinton why she had stayed in her marriage, after the Lewinsky affair. Yet people queued up to be interviewed by her. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher gave “Woman’s Hour” her last major interview before her resignation.

Jenni Bailey was born in Barnsley in 1950. Her father was an electrical engineer; her mother had been a civil servant, but had given up work when she started a family. When she was a child, she was sent to speech and drama lessons, where she lost her Yorkshire burr. Later, her warm, silky tones were much admired: the broadcaster Charles Wheeler said she had the “most beautiful voice on radio, ever”. After leaving Barnsley Girls’ High School, she went to the University of Hull where she met Brian Murray, who became her first husband. She began her career at BBC Bristol radio in 1973. After a few years on regional TV, she got a job at “Newsnight”. She returned to BBC Radio as a presenter of “Today” before taking over at “Woman’s Hour”. By then, she had divorced Murray and had two children with David Forgham, a Naval officer. Having spent years juggling small children with a busy job, she once demanded of Mrs Thatcher why she had so little interest in childcare provision, said The Times. In 1990, Forgham left the Navy and took on the day-to-day parenting. Not long after, Murray caused a furore when she described marriage as a trap for women. She and Forgham eventually tied the knot in 2002, but Murray insisted that they’d done so mainly for tax reasons.

On “Woman’s Hour”, where 40% of her audience was male, and in her books and journalism, Murray often discussed her own experiences – of motherhood, menopause, weight-loss surgery and ill health: she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. “Life is copy,” she said, quoting Nora Ephron. In 2017, she wrote an article for The Sunday Times headlined, “Be trans, be proud, but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’”, in which she argued that trans women should not expect entry to all women-only spaces. It provoked a massive backlash. She was subjected to a torrent of abuse, and the BBC ordered her not to lead any more debates on the subject. When she left “Woman’s Hour” in 2020 – after 33 years at the helm – it was to the tune of “I Am Woman”.