Something special happens when cinnamon and puff pastry come together, says Moroccan chef Nargisse Benkabbou; it’s like culinary alchemy. And these knots are extra special because they include amlou, often referred to as “Moroccan Nutella”, a paste traditionally made with roasted almond butter, honey, and argan oil. The amlou in this recipe is slightly thicker than normal, so that it can be used to fill the knots without risk of it running out of the rolls during baking. Eat while warm – but they will keep in a sealed container for up to three days.

Ingredients (makes 12 knots)

For the amlou:

• 120g natural (ideally, roasted) almond butter, or substitute with peanut butter
• 1 1⁄2 tbsp (35g) honey
• 1 tbsp argan oil, or substitute with walnut or groundnut oil
• 1⁄4 tsp fine sea salt

For the knots:

• 2 sheets puff pastry (about 400g each)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 100g granulated sugar
• 3⁄4 tsp ground cinnamon

Method

• Combine the almond (or peanut) butter, honey, argan (or nut) oil and salt in a medium bowl and stir together until smooth and well blended.
• Unfold one of the puff pastry sheets on a lightly floured work surface. Use the back of a large spoon to spread the amlou over the sheet in a thin, even layer, about 3mm thick. The layer shouldn’t be thicker than a coin, as too much amlou will leak out when you slice the filled pastry.
• Place the second puff pastry sheet on top, making sure that the edges are aligned. Use a pizza cutter or sharp knife to cut the pastry rectangle lengthways into 2.5cm-wide strips.
• Line two baking trays with baking paper. Pick up one strip and shape it into a knot: hold the opposite ends of the strip, pull on them slightly, then roll it up into a spiral and tuck the end of the strip into the centre of the knot. Place the knot on a tray and shape the rest, dividing them between the two trays and leaving about 5cm between them.
• Cover the knots and transfer to the fridge. Let them rest for at least 45 mins, and as long as overnight.
• Preheat the oven to 180°C fan, with the racks in the upper and lower thirds. Brush the knots with the beaten egg and transfer to the oven. Bake for 30 to 35 mins, switching the positions of the trays about halfway through, until the knots are puffed up and golden. Meanwhile, combine the sugar and cinnamon in a medium bowl.
• Remove from the oven and let cool on the trays for 1 to 2 mins. Gently transfer each knot to the bowl of cinnamon sugar and turn to coat thoroughly, then transfer to a plate. Serve the knots warm or at room temperature.

Taken from Madaq: Simple Everyday Recipes with the Flavours of Morocco by Nargisse Benkabbou.

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With the real world defined by inequality and rapid technological change, it’s no surprise that filmmakers are offering critiques of both. This month’s new releases include a body horror film that takes aim at the GLP-1 dieting craze, a communist multiverse adventure and a character study about high-level art forgery. Oh, and escapism, in the form of a human-like octopus who helps lost souls find each other. Whatever brings you to the movies, there’s a proper destination for you in May.

‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’

Director Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) helms Netflix’s adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 novel about Tova (Sally Field) a grieving aquarium custodian in the Pacific Northwest who befriends a sentient Giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina). When she is forced to take time off after a fall, she helps train an aimless young man, Cameron (Lewis Pullman), in the niceties of the job.

Marcellus, facing his imminent death, helps Cameron and Tova find the truth about their pasts. The novel’s “popularity has always given the project a built-in audience, and the film’s ensemble only adds to the appeal,” said The Playlist. (May 8 on Netflix)

‘Is God Is’

Writer-director Aleshea Harris adapts her own Obie-winning 2018 play “Is God Is” for the screen in what is being described as a mashup of spaghetti western, hip-hop and Greek tragedy. Sterling K. Brown (“Paradise”) plays “The Monster,” whose daughters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), are sent to kill him by their dying mother, Ruby the God (Vivica A. Fox).

The three women all bear scars, both physical and emotional, from a fire that he set when the girls were children. “Make your Daddy dead,” she tells them from her deathbed, dispatching them on a dizzying cross-country expedition. “Is God Is” is a “riveting revenge tale and exploration of the varied impacts of family trauma that’s packed with powerhouse performances,” said Collider’s Perri Nemiroff on X. (in theaters May 15)

‘Forge’

Brother and sister Coco (Andie Ju) and Raymond Zhang (Brandon Soo Hoo) run a sophisticated and successful Miami-based art forgery ring in director Jing Ai Ng’s understated thriller. They are hired by Holden (Edmund Donovan) to recreate a large, hurricane-damaged art collection that belongs to his grandfather.

Meanwhile, FBI Agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) starts to close in on the lot as the siblings navigate a fraught relationship with their immigrant parents. “Forge” is a “top-shelf crime thriller” that’s “all about subverting appearances and how the have-nots can use people’s biases towards them to swindle and get ahead,” said Zachary Lee at Roger Ebert. (in theaters May 22)

‘I Love Boosters’

Writer-director Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”) returns with his first feature film in eight years, and it’s a doozy. Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are a team of “boosters” who operate an organized shoplifting ring in a deliciously stylized alternate-reality Bay Area.

Things get wild when Jianhu (Poppy Liu) shows up with what she calls a “situational accelerator” that uses teleportation to target unhinged fashion maven Christie Smith (Demi Moore). “I Love Boosters” is the “first socialist stoner movie of the Trump era,” featuring a “conspiracy so insane that it’s about one molecule away from adrenochrome,” said Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. (in theaters May 22)

‘Saccharine’

The parade of movies taking aim at contemporary Ozempic-driven dieting trends continues with this body horror entry from director Natalie Erika James (“Relic”). Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student who tries to kick-start a weight loss regimen by reverse engineering a mysterious diet pill she gets from an old friend.

The main ingredient: human ashes, which she obtains illicitly from a research cadaver. Unfortunately, her swift weight loss comes with a side of being haunted by the body’s ghost. The film shows that the “horror of one’s own body is the most insidious kind of body horror at play here,” said Guy Lodge at Variety. (in theaters May 22)

Malta’s 300 days of sunshine a year draw visitors, but there is much more to this island between Sicily and North Africa than optimal weather. Its history isn’t tucked away in corners, but on full display in the cities of Valletta and Mdina, and landmarks like St. John’s Co-Cathedral and the Megalithic Temples of Malta. Natural beauty also shines along the rugged coastline and in the sparkling turquoise waters.

History comes alive

Valletta is a small city, but it “packs a historical punch,” said The Independent. The Knights of St. John built Valletta during the 16th century, and the city remains “laced” with townhouses from that era that now “house atmospheric restaurants and bars.” Another early landmark is St. John’s Co-Cathedral, which dates back to the 1570s. From the outside, it looks “unprepossessing,” but inside you’ll find a “riot” of “lavish” details, including marble floors, a gilded vaulted ceiling and Caravaggio’s masterpiece “The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.”

The ancient walled city of Mdina is “hardly touched by modernity,” said National Geographic Traveler. It’s been called the Silent City since the mid-1500s, when political power moved to Valletta, and is filled with “narrow alleys full of mystery” and “winding lanes with whispers of a bygone era.” The baroque Mdina Gate makes a grand statement, and visitors don’t have to be religious to find a “sense of spirituality” in the “gilded altars” and “detailed frescoes” of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Though a bit “gruesome,” the Mdina Dungeons are worth a descent and feature “macabre” dioramas showing how Malta’s former rulers once doled out “punishments and tortures.”

Snorkel, dive and swim in turquoise waters

Divers and snorkelers love Malta for its coves, accessible wrecks and clear water with high visibility. A top spot to visit is the “picturesque” Ghar Lapsi, a bay known to have “some of the best reef life on the island,” said Lonely Planet. Boat and shore dives can be arranged for all skill levels.

For unmatched views, head to the Blue Lagoon on the small island of Comino. This protected area boasts “luminous” blue water “flanked by caves” and is “unmissable,” said the Times of London. It gets crowded, and to curb the number of sightseers and make the experience more enjoyable for everyone, you must now book a slot to visit the lagoon.

A signature Malta experience

For a laidback experience, head to the sea and explore one of Malta’s traditional fishing villages. Marsaxlokk’s harbor is filled with colorful wooden boats, called luzzus, and it’s entertaining to watch the fisherpeople “studiously touch up” their “prized” vessels, said the Times of London. The action picks up on Sundays, when the town hosts a fish market where hawkers “loudly declare their wares.” During the week, artisans set up shop and sell their own handmade art, crafts and jewelry.

Ancient stone wonders

Some of the world’s oldest free-standing stone buildings can be found in Malta, and experts believe many of the structures were built before the pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge. Among the most notable are the Megalithic Temples of Malta, constructed more than 5,000 years ago. They are “remarkable for their diversity of form and decoration,” and the Hagar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien temples are “unique architectural masterpieces” due to the “limited resources available to their builders,” said UNESCO.

Eating the Maltese way

Malta’s location between North Africa and Italy plays a major role in its cuisine. Dishes feature Arabic spice blends, touches of “Sicilian comfort” and a bit of “French flair,” all made with ingredients and seafood straight from the Mediterranean, said Broadsheet.

One Maltese staple is the pastizzi, a golden flaky pastry often filled with ricotta or peas that’s best served “straight from the oven” and “eaten with your hands,” said Broadsheet. The country’s national dish is fenek moqli, or slow-cooked rabbit stew, a “rustic, hearty” meal, and its “answer to lasagna” is timpana, a baked meat pasta “encased in buttery pastry.” On a simpler note, the seafood in Malta is “second to none,” and diners can’t go wrong choosing fresh grilled swordfish, lampuki (dolphinfish) or octopus stew.

In the small hours of 29 November 2019, a young man was captured on CCTV jumping from a fifth-floor flat on Millbank on the Thames. His body struck the embankment wall on the way down, and he drowned in the water below. It emerged that he was 19-year-old Zac Brettler, a former public schoolboy from Maida Vale known for telling “tall stories”, said Ian Thomson in The Guardian. That night, he’d been in the apartment with “gangland debt collector” Verinder Sharma, and another associate, a cryptocurrency and real estate trader named Akbar Shamji. There was evidence that the two men, who’d befriended Brettler weeks earlier, had assaulted him shortly before his death – though neither was charged by police, who concluded that the death was probably suicide.

In this “scrupulously researched” and “page-turning” book, The New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keefe revisits the case – and reaches a different conclusion. Opening a disturbing window onto Britain’s capital, with its dirty money and “Walter Mitty-like” fantasies of wealth, “London Falling” is a “grimly absorbing” work.

Despite coming from a comfortable background, Brettler always “wanted more”, said Craig Brown in The Times. At his north London private school, he’d rubbed shoulders with the “offspring of dodgy oligarchs”, and envied “the way they would hire Ubers rather than walk a few minutes from dormitory to classroom”. He compensated by spinning fantasies: it emerged that when he’d met Sharma and Shamji, he’d posed as “Zac Ismailov, the son of an oligarch”, and had claimed he was about to come into a £200 million fortune. Radden Keefe suggests that this “bogus boast” is what sealed his fate – that when the pair discovered that he’d conned them, they lured him to the apartment to exact revenge. Brettler jumped, he thinks, in order to escape, believing he’d land directly in the water.

Radden Keefe – best known for “Empire of Pain”, his exposé of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid epidemic – specialises in character-based narratives from which “wider moral themes emerge”, said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. “London Falling” is at heart a “desperately sad family story”, but Radden Keefe overlays this with a “disturbing glimpse of London’s sinister, money-driven, exploitative underbelly”. There are a few minor slips: no Londoner would think of calling Park Lane “a short street”. Overall, however, this “impeccable” book is a “masterclass of evidence-chasing, narrative clarity and authorial empathy”.

Visiting the Maldives is all about relaxation; finding the perfect spot under a swaying palm tree so you can while away the hours gazing out at the ocean with a fresh coconut by your side to sip on. Joali Being takes this one step further. The whole island is dedicated to wellness, with a cutting-edge spa and a sound healing centre all designed to have you floating back home on a dopamine high.

Why stay here?

Joali Being is a beautiful island in Raa Atoll with talcum-powder-soft sand, an aquamarine lagoon and lush greenery everywhere.

The resort revolves around the concept of four pillars when it comes to wellness – mind, skin, microbiome and energy. When you arrive, guests have a wellness consultation with a doctor. In mine, I share how I’ve been struggling with frequent migraines and insomnia. If your body is a temple, mine is on shaky foundations and threatening to collapse. She assigns me the mind pillar category, and later on sends me diet and supplement recommendations.

The beach and overwater villas are a strikingly modern take on a thatched Maldivian cottage with artfully curved roofs and extremely high ceilings. The resort was created by Turkish entrepreneur Esin Güral Argat, who believes in biophilic design – using nature in the decor to enhance a sense of wellbeing – which means lots of pleasingly curved edges and playful nods to the ocean.

Inside my overwater villa is a delightful pastel-hued confection in blush pink, creams and greys. The living room is decorated with a manta ray sculpture on the wall. The sliding doors into the bedroom have a cream-grey coloured shell pattern and there’s a desk with the quirkiest chair I’ve ever encountered – it looks like a Lego block with square prongs sticking out that retract as you sit on them. It’s surprisingly comfortable and a sign of how fun the resort’s style can be.

Before you arrive you’re given a pillow menu to fill out; I choose an anti-stress one with carbon fibres that are supposed to remove all the static electricity accumulated in your body throughout the day. The bed is huge, with romantic netting draped by its sides. There are no plug sockets near the bed to encourage guests to scroll less while they’re there but an extension lead is available if you want it.

It’s also one of the few villas in the Maldives where you’ll find a musical instrument instead of a TV (which, again, is also available on request). A glockenspiel sits on a shelf in the living room so I can indulge any musical whims. The bathroom is beautifully designed in sage green and white, with open shelving for your wardrobe and there are three different kinds of salts next to the bathtub. Outside there’s a large terrace with a sofa swing, which looks out on a stylish pool and a pair of sunbeds with steps that take you down into the ocean.

Eating and drinking

Flow, overlooking the beach, is where guests start their day with a bountiful breakfast buffet stuffed with healthy options, including gluten-free bread, vegan cake and delicious home-made granola. There’s freshly cut fruit, a salad bar and a crepe making station. There is also an impressive à la carte menu – my favourite dishes were the custard-like French toast and tasty crab congee that came piled high with fresh shiitake mushrooms, crunchy fried onions and chilli oil.

Mojo is the resort’s beach-side restaurant, which is the place to head to for lunch. I tried juicy tiger prawns with Vietnamese vermicelli salad in a sweet chilli dressing. I also had a perfectly chargrilled lobster with a light herb and leaf salad. Desserts on offer include mango with creamy sticky rice and a heavenly coconut sorbet served with fresh fruit.

There are several options for dinner. Mojo has a different menu for the evening and it’s beautifully lit up with fairy lights. I had a flavourful seafood paella loaded with mussels, clams and reef fish, along with a delicious octopus salad. Flow is also worth visiting at night; I ate succulent seared scallops and the most tender wagyu steak followed by a decadent chocolate mousse.

The Japanese eatery, Yutori, is an open-air circular restaurant overlooking the sea. I feasted on a prawn popcorn salad, which comes with a punchy spicy sauce, and delectable black miso cod, one of the signature dishes, which is marinated for 24 hours. For dessert, I had the wonderful matcha tiramisu, which layered earthy matcha with sweet mascarpone cream and a red bean compote. It was an incredible way to end a spectacular meal by the sea.

What else is there to do?

During my stay, I tried several massages at the beautifully designed Areka spa – the relaxing signature four pillars massage, reflexology and the mind therapy massage, which involves singing bowls being played before my treatment. The resort offers a watsu treatment in the Kaashi hydrotherapy hall, where guests float in the water with a therapist to support them, tapping into primitive feelings of being back in the womb. There’s also a cryotherapy chamber in the gym, Core, where you can enjoy a short sharp shock of cold Arctic air, known to reduce inflammation and help muscle recovery. Joali Being is dedicated to giving you the best wellness journey possible but don’t worry, it’s not a boot camp – you can be as strict or indulgent as you like when it comes to food and exercise.

Joali Being has a sound therapy centre, Seda, which offers sessions where you can lie on a bed with guitar strings underneath, surrounded by oversized instruments that are played by a therapist. Taking a stroll along the Discovery Sound Path is a fun way to pass some time. It’s a squiggle of a walk in a shaded garden that leads to several instruments, including a giant glockenspiel and sheets of metal that can be bashed like a gong.

B'Kidult, the children’s club, is a great space to leave the little ones for a few hours. It features a shallow pool for toddlers to splash about with their parents, an outdoor art pavilion for crafts, a yoga space for the whole family to perfect their downward dog and cute mini sunbeds.

The verdict

As if its beautiful beaches and stunning lagoon aren’t enough to lull you into a sense of deep relaxation, Joali Being will stop at nothing to enhance your sense of wellbeing. If your ideal holiday involves being pampered at a spa in between bouts of sun-tanning on the beach then this resort should be your holy grail. The staff make a Herculean effort to ensure you return home refreshed. It’s the ultimate wellness destination in the Maldives if you want to unplug and unwind.

Ann was a guest of Joali Being; joali.com/joali-being; begin your Maldivian journey with the experts at Angelfish Travel, angelfish.travel

This is where Paris stole Helen and triggered the Trojan War; that’s where Heracles fought the lion; here are the Arcadian mountains that goat-footed Pan called home, and over there are the gates to Hades.

The Peloponnese peninsula of Greece is a land packed with myths and legend. Hanging down from Corinth like a four-pointed leaf (it used to be called Morea or mulberry), it’s at its prettiest in flower-strewn April to June. As well as a wealth of ancient Greek sites to soak up, there’s also stacks of drama from more recent times. Set off on an old-style road trip and, in just a couple of days, you can journey from Homeric palaces and 2,000-year-old amphitheatres to Venetian fortresses, clifftop monasteries, dramatic gorges, and the strange battle towers of feuding medieval clans.

Nafplio to Epidaurus and Mycenae

The pretty harbour town of Nafplio, a couple of hours south of Athens, makes an ideal first base. The fledgling capital of modern Greece, it has a lovely faded elegance, with narrow streets, flower-draped balconies and a photogenic Venetian fort on an island in the bay. We stayed at the quirky Ilion Hotel, all sloping floors, antique finds and walls hand-painted with idiosyncratic copies of famous portraits. Towering over the town is another, much bigger, Venetian fort, the Palamidhi (named after Palamedes, Nafplio’s legendarily clever local hero, who outwitted Odysseus and, well, didn’t live long enough to regret it). Climb the 900-odd steps (or cop out in a car) for a walk through its eight baroque bastions and some breathtaking views.

Just half an hour west of Nafplio is Epidaurus, the ancient site of the cult of Asclepius, the healer god who had a bit of a thing for snake cures. Star of the archaeology show here is the beautifully preserved 14,000-seat amphitheatre. Built with limestone slabs in the fourth century BC, it has near-perfect natural acoustics, as the tour guides enthusiastically demonstrate.

North of Nafplio is the Bronze Age citadel of Tiryns, where you can walk round the “mighty walls” Homer described in “The Iliad”. It’s well off the tourist trail, so you can stand pretty much alone on the hilltop ruins of the palace and look over the Argos plains to the sea. Twenty minutes further north is Mycenae, home of the spectacularly ill-fated Atreus family, who had a gory habit of killing each other. Walking through the colossal stone posts of the Lion Gate into the walled citadel, you can feel the confidence of a town that dominated the region and from where Agamemnon took command of the Greek forces that set out for Troy. A few metres down the hill, tourists flock to the Treasury of Atreus, a massive, conical tholos (“beehive”) burial vault, but few visit the slightly smaller but no less impressive tholos tombs just outside the entrance. Head there for a quieter gape at the astonishing mortar-free construction.

Dimitsana and Arcadian mountain trails

The heartland of the Peloponnese is Arcadia, a mountainous province of gorges and hills, many precariously topped by medieval towns. In the spring, all is awash with green and swooped by swallows, and the many roads and hiking trails are beautifully edged with flowers.

As we headed for the hills, we stopped at Nemea, renowned for its wine, the lion labouring Hercules was first tasked to kill, and its ancient stadium, where enthusiasts still re-enact its famous Games every four years, running onto the track through the lovingly restored “players’ tunnel”.

We stopped in Dimitsana, a picture-postcard, cobble-streeted town straddling a twin hillside overlooking the Lousios gorge. The stone and wood En Dimitsani hotel has great views and a cabin-style cosiness (there’s a working fireplace in every room for chillier months). It also serves a serious dinner – try the goat spaghetti or beef kontosouvli with a juicy, deep-pink local rosé – and gargantuan breakfasts: we’d fill our boots, snaffle boreks and pastries for lunch and still not make a dent in the spread before us.

From Dimitsana, you can pick up the Menalon Trail, a well-marked, moderately challenging 75km hiking route that unfurls through the gorge. A landslide had blocked the hike we’d planned past the cliff-hanging Prodhromou monastery. So we walked among blossom and bees along the side of the gorge to Zygovisti instead, where the very friendly owner of the trail-side taverna plied us with mountain tea before the trek back – and the world‘s twistiest, turniest drive (and final walk) to the monastery, which is even more astonishing than it sounds.

Ancient Messene, Kardamyli and the Mani

From Arcadia, we drove south, heading towards Kalamata, and its famous olives, and the southern tip of the peninsula. Ninety minutes outside Kalamata are the gobsmacking remains of Ancient Messene, founded in 369BC after the final defeat of Sparta. You can roam over the huge, poppy-dappled 400-acre site, untroubled by tourist coach parties. There’s a vast agora, a theatre, an amphitheatre, several temples and then, through an olive grove, the colonnaded entrance to a vast stadium and gymnasium (pictured above). You’ll need to bring a hat (no shade) and plenty of water (no services) but you’ll leave with your flabber well and truly gasted.

Beyond Kalamata, we stayed just outside the beautiful, pebble-beached village of Kardamyli at the charming Kalamitsi Hotel, right next door to the house of British writer and WWII hero of the Greek resistance, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Simple rooms and studios look over an orchard of orange, lemon and olive trees that leads, down a stone staircase, to a small private beach. From Kardamyli itself, you can hike up to the hamlet of Exohori along paths dotted with wildflowers (we spotted orchids) and then scramble down the white rocks of the dry Vyros gorge. Then, as the sun goes down, feast on tomato fritters, roast aubergine, and hard cheese and honey in the open courtyard of the restaurant in the ruins of the old part of town.

From there to the gates of hell – and the literal end of the road. The onward drive south takes you deep into Mani country, where (strictly male-only) blood feuds were fought with elaborate tradition from specially built towers – many of which still dot the hills. You could stop to drift in a gondola through the stalactites and stalagmites of the Diros caves; you definitely should stop to admire the clutch of Maniot towers in the (almost) abandoned village of Vathia. And, when the beautiful coastal road comes to an end at a temple to Poseidon, you can walk over the hills (and the mosaic floor of a Roman villa) to the cave portal to Hades (mercifully closed) and, with the sea on both sides, stand at the lighthouse on the southernmost point of mainland Europe.

Helen travelled to the Peloponnese with Sunvil/GIC The Villa Collection

The 1970s, when the post-WWII consensus finally fell apart in the U.S., are remembered as a decade of groundbreaking movies with breathtakingly disillusioned themes. The ideas were embodied in the “New Hollywood” movement and the birth of the summer blockbuster. There are more classics than could be named here, but these eight masterpieces epitomize the decade’s social and political trajectory like no others.

‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)

A quiet and devastating character study, “The Last Picture Show” is set in a dying North Texas town in 1951. It’s a coming-of-age story, about two high school seniors and best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), who are both in love with Jacy (Cybill Shepherd).

The forlorn Sonny takes up with his football coach’s wife, Ruth (Cloris Leachman). Meanwhile, the town and its way of life is collapsing around them. A movie with a “strong and uncommon (for the time) affinity for female characters and actors,” the “beauty and brilliance” of director Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature is “found in its attentiveness to the lived detail of the recent past,” said Adrian Danks at Sense of Cinema. (Prime Video)

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic, an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel, offers a sweeping look at the travails of the Corleone mafia family. Michael (Al Pacino), a WWII hero who had kept himself aloof from the desultory family business, is reluctantly drawn into it when his father, Don Vito (Marlon Brando), is gravely wounded in a shooting.

Michael’s brother Sonny (James Caan) becomes the de facto crime boss as the Corleones prosecute a turf war against their rivals, and Michael eventually emerges as the new, and much more ruthless boss, to the horror of his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton). The movie “dramatizes how the American Dream has failed, leaving only raw capitalism, epitomized by the brutality of the Corleones,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review, and the film’s “unchartable reach has ingrained its mythological place in our culture and history.” (Paramount+)

‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975)

Jack Nicholson is R.P. McMurphy, an Oregon prisoner who feigns a mental illness to get transferred to a psychiatric institution, where he finds himself immersed in a battle of wills with the cold, clinical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Danny DeVito, Will Sampson and Brad Dourif costar as fellow patients who are inspired by McMurphy to rise up against the conformity and cruelty of the institution, an obvious stand-in for the social upheaval of the time period.

“Inspired casting,” as well as “Forman’s naturalistic direction,” helps the film succeed as both an “anti-authoritarian parable and as an affecting reminder of the psychiatric practices of the past,” said the British Film Institute. While the film’s attitudes about mental illness may seem dated, it’s important to remember that this movie is as old to us in 2026 as the silent film era was to the mid-70s. (Prime Video)

‘Jaws’ (1975)

Director Steven Spielberg’s first massive box-office hit, “Jaws” maintains its ability to shock and terrify audiences and turn shark attacks into widespread fear. When a body washes ashore in the New England vacation town of Amity, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) tries to close the beaches only to be overruled by the mayor, Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who fears the loss of tourist revenue.

But when a boy is killed, and with throngs of beachgoers en route for the July 4th holiday, Brody teams with oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to track down and kill the marauding Great White Shark. “Jaws” remains “simply put, one of the absolute masterpieces of populist cinema,” and its “vivid character details” are one of the reasons it is “still better than any other monster movie or summer blockbuster ever made,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Netflix)

‘Network’ (1976)

Network anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) unravels on air after he is fired, promising to kill himself on live television, and turns himself into a kind of prophet of capitalist anomie and populist frustration. Backed by the ruthless executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), his show is soon moved to the entertainment division, where he becomes the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” in a preview of the way that real-life cable news would be taken over by angry talking heads.

He soon has Americans taking to their windows to shout the film’s most memorable line: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This “terrifically well-made, well-written” film begins presciently as a “five-seconds-into-the-future satire” and eventually “becomes an anatomy of American discontent,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)

Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) is an Indiana utility worker who witnesses a swarm of UFOs one night and becomes obsessed with recreating a persistent vision of a mountain-like structure. His increasingly strange behavior strains his marriage to Ronnie (Teri Garr) and his three children and culminates in an unforgettable meeting with an alien craft.

Director Steven Spielberg’s film is buoyed by a sense of wonder and presents a sharp contrast to many of the decade’s more cynical cinematic themes. As in many of Spielberg’s movies, “transcendent or threatening forces enter ordinary existence,” and “Close Encounters” is a film that is “unparalleled in its combination of scary and funny ideas,” said David Denby at The New Yorker. (Prime Video)

‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella “Heart of Darkness.” Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is dispatched on a mission to bring a rogue commander, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), to heel.

Kurtz has established an outpost in Cambodia, where he commands an army of locals and refuses all orders to return. A kind of road movie, much of the film depicts Willard’s journey with Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his men through the war-ruined landscapes of Vietnam and features some of the most unforgettable scenes in cinematic history, including an aerial assault on a Viet Cong-controlled village set to “Ride of the Valkyries.” It remains the “best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul,” said Roger Ebert in 1999. (Plex)

‘Monty Python’s The Life of Brian’ (1979)

The British sketch comedy troupe Monty Python loved taking aim at contemporary foibles through its twisted and liberal reading of history. Skewering everything from leftist factional infighting to religious zealotry, the movie follows Brian (Graham Chapman), born in the same stable as Jesus and initially mistaken for him.

As a young adult, he falls for Judith Iscariot (Sue Jones-Davies), an anti-Roman rebel and member of the fictional People’s Front of Judea, who draws him into a kidnapping plot. The movie “ignited religious protests when it first released” and “contains many gut-bustingly funny scenes” while still continuing to “hold up to repeated viewing after repeated viewing,” said Simon Brew at Den of Geek. (Peacock)

On many stretches of water in Britain over the summer months you will find people “wielding their paddles like modern-day Argonauts”, said The Economist.

Boosted by the Covid pandemic, the rise of stand-up paddleboarding has been sharp. One survey estimated that 4.5 million Britons had tried SUP, and people of all abilities now flock to rivers, lakes, canals and the coast to soak up the sun on their boards.

As summer fast approaches here are some of the best spots around the UK to explore by paddleboard.

Bala Lake, Snowdonia, Wales

With its “charming canals, rivers and dramatic coastlines”, Wales has many great paddleboarding locations, said Portia Jones in Wales Online.

Bala Lake, also known as Llyn Tegid, is the country’s largest natural lake at more than four miles long and a mile wide, and it “boasts the most inviting, clear water for paddling”. Bala Lake is also “famed for its impressive mountain scenery, rare wildlife and excellent fishing opportunities”.

Bala Watersports offers paddleboards to rent and you will need to collect your permit from the lake warden’s centre before taking to the water. There’s no need to stick to paddleboarding; there are plenty of opportunities for sailing, canoeing and wild swimming too.

Kingsbridge, Devon, England

The five-mile stretch of Salcombe Estuary and its surrounding rivers is “beautiful”, said Abigail Butcher in The Telegraph. Devon’s trademark “lush rolling hills” meet “clear and blue” water “lined with sandy beaches”. The wildlife is worth watching out for too, with regular sightings including seals, herons and egrets, and even basking sharks.

Most of the routes are suitable for “complete novices”, while expert paddlers can sign up for the “SUP the Creek” race in October – an annual event that includes a variety of challenges.

Portrush, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland

Paddleboarding in the sea can feel daunting, but not on the Causeway Coast, said Lisa Drewe in The Times. Beginners can start in the “sheltered waters” and “calm conditions” of Portrush Harbour, and those with more confidence can progress to trace the coastline past Ramore Head and the Skerries Islands. These spots reveal “glimpses of marine life”, and seagulls “wheel overhead”.

Again, equipment can be picked up on arrival at Portrush Surf School, and Freedive NI offers guided tours along the Causeway Coast, with sea cave explorations included. The workouts deserve a reward too, with plenty of cafés and pubs in the area to follow a long day on the water.

Regent’s Canal, London, England

Don’t fancy the open water? For an alternative in the heart of the city, head along the canal between Paddington and King’s Cross, said London’s The Standard. The waterway offers a “seamless blend of the contemporary, historic and wild”, giving you a “unique view of the capital’s industrial heritage”.

On the way, you pass “charming” Little Venice, “vibrant” Lisson Grove and a “scenic green stretch” next to Regent’s Park. Later on, the sights of Camden Market and Gasholder Park promise a lovely balance between the buzz and tranquillity of London.

Isle of Wight, England

Just a hop, skip and jump away from the mainland, the Isle of Wight has so many fresh- and salt-water paddle options, said Lisa Joyner and Rosie Stagg in Country Living. Compton Bay, tucked away on the west coast, is one of the island’s “best-kept secrets” with its “seaside promenades, chalky cliffs, rolling hills and sandy beaches”. You can also combine the on-water exploration with fossil hunting, surfing or wildlife watching.

Just along the coast is Freshwater Bay, closer towards the western tip. This has become something of a “magnet” for paddleboarders. Its “brilliant pebble beach” is popular all year round for swimming, walks and boating.

Tony Schumacher gave himself a “tough act to follow” with “The Responder”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Based on the years he spent working as a police officer, the “quietly glorious” drama about a beleaguered first responder “electrified the flagging cop show format”.

His new series stars the “endlessly watchable” Michael Socha as Matty, a “likeable but chaotic” Liverpool casino manager, and the “equally likeable” Leanne (Sheridan Smith) who works as a cashier. Both have money worries and both start “cooking the books to steal cash until they realise they are both on the fiddle and begin to work together”.

Schumacher has a “rare talent for fleshing out every character and relationship”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Leanne is a widowed mother of two facing eviction and struggling to make ends meet while looking after her kids and caring for her grandmother who has dementia. Meanwhile, “recovering drug addict” Matty is still in the “grip of a gambling addiction” and is “too ashamed of himself” to see much of his teenage daughter “whom he loves dearly”.

On the surface this is the tale of a robbery at a casino. But in reality it’s an “astonishing, deeply angry, deeply moving state-of-the-nation piece merely masquerading as a mesmerising, perfectly paced and plotted thriller”.

Leanne and Matty soon find themselves “in over their heads” and “at the mercy of serious criminals”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. It’s an “enthralling watch”, carried by the “sheer force” of the “charisma” of Socha and Smith. “You’ll be rooting for this hopeless Bonnie and Clyde.”

Yes, the central characters are “interesting”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. However, other aspects of the show “slip into cliché”, and the “streak of sentimentality” introduces a certain “triteness”.

I found the “emotionally weighty” drama “deeply” moving, said Janet A. Leigh on Digital Spy. And “The Cage” gets its pacing “spot on”, gradually building the “delicious tension” with a multi-layered, “consuming” story. “Before episode one draws to a close, you will be hooked.”

Thrill seekers, consider China for your next adventure. There are lots of spots around the country where you can get your adrenaline pumping, whether that involves taking a hair-raising plank walk along a sheer cliff or bungee jumping from the top of Macau Tower. These six experiences are not for the faint of heart, but they will surely give you stories to share.

Pass through the Guoliang Tunnel, Henan province

The Guoliang Tunnel in the Taihang Mountains may seem like an ancient wonder, but it was constructed in the 1970s by villagers who carved it into the side of a cliff. This .75-mile-long tunnel is 16 feet tall and 13 feet wide, and allowed cars to enter and exit the isolated village.

The construction is an “amazing feat” but has never been a “pillar of safety.” Visitors who brave the road will find that “in many spots, roughly carved pillars are the only thing keeping you from plunging to your death,” said Atlas Obscura. There are “twists, turns and dips” in the most “unpredictable places,” and it’s a trip whether you’re walking through or driving “white-knuckled in terror.”

Take the Mount Huashan Plank Walk, Shaanxi province

Whatever you do, don’t unhook your harness and rope. Those tools are what keep you upright on the Mount Huashan Plank Walk — and prevent you from plunging 1,000 feet to the bottom of the cliff. The 328-foot-long path is described as the World’s Most Dangerous Hiking Trail and consists of wooden boards nailed together and affixed to the side of the mountain. It’s safer now to visit than it once was: It used to be a free climb.

Travel along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway

It’s understandable if you want to keep your eyes closed when traveling on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, but don’t — you’ll miss the breathtaking scenery. This highway is one of the world’s most dangerous roads, with hairpin turns, narrow and steep descents and high risk for mudslides and rockslides.

The curvy 1,500-mile route links Chengdu in Sichuan province with Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and passes through rugged mountains and valleys and by glaciers, rivers and permafrost. The highest point is the Mount Zheduoshan Pass at 14,075 feet, offering panoramic views, plus, of course, the potential for altitude sickness. Driving this route is challenging, and you should plan on trips taking longer than expected because of how slow cars, buses and trucks have to drive through certain areas.

Go bungee jumping at Skypark Macau

Macau is considered the “Vegas of China,” an “epicenter of gambling and glitz," said Lonely Planet. And just like in Vegas, there are lots of over-the-top ways to spend your time — like by leaping from the top of the 1,109-foot-tall Macau Tower at Skypark Macau.

Skypark is the highest commercial bungee jumping facility in the world, and the attraction says more than 5 million people have safely bungeed with the company. Visitors also have the option to take it a bit slower and instead glide down the tower while attached to a wire cable.

Power paraglide in Yangshuo, Guangxi region

Soaring above picturesque Yangshuo and its tall karsts and verdant valleys is an electrifying way to sightsee. Powered paragliding is gaining popularity in Yangshuo, with pilots taking tourists on guided tours through the sky. When back on solid ground, rent a bike to ride through the countryside, then climb aboard a bamboo raft for a journey down the Yulong River.

Walk across the Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge, Hunan province

Take a walk on the wild side. The 1,410-foot-long Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge is suspended 980 feet above the ground, and its transparent glass bottom allows visitors to look at the “dizzying abyss below,” said Escape. The span connects two cliffs at Zhangjiajie National Forest Park and offers an exhilarating way to enjoy the “panoramic” views. It’s not the park’s only thrill: You can also shoot up the Bailong Elevator, the world’s tallest outdoor elevator, built into a cliff. There’s a glass window, so you can look around you as the elevator climbs 1,000 feet in two minutes.

“Britons are rushing to book holidays in the UK”, said the Financial Times. Fears over soaring airfares and travel delays triggered by the Iran war have “put people off long-haul trips”. Holidaymakers choosing to stay closer to home are booking trips everywhere from postcard-worthy Cotswold villages to the rolling valleys of the Yorkshire Dales. Here are some of our favourite spots.

The Fish, Cotswolds

With its “cheerful smattering of honey-hued villages” and “endless rolling green expanses”, the Cotswolds is “one of the loveliest” spots in the UK, said Charley Ward in Condé Nast Traveller. “So where could be better to head for some R&R on a long weekend?” This beautiful part of the country offers plenty of chances for “long walks to cosy pubs along cobbled ancient streets” – the kinds of activities that “you just don’t need to step on a plane for”. Consider checking in at The Fish where you can opt to stay either in a treehouse, cabin or woodland hut. Its “unique village-style layout” promises “extra peace and quiet” and gives you “more precious opportunity to soak up some of the scenery while you amble leisurely over to supper”.

Blakeney Hotel, Norfolk

The pretty coastal village of Blakeney is “secluded up in the most northern part of Norfolk where it’s a positive rather than a hassle that the phone reception is a bit scatty”, said Lela London in GQ. “Not a huge amount happens” here – but that’s sort of the point. If you’re looking for somewhere to completely relax and unwind, try Blakeney Hotel on the seafront. Its “Edwardian handsomeness” feels “reassuringly traditional”, and there are plenty of walks right from the doorstep through the “wildlife-rich marshes” or you can drive along the coast for a visit to the grand stately home of Holkham Hall and wonderful sandy beaches.

Looking Glass Lodge, East Sussex

Nestled among the trees in an ancient woodland just an hour from London, the glass-fronted, eco-friendly Looking Glass Lodge is the “ideal escape for those looking to reconnect with nature”, said Elle. The self-catering retreat is rendered extra-special by thoughtful touches from “luxury deli hampers packed with local cheese and wines” to a “floating log burner for chilly nights and a vinyl collection that fits perfectly with the mood, and in case the owls get too loud”. If you really want to push the boat out you can also book a bespoke treatment with a masseuse, or try a forest bathing session with a local psychotherapist.

Middleton Lodge, North Yorkshire

“When it comes to rural retreats, Middleton Lodge might just have it all,” said Sarah Allard in Condé Nast Traveller. Set within 200 acres of parkland and woods on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, the Georgian mansion is home to a collection of “light and airy” rooms, with “cloud-like beds with deep, squashy sofas”. But what really “sets this place apart” is the hotel’s “eco-forward ethos”; head chef Jake Jones crafts his menus using ingredients from the “impressive walled garden”. And the idyllic spa includes a heated outdoor pool that’s “so striking, you’ll want to pull your phone out of your robe pocket for a snap”. It’s a must-visit.

Arizona’s three national parks show off the state’s beauty in different ways. Grand Canyon National Park offers jaw-dropping views of the massive geological wonder, while Saguaro National Park celebrates the iconic native cactus and Petrified Forest National Park showcases ancient fossils and vibrant badlands. Each one has its own story, millions of years in the making.

Grand Canyon National Park

Until you see the Grand Canyon in person, it can be difficult to comprehend just how immense it is. The mile-deep canyon is 278 river miles long, and 18 miles across at its widest point. Visitors can explore the park across different avenues, with the South Rim the most popular.

The South Rim is open year-round and has the “greatest number of viewpoints, visitor services and hotels,” said Afar. Mather Point, extremely well-liked at sunrise and sunset, has a stunning perspective of the canyon, and on clear days you can see at least 30 miles to the east and 60 miles to the west. Hundreds of bird, mammal, fish and amphibian species live at the park, and visitors might see mule deer, elk, javelina and squirrels.

Day hikers can also set out on several journeys from the South Rim, with top picks including the scenic South Kaibab Trail, Rim Trail and interpretive Trail of Time, which provides “detailed explanations” on the “colorful layers that give the canyon walls their candy-stripe appearance.” Those who prefer to learn about the canyon indoors can watch two 24-minute films inside the South Rim Visitor Center: “We Are Grand Canyon” and “Grand Canyon: A Journey of Wonder.” Before leaving, visit Hopi House to purchase Indigenous arts and crafts.

The less developed and “more rugged” North Rim is much quieter than the South Rim, and due to its remoteness only sees about 10% of the total annual visitors to the park. It’s also 1,000 feet higher, and because of heavier snow in the winter, is only open from mid-May to mid-October. The North Rim is “covered in forests of aspen, fir and spruce trees,” and “memorable views” can be found on the North Kaibab Trail, which “descends 14 miles to the Colorado River.” A devastating fire ripped through the North Rim in July 2025, which destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge and more than 100 other structures and burned countless trees and shrubs.

The West Rim, or Grand Canyon West, is on Hualapai land and is known for the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass-bottomed bridge. The East Rim is part of the Navajo Nation and includes “numerous smaller canyons carved by the Little Colorado River.”

Where to stay: The historic El Tovar has been welcoming guests since 1905, providing a comfortable place to stay right on the South Rim. This is one of the “grandest” National Park lodges, and guests enjoy the rustic charm of the lobby and dining room filled with Hopi, Apache, Mojave and Navajo murals.

Best time to visit: The Grand Canyon is busiest during the summer months, when the weather is also hottest. If possible, plan a trip during the late spring, when it’s still warming up, or September through November to enjoy cooler temperatures and beautiful fall colors. Rangers recommend that hikers bring plenty of water and sun protection year-round, and pack at least four liters of water during the hottest months.

Petrified Forest National Park

The 200,000-acre Petrified Forest, part of the greater Painted Desert, provides a “remarkable example” of how this region, a primeval tropical forest, has “radically evolved through the ages,” said National Geographic. Badlands, grasslands, ancestral Pueblo sites and petrified logs — tons and tons of them — make up the park, along with an “amazing array” of wildlife like bobcats, pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, coyotes, migratory birds and salamanders.

The short Giant Logs Trail gives hikers the chance to see petrified wood up close, and the beautiful Blue Mesa Trail showcases the Painted Desert’s colorful cones. Another way to see the park is by car. There are two audio tours that go into great detail about dozens of stops along the Petrified Forest Scenic Drive (one tour is for drivers entering from the north, the other is for those entering from the south). Highlights include Puerco Pueblo, dating back to 1100, and the Newspaper Rock site. Ancestral Puebloans etched more than 650 petroglyphs onto rocks in this area, and the “high concentration” of markings likely mean this was a “hugely significant” place, said the National Parks Service.

Where to stay: There are no accommodations inside the park, and only backcountry camping is allowed with a permit. It’s worth driving 60 miles from the park’s main entrance to the city of Winslow to stay at the nearly 100-year-old La Posada Hotel. Designed by architect Mary Jane Colter, this estancia has been revitalized, with a substantial art gallery and rooms featuring Southwestern decor.

Best time to visit: The park is open year-round, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s most crowded during the summer, when temperatures can soar to triple digits. The coldest time to visit is during the winter, and visitors should plan for it to drop down to below 0 Fahrenheit at night. Milder temperatures — and clearer skies — prevail during late spring, October and November.

Saguaro National Park

The saguaro cactus is native to the Sonoran Desert, and more than 2 million can be found spread across Saguaro National Park West, in the Tucson Mountains, and Saguaro National Park East, in the Rincon Mountains. The two districts are “nearly an hour’s drive apart,” but both have “towering cacti, captivating desert scenery and outdoor recreation opportunities,” said Travel and Leisure. The saguaro forest is “denser” in the west, and the east provides access to a “plethora of mountainous backcountry trails.”

Saguaros might reign supreme in the park, but cholla, prickly pear and barrel cactus also have a presence. See them while on a ranger-led tour or while gliding by on a bike. The most accessible trail in the west park is Signal Hill, which passes boulders covered in Hohokam petroglyphs. In the east park, the Freeman Homestead Nature Trail passes through a saguaro grove and doubles as an educational experience, with signs “informing visitors about the area’s history and flora.” Desert sunsets are spectacularly colorful affairs and are best viewed from Tanque Verde Ridge Trail and Javelina Rocks. Plan on staying once the sun goes down for “incredible” stargazing.

Where to stay: There are no hotels within either district, but there are six wilderness campgrounds in Saguaro National Park East. For a more luxurious experience, go glamping at Solana Guest Ranch and Spanish Villas. The property, near Saguaro National Park East, offers villas that are perfect for bigger groups, as well as four Conestoga wagons with pillow-top beds, air conditioning and access to the ranch’s amenities.

Best time to visit: The park is open year-round, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The busiest time of year is from November to March, when temperatures are typically in the high 50s to mid 70s. To see cactus and wildflower blooms, visit between late February and late April.

“Everyone knows everyone in St Lucia,” said our driver as he took us through the palm-fringed roads of the eastern Caribbean island. “When we toot our horns, it’s because we’re saying hello.” And toot they did, always with a smile and a wave.

This warmth is part of the draw for the million or so tourists who visit St Lucia each year. That and the exceptional beaches, views and experiences. If you want to throw in some romance and adventure, Serenity at Coconut Bay has you covered.

Why stay here?

Serenity is an adults-only resort within the larger family-friendly Coconut Bay Beach Resort & Spa. Popular with honeymooners and couples celebrating anniversaries and birthdays, it has 36 suites, each with its own plunge pool, indoor soaking tub and 24-hour personal butler service. Guests are greeted by their butler with a drink on arrival (there’s nothing like rum served in a fresh coconut to welcome you to the Caribbean) and shown around their suite.

Every villa feels tucked away from the rest, giving couples a quiet space to themselves. There’s even a service hatch by the outside door so messages and room service can be delivered discreetly. As well as the private pool, the large deck includes an outdoor kitchen area, shower and hammock built for two, the perfect place to watch the stars with just the sound of the birds and crickets. Inside, there is a four-poster bed, rain shower and tub, which was filled up for me with bubbles and fresh bougainvillea petals more than once during my stay. His and hers wardrobes and sinks mean you won’t be fighting over space.

Butlers can help with anything from arranging meals and excursions to creating once-in-a-lifetime moments like proposals or a birthday surprise. They can be reached on a special mobile phone, dubbed the “batphone” by my butler, which can be taken around the resort. Serenity has its own pool area, or guests can head over to the larger Coconut Bay before returning to their exclusive hideaway.

Eating and drinking

St Lucia is a rum lover’s dream. It’s a primary ingredient for many of the cocktails on Serenity’s extensive drinks list (if you have a sweet tooth, don’t leave without trying Jonathan’s Special or the Dirty Banana) and guests can take part in rum-tasting nights, where locally produced blends like Chairman’s Reserve are paired with different foods.

Serenity has its own restaurant, The Greathouse, which serves up an extensive range of options, from chargrilled octopus to filet mignon and pistachio-crusted lamb rack. It caters well for different dietary needs and offers service with a whole lot of smiles. Guests also have the choice of Coconut Bay’s eight restaurants and seven bars, which include contemporary Caribbean fine-dining at Calabash, the Asian-inspired Silk and the outdoor Jerk Treehouse. Couples can hire beach cabanas for the day, with food and drinks brought to them, or celebrate a special occasion in the private oceanside dining spaces of La Luna.

Be sure to try the island’s national dish, green fig (actually a green banana) and saltfish, as well as the fried plantain and freshly grown fruit. Bananas are the island’s biggest export and it has dozens of varieties of mangoes. And did I mention the rum?

Things to do

You could easily while away a week at the resort, enjoying the pools, spa and entertainment. The mile-long beach suffers from sargassum (floating algae) at certain times of the year, but the hotel is efficient at clearing it each day and it is home to water sports, like kayaking and paddleboarding, as well as a turtle conservation programme. There are plenty of night activities, too, including creole classes, sushi-making and “Paint and Punch”.

Those who choose to venture beyond the hotel will be rewarded with jaw-dropping views of the volcanic island, with its famous twin peaks and lush rainforests. You will get a snapshot of island life just driving past the brightly coloured houses, churches, schools and fishing villages. Serenity can organise a huge range of trips, from boats and dune buggies to zip-lines and ATV tours. One unforgettable way to explore the island is by horse. Atlantic Shores Riding Stables can take you on a ride over hills above the Atlantic Ocean and down to the beach for an hour – or more, if your glutes can handle it.

We took a catamaran from Port Vieux up the southwest coast of the island, past the iconic Pitons, stopping to snorkel in the turquoise Caribbean Sea. After lunch at a local restaurant, we drove to the mud baths at Sulphur Springs in Soufriere to douse ourselves in mineral-rich mud. You’ll have to practise mouth breathing to avoid the sulphur smell but your soft skin will thank you for it.

The verdict

Just a few minutes’ drive from Hewanorra International Airport and about 45 minutes from the Pitons, Serenity is conveniently located for a trip to the south of St Lucia. As the name suggests, it is a peaceful sanctuary offering a truly special grown-up break on the friendliest of islands.

Hollie was a guest of Serenity at Coconut Bay

“There are few better ways to immerse yourself in the great outdoors than to forage,” said Connor McGovern in National Geographic. As the countryside springs to life with an abundance of edible plants, now is a great time to start keeping an eye out for ingredients on your next walk.

April is “peak nettle season”. Packed with minerals and vitamins, the herbaceous perennial is surprisingly versatile and can easily be added to soups or used to make tea. Best harvested “sooner rather than later”, make sure you wear gloves to avoid getting stung and only pick the “top few leaves”.

Look out also for wild garlic, which “often grows in dense clusters on the floor of damp woodland and along shaded hedgerows”, said Helen Keating on the Woodland Trust. The leaves and flowers of the native bulb have an “unmistakable” garlicky smell, and can be used to whip up a “wild garlic pesto” or mixed with butter to make a “delicious version of garlic bread”.

Cow parsley, also known as wild chervil, is an “excellent all-round” ingredient. The perennial herb features tiny white flowers in “umbrella-like clusters” and “fern-like” leaves, and can be used in the same way as parsley when cooking. A word of warning: be careful not to mistake it for poison hemlock, which has distinctive purple blotches at the base of its stems, and an unpleasant musty odour.

Now is also the time dandelions “explode across fields, verges, scrubland and any patch of your garden they can set down roots in”, said Carys Matthews on BBC Countryfile. The petals of the bright yellow wildflower can be used to make desserts and “look lovely sprinkled on a cake”.

Be sure to look out for blackcurrant leaves, too, which have palmate lobes and a “serrated margin”. A handful of “fresh, young leaves” from the deciduous shrub can be used to make a “tasty tea with antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory” properties.

And if you’re on a health kick, try swapping out spinach for common mallow leaves or using the edible weed to thicken up soups. Identifiable by its “five-lobed leaves”, it’s rich in vitamins A, B, C and E and come summer its mauve-coloured flowers can be used to garnish cocktails and salads.

You can’t go wrong with a meatball, says chef Georgina Hayden. Light, lemony and spring-like, this brothy meatball recipe is both comforting and fresh – and a gorgeous way of getting greens into your dinner. My kids love it, especially when I roll the meatballs really small.

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 1 bunch spring onions
• 1 garlic clove
• ½ bunch flat-leaf parsley
• a few mint sprigs
• 50g breadcrumbs
• 400g minced meat (beef or pork, or a mixture)
• 1 unwaxed lemon (zest and juice)
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• olive oil
• 1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
• 180g mini pasta shells, or other small pasta shapes
• 150g peas, frozen or freshly podded
• 40g pecorino or parmesan (optional)

Method

• Trim and finely slice the spring onions.
• Peel and finely slice the garlic.
• Finely chop the herb leaves.
• Place half the sliced spring onions in a food processor with the sliced garlic clove, the breadcrumbs, half the chopped herbs and the minced meat.
• Finely grate in the lemon zest, season generously with salt and pepper and blitz until it all comes together. (You can of course do this by hand and mix well in a bowl.)
• Roll the mixture into small meatballs, around 2.5cm wide.
• Set a large casserole over a medium heat, drizzle in 3 tbsp olive oil and fry the meatballs for around ten minutes, turning, until they are browned all over.
• When the meatballs are browned and gnarly, pour the stock into the pan, bring to the boil and then stir in the pasta shells and the peas.
• Return to the boil, and simmer for 5-7 minutes, or until the pasta is tender.
• Remove from the heat and squeeze in the lemon juice.
• Taste the broth and adjust the seasoning as needed.
• Finish by stirring in the remaining herbs and spring onions, and serve in warmed bowls, finely grating over the pecorino or parmesan cheese, if using.

Taken from MEDesque: Everyday Recipes with Mediterranean Roots by Georgina Hayden.

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Most people live lives whose day-to-day features aren’t exactly gripping viewing and whose trajectories are difficult to squeeze into the structures and strictures of serialized television. So what these standout biographical series accomplish is even more impressive. They take sometimes mundane or contradictory raw material and turn it into art that both entertains and informs.

‘Elizabeth I’ (2005)

There’s a lot of royalist television out there, and much of it is either pretty mid or revels in bodice-ripping trashiness. But HBO’s “Elizabeth” stands far from that crowd, arriving two decades ago at the dawn of the prestige TV era and covering the back half of the queen’s 45-year reign, concluding with Essex’s Rebellion, a failed putsch against the monarch.

It didn’t hurt to land Helen Mirren, one of the finest actors of her generation, as Elizabeth. This comparatively brief, two-part limited series depicts one of the “few figures in history” who is “influential in their time” and “intriguing to future generations,” delivering a “richly drawn portrait of a powerful woman who is both ruthless and sentimental, formidable and mercurial, vain and likable,” said Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘John Adams’ (2008)

The early aughts saw a flowering of popular interest in some of the less widely-revered figures in early American history, including HBO’s adaptation of pop historian David McCullough’s best-selling biography. The casting of two darlings of early 2000s indie cinema — Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as First Lady Abigail Adams — was inspired.

The show’s scope is epic, beginning with Adams’ legal career in prerevolutionary Boston and tracing his life and American history until his retirement and death in 1826. A series that was “doggedly determined to remind us how bad everyone’s teeth were in the 18th century,” its greatness is due to its status as one of the “few depictions of the American revolution that treats the founding fathers as people, whose particular hang-ups and fractious personalities informed the republic they were building,” said Vince Mancini at GQ. (HBO Max)

‘House of Saddam’ (2008)

You have to hand it to the makers of “House of Saddam” because making a biographical series about one of history’s most notorious, violent dictators is one heck of a big swing. Yigal Naor shines in this BBC/HBO coproduction as Saddam Hussein, following the Iraqi dictator from his bloody rise to the country’s presidency in 1979 through his capture and trial after the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Saddam towered over Iraq’s political regime for nearly 30 years, plunging the country into multiple destructive wars, persecuting his own citizens and inflicting widespread trauma and suffering. Nonetheless, Naor’s inspired performance carries the series. “His Saddam is guilty of hubris, of believing his own propaganda, of murder many times over, but he’s still presented on a human scale,” said Troy Patterson at Slate. (HBO Max)

‘The Crown’ (2016-2023)

As ambitious as anything Netflix has attempted, creator Peter Morgan’s ‘The Crown’ is a sprawling look at the life and times of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II, starting in 1947 and running through the nuptials of her son, then-Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Over the course of six lavishly-produced seasons, she is played by three different, and phenomenal actresses: Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton.

Though the series was usually sympathetic to the royal family, it also refused to shy away from its public dysfunction, staggering privilege and often shocking insularity. While reviews are less kind to its later seasons, the series offers the kind of narrative scope that is hard to find on television. “The Crown” benefits from an “inspired strategy, casting different collections of performers to play the royal family in different decades, leveraging an astonishing lineup of talented names,” said Eric Deggans at KQED. (Netflix)

‘The Dropout’ (2022)’

Based on a podcast of the same name about the notorious rise and fall of the blood-testing company Theranos, “The Dropout” is anchored by Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The series begins with her decision to drop out of Stanford University to pursue her idea with her much older boyfriend, Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews).

The show keeps a tight focus on Holmes’ gradual descent into fabulism, driven by repeated failure of the company’s signature and purportedly revolutionary blood-testing device. Seyfried’s brilliant turn allows the show to nail the “way Theranos begins as a sincere dream and slowly becomes a pile of lies and manipulation,” said Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. (Hulu)

‘George & Tammy’ (2022)

In the great tradition of biopics about hard-partying, troubled musicians comes “George & Tammy,” which traces the doomed marriage of country music superstars George Jones (Michael Shannon) and Tammy Wynette (Jessica Chastain). When they meet in 1968, they are both married to other people, and their tumultuous romance and subsequent marriage leave very cinematic wreckage in their wakes.

Jones was a sometimes violent alcoholic, and Wynette developed a lifelong addiction to painkillers after a botched hysterectomy. Shannon and Chastain do their own singing in the show, which succeeds in humanizing these two troubled music legends. The show “isn’t an easy watch, but it keeps you gripped by the authenticity of its musical interludes and by a pair of towering central performances,” said Adam Sweeting at The Arts Desk. (Paramount+)

‘A Small Light’ (2023)

The tragic story of Anne Frank is one of the most well-known in literature and history. Much less is known about Miep Gies (Bel Powley), the secretary who helped hide her boss, Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber), his wife, Edith (Amira Casar), and his daughters, Margot (Ashley Brooke) and Anne (Billie Boullet) in the attic of an Amsterdam office building for two years before they were apprehended by Nazi occupiers.

The series begins in 1933 when Gies takes a job working for Frank and follows her through the outbreak of the war, the ordeal of occupation and the melancholy denouement that sees Otto emerge as the lone survivor from the attic. An “immensely affecting show,” its eight episodes highlight “something profoundly true about the essential goodness of those who kept their humanity in the face of one of the most inhumane episodes in history,” said Chloe Schama at Vogue. (Prime Video)

‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ (2025)

Its current home on niche arthouse streamer Mubi limits its reach, but director Joe Wright (“Darkest Hour”) delivers an important and resonant series with this biography of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Luca Marinelli). The eight-episode limited series focuses on the years between the founding of the country’s fascist movement in 1919 and Mussolini’s consolidation of power in parliament in 1925, offering modern audiences an entry point into understanding how elected leaders can dismantle democracy from within. Mussolini is “humanized by his corrosive flaws and how attractive they are to a faltering nation,” said Craig Mathieson at The Age. The series “can be overwhelming, even hinting at a rapturous trance state” in the way it shows us how war-traumatized Italy fell for such a madman. (Mubi)

Tucked down a winding road in Buckinghamshire, Burnham Beeches Hotel does not so much receive you as lower your pulse. This large mansion was once a Georgian home but now it’s a four-star hotel and spa that serves as a soothing cocoon for the soul.

Built in 1727, the grand old building has attracted many eminent visitors, including the English poet, Thomas Gray, and, less lyrically, it was the base of the England football team during the Euro 96 tournament.

The atmosphere is regal and luxurious, yet settling and unpretentious. If its character seems a little undefined then perhaps that’s the point – it’s one of those hotels where you can characterise it for yourself. You make it what you want it to be.

Why stay here?

Peace is a clear draw: every inch of the hotel and its grounds is calm. Located less than an hour from London, and a short drive from Windsor, it’s the perfect base for short day trips. The rooms are gorgeous, with options ranging from modern, elegant Nest rooms to fabulous Canopy suites with charismatic décor.

The staff are generally friendly, welcoming and helpful. Their approach is on the unobtrusive side, which adds to the peaceful vibe. If you need a lot of attention and fuss, you might feel a little ignored but the atmosphere will work well for those who prefer autonomy to validation.

The layout of the hotel is a little confusing because of a lack of signposts and labels. But any initial dazzle is a worthwhile price to pay for the homely feel that the lack of signs brings. As you prance around its beautiful floors for your next meal or spa treatment, it’s easy to pretend you own the place.

Eating and drinking

The afternoon teas, which are served in the Evergreen Tea Room, are popular and I was very keen to try one. The traditional line-up includes coronation chicken sandwiches, plain and raisin scones and an assortment of tantalising afternoon tea pastries. You can add a glass of prosecco or champagne. But I went for the vegan afternoon tea, which included sandwiches of hummus, vegan gouda cheese and chutney and beetroot. The vegan scones and cream were gorgeous. So were the plant-based pastries and the Birchall Virunga Chai I washed it all down with.

Later, I had dinner in the Arden room, which overlooks the hotel’s gorgeous lawns. I tucked into a refreshing baked celeriac, with coconut milk and chutney for starters, followed by a wholesome vegan burger, complete with gorgeous brioche bun. For dessert I practically absorbed the refreshing coconut and kefir lime panna cotta. Mocktails arrived in steady procession, each one carefully assembled, none superfluous.

The breakfast room is simple and I was thrilled with my vegan English breakfast, including scrambled tofu, mushrooms, avocado, baked beans and a hash brown. I helped myself to the standard fare of sliced fruits.

Wherever I ate or drank during my stay, I overheard the quiet choruses of my fellow guests, who were delighting in their meatier and boozier selections.

Things to do

Windsor is a 15-minute drive away, so it’s easy to head over to the royal town where you can visit the famous castle and take a relaxing post-lunch stroll down The Long Walk or visit the charming high streets of neighbouring Eton and Datchet. Other nearby attractions include Legoland, historic Runnymede, the Ascot racecourse and the town of Burnham itself. You can also borrow a bike to explore the grounds or the nearby greenery.

But I was mostly happy to stay within the hotel’s warm embrace. The spa has a gym, pool, steam room, sauna and hot tub. Treatments include unwinding massages, facials, manicures and pedicures.

I unwound with the aptly-titled “Aaahhh!” massage. It was 30 minutes of relaxation and revival for my legs and feet. I took some happy strolls around the tranquil woodland that circles the hotel and then sat looking out of the window in my room, basking in the shoulder-soothing splendour of the surroundings.

The verdict

This is a hotel of gentle calibrations and its blend of inherited grandeur and contemporary adjustment works less by declaration, more by accumulation. Which is to say, every minute I spent there was more pleasurable than the previous one. I left blissed out, feeling soothed and relaxed. This is less a hotel, more like a long exhale given architectural form.

Chas was a guest at Burnham Beeches hotel, burnhambeecheshotel.com

Those who live in climates with cold and rainy winters know that being stuck indoors can have a negative effect on moods. Journalist Richard Louv coined the nonmedical term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe the “human costs of alienation from nature.” With spring now in full swing, it’s time to get back outside in the warming sun and touch grass.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio

As the weather warms, it’s not only wildlife like herons, beavers and bald eagles that return to Cuyahoga Valley National Park — humans flock here too. The park’s “patchwork of plunging waterfalls, weather-pocked gorges and forested trails” draw visitors, as does the “scenic” Ledges Trail that passes through “some of the region’s most dramatic scenery,” said Travel and Leisure. Admission to Cuyahoga Valley, the only national park in Ohio, is free.

Forest Bathing Trail at Silverwood Park, St. Anthony, Minnesota

Forest bathing has nothing to do with hygiene. Rather, it’s the meditative act of immersing oneself in a forest’s atmosphere, which leads to relaxation. The Forest Bathing Trail at Silverwood Park near Minneapolis is certified by the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy, and guideposts along the .25-mile path encourage walkers to take their time and experience sensations like feeling the sun on their skin. All of the senses will awaken as they “engage with nature” in ways that boost health and “foster deeper exploration,” said National Geographic.

New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York

The “lush” 250-acre New York Botanical Garden welcomes visitors who want an outdoor escape without leaving the city, said Time Out New York. Areas to explore include the old-growth Thain Family Forest, Maureen K. Chilton Azalea Garden, Daffodil Hill and the Native Plant Garden filled with close to 100,000 trees, shrubs, grasses, ferns and wildflowers. A highlight each spring is the Orchid Show, which has a new theme every year.

Ricketts Glen State Park, Benton, Pennsylvania

All of scenic Ricketts Glen State Park is worth exploring, but the seven-mile Falls Trail is a “cascade carnival” that reveals “something new” around every corner, said Outside. Falls Trail passes 21 named waterfalls, including the 94-foot-tall Ganoga Falls. The trail is beautiful year-round, but visitors who come in spring see the “most gushers,” thanks to snowmelt and frequent rainstorms.

Saint Louis Zoo, St. Louis, Missouri

The Saint Louis Zoo is home to a “stunning diversity” of animals, with more than 12,500 mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and invertebrates living inside the park, said USA Today. They are spread out across six zones, including Red Rocks (tigers, zebra and giraffes), Lakeside Crossing (sea lions, seals and stingrays) and the immersive River’s Edge (elephants, cheetahs and hippos).

Admission to the zoo is free, but some attractions, like the Sea Lion Show ($2) and Conservation Carousel ($3), are ticketed. Plan on spending the entire day here, or make it part of a bigger adventure: The Saint Louis Zoo is inside Forest Park, alongside the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis Science Center, Missouri History Museum and The Muny.

Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York

This outdoor museum sits on 500 acres in the Hudson Valley, with more than 100 large-scale sculptures scattered across the property. Kids (and adults!) will enjoy frolicking in the wide open spaces and taking in works of art like Mark di Suvero’s “Figolu,” a bold open-steel sculpture, and Zhang Huan’s massive copper-and-steel piece “Three Legged Buddha.”

Watch Hill, Rhode Island

You can find “truly excellent” beach towns along Rhode Island’s 400 miles of coastline, and one of the “quietest” and “most idyllic” is Watch Hill, said Forbes. This tiny village is less than one square mile, so it’s “easy to explore” and hit all the highlights, like the Watch Hill Lighthouse Museum and Watch Hill Carousel. The water is frigid during the spring, but visitors can still relax on the shoreline and play in the sand at Napatree Point, Watch Hill Beach and East Beach, which boasts views of the easternmost end of New York’s Long Island.

Twenty years ago, the “bonkers-yet-ingenious” “Avenue Q” – a sort of “‘Sesame Street’ for adults”, mixing cute puppets with jaw-droppingly offensive comic songs – “romped into the West End”, having triumphed on Broadway, said Marianka Swain in The Telegraph. For this revival it has been tweaked a bit, to incorporate references to Netflix, AI and OnlyFans. But – happily – not “one ounce of the show’s gleefully outrageous humour” has been sacrificed in the process.

The tongue-in-cheek trigger warning – “contains puppet nudity” – doesn’t begin to cover it, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. There are also puppets having sex, and joining in joyfully bad-taste songs such as “If You Were Gay”, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet Is for Porn” – the last led by Trekkie Monster, a puppet that exudes “Cookie Monster-turns-dirty vibes”. It’s all delightfully subversive, and extremely funny.

The show is rude, but “more full of heart than snarl”, agreed Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Songwriters Robert Lopez (“The Book of Mormon”, “Frozen”) and Jeff Marx convey the anxieties faced by youngsters entering the adult world in songs such as “What Do You Do with a BA in English”; and in the bad-taste ones, they “smartly, catchily” endorse neither nastiness nor self-righteousness. Their message – which is arguably even more relevant now than 20 years ago – is that life is “more complicated than that”.

There’s much to enjoy here, including pin-sharp performances, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But parts of the show felt dated to me. “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” seems rooted in “an understanding of racism that society has mercifully grown beyond”. Younger audiences will not understand the reference to Gary Coleman, a child star from the 1980s who died in 2010. Yes, some of it has aged badly, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. But it’s still a treat. “Avenue Q” is a “fundamentally big-hearted show” with a message to “hang on in there” – and this revival is packed with the same combination of “silly, sweet and saucy comedy that bagged it a fistful of awards in the Noughties”.

Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2. Until 29 August

“Jude Law as Vladimir Putin? It’s a casting decision so absurdly flattering to the Russian president”, you might wonder if it was part of an FSB psy-op, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

In this “meaty political procedural”, no effort has been made to alter Law’s “debonair good looks”, nor his “honeyed English accent” – which actually makes a sort of sense: had this Putin come across as a “malevolent gnome”, it would be “harder to buy him as the cruelly charismatic operator” the storyline depends on. And though Law is no lookalike, he does capture the Russian’s mannerisms – his “coy, heavy-lidded glower” and “weird” pout. It’s a scene-stealing turn.

But in this film, his is not the central character: the “wizard” of the title refers to a fictional Moscow TV producer, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), loosely based on Putin’s former aide Vladislav Surkov. Baranov spends most of the film telling an American academic (Jeffrey Wright) about his own life, and how, during Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic leadership, he and his boss Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) set out to find and groom a new figurehead. They choose Putin, a colourless new Yeltsin appointee – and “a tsar is born”.

“The Wizard of the Kremlin” is an adaptation of a novel published before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. In the light of events since then, the relatively softball depiction of Putin will rankle with many. The film does vividly evoke a specific time and place, and give a sense of the “shifting quicksand of Russian politics”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But it suffers from “stodgy pacing”, and is undermined by Dano’s terrible performance. Jarringly affected, he delivers his lines in an artificial sing-song tone better suited to a cartoon snake.

In this “queasily stylish” drama-thriller, the swimming pools, locker rooms and dorms of a boys’ water polo camp in New England are a “puberty Petri dish livid with sinister bacteria”, said Jessica Kiang in Variety.

It is 2003, and a sensitive 12-year-old named Ben (Everett Blunck) has arrived at the camp part-way through. He’s new to the area, and desperate to fit in with the popular boys. At first, their “deceptively cherubic” ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) is friendly enough, mainly because he has spied a better target for his ridicule: an oddball named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) with a nasty rash that Jake declares to be “the plague” – leading to the boy’s total ostracisation. Ben “feels for Eli’s predicament”, but lacks the social cachet to risk being seen with the outcast kid.

Everything about the camp, with its beige corridors and scuffed canteen, is familiar and nondescript, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times, but writer-director Charlie Polinger knows how to make the everyday ominous. In the first shot, we see the boys treading water, to a guttural score that is “vaguely reminiscent of the Jaws theme”. The viewer is confused: is everything normal, or is something truly sinister happening? – which is what Ben is wondering too.

This is not a nice movie with reassuring lessons about kindness or being true to yourself; it’s darker and more feral than that, much like adolescence itself. The first hour is terrific, said Phil Hoad in The Guardian. Polinger (a graduate of such camps himself) is astute about the way boys talk; he observes Jake’s mob like a nature documentary; and the young stars excel. Sadly, the film becomes more predictable, and it never resolves the suggestion that, if not quite real, the “plague” might be psychosomatic.

We tend to think of our medieval ancestors as warty, unwashed, riddled with fleas, doomed to die young, and with little or no knowledge of medicine, or the body’s workings, said Helen Carr in The Telegraph. But in this “richly” detailed book, Katherine Harvey seeks to explain what they did, thought and knew – and it turns out that many of their concerns mirrored our own, from digestion and hair loss to mental health. Their medicine was based on the idea that the body was made up of four “humors” – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – connected to air, fire, earth and water. Good health relied on keeping them in balance, by blood-letting for example.

Medieval physicians’ views on diet, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times, were surprisingly similar to ours; they recognised the importance of fresh air and clean water, and they perceived a connection between body and mind. During the plague in Venice in 1348, “restrictions were placed on the wearing of mourning garb because it encouraged sadness, which damaged physical health”.

That said, some of their treatments were pretty weird. A mix of cow dung and wine was thought to cure obesity; male baldness was linked to the body drying out, so baths were prescribed. As for sex, this was believed to be good in moderation – for marital harmony, and as a form of exercise. If both parties orgasmed, all the better as this would help in the excretion of harmful superfluities.

This is a terrific book: I’ve rarely had such fun learning about the past. Ultimately, it leads one to the conclusion that our ancestors were “a lot like us: they fretted about their health, took steps to improve it, and cared for those who suffered. In the process of examining the medieval body, we also get a glimpse at the soul.”

It sometimes feels impossible to predict the shape of a single day, let alone that of years from now. But some movies, either deliberately or inadvertently, manage to offer glimpses into the future, either through visions of technological advances or predicted social and political trends.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

Director Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic remains open to many different interpretations and may seem ponderous to modern audiences. Nonetheless, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

The story involves the role that a strange alien monolith may have played in human evolution, but the main action takes place on a spaceship, Discovery One, en route to check on an outpost that has gone silent. Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is forced to disable the ship’s AI, HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), after it goes rogue. The way the film prefigured the rise of AI is particularly impressive given that “there wasn’t yet a clear notion that computation could be something meaningful in its own right, independent of the particulars of its hardware implementation,” said Stephen Wolfram at Wired. (HBO Max)

‘The Truman Show’ (1998)

Director Peter Weir’s drama didn’t exactly predict the rise of reality television — MTV’s “The Real World” had debuted six years earlier — but the concept of a single person immersed in an artificial world populated entirely by actors came fascinatingly true in 2023 when Amazon Freevee released “Jury Duty,” a reality show about an average joe who serves as a juror on a completely fake trial.

In “The Truman Show,” Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man whose entire life from birth is a reality show watched with somewhat terrifying devotion by millions. The film’s “commentary on the media’s commercialization of the individual was trenchant at the time,” said Polygon, but it was a “series of long, deepening aftershocks” in which “social media has turned its precept into a universal way of life” that cemented “The Truman Show” as a prophecy. (Paramount+)

‘Minority Report’ (2002)

Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise at the height of his stardom) is the head of Precrime in Washington, D.C. circa 2054 in director Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster. Clairvoyant people (“pre-cogs” in the movie) churn out movie-like predictions about when and where murders will happen, and Anderton then arrests the would-be perpetrators before they do the deed.

The movie features self-driving cars and targeted ads that assail you on the street after scanning your retina. “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” blares one. But the most far-thinking plot point come true might be the rise of “predictive policing,” which uses “computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are purportedly more likely to commit or be a victim of a crime,” said The Brennan Center. (Paramount+)

‘Children of Men’ (2006)

Widely considered one of the best science fiction films of the 21st century, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” depicts the aftermath of a global fertility crisis. Society’s collapse is swift and brutal, leading to widespread despair and violence.

Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is tasked with escorting a young pregnant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to a floating sanctuary called the Human Project. Much of the world is now grappling with a real (if less severe) decline in fertility. But it might be Theo and Kee’s visit to a refugee camp that will stay with viewers. As the world braces for a climate-driven refugee crisis, the way that the refugees are dehumanized (one guard jokingly calls them “fugees” while imitating their sorrow) is worth revisiting. Many of the film’s developments “feel uncomfortably familiar and have clear contemporary allegories,” particularly the way that people “must continue to plow through the activities of mundane life while society continues to crumble” around them, said Ana Carpenter at Paste Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘Idiocracy’ (2006)

After Joe (Luke Wilson) and Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to take part in a government-run cryogenic experiment, they wake up 500 years later into a future where culture has devolved into base vulgarity and where the least capable members of society appear to be in charge.

The most popular TV program is a reality show called “Ow! My Balls!” in which people sustain repeated and grave injury to their nether regions for laughs. Joe, who was selected because of his averageness, turns out to be the smartest person on Earth in the future and lands a job working for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews). The film’s “only serious misstep was to predict that it would take 500 years for America to collapse” into such a state of moral and intellectual turpitude, said Michael Atkinson at Rolling Stone. (Prime Video)

‘Contagion’ (2011)

From the opening scene vividly depicting Gwyneth Paltrow triggering a zoonotic disease outbreak in a Hong Kong casino to the rise of anti-science quacks and the movie’s year-long vaccine timeline, Steven Soderbergh’s tense, bleak “Contagion” was essential viewing early in the Covid-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020. It followed a group of characters during a global respiratory pandemic, including CDC epidemiologist Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) and family man Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) as they grappled with the outbreak.

Chock-full of jargon like “R-naught” that “entered our regular lexicon” at the start of the Covid nightmare, the film “didn’t see anything coming; it just anticipated something that, frankly, we should have already been anticipating,” said Will Leitch at SYFY Wire. (Prime Video)

‘Her’ (2013)

In near-future Los Angeles, soon-to-be-divorced and terribly lonely Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Perhaps director Spike Jonze’s greatest achievement with “Her” was the way that it eventually took on the trappings and feel of a traditional romance.

As the strange phenomenon of “dating” AI chatbots becomes more common, the film’s prescience feels uncanny. “With apps and humanoids and new bespoke bots to soothe our pains, we never have to directly face ourselves and each other anymore,” said Tanya Chen at Slate. But while the “tech imagined in the film is eerily similar to what’s available today, Samantha is still far too advanced to be a real operating system.” (Prime Video)

‘Ex Machina’ (2014)

Writer-director Alex Garland’s 2014 thriller is remembered for its depiction of sentient robots who are indistinguishable from humans, hardly a novel concept in science fiction but one that was pulled off with style and panache. But its more insightful narrative was the background setting.

Nathan Bateman (in a career-making turn from Oscar Isaac) plays a strange, wealthy recluse developing AI-powered humanoid robots. He invites a programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) to his isolated compound to run a Turing Test on the machines. The way that Nathan’s wealth and ideology blinds him to the implications and risks of his technology is eerily similar to the behavior of contemporary techworld figures like Palantir’s Alex Karp. (HBO Max)

Pixar has been “changing the game” for over three decades with its “sophisticated” and “characterful” animated feature films, said Ben Travis and Jordan King on Empire. With the studio’s hotly anticipated “Toy Story 5” due to hit UK cinemas in June, now is a great time to revisit the classics. Here are some of the best.

Toy Story (1995)

“Pixar’s first feature is still the template for every great movie the studio has made since,” said Tim Grierson and Will Leitch on Vulture. Packed with “lots of giddy, witty, silly laughs”, “ripping action sequences” and “dead-on insights into human nature”, the “best comedy of the 1990s remains perfect” three decades after its release. Despite its humour, “deep down” this is a “very melancholy film”; the toys’ “battle” for Andy’s attention speaks to “everyone’s fear of being replaced”, while reminding us the “innocence of childhood cannot last”. Tom Hanks leads the “impeccable” voice cast as Woody. He’s won two Oscars but this may be the role that “immortalises” him.

Finding Nemo (2003)

The opening of “Finding Nemo” is a “nerve-shredder”, said Vulture. But despite the “terrors” throughout the film, the message is clear. If our children are “going to survive on their own”, we must “release them into the scary world” rather than “smothering” them. The movie follows a “nervous clownfish” on a “desperate search” to find and rescue his son, Nemo, with the help of a “lovably loopy blue tang”. Heartwarming, “exciting” and “visually gorgeous”, it’s a wonderful film.

The Incredibles (2004)

This thrilling animation is “arguably the best superhero film of all time”, said IndieWire. At the heart of the action is the Parr family: “a superhero clan” forced into mundane lives in a world where their powers are outlawed. But when Mr Incredible embarks on a secret mission that goes horribly wrong, it’s up to his family to save him. A “perfect mix of funny, action-packed and emotional”, it’s a must watch.

Ratatouille (2007)

This is one of Pixar’s “smartest and deepest films”, said Wilson Chapman on IndieWire. The action follows Remy, an intelligent rat with an extraordinary sense of smell who “dreams of becoming a great chef”. He soon finds an “ally” in hapless kitchen porter Alfredo Linguini, who happens to be working in the restaurant of his “culinary idol” in Paris. Remy figures out an ingenious way of turning his passion for cooking into a reality: sitting beneath Linguini’s tall white chef’s hat and tugging his hair to control his friend’s movements in the kitchen. Funny and big-hearted, it’s an “understated emotional ride” that strikes a “deep chord”.

Wall-E (2008)

Beginning “quietly and entirely dialogue-free”, “Wall-E” soon turns into a “breakneck adventure”, said Empire. The “deeply charming” titular robot is “trapped in a future hellscape of our creation – a literal world of trash, littered with remnants of our consumerism”. But as he roams the wasteland collecting rubbish, there’s a “spark of hope” when he falls in love with Eve, an advanced probe. “Narratively bold” and richly entertaining, this is a “vital piece of cinema in the climate crisis age”.

Up (2009)

“Everyone talks about the wordless opening section” of this “devastating” tearjerker, said Jesse Hassenger in GQ. The montage follows a couple from their “first blush of childhood love all the way to the uncomfortable and unavoidable truth” that most happy marriages will end when one partner dies before the other. “Heavy stuff for a family film” but it soon unfurls into an “utterly original flight of whimsy”. The “lovely little masterpiece” follows “cranky old widower” Carl Frederickson, who ties colourful helium balloons to his home, transforming it into a “makeshift air ship” to fulfil a promise to his late wife to travel to South America.

Inside Out (2015)

For a studio bursting with brilliant ideas, this “might go down as Pixar’s most dazzling”, said Empire. Riley is a little girl whose inner world is sent into “chaos” after her family’s move to San Francisco. We’re taken into the control centre in her brain where her emotions – Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness – must navigate her new life. It’s a film of “genuine emotional intelligence” packed with “delightful creativity” and “witty observations”. It’s an “all-out miracle of a movie”.

Safaris often come with an “eye-rolling price tag”, but if you know where to look there are “bargains” to be had, said The Times.

One way to save money is to “rent a car and drive yourself”, avoiding the hefty cost of a fully guided package. It’s also worth choosing a “locally run park outside of the national park” in one of the “gateway towns”, rather than opting for a luxury lodge within one.

Everyone is keen to see the annual wildebeest migration, “but most people don’t realise that the migrating herds can be found year-round at various places in Africa, so you don’t necessarily have to be in the Masai Mara during July and August”, said Condé Nast Traveller.

Consider travelling during shoulder season in the spring or autumn and “staying longer” in one safari destination instead of moving between lodges every few days, to cut down on travel costs and increase your chances of “finding a good deal”.

“Africa has become synonymous with safaris”, said The Independent. However, if you’re willing to expand your search, “more affordable Brazil has flown under the radar”. Home to the “highest concentration of wildlife in South America”, the Pantanal region is “sometimes dubbed the Brazilian Serengeti”. It even has its “own Big Five: the capybara, giant river otter, maned wolf, jaguar, and – tick – the giant anteater”.

And with all-inclusive lodges costing a fraction of the price of a luxury resort, the country “promises an affordable alternative to a traditional safari”. Around three-and-a-half hours from Campo Grande airport in southwest Brazil you’ll find the family-run ranch, Pousada Pequi, which offers authentic safari experiences. “Giant anteaters are the lodge’s main draw” but look out for the region’s “legendary” birdlife, including the giant “inky blue” hyacinth macaws.

If you do have your heart set on an African safari, steer clear of the luxury offerings in Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe, said The Times. “The likes of Namibia, Malawi and Zambia offer the same balmy settings, bush camps and big five thrills for less.”

With the United States celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are reflecting on how historical highs and lows shaped the country into the nation it is today. The occasion comes at a time when national parks and historic sites are “at risk” and “government officials are removing, often without explanation, exhibits that enable us to see through the eyes of people who lived in a world different from our own,” said Carol Quillen at Time.

Instead of shying from uncomfortable parts of the country’s past, you can better understand American history by visiting places connected to movements and events like the abolition of slavery, the fights for civil and women’s rights, and the forced displacement of Indigenous tribes and Japanese Americans.

Manzanar National Historic Site, Inyo County, California

Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal from the West Coast of those deemed a threat to national security. This resulted in the U.S. government incarcerating more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in 10 camps, which operated until the end of World War II. The most well-known camp, California’s Manzanar War Relocation Center, held more than 10,000 people, all of them “crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights and patrolled by military police,” said The Guardian.

Manzanar is now a national historic site, where visitors can watch the short film “Remembering Manzanar,” explore a museum filled with historic images and artifacts and step inside Block 14. There are two barracks buildings, a mess hall and a women’s latrine, providing insight into what it was like to live here during incarceration. Further out, a cemetery monument stands in honor of the 150 people who died at the camp during their imprisonment.

Where to learn more: Manzanar isn’t the only War Relocation Center open to the public. You can also visit Tule Lake in California and Minidoka in Idaho, with plans underway to turn Amache in Colorado into a national historic site. Objects donated by people incarcerated at Amache are on display at the Amache Museum in Granada, including suitcases, tea crates and clothing.

National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis

In their quest for equal rights for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation, civil rights leaders and members of the movement tried many different tactics: protests, sit-ins, boycotts, marches and freedom rides. At the National Civil Rights Museum, all these efforts are given the attention and respect they deserve, with visitors able to learn more about “some of the most important wins for freedom and equality in the U.S.” while “connecting them to current happenings,” said Time Out. Exhibitions guide visitors through “enslaved peoples’ fight for freedom, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and resistance efforts in the 1960s,” with visitors able to listen to interact with media, listen to oral histories and watch films.

The museum is at the site of the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. During segregation, this was one of the properties where Black travelers could spend the night, and King often stayed at the motel when in Memphis.

Where to learn more: The U.S. Civil Rights Trail connects important landmarks in 15 states, including Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, integrated by the Little Rock Nine in 1957; the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four Black girls were killed in a 1963 bombing; and the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora, Mississippi, a museum with exhibitions on the young Black teenager’s life and his lynching by a white mob.

Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, various states

Between 1830 and 1850, the U.S. government forcibly removed members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their land in the southeast to a new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The removal came after the Indian Removal Act was passed and signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, as gold was discovered on Cherokee land and white settlers jockeyed for more acreage. About 100,000 women, men, children and enslaved people made the brutal trek, with an estimated 15,000 dying of disease and starvation along the way or shortly after resettlement.

The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail passes through Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, covering 2,200 miles of land and water. All five of the displaced tribes walked through the trail’s segment near Prairie Grove, Arkansas, and visitors who go there today can “feel the weight” of its past, said Atlas Obscura. The endpoint of the trail is Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and the nearby Cherokee Heritage Center “holds archives, oral histories and a reconstructed 17th-century village,” putting the “removal into the longer sweep of Cherokee civilization.”

Where to learn more: An outstanding example of ancient Indigenous life can be found at the Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Thousands of years ago, the Ancestral Pueblo lived in tight-knit communities built into the mesas and cliffs of this region, and the dwellings, made of sandstone, mortar and wooden beams, remain in good condition. Ranger-led tours of these cliff dwellings are available May through October.

Stonewall Inn, New York City

The June 28, 1969, police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay club was a turning point. At the time, it was illegal for someone to be spotted “holding hands, kissing or dancing with someone of the same sex” in public, and police harassment of gay bars was frequent, said History.com. The Stonewall Inn was a refuge for its clientele, and one of the few establishments that welcomed drag queens. Usually the bar would receive a tip that a raid was coming, but no such call arrived on June 28, and after officers came in, “roughed up patrons” and arrested 13 people, the fed-up community fought back.

Hundreds of angry customers and locals started throwing objects at the police and tried to set the bar on fire. The crowd finally dispersed, but protests continued for five more days. The riot was a galvanizing event and led to the creation of LGBTQ advocacy organizations like Gay Liberation Front and GLAAD. The Stonewall Inn still operates as a bar, and in 2024, a center opened next door to “educate visitors on the history of the Stonewall Uprising and the ongoing fight for equality,” said USA Today.

Where to learn more: San Francisco’s Castro District was one of the earliest gay neighborhoods in the United States, and is home to the GLBT Historical Society Museum, the country’s first museum dedicated solely to LGBTQ history and culture. A highlight of the museum is a segment of the original 1978 eight-color rainbow flag designed for San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day.

Whitney Plantation, Wallace, Louisiana

The reality of slavery hits visitors at the Whitney Plantation Museum as soon as they arrive. There is no whitewashing here. The former plantation rejects the rosy antebellum view, focusing instead on slavery’s horrors.

The audio tour goes into great detail about the lives of those once forced to work here, harvesting sugar and indigo. There are visual reminders of what they went through as well, like the two slave cabins, “ceramic sculptures of hollow-eyed slave children” and a “jarring” monument to a failed revolt featuring “multiple rows of spikes topped with what look like the decapitated heads of African American men,” said The Associated Press in 2017.

Sixteen original structures are on the property, along with two permanent exhibitions about the history of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in Louisiana. Guided tours are available, and the museum describes its docents as “historical interpreters who share the full, unvarnished truth of the site’s history.” These excursions also offer access to the upstairs of the Big House, where the former plantation’s owners once lived — after entering through the building’s rear, as an enslaved person would.

Where to learn more: The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston is the “oldest Black museum of slave artifacts in America,” almost entirely staffed by people “whose lineage can be traced to enslaved people in Charleston,” said The Post and Courier. Officials believe this may be the only former slave auction site still in existence in South Carolina.

Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, New York

The women’s rights movement picked up steam in the 1830s, as women in the abolitionist space “gained experience as leaders, organizers, writers and lecturers” and used their new skills to fight for equality, said the National Women’s History Museum. After being denied full access to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, abolitionists and women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott decided in 1848 to hold the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. There, they presented a Declaration of Sentiments, which was written using the language of the Declaration of Independence as a guide. It called for legal, political and economic equality for women and cultural reform.

Change didn’t happen overnight — the 19th Amendment, prohibiting the federal government from denying citizens the right to vote based on sex, wasn’t ratified until 1920. But more people joined the fight. Their hard work is recognized at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls. Visitors can learn about the “struggles and triumphs” of the Seneca Falls Convention and “explore the grounds where it all happened,” said Lonely Planet. There’s also an impressive bronze statue representing the “first wave” of women’s rights activists, including Stanton, Mott and Frederick Douglass.

Where to learn more: New York was home base for many remarkable 19th century women, including Harriet Tubman. After the Civil War, she spent five decades living in Auburn, in the Finger Lakes region. Visitors can still go to the “homes, church and landmarks” that shaped her life “after liberation,” said Afar. Plan on seeing her brick home at the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park; her house of worship, Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church; and the Seward House Museum, a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Critics are sometimes contemptuous of the way superhero entertainment has been embraced by adults, who should presumably be making their way through the Booker Prize longlist. But the best of these good-versus-evil narratives, like in these eight series, can connect one generation to the next, introducing kids to the world’s complexity and keeping grown-ups tethered to the wonder of their childhood selves.

‘Batman’ (1966-1968)

The original ‘Batman’ series is both the first live-action television adaptation of the now-iconic DC Comics character as well as a kind of time capsule that reminds viewers of what the genre can be like when it dispenses with tortured origin stories, brooding anti-heroes and gore. Batman (Adam West) and his sidekick, Robin (Burt Ward), spend 120 breezy, campy episodes fighting crime, and both the humor and the tone hold up surprisingly well for a show that debuted 60 years ago. Its villain-of-the-week structure introduces viewers to characters indelibly associated with the juggernaut franchise, including Catwoman (Julie Newmar) and The Joker (Cesar Romero). This Batman is not only the “most fun, it is also the most subversive and truthful Batman we can hope to ever witness,” said Jack Bernhardt at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Smallville’ (2001-2011)

Before Marvel and DC Comics staged their takeover of Hollywood and before “IP” was synonymous with viability, there was the WB’s “Smallville,” a highly successful slice of network television that helped reinvigorate the genre. “Smallville” is both a reimagining of Superman as well as an origin story, beginning with the 1989 meteor crash that brought him to the titular town and led him to be raised by the Kents before fast-forwarding to the present, with Clark (Tom Welling) as a handsome high schooler beginning to realize he has special powers. Sometimes a young adult drama and sometimes a superhero show, it often finds the “most grounded and least ridiculous take on some of the comic's stranger material,” said Chancellor Agard, Sydney Bucksbaum and Christian Holub at Entertainment Weekly, before it begins to “embrace the canon more and more” over the course of its ten seasons. (Disney+)

‘Jessica Jones’ (2015-2019)

Arriving just ahead of the #MeToo movement that shook the world, “Jessica Jones” was a superbly timed piece of entertainment that helped give depth and seriousness to the superhero genre that was producing one so-so series after another. “Superhero noir” is ultimately the best way to describe this Marvel series from Netflix. Krysten Ritter plays Jessica Jones, a former superhero battling PTSD and working as a private eye. The terrific Scottish actor David Tennant provides the season 1 villainy as a man able to puppeteer others using his voice. Buoyed by a “strong, clear performance” from Ritter, it’s not an anti-hero narrative but rather a “post-hero story, making it fascinating and unique in a marketplace that doesn’t lack for costumed do-gooders of all types,” said Sam Adams at IndieWire. (Disney+)

‘Daredevil’ (2015-2018)

Charlie Cox (“Adults”) is Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer who, in keeping with the work-around-the-clock ethos of the superhero genre, moonlights as the crime-fighting “Man in Black” at night. In season 1, gangster kingpin Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) frames him for a series of bombings, and the two go toe to toe, with Murdock torn between how to bring Fisk to justice. Elden Henson plays Murdock’s legal partner, Foggy Nelson, who begins the series blissfully unaware of his colleague’s true identity. “Dark, brooding and violent,” the series’ “pulpy style and brutality” make it “dressed for success,” said Variety. A follow-up series, “Daredevil: Born Again” was released to critical acclaim in March 2025. (Disney+)

‘Legion’ (2017-2019)

From “Fargo” creator Noah Hawley, the offbeat “Legion,” loosely located in the X-Men universe, remains beloved by critics even if it never quite found a broad audience during its run. David Haller (Dan Stevens in a tour de force performance) has spent much of his life shuffling between one psychiatric institution after another, and has been led to believe he is schizophrenic. But when he falls for a fellow patient named Syd Barrett (Rachel Keller), who inadvertently swaps bodies with him, he comes to understand that he is actually a mutant. At a kind of sanatorium for mutants run by Dr. Melanie Bird (Jean Smart), he learns to harness his powers and face his trauma. A meditation on mental illness, “Legion” is “no ordinary comic-book show: It’s a head trip, and it’s spectacular,” said James Poniewozik at The New York Times. (Disney+)

‘The Boys’ (2019–)

“The Boys” gleefully goes where no other superhero show has gone. A uniformly sensational ensemble cast is one of the show’s great strengths, including Antony Starr as the insecure, virtually undefeatable “Homelander.” The show’s conflict is between the glossy secretly sociopathic superheroes of Vought International’s The Seven, a carefully curated group of “supes,” and a band of renegade truthers, including Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the show’s protagonist, Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid).

Over the course of its five ultraviolent seasons, “The Boys” gradually merges with America’s unhinged politics, offering both a satire and a critique of the country’s drift into autocracy. A series that “takes gleeful aim at the cultural monopoly of the Marvel machine,” it is “outlandish, pessimistic and brutally funny,” said Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker. (Prime Video)

‘Watchmen’ (2019)

From the first episode viscerally depicting the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, HBO’s “Watchmen” is the rare television show that feels genuinely unique. Building on the 1986 graphic novel series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, it is presciently set in an alternate present in which police officers wear masks to hide their identities. Angela Abar (Regina King) is a detective codenamed Sister Night who is investigating the murder of Tulsa’s police chief and hunting white supremacist vigilantes in the Seventh Kavalry.

The plot defies a quick summary but involves a massive conspiracy, an omnipotent blue god named Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and a reclusive genius named Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons). The series “left me dizzy from its audacity, its delight and its occasional lack of taste,” said Emily St. James at Vox, by using superhero tropes and archetypes to “tell stories about the world we live in today and how unjust it is.” (HBO Max)

‘WandaVision’ (2021)

In “WandaVision,” Disney+ takes two characters from the smash Avengers films, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), and places them as husband and wife in the sepia-toned suburb of Westview where they try to keep their identities a secret. Kathryn Hahn is perfectly cast as Agnes, a neighbor who begins to suspect not all is as it seems.

Like the Apple TV+ comedy “The Afterparty,” every episode of “WandaVision” is a pinpoint parody of a different beloved sitcom, from “Bewitched” to “The Brady Bunch.” A series that proves “just how elastic the Marvel brand can be,” creator Jac Schaeffer’s limited series manages to get viewers “so caught up in the sheer energy and commitment” of its ensemble in “loving homages” to classic television, said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. (Disney+)

“It wasn’t long ago that crunchy or smooth was the sum total of our nut butter options,” said Sue Quinn in The Telegraph. But there is now more choice than ever and the “humble peanut is jostling for shelf space with almond, cashew and pistachio” spreads.

Sales of peanut butter overtook jam in the UK for the first time in 2020, and nut butters are “now making a bid to unseat honey from its long-held perch as number one”.

Filled with “fibre and healthy fats, it’s easy to see why nut butters appeal to the health-conscious among us,” said Lauren Shirreff in The Telegraph. They are a fantastic source of protein, “especially for people who are following plant-based or vegan diets”, nutritionist Jenna Hope told the paper.

A 30g serving of peanut butter contains around 8g of protein, which is “roughly the same as that in a large egg”, and a large spoonful “would also contain nearly three whole grams of fibre”.

One of the best alternatives to peanuts is almond butter, said Shirreff. It ticks lots of boxes, having the “most fibre” of any nut butter, and “fewer calories” too. Though it has “marginally” less protein than peanut butter, it’s “packed with magnesium and calcium”.

Pistachios have been all the rage as TikTok-viral sweet treats – think Dubai chocolate – but the best way to unlock their “bold, subtly sweet, roasted-nutty taste” is in savoury dishes, said Autumn Swiers on Tasting Table. A dollop of pistachio butter can be “placed under the skin of a chicken breast pre-roast for extra crispy, sweet-nutty moisture”, or as an “elevated candidate for homemade salad dressings”.

It is important to check the label for additional ingredients, said nutritionist Brianna Sommer on Delish. “I would look for a pure nut butter that has no added anything.” It is much better to add a pinch of salt, or a dollop of honey yourself than relying on whatever the “manufacturer has decided to include”.

The easiest way to eat nut butters is “on a slice of sourdough” or “poured over porridge”, said Stacey Smith in Women’s Health. But we all know they taste just that bit better “sneakily spooned straight from the jar”. For a “treat day” indulgence try Pana Organic Cashew Caramel Spread. “Packed with good stuff”, it includes coconut sugar for a hint of sweetness, while maca and sesame seeds bring “extra oomph”.

And if you’re looking for a classic peanut butter, try the M&S range, said Martha Roberts on Which?. Its smooth version is “rich”, “creamy” and “high-oleic” with the highest fibre content of the 56 items tested. Not only is it "reasonably priced”, it contains high levels of protein, and is “extremely low” in salt. Its crunchy alternative “comes a close second to its smooth sibling” because of its higher calorie and lower fibre content, but it’s “still high-oleic and with the same keen price”.

“Who knows what the Big Five are?” my guide Kets asks as we bounce over sand dunes in Botswana’s Makgadikgadi National Park. “What about the Ugly Five?” he laughs. “And the Tiny Five?” The humour of the safari stereotypes, and the questionable ethics behind them (“The Big Five” aren’t the rarest, but the hardest for hunters to kill) aren’t lost on us. We’ve come to the Makgadikgadi and the Okavango Delta, two less visited regions of Botswana that swiftly reveal there’s much more to this vibrant country than a safari checklist.

Not to say I don’t have a checklist. I’m as enthralled as the next city slicker to see my first tower of giraffes in the wild. The privilege of seeing these graceful giants without another vehicle in sight was worth the extra flight on Safari Air. The journey is part of the adventure. Our hosts, Desert & Delta – a locally owned and run organisation for over 40 years – run nine lodges in lesser trodden corners of the country.

Migrating zebras and noisy elephants

Arriving at Leroo La Tau Lodge, perched on the western flank of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, brought a cluster of surprises. The bungalows’ protruding balconies give views of thousands of migrating zebras, sauntering around the watering holes in the dried-up river below. The erstwhile Boteti River is now a ravine, as the water flowing through the delta changed direction following a shift in the tectonic plates. It’s the only inland delta in the world and doesn’t lead out to sea, just one fact that makes this lodge feel almost ethereal. The stretch is so laden with animals, herds of noisy elephants, wildebeest and zebra, all passing my bedroom, that we almost don’t need to go on safari but of course we do, bright and early.

Bumping around in our comfortable 4x4 I marvel at Kets’ eyesight. It’s as if he has a sixth sense, pointing out the tiniest of birds and shy steenbok (a small antelope), while the rest of us bop up and down with excitement every time we see an elephant. They may be easy to spot but are never not thrilling. Kets is one of the expert team, led by veteran ranger Metal Matmos, who has worked for Desert & Delta for 17 years. Metal has the answer to everything – whether its the details of our itinerary or what to do when a local leopard makes a late-night appearance. The answer, delivered with signature laugh, was “stay inside” – advice we gladly adhere to while the big cat roars in search of its mate.

Starlit sleepovers and birds of the delta

Leroo La Tau also takes groups out on overnight trips to the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans. Sleeping under the stars on the flats is humbling, no matter how many times you do it. Metal’s been visiting the park for almost two decades and is still enthralled. “I think about theories on the evolution of humankind between enjoying the scenery” he muses.

Heading northwest to the verdant Okavango Delta, we disembark from our tiny plane at Shakawe’s landing strip after flying over veins of water running through vast greenery as far as the horizon. The hour-long flight was followed by a lengthy drive in a 4x4 before arriving at our smaller, remote boutique resort, Nxamaseri Island Lodge, built on the banks of the water.

Here the lodge’s rangers transport us on boats, searching for hippos who give themselves away by clusters of bubbles rising to the surface of the bayou. Hippopotamuses, I learn, can stay submerged for five minutes and, despite being herbivores, are responsible for the most human fatalities on safari. I’m slightly unnerved as we float around, engine quietened, looking for a lonely male who we saw in the distance. The hippo finally emerges, parallel to the reeds that cushion the waterways, but he glides away, not keen to socialise, thankfully. I’m glad to get back to my exquisite tent of a room and kick back on my veranda to watch for eagles.

The birds of the delta are a revelation. We spy egret, heron, purple heron, kite, black geese, hamerkop, a kaleidoscope of bee-eaters, malachite kingfishers, white-backed night heron, fish-eating eagles and one Pel’s fishing owl back at the lodge. Fishing trips are also on offer and one of our gang goes out to catch dinner, which is made into delicious fish cakes by the lodge’s excellent chef. This stop at Nxamaseri Island Lodge really cements the rumour I’d heard pre-trip; there’s much more to Botswana than its wildlife.

Magical hiking in the Tsodilo Hills

I didn’t think my jaw could drop more but as a former art historian my highlight comes at the Unesco-listed Tsodilo Hills; four terracotta and copper coloured mountains jutting out of the Kalahari Desert like islands. These hills are the sacred home of a trove of 4,500 ancient cave paintings made by the San people up to 20,000 years ago.

We arrive in the foothills by sunset on the night of a full moon and the San staff and villagers tell us their legends. Descendants of the great cave painters, they perform their folk tales through dance and song; 19 villagers harmonising, clapping and stamping their ancient stories. Shamans in this group believe spirits of ancestors speak to them through the fire, telling them where to go hunting. After an impressive dinner we sleep in small pods, cleverly constructed by Desert & Delta, who are the only company with accommodation here by Tsodilo, meaning we can rise at the same time as the sun to head off for our hike.

The San believe their ancestors’ spirits rest in the hills and as we ascend the paths that loop Tsodilo there’s a palpable atmosphere of reverence. “This is Tsodilo that you’ve been looking for,” whispers Gabo, our guide who has worked on this site every day for more than 20 years. He leads us to a handful of the 420 sites of finger and hand painted forms, which are mostly human and animal figures, depicted in hematite and ostrich egg yolk, which served to make it so mind-bogglingly durable.

Beating the heat is the name of the game here, and on seeing a coach trip arrive at midday, we were glad we got up early. While they climbed the hills, we enjoy a hearty post-hike brunch. As captivating as the safari runs were, it’s the cultures of the 13 different communities of Botswanans we encountered that made this trip. I’ve been on safari before but nothing beats this, I decide, as we board the plane home.

Lucie was a guest of Desert & Delta Safaris; desertdelta.com

The South’s gorgeous — and diverse — beaches offer nearly every type of seaside experience. You can feel the white sand between your toes in Florida, kayak in Alabama’s turquoise waters, watch turtles nest in Texas and ride the waves in South Carolina. Whatever you’re seeking, you’ll find it at one of these eight wash-your-cares-away beaches.

Destin, Florida

Destin is one of the gems of Florida’s Emerald Coast. The soft, white sand beaches are perfect for lounging on, and the water is a “slightly different shade of gorgeous” than any other spot along the Florida Panhandle, said Southern Living. Destin is also known as the “World’s Luckiest Fishing Village,” due to the wide variety of fish species swimming in its waters. Visitors can fish year-round, including from the shore, or learn more about angling at the Destin History & Fishing Museum.

Folly Beach, South Carolina

At Folly Beach, you’ll find an “eclectic mix of Southern charm and seaside cool” that sets it apart from other coastal destinations, said Outside. It’s only 12 miles from downtown Charleston, with warm water “ideal for sunbathing, swimming and, of course, surfing.” The best time to hang 10 is during the winter. But visiting in the summer, when Folly Beach buzzes at “full intensity,” is the “prime time for live music, festivals, outdoor movies and crowds.”

Gulf Shores, Alabama

Have a surf and turf experience at Gulf Shores. Spend part of your day in the sea, fishing, snorkeling and kayaking through the blue-green water. Then enjoy the rest of it on land, learning about native plants and animals at the Gulf State Park Nature Center and building towering sand castles with private lessons through Sand Castle University.

Once the sun sets, make your way to DeSoto’s Seafood Kitchen for dinner. The fish is fresh, sides are made from scratch and the royal red shrimp, which taste like tender lobster, are a must-order.

Jekyll Island, Georgia

This barrier island boasts 10 miles of unspoiled shoreline, with each beach different from the next. Oceanview Beach Park offers unparalleled views of the Atlantic Ocean, Glory Beach has sand dunes and wide open spaces and Driftwood Beach is “scattered with huge, twisted, sea-weathered branches and tree trunks” ideal for “fun scampering and a dramatic photo op,” said Atlanta Magazine. The island is “relatively flat,” and walking and biking trails “meander” through salt marshes and live oaks.

Orange Beach, Alabama

Its “long strip of white quartz sand” and “aquamarine waters” give laidback Orange Beach “that quintessential Gulf Coast look,” said Travel and Leisure. Aquatic sports enthusiasts flock here for “jet skiing, kayaking and sailing” and swim and dive under its “glassy waters.” At night, head to The Wharf, a pet-friendly entertainment district where you can catch a movie, grab dinner and end the night with a Ferris wheel ride.

South Padre Island, Texas

This is party central for college students on spring break, but during the rest of the year, a “more mellow vibe prevails,” said Condé Nast Traveler. Surfing, parasailing and horseback riding on the beach are some of the more active ways to spend a day, while a visit to the South Padre Island Birding, Nature Center & Alligator Sanctuary, home to “stilt-legged birds, colorful butterflies and about 50 rescued ’gators” is more relaxing, said Condé Nast Traveler. It’s not only beachgoers who flock here — South Padre Island is popular with nesting turtles, who come between April and August.

Virginia Beach, Virginia

A highlight of Virginia Beach is its “classic” boardwalk, stretching three miles and all but guaranteeing a “lovely sunrise or evening stroll,” said Southern Living. Oceanfront Beach, with its massive King Neptune statue, is on one side, and stores, restaurants and hotels are on the other. Seasoned surfers enjoy catching waves here, but Virginia Beach is an “ideal” place for newbies too. The waves are a lot “calmer and a bit gentler than the barrels found out west,” making them easier to ride, and there are multiple surf schools offering private and group lessons.

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

When in Wrightsville Beach, pack a book in your bag, but don’t be surprised if you never crack it open. That’s because the “wide, clean sands and sparkling waters” beckon visitors, who jump in to go kayaking, paddleboarding and surfing, said AAA Trip Canvas. The atmosphere is “active and energetic” and inclusive for all: There is a wheelchair-accessible beach so everyone can relish the sun, sand and surf.

“If you didn’t know that David Hockney was 88, you might think he was in his prime,” said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The veteran artist has lately been producing and exhibiting work at a prodigious rate, and less than a year after his “colossal” retrospective in Paris, he has returned to the UK for a “magical, moving” exhibition, “A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting”, at London’s Serpentine North Gallery.

The show, which is free, consists of ten new acrylic paintings – five portraits and five still lifes – and “A Year in Normandie”, a vast, 265ft-long frieze depicting the change of seasons observed in the countryside around his studio during the pandemic. Created on his iPad and printed on paper, it is a collage of dozens of images the artist dashed off in 2020 and 2021. While it contains traces of human presence – some garden furniture, a treehouse, various images of Hockney’s half-timbered farmhouse – “the prevailing impression is of nature’s unhurried, inexorable rhythms”, gradually moving from “bare-branched trees” to the “flaring blossom of spring” to summer’s “shaggy greenery”. It’s beautiful, “transporting” and “unexpectedly emotional” – irrefutable proof that Hockney’s “artistic powers haven’t deserted him”.

Hockney has never shied away from celebrating “conventional forms of beauty”, said Ben Eastham in The Guardian. Back in the 1960s, he disproved the lie that great art had to be “difficult”, specialising in paintings that were as immediately accessible as they were clever. In this show, the curators have made an “impressive” spectacle of the main frieze, which “will reproduce well on phone screens”. This was “a smart decision, because in reality it is underwhelming”. The work is “undone by the details”: the messy joins, the “clangorous” colours, the confected “painterly” atmosphere. The best things here are portraits. One depicts Hockney’s partner looking up from his phone, his expression “at once ironical and indulgent”. Another, of the artist’s nephew, is a fine example of his ability to “conjure character”.

I wasn’t previously a fan of Hockney’s iPad pictures, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Yet this show changed my mind. Here, he uses his device with the “confidence and nuance of experience”: placing a thin film over its screen, he has discovered, gives its surface “a resistance like paper” and produces sharper effects. “A Year in Normandie” is a thrilling hymn to the seasons, “rooted in French history and landscape”: it cites everything from the Bayeux Tapestry to Monet’s “Water Lilies”. Trees are the main protagonists, “in their prime or decaying, stark silhouettes, majestic crowns, or felled”; poplars fizz “like pop art”. It’s the “masterwork” of Hockney’s old age, and the show is “a generous celebration of contemporary art’s longest-lived, most irrepressible pleasure-giver”.

Serpentine North, London W2. Until 23 August

Mercedes has reinvented the GLC, its compact SUV, for this all-new EV, blending “wafting comfort” with the tech and range customers now expect, said Car Magazine. At launch, there is just the dual-motor GLC 400 with other versions coming later, including a single-motor with a bigger range. Twin motors give a combined 483bhp, so this “2.5-tonne brute” can do 0-62mph in just 4.3secs. The 94kWh battery gives a range of up to 403 miles.

The new GLC is “really, really fast”, and the air suspension gives a very smooth ride and exceptional motorway refinement, said Autocar. There’s “constant oomph”, thanks to the two-speed gearbox, but the steering is “fairly numb”, and the GLC lacks a bit of character. A “plush and comfortable all-rounder”, but it can’t match the range and “dynamic pizzazz” of its rival, the new BMW iX3.

It’s not “thrilling to drive”, but the new GLC is “packed with kit”, showcasing Mercedes’s “latest and greatest” tech, said Auto Express. The entry-level Sport spec gets two wireless phone chargers and new headlights that illuminate the length of five football pitches. The “massive” 39.1-in display is standard too, with video capability on the passenger side, and the self-park function is “better than ever”.

Fantasy is a genre that’s hard to define. But to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you see it — magical realms with vaguely or unmistakably medieval trappings, princes, princesses, villains to best and, inevitably, a quest for our heroes to complete. For our list we have excluded animated films like “Spirited Away,” as well as those that feel more comfortably placed in the science fiction or superhero genres.

‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

In MGM’s cultural juggernaut, young Dorothy (Judy Garland) is knocked unconscious during a tornado that rips through her Kansas town. She awakens to find her house moving through the air and into the magical Land of Oz, having landed on and killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Dorothy is then pursued by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) as she and her companions, including the Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) and Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where the titular wizard (Frank Morgan) can — purportedly — send her home. This seemingly ageless classic “genuinely hits on childish delights” and fears with “effortless grace, warmth and imagination,” said Alan Morrison at Empire. (HBO Max)

‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982)

A movie that has to be in the same “haunted the childhood of all Gen Xers” conversation as “The NeverEnding Story,” the extraordinary film, directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, uses live-action puppetry to tell its story. Set on a planet called Thra, two new races emerged eons ago from a shattered crystal: the homicidal, vulture-like Skeksis and the gentle, inquisitive Mystics.

Jen (voiced by Stephen Garlick), who is a member of another, near-extinct race called Gelflings, was raised by Mystics after Skeksis wiped out his extended family. Along with another Gelfling, Kira (voiced by Lisa Maxwell), Jen is tasked with retrieving a shard of the crystal within three days to prevent the Skeksis from ruling Thra forever. Featuring a “luxuriantly original fantasy world as dark as the magic crystal totem at its center,” Henson and Oz’s film features stunning “set pieces that justify the expense and the viewer's attention,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Peacock)

‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)

Director Wolfgang Petersen’s film, adapted from the first half of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel, follows Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barret Oliver), a bookish boy grieving the loss of his mother. When Bastian ducks into a bookstore and starts reading a book about a malevolent force (the Nothing) devouring the realm of Fantasia, the narrative comes to life.

As Bastian reads, a boy named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), while pursued by a green-eyed creature called G’mork (Alan Oppenheimer), is dispatched by the Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach) to find the cure for the mysterious nothingness enveloping the kingdom. An “extravaganza of wondrous beasts and princesses,” the film also contains an important lesson: “Keep going, keep forging onward, don’t stop to mope or you will sink into the slough of despondence,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Tubi)

‘Labyrinth’ (1986)

Muppets mastermind Jim Henson helmed this story about a tween named Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), who inadvertently summons The Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie), to kidnap her baby half-brother. The move forces her to plunge herself into his fantastical maze-realm to retrieve him in 13 hours, lest he be turned into a goblin.

While navigating the labyrinth with the help of Hoggle (Shari Weiser, voiced by Brian Henson), Sarah encounters one fantastical character after another, including The Worm (voiced by Timothy Bateson) and The Junk Lady (voiced by Denise Bryer). Henson’s’ “complex and confusing” film is “now a mainstream cult favorite” and reminds us that childhood “has been this way forever: wonderful and hard and full of horror,” said Alison Stine at The Atlantic. (Disney+)

‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)

Director Rob Reiner’s often-hilarious adventure uses a familiar story-within-a-story structure. Peter Falk plays a man reading a story to his grandson, about a Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), who falls in love with her farmhand, Westley (Cary Elwes).

When Westley is presumed dead at the hands of pirates, she is betrothed to the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), before being kidnapped by the trio of Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Fezzik (André the Giant) and Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin). Patinkin’s repetitive delivery of the line “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” is a highlight. “The Princess Bride” is a “movie generally well-received by everybody who's ever seen it but given the august profile of a universal cultural touchstone by those of a certain age,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Disney+)

‘The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring’ (2001)

With “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first in the original trilogy, director Peter Jackson brings the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novels thrillingly to life, seamlessly integrating live action and CGI. The protagonist is Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), who hails from a village of whimsical creatures called Hobbits in the realm of Middle Earth.

He is tasked with destroying a powerful ring he inherits from his uncle Bilbo (Ian Holm) by delivering it to Mount Doom before it can fall into the hands of the evil Sauron (Sala Baker, voiced by Alan Howard), granting him dominion over the realm. A film that is “soaked around the edges with a melancholy darkness,” it is a “big movie in its scope and vision” that nevertheless works on a “much more intimate level as well,” said Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. (HBO Max)

‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004)

The first two Harry Potter films, based on the JK Rowling novels that became a global sensation, were massive events and box office successes but earned middling reviews from critics. Then the franchise was handed, briefly and mercifully, to the talented director Alfonso Cuarón.

In this entry, the third of the series, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his chums at a children’s finishing school for magicians called Hogwarts must work together to protect Harry from a killer named Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), who intends to kill the young wizard. With “monstrous special effects” that are “seamlessly inserted into the musty halls and twilight fields” and backstopped by “top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” the film is a triumph by virtue of its “emotional force and visual panache,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)

From Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, “Pan’s Labyrinth” is set in 1944, when a group of Spanish holdouts from the Franco dictatorship are holed up waiting for deliverance from the Allies. 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), whose cruel stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), is hunting the rebels, discovers a creature called The Faun (Doug Jones) in the nearby forest, who tells her she is actually Princess Moanna of the Underground Realm and that she must complete three tasks to take her throne. They include entering the foreboding lair of the terrifying Pale Man (also Doug Jones) to retrieve a dagger. Del Toro’s “richly conceived fantasy creates a new postmodern mythology and establishes the picture as a landmark of the genre,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (not currently available to stream).

For his “assured directing debut”, the actor James McAvoy has chosen the true story of two rappers from Dundee, who pulled off one of the most audacious hoaxes in recent music history, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail.

In the early 2000s, old friends Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd were working in sales while trying to break into the music business. They were convinced they had the chops to make it, but when they pitched their work to record companies in London, they were not taken seriously, apparently because of their accents. One executive dismissed them as “the rapping Proclaimers”.

So in a “masterstroke”, they broadened their accents, and – calling themselves Silibil N’ Brains – posed as Americans who’d arrived in London “straight outta California”, which made all the difference. It’s a cracking story, told with terrific verve, but the genius lies in the casting: Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross are very funny and “tremendously likeable” as the pals at the heart of the tale.

There is a “giddy thrill” to the start of the con, said Richard Lawson in The Guardian. The pair prove to be great at what they do, and are soon on a “runaway train” to success. But this distracts them from their original mission, which was to expose the prejudices of the industry elite, and the lie they are living under puts a massive strain on their friendship. The plotting is “awfully predictable”, and the direction could be tighter in places, but it’s a “kindhearted film”, about integrity, art for art’s sake and staying true to your roots. “The ending doesn’t pack the emotional punch it could”, said Anna Smith in Rolling Stone; and the James Corden cameo was a mistake. “But mostly, this is a blast”, with an infectious energy and a spirit that recalls everything from “Kneecap” to “The Full Monty”.

Consisting of “two dreamlike, black-and-white hours of murder, sex and existential brooding”, “The Stranger” is “the Frenchest film I’ve seen in years”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

A “spellbindingly sleek” adaptation of Albert Camus’ novella “L’Étranger”, it is about a young French settler in 1930s Algiers who – shortly after his mother’s funeral – kills an Arab man on a beach. The rising French star Benjamin Voisin plays the character of Meursault with “mesmerising Alain Delon-like sangfroid and a shard of ice through his soul”, and the scene of the killing is “masterful”. This is a film with “the suspended horror and cruel, glinting beauty of a guillotine blade”.

The film is faithful to the book, but it has “a subtle revisionist slant”, said Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound. In recent years, much has been made of “the erasure of the Algerian identity” in Camus’ story. The book does not name Meursault’s victim: he is referred to only as “the Arab”. In 2013, the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud published “The Meursault Investigation”, as a critical response to Camus’ work, and this film seems to have been made in the spirit of that work. Here, the victim has a name (Musa) and a personal history, and Algerians and their country are introduced as a dominant presence. Director François Ozon fleshes out the female characters too, said Jessica Kiang in Variety: Meursault’s girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder) in particular is given more depth than Camus’ first-person narration allowed. Yet crucially, in this “confounding, disturbing” and “icily compelling” film, Meursault himself “remains magnificently resistant to diagnosis or psychologising”.

Jan Morris’ life “seems impossibly rich”, said Charlie Gilmour in The Guardian. As James Morris, he experienced the world first from inside the British elite, “with all the opportunities that entailed”. After winning a scholarship to Lancing College, he joined the Army, and was sent on “plum postwar deployments to Venice and Trieste.

Oxford followed, then The Times, where he became a star foreign correspondent. Morris scooped the world in 1953 with the news of the British expedition’s conquest of Everest. He interviewed Che Guevara, and watched Adolf Eichmann “trembling” in the dock. He wrote a great many books – travel, history, biography, memoir – which were mainly popular and often critically acclaimed. “And, over the next two decades, he transitioned from James to Jan.” But whether James or Jan, Morris was, above all, a writer. “It will make an excellent and not unentertaining piece of memoir!” she wrote, after her vaginoplasty at a clinic in Casablanca in 1972. Sara Wheeler’s biography is “sensitive, beautifully written and masterly”, and makes space for all the complexities.

“In her later years, Morris liked to say kindness was the most important thing in life,” said Justin Marozzi in The Sunday Times. “Yet kindness is not the quality that lingers most in the mind after reading this stunning portrait” – certainly not on the evidence of four of Morris’ children. “Monumental selfishness would be closer to the mark.” (Her eldest son, Mark, called her “a narcissist in her inability to empathise”.) “The rock” to which Jan always returned, from her “ego-driven peregrinations”, was her partner of 70 years, Elizabeth. What it all cost Elizabeth, Wheeler writes, “no one can know”. Wheeler, an admired travel writer, was “the perfect choice to write this biography ... she is as fierce and flinty as her subject”, and takes no prisoners. “Why did she dress like a Walmart version of the Queen?” she asks.

Morris “was an elusive, self-contradictory person who makes a terrific subject for a biography”, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The New Statesman: a woman who was once a man; a brilliant writer who was also a shamelessly lazy hack; a loyal friend who was an “aloof and unhelpful parent”. Wheeler, “brisk and sardonic”, lays out the facts as she finds them. She has exactly the right blend of sympathy and critical detachment, said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. And “she does not pretend to omniscience, leaving some things up in the air”, such as whether Morris’ transition gave her fulfilment. “Seldom have I read such an enthralling biography.”

Everyone is familiar with their hits “Cabaret” and “Chicago”, said Clive Davis in The Times. Yet John Kander and Fred Ebb’s later musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” – “a fiercely intelligent portrait” of two men who form an unlikely bond in a prison cell in Argentina during its Dirty War – “has slipped from view”.

Now, though, a new film version is about to land, and we also have this “glorious, scaled-down” stage production in Leicester (then Bristol). Based on Manuel Puig’s novel, and with a book by Terrence McNally, the piece is “as bold and thoughtful as any Sondheim”, and the “dynamics of a drama” played out in a cramped space are well served by Paul Foster’s “chamber approach” here. With deft choreography, and a full sound drawn from a small band, the evening “is a triumph all round”.

It’s an “exceptional” production, agreed Holly O’Mahony in The Stage – as “smooth as spider’s silk”. Fabian Soto Pacheco gives a wonderfully layered turn as Molina, the gay window-dresser jailed for gross indecency, who survives his incarceration by retreating into “elaborate fantasies” based on old movies, said Susan Novak on British Theatre. His flamboyance never tips into caricature, and along with wit and warmth there is real pain. “Opposite him, George Blagden brings steely conviction” to the part of Valentin, the committed political activist whose “ideological armour gradually develops cracks”. The pair provide the drama with its “beating heart”, while Anna-Jane Casey thrills as the film star Aurora (and her sinister Spider Woman alter ego), who appears in fantasy sequences to embody fear, desire and death.

Kander and Ebb have form in mixing gritty with glamorous, said Holly Williams in The Telegraph. They pulled it off perfectly in “Cabaret” and “Chicago”. But this brutal tale, which switches from scenes of torture to high-camp fantasia, sets a greater challenge. Foster’s production (the show’s first major revival in the UK since 1992) has much to recommend it, but it “can’t quite untangle the Spider Woman’s knotty web”.

Curve Theatre, Leicester. Until 23 April, then Bristol Old Vic and on

Rollercoasters are usually the main draw at theme parks. But the UK is set to welcome an outdoor attraction with “thrills of an entirely different kind”, said Time Out. Kynren – The Storied Lands will open in County Durham this summer, but instead of offering exhilarating rides the historical theme park will “keep visitors entertained with live shows and immersive experiences that tell tales from Neolithic Britain, the Vikings and Victorian England”.

If battle reenactments aren’t your thing, though, there are plenty of other theme parks across the country to keep the whole family happy. Here are some of the best spots.

Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Surrey

The UK’s first World of Paw Patrol is opening at Chessington World of Adventures on 3 May, just in time for the bank holiday. “Four exciting new rides, interactive attractions and themed experiences” have been confirmed, said The Independent, including a “beginner-friendly rollercoaster that puts young riders in the middle of a rescue challenge with Chase and Everest”. And next year, the resort will welcome visitors to the first fully immersive Minecraft theme park.

chessington.com

Paultons Park, Hampshire

Paultons Park is “perhaps best known as the home of Peppa Pig World”, said The Mirror. But on 16 May the theme park will unveil its new attraction, Valgard: Realm of the Vikings. “Aimed more at teenagers and adults”, it will feature the “park’s first inverting rollercoaster” with a “vertical lift hill and two twists where riders will be flung upside down”. The Cobra ride has also been “revamped” into a “bobsled adventure” that fits in with the Viking theme.

paultonspark.co.uk

Alton Towers, Staffordshire

The team behind the new Bluey rollercoaster at Alton Towers spent “over 180 hours watching 154 episodes” of the kids’ cartoon about an anthropomorphic puppy, said Shyvonne Thomas on Digital Spy. The ride takes inspiration from the “fan-favourite ‘Grannies’ episode” of the cartoon series which “sees Bluey and Bingo dress up as grannies Janet and Rita to cause granny-like mayhem”. Ideal as an “introductory rollercoaster for toddlers”, I was “pleasantly surprised at the sudden rush and how fast the ride was, and my three-year-old loved it just as much”.

altontowers.com

Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Lancashire

Expect “properly thrilling rides” at this popular park, from “the heart-stopping Infusion to the indomitable The Big One”, said The Telegraph. Little ones are also in for a fun day out at Nickelodeon Land where the rides are inspired by “popular characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer”. Over the summer months, visitors can also make the most of the extended opening hours at the Pleasure Beach, experiencing “‘late-night riding’ along with fireworks displays”.

blackpoolpleasurebeach.com

Stumped on what to gift the person who has everything? A personalized present guarantees they receive a one-of-a-kind surprise, crafted with them in mind. These eight gift ideas can be tailor-made for anyone, for any occasion.

The Printed Gift custom recipe towel

Move their grandmother’s famous cookie recipe out of the box and onto a tea towel. The Printed Gift takes scanned handwritten or typewritten recipes, cleans them up to remove any stains and smudges then transfers them to a cotton towel. This is a “meaningful” way to preserve and “celebrate family recipes,” said Southern Living. ($30, The Printed Gift)

From the Library Of book embosser

This personalized book embosser will certainly make an impression. Choose from a variety of designs, add their name and poof, they’ll have the “perfect way to mark their books,” said Today. ($31.50, PickledStamps on Etsy)

Happy Tooned custom portrait

This one’s for the character in your life. Send Happy Tooned a picture of your person, and an illustrator will create a custom portrait of them in the style of an animated series. Options include “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy, “Rick and Morty,” “Bob’s Burgers” and “My Hero Academia.” The artist sends a preview for approval, and you can make as many revisions as you want until it’s perfect. (starting at $40, Happy Tooned)

Mark & Graham Bespoke Embroidered Crest pillow cover

Significant moments should be honored with a timeless gift. Mark & Graham’s bespoke pillow covers can be embroidered with monograms, names and dates, commemorating weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. There are four elegant crests to choose from in six colors. ($69, Mark & Graham)

Nautilus Puzzle customized puzzle

A customized wooden puzzle might be the missing piece to their game collection. The design process is simple: Upload the image you want on the puzzle, then choose a theme and size (260 or 475 pieces). There are 20 different categories to choose from, like birthday, congratulations and anniversary, and each style has its own shaped pieces to match the theme. (starting at $100, Nautilus Puzzles)

Smithey personalized ironware cookware

Making dinner is more enjoyable when using sturdy pots and pans, and Smithey’s “heirloom-quality” cookware is “undeniably great,” said CNN. Several of the company’s skillets, griddles and Dutch ovens can be personalized with a message or name, adding a special touch to kitchen essentials they’ll be using for “years to come.” (starting at $85, Smithey)

Songfinch custom song

Songfinch’s roster of independent musicians work with you to create a one-of-a-kind song that’s all about the recipient. After choosing a genre and artist, you’ll share with them memories, stories and other details you choose to be part of the lyrics. The final song is uploaded to a page that includes the lyrics and artist information. (starting at $200, Songfinch)

Susan Alexandra custom Devotion locket

Keep their favorite person, pet or item close at heart with this whimsical piece of jewelry. Upload the photo you want on the hand-enameled locket, then choose a background color and chain style (The Bijoux, made with colorful beads and pearls, adds a vibrant touch). An engraved message can also be added to the locket’s back. (starting at $278, Susan Alexandra)

Toronto may not be top of your travel list, but there are so many reasons it should be. This vibrant city is a foodie’s sanctuary, a shopper’s delight, and a cultural hub bursting with museums, galleries and cafes.

Located downtown on University Avenue, the beautiful and luxurious hotel Shangri-La Toronto makes the perfect base to explore everything the city has to offer.

Why stay here?

Shangri-La’s central location means you can explore this multicultural metropolis, while enjoying a five-star stay with world-class comfort and service. But you may have to drag yourself outside; the spacious rooms and suites are bright and comfortable with floor-to-ceiling windows, hi-tech controls and marble furnishings.

My suite was an impressive 820 sq ft and featured a walk-in wardrobe, separate living room and stunning marble bathroom with a walk-in shower and a deep-soaking bath, where you can relax and take in the spectacular views – over iconic landmarks like the 1,1815ft CN Tower – day and night. The bathrooms are kitted out with divine John Masters Organic toiletries.

Toronto is easy to reach with direct Air Canada flights from Heathrow, and use of its Maple Leaf lounges when you fly business class. The hotel is a half-hour taxi ride from the airport and has an impeccable concierge service; the staff are happy to offer advice on what to see and how to get there.

Eating and drinking

Breakfast at Shangri-La Toronto is worth waking up for. It’s not your typical buffet, but an experience in itself with dishes that include a wellness frittata, duck congee, and homemade granola. It’s served at the hotel’s signature Bosk Restaurant, where dinner is just as delicious. The evening menu celebrates northern Italian flavours, sourcing produce from Canadian farmers and businesses.

One of the places the hotel sources its ingredients is St Lawrence Market, a short walk away. I took a tour with Bosk Restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Troy Cabarios. The market sells foods from around the world, reflecting Canada’s diverse population, and some of the stalls have been there for generations.

With your appetite woken, there are plenty of cafes and restaurants to try outside the hotel. I visited Takja BBQ House, a Korean restaurant where meat and seafood is grilled in the middle of your table. Lunch at the Peller Estates winery, producer of the best wine in Canada, is a must. It is close to Niagara Falls, so you can combine the two on a day trip. The winery runs a lunch and wine-tasting package, plus a tour of the winery. A five-course tasting menu starts from $200 (£107), and a tour alone costs from $45 (£24).

Don’t miss the 10below Icewine Lounge, made completely of ice, including the furniture. Its temperature remains at -10C all year round, which is the temperature Peller sets for harvesting its ice wine grapes. In the chilled atmosphere, enjoy a glass of the well-known Canadian ice-wine – liquid gold!

Things to do

As you may expect, the hotel’s Miraj Hammam Spa offers the perfect way to unwind and relax after a busy day of shopping and sightseeing. Middle Eastern wellness rituals blend with modern needs – you’ll want to try more than one treatment. I opted for a deep tissue massage, one of the best I have had, but you may be tempted by the Turkish bath or a Sodashi plant-based facial. You can also sample some in-room spa time: book the ‘bath butler experience’ in advance and your bath will be set up with petals, a candle and a bath bomb, alongside optional room service.

No visit to Toronto is complete without a tour of Niagara Falls, 80 miles away on the other side of Lake Ontario. But for something really special, book a trip with Niagara Helicopters, where you’ll have the opportunity to capture the most amazing views of the Falls. It doesn’t come cheap: a 12-minute flight costs $200 (£107) but you’ll leave with some incredible memories. I also tried out the recently opened virtual experience at Niagara Parks, where the immersive ride ($33 [£17] for adults) lets you soar above Lake Ontario and the thundering falls without boarding a helicopter.

While the falls is an unmissable side trip, there is plenty more to see. Don’t miss the CN Tower for amazing views of the city, Little Canada, the Aquarium – and the historic Distillery District is a must-see. See what’s on during your visit at Visit Toronto.

The verdict

Just as you would expect from any Shangri-La hotel, the Toronto outpost made my visit to the city truly enjoyable. It’s a seriously classy hotel and I found it the perfect place to come back to after exploring everything the busy city has to offer. If you want to combine adventure, luxury and relaxation, the Shangri-La is the place to stay.

Kalpana was a guest of the Shangri-La Toronto; shangri-la.com

Old sitcoms have a “habit” of returning to our screens either “tired” or “lazy”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. “But that particular memo didn’t reach” the team behind the “Malcolm in the Middle” reboot. “Faster and funnier than before” with more emotional depth, it’s “miraculous how well it works”.

The action picks up 20 years after the original show. Frankie Muniz returns as Malcolm, “the child genius prone to fits of stress-induced sociopathy”. Nearing 40, he is now a single dad raising his teenage daughter Leah (Keeley Karston). Malcolm has turned out “alarmingly normal”, but we soon discover that’s because he has “put distance (physical and emotional) between himself and the full-blown chaos of his family life”.

“Unfortunately”, Hal (Bryan Cranston) and Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) are throwing a party for their 40th wedding anniversary, and they are “determined that it will be a full and inclusive family affair”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times.

Most of the original cast are back, giving the “short, sweet four-parter” the “confidence of a well-oiled machine”. It succeeds largely because it doesn’t try to “modernise itself” – instead, it feels like the team has “banded together to make another handful of ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ episodes”.

Over the four shows, we follow Malcolm as he attempts to reunite with his dysfunctional family “without losing his mind”. There is something “comforting about the sameness of it all”, and the “gently bonkers escapades are soothingly familiar”.

However, trying to “recreate the dynamics of a kids’ comedy with adult characters” does at times feel odd, said James Poniewozik in The New York Times. “The siblings often seem less grown-up than simply enlarged into adult-shaped versions of their recognisable selves.”

Cranston’s face is “as elastic and expressive as ever” and the actors are “still funny”, said Annabel Nugent in The Independent. But the plot “scatters the family members on individual paths” and when they do eventually come together for the family reunion, it’s “fleeting”.

Still, the final showdown between mother and son had me “clenching a pillow” for “emotional support”, said Kristy Puchko on Mashable. Occasionally, a reboot manages to recapture the “magic” while “providing fresh fun”. “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” does both with this “joyful celebration” of the original show. “I couldn’t have predicted how much it would mean to me to see Hal, Lois, Malcolm, and the whole gang back again.”

The best cookbooks feature throughlines. These days, the threads in new cookbooks star the people behind the books, functioning as mirrors that showcase a cook’s technique, their family story or the kind of food the author likes to make. “Hot Sour Salty Sweet,” published in 2000, looks out, not in.

While researching the text, its authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, traveled along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia over a few decades. The pair visited villages, snapped photos and documented recipes from both sides of the monumental body of water that defines and feeds parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China. The book is epic, like the tome’s size, its 330-plus pages loaded into a format that’s far wider than it’s tall. “Hot Sour Salty Sweet” is not easy to hold in one’s hand, much like the region’s diverse grandeur.

Variations of a common theme

The cookbook’s 12 chapters wander from Sauces, Chile Pastes and Salsas to Sweets and Drinks, with moorings at Simple Soups, Salads, Rice and Rice Dishes, Noodles and Noodle Dishes, Mostly Vegetables, Fish and Seafood, Poultry, Beef, Pork, Snacks and Street Food. Each chapter is a head-spinning exercise in dissimilarity, with so many common ingredients treated wildly unalike.

Take the seafood chapter. A recipe from Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s “great inland lake,” melds smoked fish and unripe mangoes with a dressing of vinegar, shallots, galangal and fish sauce — tart, funk, spunk, pop. In tom thit heo, from southern Vietnam, shrimp and thin slices of pork shoulder frolic in a stir-fry heady with lemongrass and black pepper. Simplest of all, salt-grilled catfish has its flesh slashed and loaded with coarse salt before a turn on a grill. Each dish and recipe howls with a common sense of place. Listen closely, and you hear the soft noise of distinguishability.

The personal as point of entry

There’s no foolhardy attempt at comprehensiveness in “Hot Sour Salty Sweet.” An essay about a border town on the edges of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar; a return to the village Sangkhom in northeastern Thailand to visit pals; a profile of a Laotian rice noodle maker working from her home on stilts near the Chinese border — Alford and Duguid covered thousands of miles of territory, but their experiences there are theirs alone.

Decades before the notion of the “exotic” was proscribed, rightfully, and white journalists began learning how to remove themselves from the center of every story, Alford and Duguid, who are both white, liaised with more than 15 Southeast Asian ethnic groups for “Hot Sour Salty Sweet.” They did so with curiosity, capturing their subjects with careful research, stirring photos and clear-eyed writing. This is documentation as honoring.

The UK is home to some incredible birdwatching spots, but Europe’s scale and variety of wildlife is just as tantalising for twitchers. As migration season begins, get ready for an influx of species, from flamingos to forest woodpeckers. Here are some of the best destinations in Europe to try this spring.

The Camargue, France

“Few who slurp fizz on the French Riviera realise that one of Europe’s most rewarding birding destinations lies nearby,” said James Stewart in The Times. Situated on the south coast of France between Montpellier and Marseille, the Camargue is home to “abundant birdlife”. From autumn until spring, “thousands of flamingos” descend on the marshland, and touring around the Pont de Gau Ornithological Park is “photo magic”. For keen bird-lovers, consider driving half an hour inland for a chance to spot rare Bonelli’s eagles in the Alpilles mountains.

Andalusia, Spain

One of Andalusia’s biggest perks as the southernmost point of Europe is that it sits on “important migratory routes” between the continent and Africa, said David Escribano in Condé Nast Traveller. Each year, “millions of birds” make the nine-mile flight over the Strait of Gibraltar. The region is home to some of Spain’s “most elusive” birds, such as the “endangered Spanish imperial eagle, crested coot and red-necked nightjar”. Further north, the region is filled with the “colourful” oriole, hoopoe and the “beautiful” European bee-eater.

Bonus tip: head to the Fuente de Piedra Lagoon, famous for its colony of greater flamingos and the birds’ only breeding ground in Europe not located in a coastal area.

Folegandros, Greece

This “lesser-known” Cycladic island lies between Paros and Santorini, and is home to a reserve protecting the rare Eleonora’s falcon, which has a global population of under 20,000, said Freya Bromley in National Geographic. You can take part in seasonal bird monitoring programmes and volunteer surveillance expeditions to nearby inlets. For dedicated birdwatchers, you can even participate in measuring nestling growth, or for newcomers, depart on educational hikes with conservation experts.

Transylvania, Romania

Transylvania is one of Europe’s “last great unspoilt wildernesses”, said Stephen Moss in The Telegraph. You can see majestic Ural and eagle owls hunting at dusk, and the forests are home to “several species of woodpecker, including the largest member of the family in Europe, the crow-sized black woodpecker”. Be sure to travel into the mountains where you might spot “golden eagles soaring above, and also one of the most striking and beautiful birds in the world, the wallcreeper”.

You may be focused on what’s happening overhead, but don’t forget to keep an eye out for Romania’s other headline attraction: “Europe’s largest predator, the brown bear”.

The majesty of the natural world and the incomprehensible vastness of space are almost infinitely rearrangeable variables for documentarians. We are lucky to have a long (and still-growing) library of superb television series that explore the landscapes, creatures and philosophical underpinnings of both the known and the unknown. Done right, the way these acclaimed series are, documentaries can be just as thrilling as any fictional narrative.

‘Cosmos’ (1980)

One of the most-watched documentary series in history, “Cosmos” leans heavily on the charisma and chops of its presenter, astronomer and public intellectual Carl Sagan. Its 13 episodes tackle everything from the Cambrian explosion to the nature of time and space.

It also presents a plea for people to take care of the planet while acknowledging our relative insignificance in the context of the universe. “There’s never a dull moment” in what emerges as a “complete science course, encompassing not just cosmology but also chemistry, physics, biology and the history of human discovery,” said James Kingsland at The Guardian. (Internet Archive)

‘The Blue Planet’ (2001)

A spiritual successor to “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” this BBC production outclasses its predecessors in every conceivable way. It introduces viewers to complex concepts like ocean currents and ecosystems like coral reefs, with narration from David Attenborough.

The 10 episodes took years to complete and, at the time, made up the most expensive nature documentary ever produced. The series is “unabashedly, poetically awestruck, yet unsentimental,” said Julie Salamon at The New York Times, featuring “images demonstrating the interconnectedness of life in the starkest terms.” A second season, “Blue Planet II” was released to great acclaim in 2017. (discovery+)

‘Planet Earth’ (2006)

The “11-part mother of all nature series” uses “helicopters, long lenses and all manner of cutting-edge film techniques to bring us the photographic spoils of a five-year global odyssey,” said Susan Stewart at The New York Times. It “often encourages you to root for the predator rather than the prey: fitting at a time when the planet itself seems as vulnerable as a newly hatched penguin.”

Rather than honing in on a particular animal or region, the series takes a kaleidoscopic look at life on Earth by visiting different ecosystem types, including plains, mountains, jungles, forests and the mysterious depths of the ocean. Collectively, the series leaves the viewer with a truly globe-spanning understanding of our home planet. It was followed by two additional series, “Planet Earth II” in 2016 and “Planet Earth III” in 2023. (HBO Max)

‘Frozen Planet’ (2011)

The forbidding landscapes and wildlife of the polar regions get the glowed-up documentary treatment in the BBC’s “Frozen Planet.” Attenborough narrates for the BBC, but the American version released on the Discovery Channel was recut with voice work by Alec Baldwin.

Episodes follow animals like polar bears through multiple climatic seasons, and the series is full of awe-inspiring observations about the critical importance of the region to the Earth’s general health, like the fact that a third of the trees on the entire planet exist in the circumpolar belt called the Taiga. “Frozen Planet” is “gorgeous to behold: lump-in-throat, tear-in-eye beautiful,” said Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times, “made to reveal a world few people will ever see.” (HBO Max)

‘Wonders of the Universe’ (2011)

A series presented by the “incongruously boyish and immediately watchable Professor Brian Cox,” this BBC production is meant to show us “just how insignificant our little solar system is when presented with the enormity of space and time indefinite,” said Luke Holland at Den of Geek. Cox’s “deft ability to simplify a concept without patronizing an audience” results in a “profound triumph.”

The four-part series tackles the origins of the universe, the pivotal role of stardust in all living things, and the nature of space-time, among many other cosmic mysteries. Buoyed by sharp special effects and meditative insights, “Wonders of the Universe” is gripping television. (Prime)

‘Africa’ (2013)

This is yet another stellar series from the BBC, coproduced with the Discovery Channel and narrated by the extremely prolific Attenborough, who turns 100 on May 8 this year and is still working. The six episodes of “Africa” each look at one of the continent’s regions, starting with a tour of the forbidding Kalahari and Namib Deserts and traveling through the Congo Basin, the southern tip of the continent, and the savannahs of East Africa.

Forest Whitaker deftly presents the series in the U.S. market. The series “abounds in jaw-dropping visuals on a scale that, like the best fictional dramas, infuses the epic with the up-close-and-personal,” said Sheri Linden at The Hollywood Reporter. (HBO Max)

‘The Hunt’ (2015)

Viewers might want to steer little kids out of the room before pressing play on BBC’s “The Hunt,” which takes a long look at the dance between predator and prey in different kinds of environments, like grasslands and coasts. It’s not ideal for people who are sensitive to violence and gore, but it is riveting. Some cherished illusions will be shattered, including what chimpanzees eat, which is not exclusively fruit but sometimes other, weaker primates like red colobus monkeys.

If you can stomach it, “The Hunt” is full of such revelations, rendered lovingly and narrated by (who else?) Attenborough. “The footage is truly extraordinary and gorgeous and, for the most part, artfully edited,” said Ken Tucker at Yahoo Entertainment. (HBO Max)

‘Our Planet’ (2019-2023)

You will never guess who narrates this Netflix production about habitat loss and the consequences of human encroachment on the natural world. Attenborough, well into his 90s when the series was shot, did some of the best voiceover work of his long career here. The series’ 12 episodes across two seasons visit a dizzying array of locales, from the Congolese rainforest to the Arctic, where polar bears are struggling to adapt to climate change and the loss of their icy homes. A series that “plays notes of an elegy,” it also “contains the saddest scene perhaps ever shot in a nature documentary,” depicting an “enormous gathering of walruses that have been forced onto a tiny stretch of dry land due to the shrinking sea ice in the Arctic,” said Brian Resnick at Vox. (Netflix)

With its “green, rolling hills” and “patchwork of pinot noir and chardonnay vineyards”, Oregon’s Willamette Valley has been compared to Burgundy, said National Geographic.

The valley is home to 11 designated grape-growing regions with diverse terroirs, spanning all the way from Portland to Eugene. In recent years, the “cool nights and warm summer days” here have provided the perfect conditions for some “top-notch sparkling wines”. Grape varieties used in champagne like pinot meunier have been “thriving” here.

Method Oregon is a non-profit established by a coalition of producers to ensure high standards and help place their wines on the map. Bottles carrying the stamp must be “100% fermented, bottled, riddled, and disgorged in Oregon”, use the traditional method that requires sparkling wines to go through a “natural secondary fermentation in a bottle”, said National Geographic, and be aged for no less than 24 months en tirage (“the crucial stage where wines are aged on yeast”) to develop a complex flavour.

Gran Moraine’s sparkling brut rosé is “exquisite, rich and lovely”, said Clive Pursehouse on Decanter. The delicate wine spent six years en tirage and is bursting with “floral notes of apple blossom, sweet lemon cream, and ripe, fleshy pears”.

But chardonnay remains the “king of Oregon white wines”, said Mike Desimone on Robb Report. For a special occasion, consider splashing out on a bottle from Eyrie Vineyard where winemaker Jim Maresh makes “small-batch, high-quality wines from estate-grown grapes under his family label”.

Or, you can’t go wrong with a Résonance chardonnay, said Vine Pair. When renowned French winemakers come to Oregon “you know to pay attention”. That’s exactly what happened when Thibault Gagey and Jacques Lardière embarked on their “first project outside of Burgundy” in the Willamette Valley – and this bottle is an “excellent example” of how the chardonnay grape variety is flourishing in the cool climate. Expect refreshing mineral notes, hints of “ripe pear and crisp apples”, with a “wonderfully balanced” palate.

Visiting a public garden is one of the best ways to get outside. You feel the sun’s warmth on your skin as you stroll by the trees and flowers in bloom, appreciating every leaf and petal. Give yourself the gift of fresh air and time well spent by taking a trip to one of these splendid gardens.

Edward James Sculpture Garden, Las Pozas, Mexico

During the 1960s, “eccentric” British poet and Surrealist art patron Edward James traveled to the Mexican rainforest and created this “otherworldly” sculpture garden, said The New York Times. More than 30 “elaborate” and often “nonsensical” statues and structures, with curious names like “The House of Three Stories That Could Be Five,” are scattered about, surrounded by massive ferns, orchids and waterfalls. Every area vies for your attention; exploring this topsy-turvy landscape feels like “stepping into a dream.”

Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

A 250-acre “fantasy land” of “space-age biodomes” and “whimsical sculptures,” Gardens by the Bay is known for its over-the-top features, said Lonely Planet. The “astonishing” Cloud Forest, with its 114-foot waterfall and aerial walkways through the trees, feels straight out of the tropics, while the Flower Dome “replicates the dry Mediterranean climates found across the world.” Once the sun sets, the giant trees of the Supertree Grove slowly illuminate for Garden Rhapsody, a nightly light and music show.

The High Line, New York City

Manhattan’s urban landscape is on “full display” at the High Line, said Condé Nast Traveler. This former freight rail turned “elevated, mixed-use public park” is a prime example of New York City “cleverly” turning “old spaces into exactly what you want them to be.” More than a dozen garden zones can be found along the 1.45-mile-long stretch, where perennials, grass, trees and shrubs come together in “perfect unkempt harmony.”

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town, South Africa

This trailblazing botanical garden, established in 1913, was the first in the world to focus solely on indigenous plants. It sits in a lovely spot on the eastern slope of Table Mountain, and though the garden “showcases more than 7,000 species,” a “high priority” is given to plants in the fynbos biome, like “stiff, structured proteas” and “shaggy, flowering ericas,” said The New York Times. Get a bird’s-eye view by taking the Tree Canopy Walkway, a curved bridge that offers “mountain vistas and sweeping forest views.”

Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

Conservatories, topiaries, aquatic plants, meadows, dazzling fountains and more await at the spectacular 1,100-acre Longwood Gardens. The collection of plants is “incredible,” as is the main conservatory filled with “lush” displays that change seasonally, said USA Today. Variety is key to Longwood Gardens’ success, as visitors have plenty of sections to wander, including the spacious new Orchid House, tranquil Bonsai Courtyard, verdant Waterlily Court and the modern Cascade Garden, designed by Roberto Burle Marx.

Marqueyssac Gardens, Vézac, France

Nearly four miles of pathways wind their way through this enchanting garden, where more than 150,000 boxwood trees are “meticulously laid and manicured” to “create mesmerizing patterns,” said Veranda. Marqueyssac sits on a cliff overlooking the Dordogne Valley and offers impressive views of the land and river below. Peacocks roam freely and are often spotted enjoying the garden’s beauty.

Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Pack a picnic, don comfortable walking shoes and prepare to spend all day at Australia’s oldest botanic garden. Spread across 74 acres, Royal Botanic Garden Sydney is home to more than 5,000 native and international species and “adorned with ornamental plants, rolling lawns and ancient trees,” said Condé Nast Traveler.

Highlights include the Cadi Jam Ora garden, which “shares native, Aboriginal plants and those brought from Europe by Britain’s First Fleet,” and The Calyx, a “living art gallery” and one of the largest green walls in the southern hemisphere. Leave enough time to see the ancient Wollemi pine, one of the rarest plants on Earth.

Wrest Park, Bedfordshire, England

The grand gardens at Wrest Park date back hundreds of years, giving visitors the chance to go on a “journey through three centuries of landscape design,” said The Times. The formal gardens showcase English, French, Dutch and Italian landscaping styles and “ornate” sculptures, but “venture beyond the pretty parterres and perfumed borders” and you’ll find far less manicured woodland trails. For fans of “Bridgerton,” if the grounds look familiar, that’s because scenes for season two and three were filmed on the property.

In a world full of influencers and trending aesthetics, figuring out your personal style has become both easier and overwhelming. While there is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from fashion icons, finding your signature aesthetic requires a touch of introspection. Here are some tips for navigating the personal journey toward landing on your own, very individual style.

Start with your closet

Your first thought may be to buy new clothes, but before you start refreshing your closet, take stock of what you already have. Begin from the “left side of your wardrobe and commit to wearing each item every day,” CNN said. Consider whether to “save it for evening wear or chuck it altogether.” This will give you a “clearer view of what does and doesn’t work, as well as what you’re missing.”

Everyone has a go-to outfit, “something you know works and makes you feel good,” Vitor Arruda, a personal stylist and content creator, said to The Guardian. Once you identify that outfit, “figure out what it is that makes you like it so much,” the outlet said. After you figure that out, you can search for “clothes that look or feel similar.”

Go window shopping

Shopping sprees can be fun, but they aren’t “always productive to finding your style,” said The Every Girl. There are “crowds and long lines for dressing rooms,” and sometimes the “chaos can make you pick up things you don’t actually love.”

Instead, spend your time “looking at clothes, not buying clothes.” Pick a day and “commit yourself to not swiping your credit card.” Instead, spend a “no-pressure day getting a better grasp of what you like.” You can also “test drive new pieces” by using a clothing rental service like Armoire, Nuuly and Rent the Runway. This way, you can “bring some of your style inspiration to life” without needing to “commit to new pieces that might not actually resonate with you in the long run."

Make a mood board

Mood boards and Pinterest are great ways to visualize your style ideas. If you’re a “tactile person,” you can “absolutely print and paste pictures, words, vibes together,” said The Good Trade. If you’re more tech-savvy, you can do this in Photoshop or Canva. Laying your inspirations out visually is a “great way to see commonalities in who and what you are drawn to.” Any kind of media or color swatches that catch your eye can be included. Once you put your vision board together, “you can see what aligns with what you already own and what feels far off.”

Don’t hyperfixate on your body

Many of us are conditioned to “believe that our body shape and size dictate what we wear,” said The Guardian. But this undermines the premise of personal style. Fashion advice devoted to dressing for your body type “creates a misconception that your body is wrong or that you have to hide certain parts,” Arruda said. When you do this, “you’re dressing with shame and fear,” which will “never allow you to be your true self and develop a style.”

It’s hard to “build perspective” when your “top concern is that every garment you wear makes it clear exactly how your waist is shaped,” or if you’re “worried about looking short in a long coat,” Lizzie Wheeler, a vintage expert, said to The Guardian. Don’t be afraid to experiment with shape, volume and proportion.

Learn to ride the wave

Personal style isn’t “something you find overnight,” Amanda Murray, a creative consultant, said to CNN. “It’s something you arrive at.” Over time, through “living, failing, heartbreak, love, wanting, shedding,” you will “understand what feels true on your body and what doesn’t.”

Your aesthetic is not just a reflection of your current life but “the life you’re aspiring to or think you deserve,” Jalil Johnson, writer of the fashion Substack Consider Yourself Cultured, said to CNN. Much like our “ever-evolving and changing lives,” our style “evolves too, and that evolution is not only natural but necessary.”

For a play that famously ends with the suicides of its two teenage protagonists, Robert Icke’s production of “Romeo & Juliet” feels “outlandishly joyful” and “profoundly alive”, said Alice Saville in The Independent.

Fuelled by fizzing performances from its “duo of stars”, Sadie Sink (from “Stranger Things”) and Noah Jupe (“Hamnet”), this is a “richly emotional, brilliantly intelligent take on a classic – one that’ll plunge a knife into your heart so skilfully that you hardly notice the pain”. Sink, already a Broadway veteran at 23, is “magnificent” – with a “steely passion”, quick wit and unguarded physical abandon, said Nick Curtis in London’s The Standard. And she’s well matched by Jupe, who makes a consummately assured stage debut as a boyish and impetuous Romeo.

The two leads are terrific, agreed Houman Barekat in The New York Times. So sincere and touching are their performances that we almost forgive the quirks that threaten to overbalance the play.

In “Romeo & Juliet”, “fate is a matter of bad timing”: the young lovers are confounded by bad luck as much as warring clans. “Urgent communications don’t get through; realisations come too late.” Icke draws attention to this with a giant digital clock, counting down the hours, that appears above the actors; at times it rewinds, and scenes replay with slight variations. It’s all rather “gimmicky”, generating only a “cheap, slightly hammy suspense”.

There are a lot of distractions in this modern-dress staging, agreed Clive Davis in The Times. It too often lapses into broad comedy; at times it seems as if we’ve stumbled into “an entirely new play called ‘Two Geezers of Verona’”. Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Mercutio “can’t stop baring his bottom”, and there’s “precious little sense of a city at war with itself”.

It would have made for a more elegant production had Icke not made so many directorial “interventions”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out – but “auteurs are gonna auteur”. And the cast is truly excellent: from the leads to Clare Perkins’ Nurse, and Clark Gregg as Juliet’s father Capulet, through to the minor characters. Reined in a little bit, this could have been an all-time great “Romeo & Juliet”. Instead, “we’ll have to settle for one that’s merely very good”.

Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1. Until 20 June.

“No other film this year will make you feel as uncomfortable as ‘The Drama’,” said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. It’s a “provocative and compulsively watchable” romcom – albeit one that “obliterates the very meaning of the word”.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson star as Emma and Charlie, a pair of gorgeous young Bostonians who meet in a café, fall in love and are now in the run-up to their wedding. So far so good, until “an idle, drunken conversation” one night with their closest friends (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) leads to a round of confessions about the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s all laughed off – until Emma’s turn. Without giving away any spoilers, “what she says next immediately sucks the air from the room”.

People are going a “little cuckoo” over this movie, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Emma’s bombshell is “the point of no return for the characters” – and, for some audiences, the moment “The Drama” “loses them”. It certainly walks “a thin line between thought-provoking and trolling”; you do wonder “if the sudden introduction of an issue much, much bigger than the film itself isn’t simply a shock value masquerading as shock therapy”.

The film is also tonally uneven, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. Oddly, it devotes more energy to “awkward cringe comedy” than to the characters and their feelings; it’s hard to believe, for instance, that Emma and Charlie would only have “a few faltering chats” about her confession, rather than discussing it properly.

Still, ‘The Drama’ is “beautifully made”, and most people who see it “will end up having in-depth debates, even if the characters themselves don’t manage it. The first great cinematic conversation-starter of 2026 is here.”

Alan Bennett once said that “if you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize”. Well, here he is at 91, serving up “another volume of his punctiliously kept and endlessly diverting diaries”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent.

“Enough Said” covers the years 2016 to 2024: “the pandemic, the rise of populism, and the likely last spurt of his formidable creative output”, with the play “Allelujah!”, the film “The Choral” and the novella “Killing Time”.

The general theme is of loss and “diminution”, as deafness, lack of mobility, cataracts and other medical problems intrude.

The “dramatis personae of his life” are dying off: Maggie Smith, his “adored” friend and collaborator; Jonathan Miller, an old friend and rival from his “Beyond the Fringe” days; and Queen Elizabeth II, his subject in the play “A Question of Attribution”. Revolted by Brexit and Boris Johnson, Bennett feels that his version of England is dying too, “its libraries closing and its churches unappreciated”. But he and his partner Rupert Thomas “still rummage through junk shops”, “frequent out-of-the-way churches” and eat fish and chips.

More than once, Bennett “apologises to the reader for saying things he’s said many times before”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. And he certainly does often return “to his most treasured material – family, and his exemplary standing as the grammar school boy who brought off an Oxford first”. (“Does it mean you’ve come top?” his mother asked when the results arrived.)

His memories of his Yorkshire boyhood are “wonderfully evocative of a lost world”. Rather less rewarding “are his highly conventional opinions” on politics, which “are precisely the same” as those of every other millionaire Londoner “living between Primrose Hill and Hampstead Garden Suburb”.

But his “relish” for spoken language is still there. He notes a woman in a Yorkshire newsagent, seeing news of a lightning strike, admitting cheerfully: “I love it when they have it nasty down south.”

Even as a young man, Bennett was a bit of a fogey, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Back in the 1980s, he wrote about the elderly “with piercing tenderness” in his “Talking Heads” series. “So old age feels like a homecoming, a phase for which he has been practising all of his life.” Yet he’s still suffering “adolescent doubts”. When he enters a room full of people, he feels about 16. He worries about whether he has made his mark; he fears being remembered as a “chronicler of the toasted teacake”. “In an age of curated self-belief, his vulnerabilities feel refreshing, his reticence almost radical.”